The big man with the thick, expressionless face sent his beefy fist into Jason’s gut, knocking the wind out of him. He fired another uppercut to Jason’s ribs, expelling another breath from him with an “oomph!” and loaded up for a third shot.

What were the safe words? Jason scarcely paid attention when his grandfather told them to him, because the whole video game nonsense was such transparent bullshit. Why banned mold? My hand cold? Try canned gold? “Buy and hold!” he shouted just before the bolo punch landed.

He stood in front of an auditorium full of people, with TV cameras rolling. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to talk about. Even worse, his mouth was full of marshmallows, and except for a cowboy hat, he was naked.

* * *

Jason woke up whenever he was good and ready. He’d taken the day off of school today so he could go with his grandfather to the bank. The stress of the last few days had taken its toll on him, for sure. The dream with the marshmallows and the cowboy hat was almost as bizarre as the one where he was a bum in New York a century ago.

He was making a cup of coffee when someone knocked at the door. Show time. He left the coffee maker and opened the door. “Gramps! Come on in. Have a seat while I get us some coffee.”

Jason went into the kitchen and poured two cups, adding milk to his grandfather’s, just as the old man liked it. When he returned, Gramps sat in his customary spot on the couch, with his Panama hat lying next to him, and took the cup of coffee Jason handed him.

Jason sat back in his recliner and sipped his coffee as he mentally ran through his script. “Well, Gramps, I can’t tell you how bummed I feel. It’s like I’ve been robbed of my grandfather’s legacy. I mean, I had high hopes, but to have everything come crashing down around me... This morning, when I…”

“357.” His grandfather looked straight through him as though he heard nothing Jason said.

“Sorry, what was that?” Jason was so caught up in the sheer artistry of his bullshit that he hadn’t heard the old man.

“357, like the magnum.” His grandfather said nothing else, but took a slow sip of his coffee. Then he waited.

Jason tried to figure out what the old coot was rambling about, when it hit him like a Mac truck. The monkey told him to remember a code, and…holy shit. Jason slumped back into his chair, causing his coffee to slosh over the brim of his cup and land on his sweatpants. He had a humbling realization that his grandfather wasn’t the clueless old fart that Jason imagined in his condescension. And maybe, no, definitely, Jason was an arrogant ass who underestimated his grandfather and refused to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Jason spoke like a man in a trance, or like the guy in the miniseries ‘V’ who has just realized that his wife is actually an alien lizard in a skin suit. “So there is a video game, and I was in it last night.”

“That’s right.”

“But, I…” Jason thought of the ridiculous headband, and the off-the-shelf fitness watch.

“New York City, circa 1920. Lou’s Diner. A big-breasted waitress with a 40’s hairdo. The Hindenburg drifting over the city. A talking organ grinder’s monkey in a fez.” Gramps sipped his coffee, but said nothing else as he bided his time, waiting for the truth to dawn on his grandson.

Jason felt like Neo, and realized he’d taken the red pill. “I thought the whole thing was a dream.”

“It was a dream,” Gramps said, and for the first time his expression changed from serious to enthusiastic. “That’s the beauty of it. In Grand Theft Auto, for example, every license plate number, every bit of graffiti, every song that plays on a car radio has to be created, stored in the program, and retrieved on cue. In The Midas Game, it’s like hypnosis; we merely suggest a scenario, and your brain fills in the rest, providing details that make it seem incredibly realistic, in addition to making the game unique to every player.”

“Okay, so to repeat, the old man is not a clueless old fart,” Jason thought as he wrestled with the impossibility of the idea.

“You see, I had an idea of a video game like Wii, where the game actually helps the player become more fit and active, instead of a couch potato. I wanted a game that would help players become financially independent and physically fit, but how do I do that, when the more engaging the game is—and you need engagement to get players to make changes in their fitness and finances—the more likely players are to become vegetables, who do nothing other than play the game? How do I keep players from becoming slugs without ambition, who only live when they’re playing the game?” Grandpa looked expectantly at Jason, who was still too stunned to answer. “Simple, you play the game in your sleep, while you dream.”

Jason thought that over. It was a radical concept, for sure. The two of them said nothing for several moments as they drank their coffee. “But couldn’t I cheat the game,” Jason wondered, “by sleeping in late, and sleeping during the day?”

“You can’t cheat the game. If you sleep so much that you get demoted or fired, or take a low-paying job so you can play the game more, you’re less powerful and less successful in the game. The more productive you are in real life, and the greater your fitness level, the more powerful you become in the game.” The old man became fired up in his enthusiasm for his creation, and his eyes sparkled. “Furthermore, most people’s health suffers because they get too little sleep. The Midas Game motivates the player to get more sleep, and better quality sleep, so he can fully enjoy the game.”

