Keep Going
Copyright© 2026 by Trevor Dohlen
Chapter 1: The Ticket
Daniel Mercer stared at the numbers on the screen for a long time.
Then he looked down at the ticket.
Then back at the screen.
Then back at the ticket.
“No.”
He refreshed the page.
The numbers remained the same.
“No.”
He closed the browser, reopened it, navigated back to the official lottery site manually instead of trusting the bookmark, and entered the numbers again.
The result did not improve.
Daniel leaned back in his chair.
“Well, shit.”
The ticket lying beside his keyboard was worth $987 million before taxes, just under half a billion for the lump sum payment, he thought.
Probably.
Daniel distrusted the word probably almost as much as he distrusted software that reported “success” without telling him what it had actually done.
He picked up the ticket.
Six numbers.
Nothing exotic about them.
No birthdays. No anniversary. No lucky number he’d carried around since childhood. He’d bought five Quick Picks at the grocery store because the jackpot had become ridiculous enough to justify wasting ten dollars on the entertainment value.
Four of the tickets were now exactly as worthless as they had been when he’d bought them.
The fifth had apparently created a problem.
Daniel was sixty-two years old, semi-retired, divorced amicably enough that he and his ex-wife still exchanged Christmas cards, and had one adult son who believed his father spent far too much time playing with computers and Bitcoin.
Daniel considered this criticism largely accurate.
He owned his house.
He had enough savings.
He had a respectable retirement account.
His consulting work provided more money than he needed.
He had several Bitcoin wallets accumulated over the years, which his accountant insisted on discussing with the expression of a man handling radioactive material.
Daniel had never particularly wanted to be rich.
Comfortable had always seemed sufficient.
Half a billion dollars was not comfortable.
Half a billion dollars was a systems problem.
He placed the ticket back on the desk.
“Do not lose that.”
The room did not answer him.
Daniel looked around.
“That,” he said, pointing at the ticket, “is now officially the most valuable thing in this house.”
The refrigerator compressor started.
“Thank you for your input.”
He stood, walked to the kitchen, returned with a plastic food-storage container, put the ticket inside it, snapped the lid shut, then stopped.
Plastic melted.
Fire.
He opened a cabinet and found a small metal cash box he’d bought years earlier and never used.
Better.
Then he considered burglary.
Worse.
He put the ticket back in the plastic container.
Then he realized he had no idea what he was doing.
That bothered him more than the money.
Daniel had spent most of his adult life solving problems by reducing them to things he understood.
Inputs.
Outputs.
Dependencies.
Failure modes.
If a server didn’t start, there was a reason.
If mail didn’t arrive, there was a path to follow.
DNS lied less often than people did, provided you asked the correct DNS server.
Software could be complicated, but complicated was not the same as mysterious.
The lottery ticket was mysterious.
Not mathematically. He understood the probability perfectly well.
What he didn’t understand was what came next.
He sat back down.
“Okay.”
He opened a text editor.
At the top of a blank file, he typed:
LOTTERY
Then beneath it:
1. Verify ticket independently.
2. Secure ticket.
3. Tell nobody.
4. Attorney.
5. CPA.
6. Determine claim/privacy options.
7. Taxes.
8. Trust?
9. Security.
10. Do not do anything stupid.
He looked at number ten.
Then he moved it to number one.
That felt better.
The next morning Daniel drove thirty-eight miles to a lottery office he had located through the official state website.
He did not take the ticket.
That seemed counterintuitive, but he wasn’t ready to walk into a building carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in his shirt pocket.
Instead, he brought a photocopy.
The woman behind the counter smiled professionally.
“Can I help you?”
“I have a hypothetical question.”
Her smile changed slightly.
Lottery employees, Daniel suspected, heard many hypothetical questions.
“I’ll try.”
“If someone had a winning jackpot ticket—”
She nodded.
“—and that someone had verified it against your website but was reluctant to walk around with the original until he understood the claiming process, what would you suggest?”
“First, sign the ticket.”
Daniel frowned.
“Why?”
“So if it’s lost or stolen, there’s at least some evidence connecting it to you.”
“Does signing it affect whether a trust can claim it?”
The woman paused.
“That depends on the type of trust and state rules. For something that large, I’d strongly recommend talking to an attorney before you claim anything.”
