I closed my eyes: The light show didn’t go away, but it helped me fake the illusion of self-control.
Shin-Tethys may be a massive world, but thanks to all the water, it isn’t very dense: And so orbital velocity is relatively low. It took less than five minutes for the single-stage nuclear rocket to boost us out of the atmosphere and up toward the window for our transfer to synchronous orbit. I opened my eyes when the bubble-chamber scribble of particle tracks inside my eyeballs dropped off, then felt a gentle bump as the carrier rocket detached, presumably to complete a single orbit and return to the surface to collect its next payload.
“Ah, excellent.” Rudi released his straps. “Marigold, please contact Five Zero and request a pickup at their earliest convenience. I think we should be on board in four, five hours at the most—”
The prospect of spending several hours locked in this floating canister with Rudi in preening self-congratulatory mode did not appeal, but I was short of distractions. And I found myself badly in need of distracting. Nothing that had happened to me in the past year and change since I had arrived in Dojima System made sense if taken at face value. Everyone I had met was pursuing a covert agenda, skewed at some slight strange angle to reality: Nothing was what it seemed. Rudi had slid from hijacker and kidnapper to—what? Ally? Prospective business partner?—backing away from threats and aggression toward blandishments and seduction. Why?
And then there was the Church: An even more bizarre mismatch between public image and interior goings-on would be hard to imagine, even without contemplating the machinations of Deacon Dennett against his rightful priestess. Queen Medea . . . well, she was at least comprehensible as the usual intersection of greed and leviathan-like will-to-power, tempered by just enough subtlety to try to get what she wanted by letting me run. But the stalker who had stolen my face and attached herself to the Church—what was that about? And Sondra. Don’t forget Sondra. What had bestirred her after all these centuries, to suddenly cut loose from her moorings and hurl herself screaming at the stars? Was it as simple as an urgent desire to conceal her corrupt involvement in a long-ago money-laundering scandal? Or was there something more at stake?
Almost without thinking, my hand went to the small soul-case fastened to my belt. Ana had sent it. A gift, she had implied. Use it wisely. Use what?
I glanced sidelong at my companions. They were, as I expected, busy elsewhere: Rudi nattering micromanaged instructions at Marigold, Marigold ignoring him as she grappled with the complexities of the capsule’s long-range router, Dent lost in the comforting certainties of a spreadsheet. Careful to give no outward sign of what I was doing, I opened the small case and removed the chip. Then I raised it to my neck and slid aside the flap of skin covering the empty slot—the one where my backup usually sat, the running copy of my personality that I had left with Ana as a promise and a life insurance policy.
I slid the chip into place and composed myself, closed my eyes, and slid off into a waking hallucination as I opened the doors of the memory palace Ana had gifted me (in form, a ghostly reproduction of Sondra’s palace, where we had both grown up). There was, as I expected, a README waiting in the entrance hall behind the outer doors: a lectern, chest high, bearing a codex, bound in the skin of dragons, locked with a brass key that I found on a chain around my neck. I walked toward it—the memory palace came complete with the memory of legs, for which I was grateful—and unlocked the cover of the book, opening it to the first page.
I began to read. And the universe changed around me.
* * *
Let me tell you what really happened in Atlantis System.
(I recognized Ana’s writing in the README, for it was signed with a hash of her mind’s state vector, as directly traceable to her as a slow dollar to its issuing bank.)
This is a secondhand account based on research documents that Andrea succeeded in copying under our mother’s nose and forwarded to me. I hope for her sake that Andrea fled in time. As soon as I read them, I left my previously secure position in the Corporate History faculty of the College of the Outer Belt and fled via Argos in Shin-Tethys to my refuge with the People of the Deep, because this is the sort of material that gets you hunted down and killed, however thorough your backup-and-resurrection insurance policy may be.
You can find the original documents in the mezzanine level of the library, second wing, third bay, fourth galley. There are many shelves of them. So let me summarize.
Sometime after you left on your pilgrimage, it occurred to Andrea to wonder if anyone in our lineage had previously pursued interests quite like our little hobby. After all, if we have predecessors, they would have depleted the pool of available trophies, wouldn’t they? Andrea searched . . . and the result was a negative. We are, it seems, the first generation of Sondra’s offshoots to take an interest in orphaned slow money transfers. Then Andrea looked further. You know, as do I, the necessary specialist skills of our profession. Andrea checked the tuition archives. She checked them most thoroughly and came to the conclusion that we had been systematically channeled in this direction. It’s a telling list of coincidences, sis: Not only Church and State and bankers arriving in Dojima System on schedule, but carefully trained and sublimely unaware forensic accountants hunting long-lost treasure.
Before the dawn of history, when humanity was entirely Fragile and confined to a single planet, there was a species of wild organism that was highly prized as a feedstock by those protohumans. It was called a “truffle,” and it was rare, and grew underground. Truffles were noted for their characteristic smell, but Fragile noses were not strong enough to detect them. So they took a different species of animal, a thing called a “pig.” Pigs liked truffles and had a good sense of smell, so they were easily trained to hunt for truffles: But the truffles were valuable enough that, once found, the pigs were not allowed to eat them.
