Scrivenings of the King-Beyond-The-Wall

Stolen Artifacts #30

Ozzy Osbourne has been credited with saying, “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.” Clearly, Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t missing the passkey to his USB flash drive with billions of dollars in cryptocurrency on it, because that is definitely what I’m missing the most these days.

In my defense, the crypto wasn’t worth billions when I first secured it on the drive. The digital currency has increased in value 100x since I first loaded it on the drive. Back then, I thought I was really clever putting it on an encrypted vault drive with an auto-erase function if the incorrect password is entered one too many times. Also in my defense, I didn’t expect my now ex-girlfriend to torch everything in my safe after I broke up with her, including the handwritten passkey to the USB drive. But here we are.

A lot of people want to be crypto billionaires. I happen to be one; I just don’t know how to get my money out of the place where it’s stored. I’ve even tried hiring expert cybersecurity specialists to see if they can come up with a solution but it turns out the initial security measures I took were pretty darn secure and no one’s yet come up with an idea for how to unlock the drive. Well, not without making several password attempts, and I’m not sure I’m willing to sacrifice such a precious commodity on a theory.

I’ve spent a lot of time fantasizing about what I would do with those billions of dollars if I managed to unlock the drive. I wouldn’t ever have to work a day in my life, which would be a welcome change from the low-level IT job I do for a faceless multinational conglomerate. In that respect, am I any different from the people who buy lottery tickets and fantasize about the same? I suppose the big difference is that I do actually have the funds in my possession; I just can’t get to them. I suppose the big similarity is that we both spend a lot of time fantasizing about spending money that we can’t currently actually spend.

There’s one Silicon Valley tech bro who offered me ten million dollars for the drive, straight up. And while it’s obviously pennies on the dollar for the billions of dollars that could be accessed, it’s also ten million actual dollars in my bank account now, versus something that I may never be able to access, unless I suddenly remember off the top of my head the random twenty-four character alphanumeric passkey that I used for the drive. Hell, I’ve even been to hypnotists and memory specialists to see if they had any tricks for dredging up subconscious memories.

I’m just about out of options for how to crack this problem. And, as much as I’d still maintain that the USB flash drive password is the thing in my life that I’ve lamented losing the most, there’s also a good chance that continuing to stress out about this with no viable solutions might just cause me to join Ozzy Osbourne in losing my mind as well.


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Prompt: Write about a character who yearns for something they lost.