Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  “Nonsense!” I exclaimed, somewhat too rapidly. Then: “I certainly don’t have anything like that. And if Ana has stumbled across a lost draft that large, she certainly hasn’t told me. Didn’t tell me. Before she went missing, I mean . . .” I began to tear up. “Anyway, why didn’t you ask me when you had me under oath?”

  “Your motives for visiting this system is not a legitimate subject for deposition under debugger-enforced oath during a fraud investigation.” The pirate chief seemed to look right through me. “I could lose my license. Or worse.” He whistled again: A pair of goons materialized at my back. “Take her to her quarters and lock her in until we’re ready to depart,” he told them. As they lifted me from my seat, he added: “The stakes here are far higher than you realize. I apologize unreservedly for your distress: We’ll talk again once we are under way.”

  * * *

  Iam told that on first acquaintance I usually strike people as meek and mild-mannered. This is a mistake. I believe I alluded earlier to the circumstances of my childhood. I did not so much take to silence and quietude naturally as have them forced upon me as survival tools. Sondra was cursed with a fiery, quick temper and doesn’t suffer fools gladly; more than one of my sibs who shared those traits provoked her into aborting them. Besides, the nature of my specialty is such that I have studied unsavory people and know all too well the way gangsters and tyrants dispose of those whom they consider to be traitors. So I learned early to nurse my grudges in polite silence and repay insults at my leisure.

  Once the hatch slammed shut behind me I huddled up in the mound of bedding, hugging my legs and burying my face between my knees. An observer might have thought I was weeping, whether from the shock of abduction or the indignity of interrogation: In reality, I was taking stock of my situation and concealing my anger from the microcams that the pirates would inevitably have dusted the room with. They weren’t, I noticed, uncivilized: They’d thoughtfully replaced the chip they yanked to make room for their interrogation tool. Which meant both my sockets were populated.

  Most of us harbor dual soul-chip slots simply as a matter of redundancy. We use them as journal logs for our mental state, so that if our body is damaged beyond repair, a rescuer can attempt to install us in a new anatomical framework and initialize a brain of random, barely socialized mechaneurocytes from the dump. Two sockets simply mean there’s a greater chance of surviving an accident so drastic that it crushes one’s skull. You don’t really need two backups if you’re willing to live dangerously; so, like other traders in secrecy, I habitually used one of my sockets to hold a private data repository and a dumb, programmable amanuensis.

  Quivering in a bundle of fabric, I retreated inside my own head to formulate my escape plans. A compulsive filer, I threw every image I could recall into a new and palatial memory mansion: from my interrogator’s face and his precise phraseology to the expression on Lady Cybelle’s face as Deacon Dennett explained our situation to her. Dennett’s speech, too, went into the closet. Had there been something shifty-looking about his expression? I pondered for a minute, then decided to revisit the question later.

  While I was busy establishing a sound foundation for future schemes, I noticed a couple of reminders waiting for me. Cousin Andrea’s dump—I had been ignoring it ever since I came aboard the chapel. I kicked myself mentally. I’d become so caught up in the day-to-day issues of survival and work that I’d gotten into the habit of postponing it. Knowing Andrea, she’d babble interminably and take me on a tour of the architectural plans for a new records wing of the palace I once called home: But, I now thought, could it be a complete coincidence that a large message from her had arrived so soon after Ana disappeared? Well yes, probably it could. But a firm of space pirates had departed Taj Beacon in hot pursuit and hijacked a church on flight, seemingly just to get a chance to ask me where Ana had gotten to; and there was the small matter of my stalker, whoever she was and wherever they’d hidden her, and of the double game that Dennett had so recently betrayed—

  Suddenly, Andrea’s missive took on a whole new significance.

  * * *

  Andrea leans against the railing of an ornamental bridge, facing the cameras that define my viewpoint. She has dressed as if for a formal occasion and looks serenely pleased with herself; she stands at the center of a classically composed stage, nonchalant and beautiful.