Jason sighed. “I’m not getting the 37 thousand dollars, am I?”

“Not today.” Gramps felt quite happy as he finished the last of his coffee.

Jason nodded and drank his coffee. “Hold on. Wait a minute…What exactly do you mean by ‘not today’?”

Gramps broke into a broad smile. “You won’t get 37 thousand dollars today, but you’ll get all that money, and more, in the long run as you play the game.”

The old guy seemed awfully sure of himself. Jason readied himself to go back to the kitchen to get more coffee for them. “Look, Gramps, I love you, man, but that reeks of a get-rich-quick scheme. Sorry, but I just don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Maybe you’ve temporarily lost sight of the fact that I’m older than you are,” his grandfather said with an amused wink. “I’ve been where you are, a guy without a plan, bumbling through life, working hard, earning money, and paying bills. Then one day I had a mid-life crisis, which simply meant that I realized that everything I’d been told was bullshit, and I was a miserable failure in life. So I tried every kind of wealth scheme I could find: multi-level marketing, the prosperity gospel, online selling, selling physical merchandise, and sank everything I had into a franchise. You’re smart to realize at your young age that all the get-rich-schemes don’t work, but I was a desperate, miserable failure, so I at least had to give them a try.”

“So what did you do?” It seemed to Jason that the old guy had as much as admitted that his game had no chance of making anyone rich.

“I stumbled across the FIRE movement, for Financial Independence, Retire Early.” Gramps leaned forward in his eagerness, gesturing with his open hands. “Every attempt to become a successful entrepreneur, inventor, artist, actor, or whatever, may fail. But almost everybody over the course of his life will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. How much of that money you save is up to you. We all earn fortunes over the course of our working careers, all of us, but save nothing, and invest nothing. Instead, we do stupid shit like get married and go into debt.”

“But people need that money for living expenses,” Jason objected reflexively.

“Ever heard of Ronald Read? He was a former gas station attendant and janitor at JC Penney’s, who for all everyone else knew, was a broke guy with a ripped suit held together by safety pins and an old, busted up truck. Imagine their shock when he dies and bequeaths eight million dollars to the local hospital and library.”

Jason never knew what his grandfather was going to say next. “Where did he get that kind of money, was he dealing drugs?” He took his cup and his grandfather’s cup, then went to the kitchen.

“He saved it,” his grandfather yelled from the living room as Jason refilled their cups in the kitchen.

Jason returned with their refills and after handing Gramps his cup, sank back down into his recliner. “Wait, you said the average person earns a million over a working career. A janitor couldn’t have saved eight million.”

“Very good,” Gramps replied. “He not only saved, but he invested that money in the stock market.”

“But stocks are risky. If you designed the game, setting it in 1920s New York City, you know the stock market is going to crash and cause the Great Depression.”

“That’s what I thought for years. ‘Stocks are risky’—which is why I was a broke chump. Since the Crash, there’s never been a twenty-year period when the stock market hasn’t gained.”

“Okay, so I guess it’s up to me to decide how long I want to be a broke jerkoff. What am I supposed to do now?”

Gramps smiled. It seemed that his grandson was making progress, however slowly. “The thousand-dollar emergency fund is first, otherwise the next emergency, and there will be one, for sure, will screw everything up. As long as you have the day off, let’s go through your finances and health, from top to bottom.”

Gramps helped Jason go systematically through his expenses. Jason cancelled his cable service and downsized his phone bill. When Gramps saw the empty fridge and discovered that his grandson either ate out or bought frozen or pre-made meals, he made Jason promise to start cooking his own food. The old man took Jason grocery shopping, and was kind enough to pay for the groceries and a set of clippers so his grandson could cut his own hair. He showed Jason how to cook beans, which cost almost nothing. Then the two of them scheduled a check-up and a dental appointment for Jason, which Gramps explained was an easy way to earn health points in the game.

It didn’t seem fair to Jason, but his grandfather sat in his recliner drinking a Keystone Lite while Jason lay on the floor, doing pushups, sit-ups, lunges, reindeers, and every other type of torturous exercise the old man could think up.

Lastly, as the beans cooked on the stove, the two of them formed a pile of Jason’s junk, starting with his video game collection and controller. They emptied drawer after drawer stuffed with odds and ends, all his old magazines and comic books, and emptied cardboard boxes piled in the closets, as well as all the clothes that Jason never wore, some of which he had forgotten he owned. What didn’t go into the two large trash bags was placed on the living room floor in a pile of things that could be sold.

As Jason placed ads on e-bay and Craig’s list, his grandfather said over his shoulder, “I think you’re going to like how the game goes tonight.”