Excited by their discovery, but wary about its implications (if they used it for real, would it be a crime?), they split the code to ensure they’d seek each other’s counsel before either one used the whole code for real.

Their sense of trepidation didn’t last long, however, and within days of discovering the code, they dove headlong into unknown waters of the bitcoin market, scattering $100,000 each on various ICOs in a blur of momentary madness, guided by the algorithms of their secret code. Weeks later they could barely contain straight faces while in public as the value of their bitcoins exploded as if strapped to a rocket ship bound for Mars.

Soon after, once her holdings breached the $100 mil mark, Bette sobered up and decided to steadily pull three-quarters of the value of her bitcoin holdings out of the market. It was right around that time when Jay (Kaci’s name before it had changed) started to mysteriously drop out from view for days at a time, resurfacing briefly from time to time, and then disappearing again. She’d asked Bette to monitor her bitcoins but wouldn’t explain what she was up to.

Bette had felt twinges of regret after she’d pulled most of what she’d gained out of the bitcoin market, as she watched Jay/Kaci’s bitcoin holdings keep growing as the bitcoin market continued to expand like nothing the financial markets had ever seen.  

She only realized much later on why Jay/Kaci had stayed in bitcoins – Jay/Kaci had to suddenly decamp to Kansas City and enter the WitSec program, after she’d agreed to work as one of the confidential witnesses of a multinational effort that probed the connections of a shady Silicon Valley venture capital firm to investment funds of rogue nations.   Jay/Kaci wouldn’t have been able to do what Bette had done without leaving a trail while she was doing this work, so she’d left her bitcoins untouched when she suddenly left San Francisco.

A few months into her new WitSec-driven life, Jay-now-Kaci contacted Bette, who’d been anxious about not having heard from her bestie. (“Was she still sore at me for unplugging throughout the extended Mediterranean sail ride I just returned from?”) Through backchannels, from the shadows of her hidden life, Kaci reached out and asked Bette to come visit, but to take extra precautions while doing so. Bette managed to get to Kansas City, and the first thing Kaci did was to take a starving, curious Bette to Joe’s Kitchen, the 7-napkin barbecue joint at the corner of a gas-station. As they walked out, in hog heaven, Kaci thrust a letter into Bette’s hand.