Being shot at for the cause had very much helped Alex's social position in camp. Not many of the Troupers had actually been shot at under any circumstances. Except for Ellen Mae several times, and Peter once, and Rudy on a couple of occasions in civilian life, and Greg "lots of times." Surviving gunfire was an experience the Troupers valued highly, and being shot at in the actual service of the Troupe itself brought Alex a certain cachet. He'd gotten a few grudging, snotty remarks about his new clothes, but the clothes didn't stay new for long. Alex never changed them, rarely washed, and had stopped shaving. His jeans and embroidered shirt were soon filthy, and the paper sombrero, which never left his head, grew steadily more wadded and hideous. Plus, he grew a patchy blond beard. After that, nobody paid him much attention. He'd gotten his wish, and become a cipher.
As tension mounted in the camp, though, Alex decided that his situation had become solid enough for him to take a few useful steps. He quietly approached Joe Brasseur about his legal and financial situation.
Alex was used to lawyers. He'd grown up in the company of his father's numerous hired attorneys. Brasseur was a bent attorney-that odd and highly exceptional kind of lawyer who wasn't personally well-to-do. Alex strongly suspected that Brasseur had been on the wrong side of politics during the State of Emergency.
Most people had gotten over that period of history and managed to or et the peculiar way they'd been behaving at the time, but Joe Brasseur, like other Troupers, was pretty clearly not most people.
Alex knew that it was useless talking to lawyers unless you were willing to tell them a lot of embarrassing things. He felt pretty sure that Brasseur was not a narc or some cop's little finger, so he told Brasseur in detail about his financial arrangements with the clinica in Nuevo Laredo.
Most people went through life without ever using a private currency. Most~ people were, of course, poor. They didn't have enough wealth to buy into the private-money system, or enough contacts or market smarts to use private currencies effectively. Except, of course, during the State of Emergency, when every American, rich and poor alike, had been forced to use a private currency because the Regime had privatized the U.S. dollar.
Alex wasn't exactly sure how "currency privatization" had been accomplished, back at the time. He was similarly vague about the Regime's massive "data nationalizations.~~ Joe Brasseur, however, seemed to have an excellent grasp of these principles. Brasseur was in charge of the Troupe's financial books, and they were a rat nest of private currencies.
Alex was well-to-do, and he had some unlikely friends, so he had the basics down pretty well. It all had to do with unbreakable encryption, digital authentication, anonymous remailing, and network untraceability. These were all computer networking techniques that had once been considered very odd and naughty. They were also so elementary to do, that once they were in place, they couldn't be stopped without tearing the whole Net down.
Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn't stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines.
One major upshot of the Regime's privatization of the currency was that large amounts of black-market wealth bad suddenly surfaced. This had been part of the plan, apparently-that even though the government was sabotaging its own ability to successfully impose any income tax, the government would catch up on the other end, by imposing punitive taxes on previously hidden black-market transactions.
They'd swiftly discovered, however, that the scale of black money was titanic. The black-market wealth in tax evasion, kickbacks, official corruption, theft, embezzlement, arms, drugs, prostitution, barter, and off-the-books moonlighting was far huger than any conventional economist had ever imagined. The global ocean of black money was so vast in scope that it was instantly, crushingly obvious that the standard doctrines of conventional finance had no workable contact with reality. Economists who'd thought they understood the basic nature of modern finance had been living in a dogmatic dreamland as irrelevant as Marxism. After that terrible revelation, there'd been savage runs on most national currencies and the stock markets had collapsed.
As the Emergency had deepened, the panicking Regime had rammed its data nationalizations through Congress, and with that convulsive effort, the very nature of money and information had both mutated beyond any repair.
The resultant swirling chaos had become the bedrock of Alex's everyday notions of modem normality.
Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as "Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.
Quite often these private currencies would collapse, though sheer greed, mismanagement, or just bad luck in the market. But the usual carnivorous free-enterprise market forces had jolted some kind of rough order into the mess. Nowadays, for a lot of people, private currencies were just the way money was.
When you used private, digital cash, even the people who sold you their money didn't know who you were. Quite likely you had no real idea who they were, either, other than their rates, their market recognition, and their performance history. You had no identity other than your unbreakably encrypted public key word. You could still use government currencies if you really wanted to, and most people did, for the sake of simplicity or though lack of alternatives. Most people had no choke in the matter, because most people in the world were poor.
Unfortunately, thanks to their catastrophic loss of control over basic economics, so were most governments. Government-issued currencies were scarcely more stable than the private kind. Governments, even the governments of powerful advanced countries, had already lost control of their currencies to the roiling floodwaters of currency trading as early as the 1990s. That was the main reason why the Regime had given up backing U.S. dollars in the first place.
Joe Brasseur's private-currency node in the Troupe's system was not untypical in the trade: it was the digital equivalent of an entire twentieth-century banking conglomerate, boiled down to a few sectors on a hard disk.
In order to gain admittance to the dinica in Nuevo Laredo, Alex had left a hefty wad of private currency under a secured lien by a third party. He hadn't gotten the money back, had no real idea how to get his money back, but he thought that maybe Brasseur would be the logical choice to find that money and fetch it out somehow. If so, then the Troupe was welcome to use it.