little black book

I will never forget the day I found it. It was flagged as anomalous and sent down the conveyer to land in my bin. At first, I assumed it was another smartphone as it was encased in a protective sheath used for those old devices. I remember thinking that the AI must need an overhaul for flagging this. I broke the surprisingly still intact seal and shook out incalculable wealth.

Actually, I shook out a little black book. It was well worn around the edges with an elastic band weakly wrapping its pages together. A frayed ribbon bookmark was faithfully holding a reminder of the last time it was touched. Immediately, I recognized it for what it was. Completely worthless.

A relic of a disastrous time when humans polluted the earth and raped the land. A time when trees were harvested for paper and animals slaughtered for their meat and hides. At best, It contains the thoughts and musings of a celebrity or politician, but that is highly unlikely.

My job was to sort through the bits and pieces of detritus that the AI could not categorize. I was trained to identify the object for the AI. Thus, enabling it to do its job better. Thus, making my job more and more obsolete.

I flipped through the pages and found that it was filled with numbers and letters all jumbled together. The only truly distinct thing I found was printed at the top of its first page.

In case of loss, please return to:

E. R. M.

As a reward: $

?

I almost tossed it back onto the conveyer to be destroyed. Something stopped me. Maybe it was the intriguing smell of its pages wafting up to me after so many years sealed tight. A smell I had never experienced before. Or, maybe it was that question mark sitting next to that dollar sign. I labeled it for the AI as a 'little black book', and stuck it in my pocket.

I was working on a Recovery Station somewhere in Southern California. The massive construct was slowly grinding its way through the scrap heap the ancient Americans had left behind hundreds of years before. Miles of electronic trash that the ancients just threw away. Now being mined for its precious metals and rare earths for a meager profit.

At least that was the official story. What they were actually looking for was one little black book. The same little black book that I found. It took me years to understand all this.

You see, I figured out that that little black book was full of cryptocurrency. Completely and ridiculously filled with cryptocurrency. From every kind of coin out there. The first time I filled a wallet with one of the accounts passwords the sum was a staggering $687,103,690,254! And there were thousands of account passwords.

I quit Earth and moved my family to an expensive resort on Mars. I actually bought the whole resort and now own most of its moon Phobos as well. After a few years of buying anything I wanted, I was visited by some pretty upset executives from the Recovery Station. They knew that one of my last inventories at work contained a 'little black book'. They correctly figured out how I obtained my wealth.

Their problem was, it took them too long to figure it out. And, they vastly underestimated its value. They were looking for a smartphone, or a computer, or some other electronic storage device to contain the codes they were after. They never thought He would have written it down by hand. They never dreamed it was so valuable. By the time they got their lawyers together and came after me for stealing their property, I was just too rich and too well connected. I bought their company out from under them. I bought their lawyers and I bought their associates. In the end, I even bought the executives themselves and the media that would have reported on it. All that, and I was only a few pages into the little black book's codes.