You and I, sis, and Andrea: to Sondra we are merely truffle-hunting pigs, turned loose in a forest where she knew there would be many truffles to be found, ahead of her own arrival to collect the fruit of our searches. Specialized extensions of her identity, tailored for the task and to be used and disposed of with no more heed than a glove or a sock. Yes, Andrea found the evidence: My research post was made possible by a donation our lineage mater supplied through a cutout. Just as your study pilgrimage was nudged this way . . .
But that’s not all. Why did Sondra expect us to find lots of juicy truffles in Dojima System?
More to the point, Krina, have you wondered what Sondra did to become so wealthy in the first place?
Andrea found Sondra’s records by chance, while researching orphan transactions from SystemBank Hector, where Sondra got her start. What we had not realized is that Hector’s SystemBank underwrote the Atlantis colony expedition. And that Sondra actually forked and sent an instance of herself along with the colony vehicle! She was not merely laundering the proceeds of a fraud—she was, at the other end, one of the directors of Atlantis SystemBank! She was able to sign currency transactions in both directions. I don’t think that has ever been done before.
Now, as to the precise nature of the Atlantis fraud: I think you can see where it’s going? Atlantis was not a boiler-room operation. It was a genuine research colony, populated by real scholars, dedicated to the goal of constructing a causality violation engine—a device that could connect points in spacetime instantaneously. The appearance of fraud that we attribute to Atlantis is due to two factors:
Firstly, that our lineage mater, and various collaborators among the founders of Atlantis, were using her relationship with her trusted counterpart (concealed by the growth in Atlantis SystemBank’s interstellar debt) as a license to print slow money. Yes, she—our Sondra, the one at Hector—was forging slow dollars. Which requires collusion across interstellar distances: almost impossible, under normal circumstances.
And secondly, the reason Atlantis went dark is not that the conspirators who
had established the colony as a fake investment vehicle were planning a blowout. Atlantis was not a fake after all. Rather, it’s because Sondra attempted to kill them all to protect her fraudulent, largely forged, fortune. The scholars of Atlantis hadn’t invented an FTL drive. Sondra’s records are incomplete, but if anything, they appear to have proven once and for all that FTL is impossible. But in the process, they discovered how to use quantum entanglement to move macroscopic objects—such as entire colony habitats—between widely separated locations at the maximum speed permitted by physics, the speed of light. Quantum teleportation on a macro scale, in other words.
Do I need to diagram for you what happens to our interstellar financial system once a cheap, effective light-speed-propulsion system becomes available?
It’s not as disruptive as a true FTL drive, of course. But it will instantly cause a collapse in the slow money system. Slow transactions are caught in a liquidity trap and can only be completed by a three-phase-commit process, so that they travel no faster than a third of light speed. A true light-speed drive would allow direct conversion of fast-currency systems, with no liquidity issues. To make matters worse, it appears that the teleportation drive is cheap, compared to the cost of the propulsion systems currently in use for starships and in-system vehicles. The foundation of a new colony world would no longer require huge investments of slow money. Sondra’s little scheme—printing slow dollars on the side, to line her nest—would not only be devalued; it would rapidly be exposed.
I’m not sure exactly what she did to the poor scholars of Atlantis, but I imagine it had something to do with their SystemBank, and their beacon stations, and a drastic and simultaneous application of nuclear explosives. Nor am I certain which instance of Sondra did the deed. (If indeed it makes sense to talk about them as different people: Perhaps she’d arranged some bizarre protocol to merge her divergent states regularly, much as Queen Medea kept her different instances synchronized.) It’s possible that the Atlantean sib uploaded a copy of herself to her sister, then suicided. More speculatively, it’s possible she contrived to seize control of the first of the vehicles equipped with the light-speed drive and used it to escape. But however it played out, direct contact with Atlantis System was interrupted, under circumstances likely to induce extreme paranoia among the survivors.
We pick up the story over a century later, with the launch (and loss) of the various physical missions to Atlantis System. As you can imagine, New California—literally Sondra’s investment vehicle—was instrumental in bankrolling all three missions. This ensured that Sondra was in a position to control the selection of their flight crew. A close reading of the reports of the inquiries into their loss reveals that what was lost was communication with the vehicles—they stopped transmitting, true, but as they had completed their boost phase and were drifting, and contact was lost when they were already more than a light-year outbound from their launch sites, it was impossible to confirm that they were destroyed: It is simply not possible to obtain useful images of a cold object a hundred meters in diameter at a range of over ten trillion kilometers.
My suspicion is that Sondra was again responsible. All three vehicles carried beacon transceivers capable of transmitting and receiving uploads, and during the drift stage of their mission, most of their crews would have entered slowtime: A small, coordinated cell of saboteurs could wreak havoc, then transmit themselves to safety.
