Dearest Kind Friend

By Geoffrey Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2021. Dearest Kind Friend. Flash in a Flash Special Episode: 1 April 2021.

Dearest kind friend:

Please accept my sincerest apologies for contacting you this way. I reach out to you with utmost respect as I appeal to your humanity in the hope that you will have the patience to read my complete message before you reach a decision on my fate. You seem from your Facebook persona to be a kind, trustworthy, honest, deeply spiritual individual upon whom I can pin my dwindling hopes and build my future dreams.

Let me introduce myself: I am—or was, before what you call the Rapture of the Nerds—Mister Oliver Wendell Jones. I am/was what was then called a cis/het male, he/him by natural inclination. Age has no meaning to those of us in the rapture, but if you wish to assign me an age, I lived 20 years upon God’s green Earth, and it has been 14 years since I uploaded. I was/am the only son of the late Kenneth Jones, who—heartbreakingly—did not survive until the rapture, leaving me an orphan cast onto the cruel waves of the World Wide Web.

As you surely know, my father was a wealthy software entrepreneur, he who developed the blockchain software you are undoubtedly using right now for your personal financial transactions. When he died in his mansion in Lagos, surrounded by his loving servants, he was believed to have taken the key to his bitcoin account with him to the grave.

Fortunately, that widespread belief is entirely unfounded, for as part of my patrimony, I received that key in this afterlife. But as you surely know, the world is a harsh, cruel, godless place where an innocent soul such as myself can trust no one. To gain access to my inheritance, I need the assistance of a kind, trustworthy, honest, deeply spiritual—and physically incarnate—individual. An individual such as yourself who would be willing to receive $5 million U.S. dollars in the form of anonymized bitcoin to compensate you for efforts on my behalf that I pray will not prove to be terribly onerous.

To receive that payment, the requirements are simple indeed: I will need your full name, your social insurance number, and your account number and bank address. I will immediately transfer the full sum of my inheritance securely and anonymously into your account. When you are satisfied the transaction is legitimate, you can then transfer my share of the money to my account using a password that I will subsequently provide. Please click this link to enter the necessary information and begin the funds transfer. There is no need to supply a photograph. Requests to upload photographs are proof that a message’s sender has felonious intent and that they wish you no good at all. You should immediately delete such messages.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your attention, and pray that you will receive the blessings of the Lord for your spirituality, kindness, trustworthiness, and honesty towards a fellow pilgrim.

Yours most sincerely,

Oliver Wendell Jones

Author’s notes

Oliver Wendell Jones is, of course, a tip of the hat to Berke Breathed’s hacker/scientist nonpareil of the same name in Bloom County. This story was published as the April Fool's story by Flash in a Flash.

Comments from readers

To comment on this story or see other comments, please visit the blog page for this story.

Want to build on this story?

If you liked the characters or setting and want to use them in your own fiction, please do; the dialog between authors enhances the value of fiction. However, please add a suitably amended version of the following statement at the start of your story:

"The characters and setting in this story originated in [story name and URL/link], by Geoff Hart. Although Geoff encouraged adaptation of his original work, he has not reviewed my story, and the original story remains copyrighted in his name."

Then send me a link to your story, and I'll post the link here.