A Trove of Secrets

The feeling she had was indiscernible from that when finishing a cherished novel or the third act of a great movie. She didn’t know an English word that captured it, not precisely, but the Portuguese word saudade came to mind: a melancholy nostalgia for something loved and lost.

Naomi rode the El train to work, just as she would have if her life wasn’t about to change forever. Her sack lunch crinkled in one hand: a Bánh mì, still warm from her food printer. She bore no wrinkles but her outmoded clothing marked her as a tenured professor.

Despite her misgivings, it was time to move on, to put the capstone on her life’s work. She had toiled for decades, received doctorates in cryptography, linguistics, and psychology, and spent her nights curled up on her white leather couch with a pint of mint chocolate chip or an old vine Zin and her most treasured possession: the book.

She knew it better than her own body: the texture of the leather, worn smooth on the bottom right front cover where her thumb traced millions of absentminded circles; the slap of leather on leather as it plopped down on the couch after a long day; the weight of the book, to a degree that she’d know if a single page were missing. The small black notebook that was her constant companion for 30 years. The book she tucked under her pillow at night and clutched tightly on the train, as she did now. A thing she wished could transform into a ring or a tattoo or a tooth, so she’d never lose it.

The book was there when she became a woman, and when she first exercised those powers. It had seen her fall into and out of love. It was the reason she was a triple doctorate, a professor, a divorcée. She had worn it under her wedding dress, literally putting it between her and Fisher, a harbinger of strife. The book comforted her when he ran off with some floozy, and when that floozy became the new mother to her children.

She inherited the notebook when she was 11, back in 2021 when her great-uncle passed away unexpectedly. His will, one page in length, handwritten, left an old tract house, a beat-up Toyota, and assorted stock certificates to his nieces and nephews. To his great-niece, Naomi, two things: a gift from his trust of $20,000 per year, in perpetuity, and a black leather Moleskine, used. The $20,000 stipend was ostensibly the gift, but the notebook was the real trove.

Naomi still remembered being handed this strange artifact at the reading of Uncle Dave’s will. The cover couldn’t contain the pages inside, curling from the sheer weight of the ink upon them and alternately stained brown from his morning coffee or yellow from his evening chamomile. The elastic closure had long since ripped off, evidence of his eagerness to fill the pages, leaving frayed edges behind.

“And what the bejesus is that?” her Aunt Lauren wailed. She had already been warned about her language in front of the child.

“You know Uncle Dave,” her mother placated. “Another one of his ridiculous fancies. A harmless gift from an eccentric man.”

Naomi crept out of the lawyer’s office, sat in the lobby, and opened the book. Inside, she found 24 puzzles spilled across 96 pages. No, not puzzles. That implied challenges a child could solve. These were ciphers, conundrums, Gordian knots of logic, paradoxes. One looked to her like hieroglyphs, which she would later identify as Maya script. Another contained blocks of five letters, like AXWIN PCHER JQKZN SJBML, that were encrypted with a one-time pad she would have to reconstruct by finding the key. Another was styled like a pirate’s treasure map, which accounted for her 33rd birthday spent on the high seas, yelling at the captain about the location of an island only she knew existed.

The train slowed and Naomi rose from her seat, her fingers tight on the notebook as she crossed the threshold to the platform. Even after solving all of the book’s puzzles, its value to her had not diminished. It reminded her of her accomplishments, her setbacks, and most of all, her great-uncle.

He had taken Naomi to a Mets game when she was nine, two years before his death. It was the second Sunday in June, after school had let out but before the oppressive heat of summer arrived. He bought her a foam finger and a blue raspberry cotton candy within minutes of arrival, with no awareness of the incompatibility of the two. After the third inning, when she couldn’t make up her mind, he bought her both a hot dog and nachos. And when the Mets won in a 6-1 blowout, they just had to celebrate with ice cream on the way home.

She didn’t see Uncle Dave much after that day, didn’t know him well at all. He claimed at various times to be an investor or philanthropist, a man who traveled and collected both experiences and acquaintances. Her mom used to tell stories of how he’d run into someone he’d known his whole life in an airport or a deli, and how, with perfect recollection, he greeted everyone by name.

The notebook had been a complete mystery to Naomi’s parents’ generation, but to her it was a ball of yarn she could unravel for a lifetime. She solved the first puzzle at 15, a scant four years after receiving it. She had pieced together letters ingeniously hidden in a magnificent four-page illustration of New York from above, and came up with the word cereal.

That only led to more intrigue, but without any recourse, Naomi could only press on. It took another two years to solve the second puzzle, a riddle whose answer was remember.

Remember cereal? What was Uncle Dave trying to tell her?

