Since there's not been more contributions than prizes everyone gets one!

Thanks for participating and see you around next time.

I've decided to extend the term a further two weeks, because loads of people have been hounding me that they're "almost done" and need "just a little more time" so "please". You'd better actually do it now, ya lazy bums! To the few that have made it in time : sorry about this, it's the absolute last extension. You are allowed to at your option either re-submit a modified version or benefit from automatic tie-breaking in your favour.

Thanks all!

By the end of today though, it would be different - this was a key signing party; and by the end of it they would all be closer.
The coordinator was one of those alpha geeks - dominant, and a stickler for procedure. He cleared his throat a few times, and straightened his tee-shirt.

"Welcome everyone, are we ready to start?"

Conversation died off, and people began to rummage through pockets or bags for the list of public keys.

"So, you have all sent me your public keys prior to today. I've generated the keyring and distributed the text file. Has everyone brought a copy?"

Murmurs of agreement were issues. A twitchy looking guy Alice didn't know nodded vigorously.

"Has everyone checked their own keys are present on the list? And that the checksums are all ok?"

Eve injected herself into the conversation, having spent most of the night so far listening.

"I noticed something a little bit funny with the checksums..."

The coordinator did not like this at all - the key signing party was going off-plan here.

"What do you mean, funny? I checked this list twice!"

"Well... it's the checksums - take a look at key #2 and key #5," said Eve.

Everyone rustled their hard copy. The twitchy looking guy's eyes widened. Alice couldn't see what the fuss was about. She looked closely for a moment... 70096AD1? That looked like her key's short id... but the first key had it as well? What was going on?

The coordinator was red-faced, and began insisting he had made no mistakes in shrill tones.

Alice didn't know what this meant. How could there be another key like hers? The odds of it... they must be astronomical.

The twitchy guy began to twitch a little more, and with jittery hands waved everyone to silence.

"There's no mistake," he said. "My key is #2. Who's got #5?"

Alice made eye contact with him - twitchy, yes, but kind of cute. "I do".

Everyone began talking at once - a few began tweeting. This wasn't the first time a collision had happened, but it was almost unheard of none the less.

The coordinator flushed angrily, he was losing control. "Alice, Bob - I need to ask you to leave! We can't have this sort of thing spoiling our web of trust!"

Alice felt a flash of anger, Bob simply looked surprised. "Well... ok... I guess, we'll leave then!" he uttered. Alice didn't say anything, and simply grabbed her coat, stomping to the front door. Eve stayed, listening to the chaos.

Alice slammed it open and stepped outside, turning to march down the street. Twitchy - no; Bob - hurried after her. He caught up with her - "Hey wait!"

"What is it?!," Alice asked, probably a bit more harshly than she intended.

"That's incredible! We've got a key collision!", he exclaimed

"So?"

"Well.. don't you think that's amazing?"

Begrudgingly, she admitted it was the case. It wasn't his fault they had to leave, she supposed. He *was* kind of attractive, in a pale geeky kind of way. So when he asked, "Did you want to grab a coffee?" she simply said

"Yes".

That had been five years ago. They were young then, and ever since that first meeting the feeling of kismet had grown.
They shared the same kind of quirky interests, and had grown up within a few kilometres of each other, never having met.

The relationship deepened, they started dating, and eventually moved in together.

When Bob asked Alice to marry him, Alice didn’t hesitate.

For the second time in her life, she turned to Bob and said something that would change her life.

“Yes”

The wedding was a small affair. Eve came. Both of them didn’t have many friends, preferring each other’s company.

They said their vows in quiet, shy tones - to love and to hold, to trust and to cherish, till death do us part - and slipped on the rings that bound them.

Known only to a few of their friends present, etched inside each ring was the public key they had brought to that key signing party, where they had first been thrust together by chance.

It was their secret, a little inside joke between them.

The priest smiled, and closed the bible - his words seemed muffled as Alice turned to Bob. That was it, they were married!

Alice closed her eyes and kissed Bob, for the first time as man and wife.

