April 6: And What Goes Around

by Mackey Chandler

  "Then it's going to happen again," April assured him, immediately convinced in her own mind.

  "Maybe, it's kind of hard to look back at it and say if the crash caused the bank closings or if the bank closings caused the crash. It sort of swept along from time zone to time zone and country to country over a week," Jeff told her. "The stuff I've read doesn't all agree and the Americans blamed the Europeans and the Europeans blamed the British, and the Arabs blamed everybody but themselves... "

  "What are we doing about it?" April demanded.

  "I already issued a notice to our customers that we don't trade in Earth currencies until further notice. That per our contracts for their accounts, anything other than Solars are payable in those currencies only on a one by one special approval. How much cash are you holding?" Jeff asked April.

  "Maybe twenty or twenty five thousand EuroMarks. Hardly any USNA Dollars but quite a few Tongan Pa'anga."

  "Spend the EuroMarks if you can," Jeff suggested. "The Dollars... I don't know. I can't see how the Europeans can do this and the USNA not do the same. The value has to stay in balance for trade to continue. I'd spend the Dollars too," he decided. "The Pa'anga are the best bet. I've heard so much about the king. I can't imagine him doing this. And if his currency rises in value it isn't like they depend on exporting local made goods for their economy. They pass through our goods... "

  "What? You look stricken," April said.

  "More worried. Our money is going to be overvalued. It's going to be really hard to sell our stuff to Earth," Jeff predicted.

  "I can't think of anybody here I'd give EuroMarks knowing they are going to decline in value. That would just feel crooked to me," April said.

  "Go home and order stuff up from Earth," Jeff said with sudden conviction. "I'd pay for expedited shipping, not standby. It's already late to be doing this. If they lift it you have the cash to settle. You can send it in a courier pack if I can't do a transfer for you. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but the few EuroMark accounts I have I can cover. They should be easier to cover if I have to buy EuroMarks to do so, because I expect them to drop in value faster than their face discount schedule. You can transfer the risk to the customer but they are not all stupid. They will book the coming discount in if you insist on paying them with this crap."

  "I don't especially need anything right now," April protested. "My dad is stocking up on things."

  "Order anything you will need. Or trade goods. Bed linens, freeze dried food, coffee, clothing, good whiskey. If you have to pile it in your living room you'll thank me in a couple months. You can always send it on to Central standby. I'm going to go do that myself right after lunch. It will be worth something and the currency won't." Jeff looked really anxious, chewing at his lower lip.

  "OK, I can see that. It'll be hard to find enough stuff to spend that much on though," April said.

  "Buy some old gold coins if you run out of other stuff. Stuff with numismatic value. The coin dealers will ship on an unrevokable Visa. It's the same as cash and they are going to be wanting cash with everything so uncertain. You can settle your account in Earth money. That's why the card company is bonded. It won't be handy next week, but it will be in the long run, believe me," Jeff said.

  "Oh, I always believe you," April told him. "I wouldn't be running home and doing this if it was anybody else telling me."

  "You might want to spread the orders around. Too big an order at one place might raise alarm bells," Jeff suggested.

  "They'd be better off to shut down and hoard their stock wouldn't they?" April asked.

  "Yes, but they won't," Jeff assured her. "Well, maybe one in a thousand. But most people like us who have never seen a real crash? No way. Most people have a very hard time believing anything can happen they haven't seen before themselves."

  "What you said about our money being too valuable... I want to suggest our money is too big. We need some fractional denominations too. We need to be able to trade with people who don't have the means to convert a whole Solar or make change against it," April said.

  "I've had a couple other people make that complaint. I'd pay more attention to it if I had more metal than people want Solars. But I know that will happen eventually. I could make a quarter Solar. Below that I'm uncomfortable with how small a tenth Solar or less is physically. They'd be difficult to handle and hard to verify their authenticity," Jeff said.

  "Earthies put serial numbers on bank notes. Couldn't you do something similar?" April asked.

