“Give me freedom, or give me death!” Ben James said, jabbing his fork in the air for emphasis. I smiled back at my husband as he enjoyed the steak I’d grilled in the backyard. He told me about the second Citadel he wanted to create, this one affiliated with ours, run like ours, but on Mars. We had enough wealth from his father’s early Bitcoin purchases to create multiple cities if we wanted to. And Ben James wanted to.

I watched our daughter, Marla, dutifully making sandwiches for her brothers before they came home; she was beautiful, the sun shining behind her long hair as a breeze blew through our kitchen windows, her sundress rustling softly in the hot summer air, her apron accentuating her slim waist. We made eye contact, a deep understanding and a knowing exchange between us. My youngest daughter, 6-year-old Eloise, was sitting at the table doing her reading homework.

In Ben James’ citadel, every child was homeschooled. Some mothers banded together to lighten the load, teaching someone else’s children for a year or two, then switching over.

“They say Mars is like the Wild West,” Marla said. I turned, knowing how this conversation would go before either of us said another word. “Survival is so hard that women have to be willing to act like men, to do everything men do, whether it’s because there’s so much to do or because the men are dying.”

Ben James put down his fork, his eyebrows raised as he assessed her. “Maybe those boys haven’t figured out how to be a man yet,” he said. “That behavior would be no more tolerated on my Martian citadel than it would be here. No woman of mine will ever work for another man. I won’t have any whores in my family, or in my Citadel.”

Marla got a sly look on her face. “So what does that make men work for other men?” she joked slyly. “Didn’t you work for—”

Ben James’ chair screeched painfully on the floor as he stood up. My husband and teenage daughter stared at each other, and I wanted to grab her arm, pull her back, and tell her to stop being a rebellious, impulsive child. In a Citadel, the Sovereign’s word was law. And he could banish you, or worse, on a whim.

“You are a young, chaotic woman,” he said softly. “You cannot understand how the world works. You have everything you need. As a family, we are free from the tyrannies of the state. And you are lucky to be where you belong. Women are happiest in the home, cooking, working with children. I will hear no more of this foolishness.”

“Yes, yes, Bitcoin gives Freedom,” Marla smiled. “Without freedom, better death.” In a way that only a teenager can, she grinned slyly at him, her mouth pursed, and arrogantly went back to eating the sandwiches. “I love spreading mayonnaise on slices of bread while my brothers buy rockets for a distant planet.”

“GET OUT!” shouted Ben James.

“Please.”

Marla left, dropping the knife smugly on the uneaten sandwiches.

I sighed and looked at him with sympathy. “She’ll learn,” I said.

“Jeremy was here yesterday,” he said.

“Oh?” I asked, my heart starting to beat faster.

“He would like to marry her.”

I looked up excitedly. “He was going to get her in line.”

“Indeed. A few more years and his Bitcoin holdings will be enough for his own little Citadel. Not a city, but certainly a small town or a large ranch with a dozen other families living there. He would run it extremely well.”

My four sons all ran inside at once: 7-year-old Jared, 13-year-old Bo, and the 17-year-old twins Jackson and Luke.

Ben James smiled broadly and went back to his steak. “Eat their sandwiches,” he told me.

I laughed good-naturedly and turned to the counter with a smile to eat their food.

Ben James had approval in his voice. “That, boys, is a good woman! Never ask a woman to make you something for dinner; you have to tell her. If she says no, walk away. If she complains about the way you ordered her, find another woman. A fundamental test of the quality of a woman.”

I gave my sons their food and asked Luke how the day had gone.

He smiled at me. “A lot of things you wouldn’t understand,” he told me lovingly.

I thought of my days before the war broke out, before society had descended into anarchy, when I was in school learning how to build the rockets he probably wanted to buy. He had no idea how they ran.

But Ben James always said that building rockets would never fulfill me. Home was my happiness. I smiled at my four boys and Eloise, at my husband. Those days of curiosity and problem solving were behind me. My father-in-law’s wealth made it possible for me to be truly happy here, in this house, without the dopamine rush of intellectual and technical problems solved every day.

I had married Ben James to survive, as women had done since the beginning of time. He was my provider and protector. He had taught me much, and his passion for self-sovereignty had infected me.

My eyes rested on the quote framed in the living room. “I don’t believe we’ll ever have good money again until we get the thing out of the hands of the government, that is, we can’t get it out of the hands of the government by force, all we can do is introduce something by some cunning means that they can’t stop.”