Bob ended up having to travel for his work a lot during the next few years. Skype sessions and telecommuting only took him so far - he had to get his boots on the ground, and speak to engineers or sysadmins more than he liked.

Alice grew lonely. Her husband was her closest friend, but she began to resent his absence. She felt lost. Eve wasn’t much comfort during this time, occasionally coming around; but never saying anything of substance - just listening.

Bob would come back for a day or a weekend, then fly out again. Their dinners, once quiet discussions of things that fascinated them both began to grow stale, then cold.

Months passed, and Alice felt her whole existence had narrowed down to a point where silence was the major thing in her life.
She found herself upset for no reason she could understand, and grew even more despondent.

Bob could see these changes, but didn’t know why. His wife was unhappy, and he buried himself further in his work to avoid the cruel reality - his marriage was failing.

Eve sat in the kitchen, holding her tea, listening intently. Alice felt tears well up.

“It’s not that we even need the money! We have hundreds of thousands, but there’s no way for us to spend it all! I just don’t understand why he has to work so much,” she sobbed to Eve.

Eve didn’t say anything, always listening, nodding in sympathy. Eve couldn’t believe the problems Alice was having - too much money? Who has too much money! she thought. Not me, that’s for sure.

“Ever since we were married, we’ve haven’t even had the time to update our keys. Our keys for goodness sake. We’re still using the same old ones from when we first met! He’s not even interstate next week, just forty minutes away; but it might as well be a thousand miles...”

Alice snuffled her way through this week’s lamet, while Eve ruminated....

Mallory looked at her sister in disbelief.

"She's alone most of the time?"

Eve nodded.

"She has hundreds of thousands of dollars?"

Eve nodded again.

“Neither her husband or her have changed their keys in years? And they have a key collision?,” Mallory asked.

Eve smiled. Mallory smiled back. This is going to work out well...

Eve was back in the kitchen. Alice’s eyes were red, a wadded up tissue in her right fist. Bob is away again.

Carefully, Alice inhaled, then exhaled, trying to get a grip on her emotions. Just as she was about to launch into another wave of self pity, a shattering of glass interrupted her.

"What was that? Did you hear that?," Alice asked. Her heart rate went up a notch. This wasn't normal. Glass doesn't just break itself - was there something wrong? It was the late afternoon, not many people would be home from work.

Was a burglar trying to break in?

Alice looked at Eve. Eve blinked, looking worried.

Alice stepped over to the knife block, and grabbed the largest meanest looking knife she could see. Quietly, she stepped towards the sound, slipping into the hallway. A gloved hand was reaching for the door handle through a broken pane of glasss.

This sight send a pang of fear through Alice. She wavered, even as the fumbling hand caught hold of the door knob, and managed to funble the lock off.

Alice began to panic. She forgot the knife she was carrying and back into the kitchen, hissing at Eve.

"Someone is breaking in... call the police!"

Eve went white, and began to fumble around in her purse.

The opening of a door, followed by footsteps could be heard. These weren't the footsteps of some cat burglar, someone attempting to conceal themselves. They were brash, confident. Alice began to hyperventilate.

A woman, holding a small pistol, stepped into the kitchen and fired once into the wall.

Alice screamed. Eve dropped her phone and ducked under the table.

"Don't move, " the woman commanded.

Eve looked up at her sister, Mallory, who took two brisk steps forward and hit Eve with the butt of her pistol.

"I said, don't move"

Alice couldn't comprehend what was happening. A silence settled in - no longer the silence of a lonely house, but one pregnant with danger.

Alice's ears were ringing from the shot. The woman grabbed Eve by her arm, half lifting, half pulling. A trickle of blood seeped from Eve's lip, but she followed the rough physical shoves.

Eve found herself leant half over the table. The woman cocked the gun and pushed it into Eve's throat. It smelt of cordite, of the heat of a recently discharged round. Eve whimpered.

"I'm here to take your money. If you complain, I'll shoot. If you make a sound, I'll shoot. Take off your rings," said Mallory, looking directly at Alice.

"W-w-," was all Alice could manage. Where was Bob? Where was anyone? Surely someone heard the glass or the shot.

Mallory lifted the gun from her sister and pointed it at Alice.