  Jeff considered the problem and didn't answer quickly. "I've seen coins sealed up in plastic. We could seal the smaller coins in sapphire or diamond and they need never get worn or lose weight. You could enclose a chip powered by ambient light that you can interrogate with a laser and it responds with an LED. Each test resets the chip to a new value, it's called TOTP authentication, so recording the test sequence doesn't give you the ability to counterfeit. Much better than just stamped serial numbers. We can make it very hard to break. We just need to release a free app to let your phone do validations."

  He frowned. "People would have to trust us because as the authority you could invalidate a coin remotely. A government could invalidate all their coins held in another nation."

  "Well yeah, for fiat money, but ours they could bust it open and extract the metal," April said.

  "Good point," Jeff allowed. "On second thought, a Solar is twenty five grams. Fractions of that make awkward numbers. That's why I didn't use the Troy ounce. I'll just issue ten gram, five gram and one gram pieces. I'll call Alex at Trick Proto and ask him to run off a couple prototypes. I know he can do diamond coated sapphire optics. I already have a few chips that can do the verification. A lot of people have bio-hazard scanners on their phones. I'll make sure the same sort of hardware can interrogate these chips. Satisfied?" he asked April.

  "Yes, that's the sort of thing I had in mind. Although I suspect you may end up making a half gram or even a tenth gram coin."

  "With a twenty five gram Solar coin we just absorbed cost of striking it. We issued them at whatever the spot price of the metal was in the currency they were exchanging. But making much smaller coins, especially with embedded electronics minting costs are going to be an issue in large numbers. I'd have to actually charge more than the value of the metal to issue the coin. I'm not sure people will support that," Jeff said.

  "You are competing with currencies that have a depreciation schedule," April reminded him indignantly, pointing to the stack of EuroMarks, "and you doubt people will pay a little fee upfront for a currency with physical value that can't be counterfeited? If it's a bad deal it's the least bad choice I'd think."

  "OK, put that way I think you may be right," Jeff agreed. "People do pay a small premium for bullion coins already." He riffled the bundle of bills. "I can see where once these are announced everybody else is going to be falling all over themselves to do the same thing. I'll listen to you on this and at least do some prototypes. I'll do them in gold first though. This seems more targeted to Earth markets and Home has been absorbing every full size platinum Solar I can make."

  "Thank you. Now, would you please humor me and finish your sandwich. You've taken one bite," April complained.

  Jeff blinked at the sandwich like he wondered where it came from. It did have one solitary crescent missing. "Yeah, but I finished the soup. I don't remember eating it but I must have." He pushed the empty bowl away, heaved a big sigh, and pulled the sandwich back in front of him. "Tell Ruby to order up whatever she can too," he suggested.

  "She still has a lot from when we thought the UN was going to boycott us," April informed him. "I remember her telling me she blew the whole year's budget at once, and my dad approved it. She bought staples like pancake mix and dried eggs. They may have done it again already."

  "It's been a year. If she has a new budget released tell her to do it again. And if your dad balks tell her to have him call me. Maybe I should be talking to him anyhow," Jeff decided. />
  "There is only so much pancake mix it makes sense to own. I'm sure she'll add some variety. Some Spam undoubtedly," April added, teasing him mercilessly. Jeff was not fond of Spam.

  Jeff took another bite and looked at his sandwich. "They can corned beef too, don't they?"

  * * *

  "April I need to know something," Jon said. She was still in the cafeteria and she split his image in her spex so she could still see her plate. He looked unusually concerned.

  "Ask away. If it's anything I know I'll be glad to tell you."

  "Is this yours?" Jon asked substituting an image of the wall cruising robot for his face.

  "I have something like that at home on the wall..." April said, squinting at the image. Jon was alarmed. "I think it senses the temperature and oxygen levels and stuff. Probably smoke too. You don't have a scale on it. How big is it?"

  "About eight centimeters," Jon said going back to his face image. "Does it move?"