I stress that this is speculation, Krina. But we may have been overestimating both the size and the audacity of the Atlantis fraud, and underestimating the ruthlessness and reach of its perpetrator. Who, along with her accomplices, has for a long time now planned a final liquidation meeting, to be held at Shin-Tethys, where the final proceeds can be divided up and the last of the conspirators killed.
Why killed?
Consider: The three-phase-commit model used to transfer ownership of a slow dollar transaction means that the donor must be able to find the recipient in order to complete the acknowledgment of transfer. Between systembanks, across interstellar channels, this is unremarkable. But for a covert transfer, at short range, it is unsafe for the recipient: The risk of robbery is not inconsiderable. Hence the use, in the Atlantis Carnet, of a cutout—the banker Ivar Trask-1—and the scandal of his subsequent disappearance. I think Sondra was testing a means of finding and murdering her coplotters: requiring them to reveal their location in order to receive their final commission. Of course, if this is what she planned, then it would result in a number of high-value orphan transactions that would require tracing and unwinding . . .
We were created and trained specifically to mop up the loose ends, after the murderous termination of the biggest fraud in history. If not for Andrea’s prying—which was emphatically not part of Sondra’s planning—we would be unaware of this. We would have pursued the Atlantis Carnet, it’s true, not to mention the other missing transfers: but only under her direct control, and without insight into what it was about. And I very much fear that after locating them, we would have no future in her world.
Which is not to say that our lineage mater is going to succeed, sis. There is another player in this game, of whom Sondra appears to be unaware.
I think it’s time you asked Foxy Rudi where Branch Office Five Zero really comes from . . .
Jubilee
“This institution of yours, the Crimson Permanent Assurance,” I said. “Where exactly does it come from?”
On arrival and docking, Rudi and I had retreated into his private nest aboard the Five Zero. It was a small, cozy bower of felted fur and colorful silks, anchored to the trunk of one of the free-fall palms that lined the accommodation bubble of the vehicle. Rudi hung from the nominal ceiling, grooming his underarm fur, while I made casual use of the waterspout to damp down my scales and fins: It was humid in the accommodation spaces, but it was also hot, and my ocean-adapted body was inconveniently bad at retaining moisture. Rudi had done me the courtesy of dimming the lights, for I had acquired a stinking headache almost as soon as we emerged into the shriek and glare of the privateer’s engineering decks. (I’d ordered up a pair of mirrored goggles from his personal fab as soon as we arrived here, but they were still growing.)
Rudi paused his grooming. “Why don’t you tell me what you suspect?” he asked.
“You said your head office was incorporated in, where was it—”
“—Mombasa Six,” he volunteered.
“Indeed. And I am absolutely certain that a corporate entity called the Crimson Permanent Assurance was indeed incorporated in Mombasa Six nearly five hundred years ago, and it’s your nominal headquarters, because you’re not stupid enough to lie about that.” I smiled, remembering not to bare my teeth. He cocked his head and looked at me politely.
“Do continue . . . ?”
“You suggested I might invest in your corporate hedge fund. But I gather you have also been advising the People to short any investment vehicles denominated in slow money.” Now I showed him my toothy grin. “Assuming I hand you the thick end of two million slow dollars to invest on my behalf, what will you do with them?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious.” He snapped his muzzle at a tangled tuft in one elbow, peeping out suspiciously at me over the top of his wing membrane. “I’d throw them away, taking whatever I can get in fast money, regardless of the exchange rate. Probably a ninety-five-percent loss, but it beats losing it all, and you’ll still be independently wealthy. Isn’t that what you were hoping to hear?”
I fanned myself through the stream of droplets from the water spigot, spraying watery baubles in all directions. “I believe you came from Atlantis, Rudi. After the blackout. None of this is a coincidence, is it?”
“Of course not.” Over the past year, I had become attuned to some of the bat-privateer’s mannerisms: What Rudi was showing me now was perhaps closest in intent to a piratical grin. “It’s all about your lineage mater.”
“Who succeeded in blowing the beacon station,” I offered. “And who will make a serious attempt to kill you just as soon as she works out who and what you are.”
“Which is?”
“A privateer, with letters of marque and reprise authorizing military action against the enemies of the nation which issued them. Yes?”
“And what nation would be . . . ?”
“Atlantis.” There, I said it.
Rudi chittered. “Well done! Yes. I do indeed have a certificate from my government, calling for the arrest or destruction of the notorious renegade Sondra Alizond-1, for mass murder, attempted mass murder, crimes against humanity, and a laundry list of lesser offenses. But at the same time, the Permanent Crimson is entirely real: We are, indeed, insurance underwriters. It’s very hard to move openly against a power such as your lineage mater, given the nature of her allies—”
“The Church?”
“Among others, yes. They were largely responsible for the Atlantis research program in the first instance—one imagines they believed that a successful FTL drive would finally bring the prospect for founding a New Eden for their Fragile charges to fruition—but they subsequently changed their minds, concluding that what our researchers had actually found would merely undermine the pyramid scheme they had engineered to drive the continual wave of colonization and expansion—”
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