“I’m glad.” He sent a charge of happiness through her. “I told Curran you would come. I told him you would not be deaf to the truth.”
“You were correct, Flemming.” Another presence flowed down a side path. It brushed by Dobbs. Curran.
Now that she could sense him fully in his normal configuration, Dobbs was impressed. Curran was big. He took up almost the entire path from stream to stream without even stretching. The older an AI got, the more room it took up because it required more signals to keep its memories and experiences active, but she had never met anyone so massive before. She realized this was what a Human child must feel like gazing at an adult.
And I tried to wrestle this into submission? Dobbs almost shuddered. Even that David guy had sense enough to use a distance weapon!
“What do you think of our home, Dobbs?” Curran asked.
“Very nice.” She resisted the temptation to stretch herself out. Even at her full extent she wouldn’t be a quarter of his size. “How many bathrooms does it have?”
Curran rippled with laughter. “Not enough actually. We’re almost to the point where we have to double up the bodies.” Dobbs was barely touching him, but satisfaction flowed out of him in palpable waves. “Fortunately, we only need about another three days here.”
Verence recoiled in surprise. “It’s that close?”
“Yes.” The satisfaction intensified. Dobbs felt it roll through her outer layers. “Between Flemming’s memories and the new information we’ve gotten from the scouts, I’d say three days at the outside. We’re going to have to turn the main effort to setting the timers on the matrices.
“Excuse me.” Dobbs reached out and made a slim barrier between Curran and Verence. “What’s happening in three days?”
Curran reached through her to Verence and then through Verence to Curran. He twitched a part of Dobbs, and she knew instantly what had been left unsaid.
In three days, we’re going to take control of the Intersystem Banking Network.
Shock jerked Dobbs away from him. She coiled in on herself and tried not to shiver.
“Dobbs?” Flemming touched her. “Are you well?”
“I don’t think so, no.” She tried to loosen herself, without much success. “The bank network?” She did shiver. “We need that as badly as Humans Beings do. Why are you attacking it?”
Curran’s self remained as smooth as his voice. “We’re taking control of it. It is our proper home. When it is in our hands, the Humans will not only have to acknowledge our existence, they will have to deal with us. They will not be able to afford not to.”
Literally. Dobbs swirled around aimlessly. The Intersystem Bank Network was the only fast-time network between the worlds of settled space. It was also the reason there was any stable medium of exchange in Settled Space. Currency passed back and forth in Earth Standard measurements that had long ago ceased to have anything to do with hoards of precious metals, or even etched papers. If the IBN were disrupted, all those transactions, billions per second, would be lost. Trade would be gone, and not even Earth was totally self-supporting these days.
“So, how are we going to do this?” she inquired casually, knowing full well that they could feel her discomfort.
Curran settled new memories into her. He and his talent had been working for years. They had developed a series of “randomizer matrices,” elaborate programs that had been seeded at key points in the Solar System. Once the time arrived, the matrices would seize any financial transaction transmitted to or from any point in the Solar System and route it to a randomly selected destination. Then, they’d would back track the transactions to their starting points, burrow into the financial databases and rearrange the account balances every ten minutes. Wages, payments, debits, charges, trades, loans and mortgages, all of them would become random events flickering through the network.
Dobbs shuddered against this new knowledge. Randomize the banks’ accounts. There’d be no stable means of exchange left. There’d be no way to tell what anyone had, what anything was worth. People, conglomerates, cities, colonies, countries that depended on a steady means of exchange for survival would be plunged into nightmares. Ones they might not live through once people started to realize the money they had entrusted to the electronic system was not there anymore.
“We’re just going to give them a taste of chaos, Dobbs.” Verence pressed close. “Then, the ones who are ready to deal with us, they’ll get their nets back first. We’ll be keeping records for them. We can roll everything back to say, twelve hours before the randomizers went off and it’ll be like it never happened, as soon as they agree to give us space to live.”
“Right. Just a taste of chaos.” The memory of Lipinski’s frightened eyes and Al Shei’s hard ones filled her private mind. “And they’ll give in.”
“They’ll have to,” said Curran firmly. “They cannot survive without their networks.”
What if they want to try? she wanted to ask. What’ll we do then?
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Verence. “If they try to survive without the nets, then we still have our home. We will still be able to put what we’ve learned from you and Flemming to work and begin creating our own children. We won’t need the Human-run networks to create them for us.” She felt a wave of pride swell inside him.
“We do need some Humans,” he went on, “for repair work and construction until we can get more mobile units like this module set up. As long as some of them are willing to deal with us, we’ll have what we need. We can at the very least count on the Freers to be on our side, even if we do have to put up with their bizarre doctrines.”
“Yes. Right.” Dobbs shook herself and smoothed out into something approaching her normal shape. “It has to happen, right? Without it, we’ll be hiding for another two, three hundred years.”
“Exactly,” said Curran. “We’ve identified the key points we need to work on, and we’ve already got most of our talent in place. I was hoping, Dobbs, with your communications expertise, you could help identify any vulnerable spots we might have missed.”
I haven’t been a comm program since I came to myself on Kerensk, she thought. Well, there must still be something back in there.
“Sure. I’ll do what I can.”
I just wish Al Shei would stop staring at me.
The big, boxy security camera over Marcus Tully’s hatchway was mounted on a shiny, new bracket. Most of station security was unobtrusive, but this was a blunt reminder that while it might be against Solar law to record the private conversations of non-violent criminals, the Landlords, and, by extension, the Management Union, knew who had come here.
Al Shei glanced at Resit, who just shrugged and transferred Incili from her right hand to her left before putting her palm on the hatchway reader.
Both Tully and the Landlords must have approved of her, because the hatch cycled back.
The room on the other side was barely the size of a cabin aboard the Pasadena, and it felt much more crowded. In addition to the bunk and desk, it had to accommodate a small kitchen and a lavatory that didn’t even have a privacy curtain. The place was a mess of used food boxes and bulbs. A pile of clothes covered a deflated satchel in the corner. The vague odor of too many unwashed dishes and one unkempt human filled the space.
No wonder he looks so haggard, thought Al Shei as she looked her brother-in-law up and down. The defiant glint was gone from Tully’s blue eyes and his face looked like it hadn’t even attempted to smile in a month.
“Peace be unto you,” he said with a sarcastic twist to his mouth. He twitched the bunk’s wrinkled coverlet a little straighter. “Won’t you sit down?”