  April looked at him like he was losing his sanity. "Of course not. It plugs in a socket. I called housing and environmental services and got a code to punch in so I could pull it to lay new wall covering right up to the edge of the socket without alarms sounding."

  "Alright, I wanted to eliminate it being yours. I know you have this thing about knowing what is going on. Sometimes to extremes."

  "Really? Extremes? Have I ever invaded your privacy?" April asked, a bit miffed.

  "I remember the scanners you and Heather had," Jon said. "That's not a common habit among the general population."

  "We still have them. They aren't invading your privacy. If you broadcast in the clear you might as well shout down the corridor and complain I listened. I seem to remember you were happy to hear Heather's intercept of the Seal who was conducting black operations in your jurisdiction. What does that have to do with your little thing?" April asked, tracing out a rectangle with her fingers.

  "It's crawling around on the corridor walls and I supposed it might be some sort of snoop device." Jon admitted.

  "Yeah or it might be a hunter," April said right away.

  "Yes... That possibility occurred to us too. We're looking right now to see if there are others and keeping an eye on it," Jon said.

  "But you didn't want to upset me with the idea." April had an accusing tone. Jon ignored it.

  "Might it belong to Jeff?" Jon asked. Obviously a new thought from the change on his face. Jeff did have some sort of intelligence group.

  "Jon, Jeff would never be so obvious. If Jeff snoops on you you'll never know. He's way smarter than me and I'd never be so obvious," April said.

  "How would you do remote sensing around Home if this is so crude and obvious?" Jon asked.

  April had some more sausage and considered the matter a whole fifteen or twenty seconds.

  "There are all those delivery 'bots that take packages all over the hab. I'd probably subvert a few of those or put my own in service. Nobody even thinks anything about one going by. They're effectively invisible. They have to plug in and recharge so they could report back through the power lines," She'd stopped eating and was giving the problem entirely too much thought for Jon's comfort.

  "Please, just don't," Jon asked her.

  "Oh, don't worry. It's much more trouble than it's worth," April assured him. "But those delivery 'bots, does anybody have any veto on them? I know they aren't licensed, but are there any safety standards or limits on how many are in service?"

  "I know Mitsubishi set a spec for them to conform to some Earthside safety standard. Not to bump people and such. I'm not sure if it was a Japanese or USNA standard. But they're so expensive I don't think there was ever a problem limiting them," Jon said.

  "Maybe the little wall crawler is legal too," April suggested. "I mean, do you know it doesn't meet spec? I see a little delivery cart going around that says, "Home Chandlery and Provision Co.", but Zack is proud of his business and is advertizing. Not having your name on it may not be required by the spec."

  "That's a novel idea, except the damn thing acts guilty," Jon said.

  "How can a little box act guilty?" April asked, perplexed again.

  "It stops moving and tries to look as innocuous as your temperature control if anybody is moving in sight of it. It only moves when nobody is watching. That's how we having it pinned down in a fairly safe section of corridor right now. I had people walk through until I'd have had to start repeating. Then I sent a man to start scrubbing down the opposite bulkhead on the corridor. It's a long corridor, and he's going as slowly as possible, but eventually I'll have to dream up some other activity to keep it inactive," Jon said. "Or destroy it."

  "Oh yeah," April agreed, "that's totally not innocent behavior."

  Chapter 9

  April related the side of her conversation with Jon that Jeff hadn't heard.

  "That sounds really crude," he decided. "Why wouldn't they use fliers? All our spy bots on Earth have that capacity." He thought for a bit staring off at nothing and April didn't interrupt his thought. "Of course it would be different to make a mini-bot to fly in zero G. It isn't just programming. They'd have to be redesigned completely because all of them have a certain balance to fly in gravity. They have a center of gravity under the lifting surfaces so they are naturally stable in flight. They'd be unstable in zero G and the aerodynamics would just be all wrong the way they are made now. Flying in different gravitation levels might be tricky too." He always loved a new problem and was engaged.

  "You heard me. I assured Jon it wasn't your bot because it was way too obvious. So don't make a liar of me."