By this time, she had discovered boys and was working as a freelance driver delivering packages. She was studying for her SAT and exploring her sexuality. There wasn’t much time for puzzles.

Still, she held on to the book, and after a rough patch in college it was there for her. A theory about its meaning had been percolating for years, and a hypothesis took form. She ran a scientific experiment twice, yielding positive results, and the evidence continued to build.

The four words extracted from the text were on a special list of just over 2,000 words, part of a proposal to make Bitcoin more recoverable by using a sequence of 24 common words to unlock your funds. And so the hypothesis grew into a theory: her great-uncle’s notebook was his 24-word seed phrase, the key to his staggering wealth that he had hidden from his nieces and nephews and gifted to her. Naomi was so transfixed by this theory that she spent the remainder of college trying to identify her uncle’s Bitcoin wallet, by looking through the public blockchain record, and trying to brute-force the seed phrase from the four words she knew.

Both these ventures proved fruitless, as there were too many Bitcoin addresses and too many possible seeds. So after college, she went back to work. She solved seven of the puzzles during a career in cryptography, including one that came as a direct result from her thesis. Another eight surrendered to the knowledge she gained studying languages. The final five led her to become a psychologist, studying the mind itself.

Naomi had interviewed her mother and Aunt Lauren at length, about their uncle and their oldest memories of him. She retraced his footsteps from the Marble Caves of Patagonia to Le Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. Between adventures, she would solve puzzles while pacing the living room or nursing a child, the book resting gently against the baby’s cheek.

Once, when Fisher was yelling at her about how she never listened and something else, a partial solution to the puzzle involving pyramids sprang to mind. She turned to leave, to record her thoughts, when he grabbed her wrist and held tight.

“What’s going to happen when you finish it, Naomi?”

She wrenched her arm free, staring him down. “I suspect balloons will fall from the ceiling,” she said, to see if she could make his eyes roll. That was a game of which she never tired.

Another time, as their passion cooled in bed, she nearly confessed that she didn’t need to solve any more puzzles. With 24 positions and 2,048 possible words, the number of potential seeds roughly equaled the number of atoms in the universe. But knowing 19 words was enough to brute-force the rest. At some point the journey had become the destination, and she wasn’t ready for it to end.

Naomi arrived at her office, a low-slung white building amidst a growing campus. She preferred to keep an office in the mathematics department. The quiet was conducive to thinking. She sat at her desk, blinking as her retinal implant superimposed her research on the blank wall. She picked out the file with the 23 words, listed one per line, and entered the final word.

She stared at the completed list: 24 words spanning more than the same number of years of her life. She had visited every continent, learned five languages, written four books, earned three doctorates. Because of the notebook, she was the most interesting person she knew.

The last four pages of the book had been a masterclass in puzzling: the longest anagram she’d ever seen, describing Dave’s life. And within that, she discovered a fontcode, clues baked into the font itself: an extra flourish on a serif, the thickness of a pen stroke, that illuminated the 24th word: uncle.

A jolt of adrenaline surged through her, mixed with doubt. Was there anything left in the wallet? Was there a wallet at all? Had a rogue AI or hacker with a quantum computer cleaned out the funds long ago, leaving her with nothing? Well, not nothing. An interesting life, filled with achievement, adventure, and meaning.

Now only the prize remained. Her imagination had run wild for decades, run the gamut from a congratulatory note to a dragon’s horde. With ten Bitcoin she could afford indefinite life extension. With a hundred she could put a dent in climate change. With a thousand, she could buy a good chunk of Mars.

She opened an interface that could access her wallet with the seed phrase, and moved the 24 words into place. Once she started the scan, there might be only a few seconds before someone monitoring her connection could steal her funds. Putting your seed into the ether was a one-way trip.

Naomi was about to go from distinguished professor, accomplished puzzler, woman with a subpar family life, to one of the wealthiest people on Earth.

A knock came at the door, soft and meek.

“Dr. Evans? May I ask a question about our assignment?”

Naomi nodded, afraid to speak. She folded her hands in her lap, trembling, holding fast to the near-orgasmic rush of dopamine flooding her system. She felt like her nine-year-old self, eating sweets at the ballpark before lunch.

This moment was the pinnacle: the novel she didn’t want to end, the perfect film nearly run through, the summit almost crested. Only this one moment hung between her and the finish. She wished it could last forever.

Finally the girl left. Naomi slumped back in her chair, breathing heavily. Her medbots struggled to regulate her system. She forced herself to breathe, and then initiated the query.

Milliseconds and a lifetime flew by. The response came back: a lock flashed, unlocked, and glowed green. The balance of her great-uncle’s wallet, her wallet, filled her vision.

Naomi laughed uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face, dripping off her cheeks and landing on the book, the most precious gift of all.