Ast stopped to buy a couple of bottles of whiskey along the way. The cashier who certainly would have recognised Ast by now (even though he frequented numerous stores to try and avoid this) this tried to make small talk, wrongfully assuming Ast must have been paying attention to the news story on the tv off to the side of the counter since he was blankly staring in that direction while the cashier scanned his items.

"Do you think it's actually happening this time?" the cashier asked.

"Huh?"

"Nuclear war"

"I don't know, I don't follow politics"

"You must be happy"

"Something like that"

"Take it easy, bro"

"Thanks"

Ast had lied, he followed politics, especially geopolitcs fervently, he knew politics was more or less inconsequential in his day to day life or at least his knowledge of politics was and even considered most of it scripted and fake but he followed it anyway as a guilty pleasure, like a soap opera. Ast had become so worried over the increasing worldwide tensions over the past years that he had built a bunker under his house last summer, it was very simplistic, only large enough for him to stand up or lie down in. He had initially planned to make a full size room but the slow progress quickly caused him to narrow the scope.

The room wouldn't be much use beyond sheltering from a distant blast or minimising radiation exposure, he would still have to leave it from time to time to acquire essentials but he could sleep in it or pass his days reading there. The floor and walls were built from bricks that he had brought into his place one backpack at a time to hide the development, the walls ran up to the bottom of his house, making the floor of his house its roof, a PVC pipe provided airflow. The entrance was in his wardrobe, there was an existing trap door in place to provide access to underneath his house, the area under his house was completely inaccessible otherwise due to thick concrete walls with only small air vents, while initially this crawlspace was only around 50cm high, over the course of weeks in his spare time he had slowly dug his bunker down a couple of metres.

Ast had told no one about this project of his, he wasn't speaking with Ner much at the time (a large contributor to why he searched for a distraction to focus on and why he had been indulging in paranoid fantasies so much) and no one else ever visited his residence. While he didn't outright own his apartment, he had purchased a 99 year lease and more or less had full rights over his section of the building, only playing a small amount for upkeep of the shared areas to the building owner, he had come to understand two of his neighbours were in the same situation with only one apartment still being rented out by the landlord.

Ast had other motives for this area, he didn't know exactly what they might be but he thought a secret room may become useful to him at some point, he had planned to lock and hide the entrance/vent, creating a space that only he could know about. He thought this might be a useful storage area incase he ended up sharing his house with a future wife/family and wanted to hide things, he only had vague ideas of what these things might be but he wanted the option, at the moment he just stored his silver in there.

Before meeting Ner, Ast had been smoking a lot of marijuana, roughly in the order of $100 a week for the past two years but he decided to quit to try and impress her. He thought it would show her the strength of his character (even though he never told her that he was once more or less addicted), and demonstrate to her how he was on the path to better himself and was in control of his life but more honestly it was to convince himself of this.

Ever since then he had only smoked a couple of times when it was offered to him, instead focusing that same time on impressing Ner or increasing his drinking. However, he continued to withdraw the same amount of cash each week, in a sense pretending to whoever/whatever was possibly surveilling him that he was still a heavy smoker. Virtually no one used cash anymore for anything except illegal activities but he knew as long as he kept the withdrawals to a reasonable amount that any authorities wouldn't be bothered to look into it. If he had of been drawing large or inconsistent amounts, they no doubt would have looked into his situation and put him under more stringent surveillance. Ast didn't have a definite reason for this withdrawal of money, he was using it to gradually hide his assets/wealth but didn't have an end goal in mind for that. His reasoning was that he was keeping his options open for if one day in the future he urgently wanted to hide his wealth for whatever reason, it would be too late, the algorithms would detect his desires before he did and increase surveillance and even if he managed to successfully hide his intent, they no doubt would quickly notice his unusual withdrawals and look into it.

He rightfully assumed the authorities could have been aware of his previous habits, not just from his financial activity but also his communications, so to maintain their belief he would occasionally search things loosely related to marijuana consumption online, enquiries into local prices, methods of smoking etc.

A few times a year he would buy a kilogram of silver at the premium that came from no paper trail. One major reason was to avoid possible inflation that he was increasingly worried about but he had another more paranoid reason, he considered it was possible that from time to time the authorities would track the serial numbers of bank notes, usually at the time of bank transactions and suspicions might be raised if the the notes he withdrew were all classified as permanently removed from the circulating economy.

Over the past three years since he had met Ner, he had amassed 7kg of silver of which no one should be aware. He often fantasised about what he might be able to use his hidden assets for, he thought it to be possible that he could fake his own death and use them to fund the creation of a new identity or simply to go off the grid somewhere isolated and buy everything with cash if such a place hidden from surveilance still existed. He thought one day he might perform some criminal activity and the money would prove essential in covering his crimes. This was a recurring theme in Ast's thoughts, the idea that some day he would finally break out from his uneventful life, do something wild and his 'real life' would begin, never going back to being an ordinary person with uninteresting stories, finally find his motivation to go 'all in'. He felt as if his every action should in some sense be towards setting up his future 'real life' with the means and ability to achieve whatever happened to be their desire, a lot of the time he felt like nothing about his current situation including himself was even real. Recently though, he had been forced to confront the reality of his existence and his own looming mortality, he was now rapidly approaching 40 and while still in relatively good health, he seemed to constantly have at least one point of temporary discomfort or another, a bad back, sore tooth or some joint pain, the latter of which he had felt in his shoulder particularly bad in the week before, probably lending to his unusually steadfast resolve to actually work on finishing his latest poem rather than drop it after a few hours like all his previous attempts. He told himself that he would finally put something out into the world this time and while he often said that, this time he truly believed the situation was different.

He didn't know what his real self would be capable of but he thought it might be a useful place to store a corpse or prisoner, he had a lot of murderous fantasies which he felt to be relatively normal and believed he would always manage to contain them to his imagination. While geopolitical tensions last summer had mostly subsided rendering his bunker obsolete he was grateful to his past self for this preparation as they flared up again.