  "Oh, I won't. He'll never see mine," Jeff promised, grinning. "But if we are getting spy bots here I am going to design our own hunter killer bots to clean them out. They will be optimized for a habitat and function in zero G. And we'll make a version with a fuller sensor suite to smuggle into other habs. We really don't know enough about what is happening on them from human intelligence."

  "So, you were too busy to go to supper with me at the Fox and Hare. How about tomorrow? Can you be free?" April asked.

  "I'd like that. Can you get a reservation on such short notice?" Jeff asked.

  "I could, but I'd consider it an imposition so soon. I had more in mind a quiet intimate dinner at my place," April offered, and put extra effort into her smile.

  "That sounds wonderful," Jeff said, not totally oblivious. "What time?"

  "I'll be home early. Any time after 1600," April offered.

  * * *

  Jeff was slouched on April's couch, relaxed and waiting to help her make dinner. He'd found it both instructive and therapeutic the few times he'd done so before. His eyes kept going to the big drawing on the wall. He wondered if he'd ever get tired of it? He didn't have anything like that in his cubic. When his phone rang he went ahead and answered it since April was changing. When she was dressed he'd turn it off except the highest emergency overrides. He hated it when people let their phones dominate their lives. It was a Home origin call so he answered even more readily.

  "Mr. Singh? My name is Haruki Natsume and I'm a senior sales manager for YYR. I'm staying at the Holiday Inn Home and wonder if I might make an appointment to discuss some business with you?"

  Jeff couldn't place the face on his screen. The man appeared Japanese in his face, hair, and how he was dressed. "YYR?" Jeff asked, trying to place them. Certainly not a Home company. But then he'd said he was at the Inn, so he was probably a visiting Earthie. He was wearing spex, but some Earthies were comfortable with them even in social situations. Despite being a Japanese subsidiary, M3, the physical habitat on which the nation of Home resided had few Japanese. He knew for a fact it was considered a hardship posting.

  "Yaskawa – Yushin – Robitiq," Natsume supplied readily. "Perhaps you do not involve yourself at that level of acquisition?" he wondered, and looked disappointed.

  "Oh, no! There's very little we do that I don't involve myself in directly. I had to give up personally designing spacecraf
t, which I miss. It's just too time consuming. But everything else I at least sit and talk directly to the people doing a project for me. I know the company now. We buy robots from you. If you'd made your logo I'd have known right away," Jeff bent his wrist and put his index finger and thumb together delicately in front of the camera, like picking up something tiny and splayed the other three finger back the way a society matron might wield a dainty tea cup.

  "Yes, that's us," Natsume agreed smiling.

  April joined Jeff on the couch, hair wet and dressed to stay in. But she sat back curious and not acting anxious for him to be rid of the man.

  "I'm about to have dinner with one of my principal partners," Jeff said. "Could we perhaps continue on com later tonight or in the morning? Do you have some other customers you can contact tonight so your time is not wasted?"

  "I hadn't actually planned on speaking to anyone else. We don't have another significant customer on Home. If I felt free to have a meeting on com I'd have done that from Earth. I didn't even want to broadcast that I was seeking a meeting until I could do it on your local net. There is entirely too much... interest, in Home com traffic. I'd rather wait to speak face to face, or if that is not possible in the near future perhaps I can return to Home at another time."

  "Let me consult briefly with my partner," Jeff requested, and muted the pad.

  "If he'd waste the price of a shuttle ticket to speak with us discreetly he's serious," April said before Jeff could speak. She'd been evesdropping on his call. "Why don't you have him meet us for dinner?"

  "I'm not comfortable bringing him here. Especially with Gunny gone," Jeff said.

  "Neither am I. I meant to change our plans and meet him in the cafeteria," April said. "Dinner will keep in the frig for tomorrow. I have a feeling this is important. I'll throw on boots and a cardigan."

  "You don't mind talking business over supper tonight?" Jeff asked her. He minded actually.