The Dollar Maze
Elon Johnson, an accountant whose name is so ordinary it disappears into a crowd, hits a wall in his fortieth year – a wall built of dollars, yet harder and colder than concrete.
This wall is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Each bill bears the portrait of Benjamin Franklin, yet exudes the stench of decay and deceit.
Elon Johnson's life, like his ten-year-old Toyota Camry, was steady, boring, but also safe. Every morning, he would arrive punctually at the gray office building on the edge of Washington D.C. and bury himself in piles of numbers. His job was auditing, his life was numbers, his world was one constructed of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, accurate to two decimal places.
Until that day, that damned, sunny, and sleep-inducing Tuesday.
As usual, Elon Johnson was reviewing a contract from a government department. The contract was for "National Security Infrastructure Upgrades," worth billions of dollars. At first, everything seemed so normal, so procedural. But as he delved deeper, comparing the cumbersome sub-projects and supplier information, a strange unease began to spread in his heart.
He found that some sub-projects were ridiculously overpriced, some suppliers' names were unsearchable, and some… were simply blank, leaving only a cold number, like a bottomless pit, devouring taxpayers' hard-earned money.
"This isn't right," Elon Johnson muttered to himself. He rubbed his dry eyes, took off his glasses, and wiped them again and again with a worn cloth. He hoped he was wrong, hoped it was just a nightmare.
But he knew it wasn't a dream.
Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, he began his adventure – or rather, his descent. He peeled back the layers of disguise on those contracts, layer by layer, uncovering the secrets behind the numbers. He discovered that it wasn't just one fake contract, but a huge, meticulously designed scam, a maze composed of countless fake contracts, fake companies, and fake projects.
This maze, like a giant octopus, extended its tentacles in all directions, reaching into various government departments, reaching those well-dressed politicians and businessmen. And he, Elon Johnson, was like a small fish caught by the octopus, the more he struggled, the deeper he sank.
He began to receive anonymous warning letters, his phone was tapped, his computer was hacked. He felt fear, he felt despair, but he didn't back down. He knew he had embarked on a road of no return, and he had to continue, even if the end of the road was an abyss.
He started looking for allies, he contacted the media, he contacted the FBI, he contacted everyone he could think of. But he found that this maze was deeper and more complex than he had imagined. Some people mocked him, some ignored him, some… even threatened him directly.
Elon Johnson became a lone hero, a tragic Don Quixote-like figure. He brandished his calculator and charged at the giant windmills. He knew he might fail, he might be crushed, but he had no choice.
One day, in a deeply hidden document, Elon discovered a key name: Morris Night Shyamalan, a mysterious figure in a high position, who seemed to be the architect of this dollar maze.
He decided to meet this "architect" in person. Like the mazes of Borges, once entered, it is difficult to find the exit, but Elon Johnson firmly believed that even the most complex maze has its design logic, and he, an accountant proficient in numbers, might be the one who could find the exit. He just didn't know whether this exit led to light or to an even deeper darkness…
Fate, like a mischievous child, pushed Elon Johnson into this vortex of numbers. And he can only continue to search, continue to calculate, continue to… fall in this absurd and cruel game. And the final outcome of this game, perhaps only Franklin's ambiguous smile can provide an answer.