  (I describe it as I see it unfolding in my mind’s eye. However, the scene is captured in ancient light: Andrea could be dead by now, for all I know. It’s a rehearsed briefing, delivered to the camera’s vision years ago, then encrypted for my eyes only and relayed from beacon to interstellar beacon until it caught up with me at Taj.)

  “I’m afraid we’ve had a little bit of a screwup at this end, and news of it is going to catch up with you not long after this message. Summary is: Do not proceed to Shin-Tethys. In fact, stay away from Dojima System entirely. Cancel your upload, just write it off and don’t go.”

  Andrea inhales deeply, her chest rising and falling as she flushes her gas-exchange surfaces. (Many of these reflexes of ours date back to our Fragile ancestors; archaic and not really useful to our refactored bodies, but one dabbles with redesigning the autonomic nervous system at one’s peril.) She pauses to compose herself—evidently upset—before continuing:

  “Word of the existence of the Atlantis Carnet appears to have leaked. I’m not sure who blabbed, and whether it was just a loose tongue or something more serious (although I’ve got my suspicions), but there was an attempted burglary at the family archives just over five days ago.”

  (I forced myself to resist the impulse to sit bolt upright at that point but froze the message while I forced myself to understand the significance of the bomb Andrea had just detonated. After a moment, I resumed the recording . . .)

  “The burglar in question was a zombie. It penetrated security by impersonating a young sister, Michaela—I don’t know if you knew her. Unfortunately, whoever sent the burglar abducted her, and we assume that they murdered her for her security tokens. She—the impersonator—was caught attempting to penetrate the secondary archive vault. When Valia’s security auditors examined the corpse, they found it in possession of this.”

  Andrea extends her cupped left hand toward me. It cradles the small black nub of a soul chip. “It contains metadata identifying it as Sondra’s private key, but the contents are scrambled. As the burglar hadn’t made it into the vault when she was stopped, we assume that the intention was to substitute this forgery for the contents of the vault. Which in turn suggests that whoever sent the burglar is attempting a sophisticated fraud against the bank’s long-term-deposit archive, and might be fully informed about our earlier successful copying of the Atlantis Carnet. If you proceed from GJ 785 to Dojima, there’s a very good chance that you’ll run into someone sent to relieve you of it. And if they’re ruthless enough to have abducted and murdered Michaela, it’s reasonable to suppose that your life is in danger. Not to mention Ana’s.”

  Oops.

  “I’m trying to track down the source and extent of the leak. If I can work out what got out, and who knows about it, I’ll let you know. But for the time being, if you wish to continue your pilgrimage, it is probably safe to go directly to Shin-Kyoto and commence your scheduled study year with Elder Shibbo. Doing so will probably suffice to warn off your pursuers. Ana, however, is less lucky and will have to make arrangements for her own security. We all need to lie low for a few years, and she may be stuck in Dojima System. I have sent a warning similar to this one directly to her; if it reaches her in time, she should have time to seek sanctuary. I told her that if it’s safe for her to do so, she should head for Shin-Kyoto with anything she’s found and meet you there—”

  (By this point I had stopped listening and was swearing violently under my breath, oblivious to the possibility that my abductors might overhear my indecorous words. I paused the message again and forced myself to breathe de
eply. Then I dived back in to finish it.)

  “In summary, dear sis, you should avoid Dojima System and Shin-Tethys in particular like the plague. Ana will either have to escape on her own or . . . we may very well have to abandon the game, hide out, and pretend none of this ever happened. I’m sorry, but there’s no alternative. Do take care, get yourself to safety, and remember to write!”

  I killed the message and opened my eyes, taking in the twilit constriction of my makeshift oubliette. Then, after some seconds or minutes of bleak near despair, I began to update my notes.

  * * *

  Dear Reader.