"Take. Off. Your. Jewellery."

The threat of the gun and the pumping adrenalin finally broke through to Alice. She began to fumble at her rings, never taking her eyes off of the deadly weapon pointed at her.

Her hands were slick with sweat, but she finally got her wedding ring off.

"Give it to me," commanded Mallory.

Alice didn't move, her feet cemented in place by fear.

Mallory stepped around the table, and over to Alice, grabbing her by the hair. Alice's knees went weak.

"T-T-take it, leave us alone, " she stammered, holding up the ring.

Mallory kneed her in the stomach.

"I'm the one who makes the decisions," she hissed.

Alice gasped for air, suddenly winded, falling down more from shock and fear than pain.

Mallory picked up the ring, and kicked at Alice, who was curling into a ball on the floor.

“Now you are going to tell me a few secrets, aren’t you?” Mallory said, pointing the pistol at Eve but staring at Alice.

In her state of fear, Alice could only think one thing.

Yes, anything to be left alone, yes.

Bob’s phone buzzed with a new text message. It was a withdrawal of funds notification, over a pre-set limit, from his bank..

Funny. Unless Alice is … shopping? But this is a hundred thousand dollars - that’s got to be a mistake.

Bob frowned, and excused himself from the meeting.

Alice cried uncontrollably. Mallory had hit her, kicking and screaming at her. This wasn't a robbery. She wanted bank details. She wanted security codes.

She wanted Alice's private key.

At first, Alice had thought about lying, but she was afraid for Eve - Eve who sat there, not saying a word, listening to the entire situation in a state of shock with a weapon trained on her.

Ten minutes in, she broke. There was no way out but to give up her private key. She told Mallory the passphrase, and watched as it was unlocked on a nearby computer.

At least Eve was going to be alright. That was Alice's last thought, as Mallory turned towards her, levelled the pistol and fired twice into her body.

Bob couldn't understand. He tried to authenticate with the bank's online site, but the wireless on his phone was terrible. He'd been meaning to replace it, it kept dropping access at a cruical moment or another.

He dialed Alice's phone, but it wouldn't connect.

Finally, Eve spoke.

"You didn't have to hit me so hard, sis."

Mallory looked a bit sheepish. "I had to make it look real. She'd never have given up the key unless it seemed like she was really going to save her friend's life."

"Even so, it's going to take a lot of time for this swelling to go down," Eve complained.

Mallory didn't say anything. "Time is money - I'll give you an extra 5% cut of the 500,000 then - call it a pain and suffering allowance."

"Gee, thanks sis, " replied Eve, sarcastically. Even as she said it though, she smiled. A two years salary in a day; transferred from Alice and Bob's account into bitcoins, and routed to the exchange via TOR. It would be a cross jurisdictional nightmare to follow the money - the local police were hardly at the level of Interpol when it came to this sort of thing.

Mallory turned back to the computer, to make a few more last minute purchases.

She turned to Eve.

“We should go”

They left the scene.

Bob was frantic. He was in his car, only a few minutes away from his house. The alert messages had just kept coming. His bank balance was zero. What the hell was Alice doing?

He barely noticed as he passed through the e-ticket toll booth, the total deducted from his account.

Bob pulled up into his driveway. The automated roller door opened, he dashed in through the garage. He could hear sirens in the distance - some poor person getting pulled over a few blocks away, most likely.

"Alice!", he shouted.

There was no answer. He checked the living room, and the study. He dashed upstairs, accidentally stepping on a piece of glass. It crunched harmlessly under his shoe, and he charged up the stairs.

"ALICE," he called. Where was she. What the hell was happening? He sat on the bed and tried his phone again for a few minutes, but to no avail.

He was walking back down the stairs when it struck him. Glass? On the carpet?

He turned towards the door. There was a figure on the other side, and someone has obviously smashed part of it. What...

"This is the police. Open the door." The police officer hammered on the door heavily.

The police? At his house? None of this made any sense.

The police officer turned the handle and shoved the door. His partner swept into the room, brandishing a weapon. Bob simply stared, half way down the stairs.

