The Places Behind Twelve Words (The Bitcoin Legacy)

Explore the real and imagined places behind Twelve Words—from Cambridge to Delhi—and discover how setting shapes mystery, memory, and meaning.

When people hear the phrase location research, they often think of maps, architecture, historical detail, or the practical work of making a setting believable. Those things matter, and I care about them. But for Twelve Words (The Bitcoin Legacy), the deepest “research” was not merely factual. It was spiritual and personal.

The places in this novel are there because they marked me.

They are places where I lived, prayed, studied, returned, and remembered. They are places where beauty stirred something in me, where history humbled me, and where I saw more clearly that God works not only through ideas, but through time, memory, place, and providence. Long before these places became part of the world of the novel, they had already become part of the world of my own soul.

That matters because Twelve Words is not only a story about money, technology, power, and hidden systems. It is also a story about faith, conscience, spiritual inheritance, and the long road back to trust. I needed settings that could hold both kinds of weight. I needed places where transcendence and ambition could exist side by side, where memory could speak, where beauty could unsettle self-sufficiency, and where grace could feel not abstract but near.

Cambridge, London, Greenwich, and New Delhi each gave me something essential. Each shaped the book in a different way. And each, in its own manner, helped me understand the story I was trying to tell.

Cambridge: Beauty, Memory, and Reverence

Cambridge is one of the places that most deeply formed my imagination.

I went to graduate school there, and I came to love not only the town itself, but the way it seems to gather so many worlds into one place. It is ancient and modern at once. It is steeped in Christian memory and filled with technological ambition. It is a place of chapels and laboratories, of prayer and scholarship, of worn stone and new ideas. In Cambridge, the old is not entirely gone, and the new does not fully escape the presence of what came before.

That tension became deeply important to Twelve Words.

When I lived there, I stayed in a townhouse built in 1725 and ate dinner in a dining hall built in 1496. There is something quietly shaping about daily life in places like that. You become aware that you are surrounded by what has endured. You feel, almost without realizing it, that your life is not self-contained. Others came before you. Others prayed before you. Others struggled, learned, repented, hoped, and worshiped before you. A place like Cambridge resists the illusion that we are self-made.

That mattered to me spiritually, and it mattered to me as a writer.

Some places in Cambridge stayed with me with particular force.

The Round Church was one of them. There is something powerful about worshiping in a place associated with returning crusaders, a place so old and yet still present, still standing, still speaking in its own quiet way of inheritance and continuity. It reminded me that faith is not simply private sentiment. It is something handed down, recovered, lost, and sometimes found again. For a novel like Twelve Words, so concerned with what is inherited and what is forgotten, the Round Church belonged naturally in its atmosphere.

King’s College Chapel was even more personal to me. It was where I prayed before exams. That memory has never left me. I can still picture walking into that space with all the normal pressures and anxieties of student life, only to be met by a beauty that reordered things. Its fan-vaulted ceiling has always looked to me like the throne room of God. I know that is not the language of an architectural guidebook, but it is the language of truth as I experienced it.

In that chapel, intellect felt smaller, and rightly so. Achievement felt less ultimate. Worry lost some of its scale. The place lifted my eyes. It reminded me that all human brilliance exists beneath a greater glory.

That sense found its way into Twelve Words. Geneva moves through a world of extraordinary intelligence, systems thinking, and technological power. But her deepest need is not greater brilliance. It is remembrance. It is humility. It is the recovery of wisdom. It is the return of faith. Cambridge helped me imagine that not only as a theological idea, but as something embodied in stone, light, height, and silence.

London and Greenwich: Power, Time, and the Search for Orientation

London and Greenwich also hold an important place in my heart, and they belong in this story for more than plot reasons.

London has always felt to me like a city where grandeur and hiddenness coexist. It is full of institutions, rituals, signals of power, and the visible forms of order. But beneath that surface, it also carries private memories, moral struggles, and countless unseen decisions. For a novel about financial influence, narrative control, and the seduction of systems that promise stability, London made sense immediately.