  Andrea told me to write, so I’m going to write, but not in any expectation of her ever reading this. I’m keeping this in a securely encrypted notepad in my repository chip. The simple truth is: While I am indeed a mendicant scholar on a pilgrimage between the fellows of my order, most of what I told Deacon Dennett and his conspirators was a pack of lies. Which is entirely fair insofar as he lied to me, shamelessly and extensively. (If the priestess Cybelle had been at the helm, it would have been far more unlucky for me; priests and priestesses don’t need debuggers to dig information out of you. But my inference is that Dennett took advantage of the accident aboard the chapel to arrange a bloodless mutiny and this circumstance left him at a disadvantage: He might have known that I held a valuable secret, but he had no simple tool for digging it out of me while I was in his clutches, and I slipped through his fingers before he had time to grow desperate.)

  I even managed to conceal my purpose from the pirates, for they seem to be mostly interested in Ana’s insurance policy rather than in my secrets. Or perhaps Rudi was honestly telling the truth when he said he wasn’t allowed to pry them out of me using a debugger. (I wonder what she insured herself for, to provoke the underwriters to such drastic action?) Given the nature of this affair, it’s not surprising. We are engaged in a battle without honor or humanity. People behave very oddly when the ownership of large quantities of money is at stake. Some—as we have seen—will commit murder or send out shape-shifting zombie assassins. I am not that ruthless. However, here I am, running around into the cold and unwelcoming universe at large, having adventures—something I loathe and fear, for the definition of an adventure is an unpleasant and possibly unsurvivable experience—in the hope that Ana and I might be able to wind up an ancient business venture and in so doing finally free ourselves from the shadow of our mother: For redeeming the Atlantis Carnet will tarnish her good name irredeemably.

  Ahem.

  To understand why the Atlantis Carnet is so important, I need to continue my exposition of the nature of money, fast, medium, and slow: the one that Dennett waved away. If you are Andrea, or another of my ilk, you might as well skip this section of my correspondence. If you’re here to pick up the pieces . . . well, read on.

  Let us ignore for the time being the ontology of money, the question of where money comes from and what money is. Instead, let us contemplate the teleology of money—the purpose it serves and how form follows purpose.

  Cash is fast money. We use it for immediate exchanges of value. Goods and labor: You sell, I buy; we negotiate the value on either side of the balance sheet (what are your goods worth to you? What is this service worth to me?) by collapsing desire to an integer. Cash is unidimensional. Cash is fast. Cash is dumb. Cash destroys information about values inherent in previous transactions. Cash is bits and atoms. If you are human, whether Fragile or Post, you already know all about cash.

  Medium money is something you buy with cash; something durable, something that is not easily liquidated or valued in fast money. Cathedrals and asteroids and debts and durable real estate and bonds backed by the honorable reputation of traders in slow money—it takes years for medium investments to rise and fall, many days or years to buy or sell them. Medium money is what you use to store your fast money when you’ve got more of it than you need for your immediate purposes. Medium money is the bony skeleton of a planetary economy, emerging out of human exchanges of status signals. Cash can crash or hyperinflate into valueless scrip, but if you converted it into a farm or a road or a home or to buy the loyalty of clients and the fealty of newly forked child instances, you will still have your medium money at the end of the fast money apocalypse.

  The Fragile didn’t know these types of money by name; indeed, those of them who focused on the uses of capital mistook medium money for a special case of fast money. So the bubbles and crashes that rippled through their fast money systems frequently caused misery and massive infrastructure damage. By denominating them separately, by having a flexible exchange rate, modern economies decouple transient demand from the bones and muscles that underpin survival. It makes for stability, in the long term—but not long enough for slow vehicles.

  Slow vehicles, such as starships.

  Colony vessels and migratory habitats like cathedrals hurtle between the stars at unimaginable speeds; at thousands of kilometers per second, almost a measurable percentage of the speed of light. But while such a velocity is hard to comprehend, the distance between the stars is vast. Here, at the tip of my thumb, is a G2 star, the sun beneath the rays of which the Fragile were born. The span of the fingers of my hand takes us to Earth, their home world. To reach the inner edge of the Kuiper belt, the second asteroidal debris belt beyond the outermost of the planets, is a distance of perhaps three meters. Lonely, icy Eris orbits between four and ten meters away. On this vast scale, a centimeter represents ten million kilometers. But the distance to the nearest star is over five thousand meters. The distance from Earth to Shin-Tethys is over forty kilometers. And it would take one of our starships nearly four millennia to cross that gulf.