The cop trained the weapon on him and told him not to move.

"Is anyone else home?", asked the cop.

Bob stammered, feeling his nervous twitch come back with a vengeance. Bob stuck his hands up, almost comically.

"I asked is anyone else home?"

"Just... my wife.. but.."

"Check the back," said the cop to his partner. He didn't lower the pistol.

The other police officer moved down the hall, towards the kitchen.

"Oh shit!" came the exclamation. "Take him into custody, now!"

The detectives sat across from him, and stared.

Bob stared back, blankly.

“You’ve been read your rights?”

Bob said nothing. He was shocked.

“You understand that you are here in relation to the murder of your wife, Alice?”

Bob was numb. It still didn’t make any sense at all. Why did they keep talking about Alice? Why did they keep saying murder?

"You see Bob," said one detective, "We have you already. Why don't you just tell your side of the story."

"We've got it all," said the other. "Logs of you cleaning out the bank account. The transaction with the airline to get a ticket for today. You have no alibi - we've checked. Everyone at your office says you looked at your phone, got up and left in a hurry."

"Air-..?"

"We've got logs. We've got logs of you passing through two different e-ticket points. We've got logs showing you arrived at your address at least within half an hour of the time of death - plenty of time for you to shoot her, go upstairs, and start preparing to flee. We've got officers at the scene discovering you with the body."

"Just tell us what happened," cooed the original detective.

“I don’t have to talk to you,” said Bob. He didn’t understand. Did they really think he would.. Alice.. dead? This isn’t real.

“We’ve got the gun. We don’t need a confession - we’re going to do a gunshot residue test on you, showing you fired it. The bullets are going to match the gun. The gun is going to match your fingerprints.”

Bob just looked back and forth at them. None of this is true. It’s some kind of game. I don’t know what they want. What gun?

“I came home - I got an alert that my bank accounts were having money transferred. I couldn’t get in contact with Alice”

“So, what? You got in your car, drove home, breaking the speed limit, walked inside and what then?”

"I want to see my lawyer," The detectives looked at him. "I said I want to see my lawyer. I know my rights, I don't have to talk to you, you can't make me tell you anything without my lawyer. I want to see them."

The detectives stepped away, and left the interview room. The first turned to the other. He looked tired.

"I know he did it. I've got that feeling. Something just isn't right here."

Hours later, lawyer present, the detectives and Bob sat again.

“My client will agree to a gunshot residue test,” said the Lawyer. The detectives smiled.

“He doesn’t get to agree or not, this is a murder investigation. One phone call and it’s a court order.”

“Even so, let it be noted he is cooperating in the investigation while maintaining his innocence.”

One detective exited the interview room, presumably to fetch a gunshot residue kit.

The other looked directly at Bob.

"Cooperation. Let's talk about that. It might interest you to know that there are a lot of commercial operations around that are really interested in cooperation. For example, Alice's bank."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, just as we might do a test to see if you have fired a gun recently, should we find that gun we'd look for fingerprints. In the case of your bank, there's another set of fingerprints. Access logs to bank accounts.

“You might be interested to know that Alice's bank is very good with fingerprints - they take and log one every time someone accesses an account authenticated with their private keys. There's a time, there's a date, and we know it's accurate."

Bob was puzzled as to what the detective was getting at. Did he know something about the missing funds?

"The other thing we know is about when Alice was murdered. Help me with this - you say you arrived home about 3:40pm, right?"

Bob nodded.

"We know that Alice's time of death was between 3:10 and 3:30, from the pallor mortis. Pallor mortis is where the blood leaves the skin, giving a body a 'deathly pale' appearance.

“What we know for sure is that Alice's bank accounts were accessed at 3:23pm, and a sizable amount of funding was transferred into bitcoins via an anonymous exchange.

“The problem we have is this: there are no other records indicating anyone else has access to that account but her. Yet 10 minutes after her death, she decides to transfer a large amount of money. How do you suppose we explain that, Bob?"

Bob swallowed, hard. “I was notified about the missing funds, that’s why I left.”

“That doesn’t seem very likely. We’ve looked: there’s only ever been one key that can access that account, and it’s hers.”

