Last week. Had it only been a week?  

Last week, she’d answered a call from someone she’d known since childhood, someone she’d been besties with almost from the moment they’d met as seven year-olds on a beach in Necker Island in the Caribbean. The call jangled her awake in the wee hours of a lazy Sunday morning. She picked it up with a raspy, “Hello?” then heard a voice she hadn’t heard in two years, and hearing that voice again after such a long time was like being woken by a bolt from the heavens. She struggled to sit up. This was her best friend! The friend who’d suddenly changed her name, had moved to another city without notice, and had insisted on being called by the new name from then on.

“Hey,” the voice answered hurriedly, without preamble, in a harsh whisper.

“Kaci! What … what’s up. How-how are you? Still in Witne…”

“I need your help, Bette,” Kaci interrupted her.

That led to a flight to Kansas City, and then a drive past downtown, into a suspicious-looking neighborhood.

Kaci had given her a landmark Bette had been familiar with, Joe’s Kitchen, a gas-station joint that served the best barbecue Bette had ever tasted.  It was the place that Kaci had taken her to, in fact, the last time they’d seen each other.

Bette drove past Joe’s Kitchen and followed the GPS to a warehouse where Kaci was waiting for her.  

Aside from being tight friends, Bette and Kaci shared a hallowed secret, one that had led to unimaginable personal wealth for each.

And now, Kaci said she needed Bette’s half to the secret – the secret code, that is, to a backdoor to the Ledger that controlled bitcoins, a code that could unlock algorithms that tapped into the stream of calculations that fed bitcoins, algorithms that could predict which bit-coins would grow in value. The code they’d shared was the sole key to a magic door to a treasure trove in the ether.   

Albeit an unexpected piece of luck, the code didn’t come gift-wrapped and labelled with their names on it. Three years prior, while sorting through strings of code Kaci had picked up from some corner in the Dark Web, Bette focused on one that drew her attention. She worked on it for a while, then passed it back to Kaci, who played with it further, then passed it back to Bette – they continued to refine the code as an intellectual exercise until one day they realized they were on to something big when they applied it to data Kaci pulled together from the bitcoin market.