Yet I did not include it simply because it made sense. I included it because it matters to me. There are places in London that I have loved not as landmarks but as lived spaces, places that carry memory and association, places where the city becomes more than a capital and begins to feel almost like an argument about what human beings worship.

Greenwich carries a similar weight for me. It is hard to think of Greenwich without thinking about time, measure, navigation, and orientation. Those ideas are woven into the identity of the place itself. That made it especially resonant for Twelve Words. This is a story in which the characters are constantly trying to locate themselves—morally, spiritually, intellectually. They are trying to determine what is true, what is manipulated, and what direction leads toward freedom rather than captivity.

Greenwich felt, to me, like a fitting place for such questions. Not just because of its physical beauty or history, but because it quietly symbolizes the human need for true bearings. A person can know where he is on a map and still be spiritually lost. A civilization can master systems and still fail to know what it is for. Places like Greenwich helped me hold that thought close while writing.

New Delhi, India: Chaos, Compassion, and the Reality of Grace

If Cambridge shaped one side of this novel, New Delhi shaped another.

My business career, and later my charity work, took me to India more than fifty times. Even now, I find it difficult to describe India to someone who has never been there. It is chaotic, yes, but that word is too thin for the reality. It is intense, crowded, loud, layered, exhausting, vibrant, and often overwhelming. It can feel as though every sense is being asked to work at once. It resists control. It resists neatness. It resists simplification.

And yet it is also one of the places where I have witnessed most clearly the transforming power of faith in Christ.

That is the truth I carry most strongly from my time there.

India was not merely a place that fascinated me. It became a place that humbled me. It reminded me how fragile many human lives are, how limited our tidy categories can be, and how deeply people need something no system can supply. In India, I saw things that sharpened my understanding of grace. I saw that the gospel is not merely a doctrine to assent to, but a living power that enters brokenness and brings dignity, hope, and change where human calculation alone would never expect it.

I witnessed transformations in individuals and in whole communities through faith in Christ. Those experiences stayed with me. They shaped the moral and spiritual world behind Twelve Words in ways that are difficult to overstate.

The minor character Samuel may be fictional, but the description of his circumstances and his transformation reflects the lives of real people I have known. I have met men and women whose stories carried that same blend of hardship, sorrow, dignity, and redemption. I have seen Christ change people in ways that no efficient system, no political lever, and no financial architecture could ever manufacture.

That mattered immensely to this novel.

Because Twelve Words is, in part, about systems. It is about how power organizes itself. It is about the seduction of coherence. It is about the fear that human beings can be managed into safety if only the architecture is strong enough. But the gospel tells a different story. It tells us that the deepest human problem is not inefficiency, and the deepest human hope is not control. We do not need merely better systems. We need redemption.

India helped keep that truth before me.

If Cambridge reminded me that beauty can lift the soul toward God, India reminded me that grace can reach into places of profound need and bring life where no one expects it. If Cambridge spoke to me of inheritance and reverence, India spoke to me of dependence and transformation. Both belong in Twelve Words, because the novel lives at the intersection of those realities.

What These Places Taught Me

Looking back, I can see that each of these places gave the novel a different gift.

Cambridge gave it reverence, beauty, memory, and the tension between faith and intellect.

London and Greenwich gave it scale, power, and a language of measure, direction, and moral reckoning.

New Delhi, India gave it urgency, witness, compassion, and a lived reminder that people are more than the systems that surround them.

Together, they shaped not just the setting of the novel, but its inner atmosphere.

That is why I hesitate to think of this simply as location research. Of course I researched these places. But more than that, I loved them, lived in them, walked through them, prayed in them, and was changed by them. They did not simply provide scenery for the book. They provided part of its spiritual vocabulary.

In the end, the world of Twelve Words was built from more than ideas. It was built from places where I experienced wonder, pressure, beauty, and grace. Places where history felt alive. Places where prayer felt natural. Places where the modern world showed both its brilliance and its poverty. Places where I was reminded that no matter how elaborate our systems become, the deepest things remain the same: truth, worship, conscience, fear, hope, and the need for God.

Those are the places I wanted this novel to carry.

And perhaps that is the simplest way to say it: the settings in Twelve Words are not just researched. They are remembered with gratitude.