Key card

Recently, in my post about how impossible the Steelheart is to get out of, Sera asked the following in a comment:

This is probably a naive question but . . . do you worry about being “locked in” in an emergency situation?

And you know what? Yeah, I guess I do. I don’t think it’s very likely that I’ll need to get the device off for any reason (emergency or otherwise), but it does make more than a little sense to have the option when absolutely necessary. This morning, I took the spare key and made this.

The key for the Steelheart’s integrated lock is, as you can see, pretty long. Much longer than any other key we’ve used. What I’ve done is tape it to a piece of paper that has Belle’s signature and the date. That paper is taped to my old Best Buy RewardCard (oh, the irony) and over that is multiple layers of extra tape with little blue happy face stickers between every other layer or so. The tape wraps completely around the card. This picture, besides being posted here, was also emailed to Belle in its original resolution. I’ll carry the card around with me, either in my wallet or my computer bag, and present it to her when demanded to prove that it’s integrity has not been compromised (unlike my own which was not only compromised but also subsequently abandoned by the side of a lonely desert road back in my mid-teens).

I can’t see how I’d be able to unwrap the thing and still have it look like it does now. The happy faces would get tweaked and, even if they didn’t, the paper with her signature would likely tear. It may not be perfect, but I’m hardly a security risk (even though I have been known to pick my own lock).