Daniel nodded.
“Good.”
She smiled.
“Good?”
“That’s what I hoped you’d say.”
“You really have one, don’t you?”
Daniel considered lying.
Instead he said, “Hypothetically.”
Her smile widened.
“Then hypothetically, congratulations.”
“Thank you. Hypothetically.”
By noon Daniel had identified six attorneys.
By one o’clock he’d eliminated four.
One had a website that played music.
Disqualified.
Another’s website used the phrase wealth journey fourteen times.
Absolutely not.
The fifth attorney specialized in estate planning but had no obvious experience with lottery claims or cryptocurrency.
The sixth was named Margaret Lawson.
Her biography said she specialized in trusts, asset protection, complex estates, and high-net-worth clients.
More importantly, her website contained no inspirational quotations.
Daniel called.
A receptionist answered.
“Lawson and Kline, how may I direct your call?”
“I’d like to schedule a consultation with Ms. Lawson regarding a trust.”
“Certainly. Is this for estate planning, asset protection, business succession—”
“Potential lottery proceeds.”
There was a very small pause.
“May I ask the approximate amount?”
“Nine hundred and eighty-seven million.”
A longer pause.
“Is that the jackpot amount or the estimated cash value?”
Daniel smiled.
Finally, someone asking the right question.
“Jackpot.”
“Have you claimed the ticket?”
“No.”
“Have you signed it?”
“No.”
“Have you discussed it with anyone?”
“You.”
“Anyone else?”
“A lottery employee who thinks I may have been speaking hypothetically.”
The receptionist laughed once, then recovered.
“Mr...?”
“Mercer. Daniel Mercer.”
“Mr. Mercer, I’m going to put you on hold for just a moment.”
“Of course.”
The hold music was Vivaldi.
Daniel decided that was acceptable.
Less than a minute later, a woman picked up.
“Mr. Mercer? This is Margaret Lawson.”
“That was fast.”
“For nine hundred and eighty-seven million dollars, I can occasionally locate my telephone.”
Daniel liked her immediately.
“Have you actually won?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you certain?”
“I checked the official numbers three times, then drove to the lottery office without the ticket and asked enough questions that the employee figured it out.”
“Good. Where is the ticket?”
Daniel glanced toward the hallway.
“In my house.”
“Where in your house?”
“In a plastic food-storage container inside a metal cash box.”
Silence.
“I understand that sounds ridiculous.”
“No, Mr. Mercer. I’ve heard worse.”
“The metal box isn’t fireproof.”
“We’re going to fix that.”
“Excellent.”
“And please don’t stop at a convenience store on your way here to buy a fireproof safe.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.”
“Amazon?”
“No.”
“Also good.”
She asked him several questions about marital status, children, debts, current assets, residency and existing estate documents.
Then:
“Do you have cryptocurrency?”
“Yes.”
Another slight pause.
“How much?”
Daniel looked at the ceiling.
“That depends on today’s price.”
“That answer worries me.”
“It worries my accountant too.”
“Approximately?”
“Enough that we should probably discuss it.”
“All right.”
“And technically, Bitcoin isn’t—”
“Mr. Mercer.”
“Yes?”
“We’ll save that conversation for later.”
Daniel smiled.
“You’ve had that conversation before.”
“Many times.”
They scheduled a meeting for the next morning.
Before hanging up, Lawson said, “One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Do not tell your son yet.”
Daniel frowned.
“He’s my only child.”
“I understand.”
“He’s trustworthy.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t. But the moment you tell another person, you create another person who has to keep the secret. Let’s understand your options first.”
Daniel thought about that.
“Okay.”
“And Mr. Mercer?”
“Yes?”
“Do not post anything online.”
Daniel looked mildly offended.
“I’m sixty-two, not twelve.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“No, actually, I wouldn’t.”
That evening Daniel sat at his desk with the ticket still locked away.
He had expected excitement.
Instead he felt increasingly irritated.
The problem was dependencies.
The lottery money would require lawyers.
Lawyers would require documents.
The trust would require administration.
Administration would require accountants.
Investments would require management.
Taxes would require records.
Property would require insurance.
Insurance would require inventories.
Every dollar would create another little thing that needed to be watched.
He opened his LOTTERY file.
Under the original list he typed:
What do I actually want?