“We have a key that shares the same hash. If you only look at logs in a certain way... well you might only find that hash.”

“You mean to tell me, that out of the millions of people - no, billions, with just about every citizen in every country having at least one private key - that you and your wife just happen to have an identical key.” The detective laughed.

“You know, we catch criminals like you all the time. We get asked to believe the most amazing things. But I think this has got to be the most statistically unlikely.”

“I didn’t say we had the same key, just the same fingerprint”

“And that makes it so much difference. The odds are still millions to one. I think I’d sooner believe in santa claus.”

“It does make a difference! It makes an order of magnitude difference!”

The detective shook his head. “We think you killed her and took that key. How likely is it that her now 10 minutes dead body rose up, bought a plane ticket anonymously, and put it in your name. We think you’ve had that key for a while too.”

The detective slid a printed piece of paper to him. His lawyer glanced briefly, then Bob picked it up.

It was an email.

It was an email written by Alice.

Bob’s eyes widened, and he began to fume silently.

“Pretty explicit, isn’t it. We think you’ve had Alice’s key for a while. We think you saw this. A letter to a lover. We think when you saw this, you were angry. Angry enough to plan out a murder. Angry enough to plan out your escape. We think you killed her, then started to execute your escape plan when the police arrived to arrest you. With her body in the kitchen. Still warm.”

“I would never hurt her! I’ve never seen this email before in my life!”

Bob’s lawyer touched his arm, and shook his head. He leant in to whisper. “The more you get worked up, the more they will push you. The more excited you get when they push you, the worse you come across.”

Bob listened numbly, his paranoia in total control of his mind. This was some kind of setup. There was no way anyone would ever believe this. He’d been at work. Why wouldn’t they believe him? Someone must be out to get him.

“I don’t want to answer any more questions.”

The other detective returned, with the kit. He sat down and began to open it. The silence between his lawyer, the detectives and the rustling of the sterile packing.
A swab was produced, and brushed against his hand.

He said nothing.

The surly detective taking the swab placed it in a container.

His lawyer stood. “Detectives, my client has exercised his right to silence. You have your test. We’ve cooperated. This interview is over for now, I need to speak with my client in private.”

They stood, without protest, and left.

Bob put his head down on his folded arms and wept, thinking of Alice.

The trial didn’t go well for Bob. The jury regarded his increasing paranoia with something regarding alarm - he was obviously a detached, slightly deranged murderer.

His emphatic protests about the key collision were seen as rantings of a madman - everyone in the jury had their own private key. They knew just how secure it was.

The circumstantial evidence was enough for them. The fact there was no gunshot residue was ignored. He’d been found with his wife’s body, by the police.
The digital trail was his final undoing - it looked like he wanted to flee, it looked like he had access to his wife’s email for months. They found he had the means, motive and opportunity almost by the end of the first few hours.

For the rest of the trial, he just sat sullenly. His lawyer seemed to accept the air of defeat.

They convicted him after only four hours of deliberation.

Outside, the two detectives smoked, and spoke in soft tones.

“We’re lucky that guy is so unlikable. I thought when we couldn’t tie the murder weapon to him... well the DA was nuts to push forward with what we had.”

“For me, I knew it was him. The moment we found that email from his wife. There’s no way anyone could read that and not come to the conclusion their wife was having an affair. You saw how he reacted to stress - paranoia, fear, even aggression. But always a calaculating kind of aggression.
I can completely believe that was what triggered him to kill his wife.”

“It’s funny..”

“What is?”

“Well, if you think about it - if his wife’s email provider hadn’t cooperated, if the bank hadn’t wanted to turn over logs without a court order, we’d have never had enough to convit. It’s licky for her that no one’s data is really that private - if she’d had pretty good privacy, we’d never have been able to convict...”

The surly detective grinned, dropped his cigarette, and ground it out with his heel. He left his partner there, too amused by the pun to say anything else.

He left.

---
My address: 17hqpof5NaPs8XiErNNoF61XF8qPcqwA2Y
P.S. I know I'm late but the two weeks were quite a short time for this...