  Starships, of necessity, travel light. The cost of building and launching one is crippling—and the cost of building one that could carry the millions of bodies with different skills that it takes to render a new star system fit for habitation would be impossible. So we make do by sending starships with only a skeleton crew. The job of the starship’s complement is to build a beacon and trade for skills with the neighbors, to solicit immigrants via laser transmission and build new bodies for them. It’s teleportation, of a kind. But this takes slow money.

  Slow money is a medium of exchange designed to outlast the rise and fall of civilizations. It is the currency of world-builders, running on an engine of debt that can only be repaid by the formation of new interstellar colonies, passing the liability ever onward into the deep future—or forgiven by the Jubilee, a systemwide reset of the financial system entailing nullification of all debts, but that becomes less feasible the more colonies we create. By design, the slow money system is permanently balanced on the edge of a liquidity crisis, for every exchange between two beacons must be cryptographically signed by a third-party bank in another star system: It takes years to settle a transaction. It’s theft-proof, too—for each bitcoin is cryptographically signed by the mind of its owner, stored in one of their slots. Your slow money assets are, in a very real manner, an aspect of your identity. Nobody would think to detach from their roots and emigrate to a new colony for pay in any other currency; for the very slowness of slow money guarantees that it isn’t vulnerable to bubbles and depressions and turbulence and the collapse of any currency that is limited to a single star system.

  Now pay attention, please: There is a protocol to understand.

  Suppose I wish to hire you—in another star system—to loan me a copy of your soul as indentured labor for a decade or two. Obviously, I must pay in slow money (and pay double, for both copies of you). I send you a signed dollar, one that can be authenticated by a third-party bank as having originated in my own bank. (The authentication step takes place in another star system that I cannot physically control, for it is distant.) Once you receive my coin, you sign it and send a copy of it to the third-party bank for verification. Meanwhile, you upload yourself to my vicinity and again send a copy of the signed coin to the bank. The bank
can now countersign the coin—having received two copies of it, you have proven to it that you have traveled from your first location to mine, fulfilling the contract—and sends an activation checksum back to each copy of you, which confirms that each of you are in possession of half a dollar. (Or, by prior arrangement, only one instance of you ends up in possession of the dollar—issuing banks, and only issuing banks, can break coins. As to where the coins come from, that is another question entirely, and I shall discuss it at length later in this report.)

  Thus do we pay for interstellar services. It is the ancient dance of the three-phase commit, and it can take many years to complete, for slow money effectively travels at a third of the speed of light. It is cumbersome but very secure. The transactions are tied to the identity of the person or bank that owns the money—you can’t steal slow money without kidnapping or mindrape or fraud. How does the bank know you have traveled? That’s easy to prove; beacon stations watching different stars record the arrival of your signed bitcoins from physically separate star systems. You can’t forge it—not without a starship. You can’t inflate the quantity in circulation—the bitcoin algorithm used to prime issuing banks prevents that. Short of rewriting the laws of mathematics and physics, it’s solid.

  But sometimes, something goes wrong.

  Suppose I die after I send you the coin but before I can send it to the authorizing bank for verification. Or that I send it but you die before you send your received copy to the bank. Or that you receive it and get it signed, but your copy (who has traveled to my beacon station) dies before they can sign the coin and verify it with the bank. Or suppose civilization in the bank’s star system collapses halfway through the transaction. Suppose, suppose. These are the simple failure modes. Slow money transactions can take a good chunk of a person’s life. Of the lives of the people at either end. And while local banks are happy to act as proxies or to take care of negotiation and settlement, sometimes people cut corners.