Bitcoin. The instrument that equalized the power dynamics between the powerful and the governed. The means to freedom for millions. The great exalter.

I smiled.

When Ben James sat Marla down the next day and told her she was marrying Jeremy, I was struck by her silence. She didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even look in my direction. She stared blankly at the floor for a few seconds. After a moment, a small smile formed on her face and she looked Ben James straight in the eye. “Father.” She blinked. “You’ve always taught me so much.”

He looked bewildered. “And?”

She shrugged. “That’s all. I want you to know that despite everything, I took it to heart.”

He looked at me in amazement. But then he said to her, “You’re getting married in two months, when all the wedding details are settled. You and your mother will sort it out.”

Marla finally looked at me. There was a new seriousness on her face that I had never seen before. But I understood; she was ready.

I had been preparing for this wedding day for years and the pieces were finally falling into place; buying clothes and packing for her honeymoon, transferring the money her father had saved as dowry into new UTXOs, ready to pool funds with her husband. My daughter was wealthy, wealthy enough to own her own land, a large part of it.

My husband saw the cost later that day at the airline. “I see you bought her honeymoon tickets, a bit pricey.”

I pulled a face. “I wanted them to fly private.”

“It’s okay, I should have done it. I know women don’t really like finances. It’s not your fault they overcharged you.”

I shrugged, remembering the first time he had hit me; I had spent money on a plane ticket, planning a trip to visit my friends. He had made it clear that women who traveled alone for fun always led to affairs and harm, especially if they went with their girlfriends. Later he had explained that it was just as taboo to want to visit my mother. I knew that Marla would not visit after her marriage to Jeremy. She would stay home with her children, even if Jeremy visited Ben James.

Two months later, everything was ready. “We’ll see you at church,” I said to Ben James. My eyes fell again on the framed quote. “A Cunning Detour.”

The boys headed off to the bachelor party while Marla, Jared, and Eloise got in the car and I loaded Marla’s honeymoon suitcase into the trunk. We were supposed to meet at the chapel that night for the wedding. Marla and I smiled at each other as Ben James and my older sons drove away.

We got in the car. Two hours later we reached our destination and packed her suitcase, which contained clothes for me, Eloise and the two young children. The same twelve words were in my head and Marla’s. We rushed to the private plane that was waiting for us and the pilot himself stepped forward to meet us and verify our four discounted tickets before escorting us inside. Ten minutes later we were in the air.

__________________________

We had been living in Rockson Citadel for six years. It had taken Ben James a full two years to find us. He quickly realized that we had fled to a small country that was much more prosperous than he was. There was nothing he could do to get us back. I had my own Bitcoin that he had never known about, enough to escape, to hire protection, and he could not reach us. I soon found myself participating in the prosperity of Rockson, no longer in a Citadel with the brainpower of only 50% of the population, who could only buy old rockets, but in Rockson, a society that built new rockets and created innovation. I added my insatiable curiosity and joy of discovery, my brainpower, to that of everyone else, and contributed to the society and the rocket industry. My many female colleagues worked alongside the men, and our combined brainpower put us light years ahead of small backward Citadels like Ben James’s. Our weapons alone could wipe his city off the face of the earth before he had time to point his angry finger in judgment.

My daughter married Jason and they were expecting their second of hopefully many children. He continued to work as an engineer in the oil industry and Marla had a remote job at home, tutoring physics students while staying home full-time with the toddler. She had earned her bachelor’s degree with his support and he had stayed home during college to watch the children when needed. She was now taking online courses for her master’s degree. They also had a thriving art community, painting every morning and selling the pieces for a hefty price, the shared passion that had brought them together in the first place. The three of them had dinner together every night and whenever I wanted to come over I was welcomed with open arms.

By the time I remarried, Ben James was just the butt of jokes.

My husband Henry always said, “I can’t believe he knew Bitcoin would give men the power and freedom to vote with their feet, but he couldn’t have foreseen it would give women the same power as men.”

Marla would add, “He basically thought we were all going to go back to the traditional roles for women, stuck at home, being told by them that we… it What We like, what we want.”

I laughed, Henry’s arm slung cheerfully around me. “Our freedom means that men have to be better at being chosen by us – we have the means to escape, to thrive, to have the power to choose who is best for us.” I added cheekily, “Men have to show more evidence of work.”

Henry hugged me tighter. “We’re better men because of the motivation. Sounds like a net positive to society to me.”

Marla smiled brightly. “Give me freedom, or give me death.”

This is a guest post by Ninja Grandma. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.