Well, Spain no longer exists. But we have some new and exciting twists on the Spanish Prisoner to offer you in its absence! Foremost among these is the FTL breakthrough. Everybody knows that faster-than-light travel is impossible. Except that, conveniently for con artists, it isn’t entirely ruled out; quantum entanglement, wormholes, tachyons, you name it, the devil is in the details that lurk at the edges of experimental physics, in the corners of the map that might as well be labeled “here be dragons.” The gold mine of experimental physics played out thousands of years ago, even before the Fragile went extinct for the first time; it ran into the law of diminishing returns. The machinery required to break new ground got more and more expensive, until finally the construction costs of a bigger particle accelerator—Bigger than the rings of Saturn! Cheaper than fifty colony starships!—priced the privilege of squinting at a new quark-trail squiggle right out of the market. And so, FTL hasn’t been completely ruled out, and therein lies a new twist on the Spanish Prisoner.
I happen to know that someone a very long way away was experimenting with an FTL drive! And miraculously, they managed to get it to work! But on their first trip—a test flight to this very star system—they met with an unforeseen malfunction. They’re trapped here, hiding out in slowtime hibernation in the outer belt until they can buy certain rare and expensive materials with which to repair their drive, hoping nobody unpleasant stumbles across them. They’re not poor: Here, see these slow dollars, signed by a bank a very long way away? Won’t you hold them as collateral and front me a sum of fast money to help my friends make their repairs? We’ll accept a ruinous conversion rate, just in return for the money we need to get our space drive working again; when the bank-countersigned certificates for these slow dollars reach you, you’ll be rich!
Alternatively: I happen to have friends who have built and are right now testing an FTL drive. Do you know what that means? It will detonate under the foundations of our financial system like a nuclear mine! Suddenly, it will be possible to trade fast money across interstellar distances. Meanwhile, slow money will depreciate disastrously. They are less than a year away from completing their work, but they’re running short on cash. But they’re not poor—see these slow dollars, signed by a bank a very long way away? We need to off-load them fast, regardless of the exchange rate, by way of a friend who won’t lead the bankers back to our secret laboratory, where they might recognize the significance of our research and destroy our test vehicle before it can fly . . .
Yet again: My friends have developed an FTL drive. As you know, this will cause a crash in the slow money market once word gets out, so it is essential that we keep it secret until we have tested it. However, on the upcoming test flights, there will be an opportunity for a select few investors to entrust us with slow money instruments that need negotiating via the bank of (some plausible destination a few light-years away). We’ll go there, get the bank to countersign the bitcoinage you entrusted us with, and as soon as we get back, you’ll be able to complete the transaction, convert your slow dollars (drawn on the bank of plausible destination) into fast money and incidentally prove the bona fides of our FTL drive! Everyone wins! You just need to buy slow dollars in the bank of plausible destination, then use them to buy fast money, nominating me and my friends as your proxy . . .
Faster-than-light travel is the new-old Spanish Prisoner. Do you want me to go on? I could keep this up for hours. It’s my primary field of study. I’ve published numerous papers on the subject. I am an avid student of the history of FTL frauds and can enthrall and expound at academic symposia and after-dinner speaking engagements alike. I am, in fact, one of the only people ever to make an honest living from FTL fraud. You’d think people would be tired of hearing about yet another faster-than-light scam, but it’s so amazingly attractive—a breakthrough in the frontiers of physics that permits a revolutionary new technology that offers you, and you alone, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a gigantic financial killing (just so long as you keep your mouth shut). It keeps coming up every few centuries; indeed, it runs in waves. It just won’t die.
And then there’s the history of the Atlantis project—which some people believe was the real thing.
The difference between merchant banking and barefaced piracy is slimmer than most people imagine. Over the months I spent aboard Permanent Crimson Branch Office Five Zero, I discovered that I was disconcertingly comfortable with the profession. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Count Rudi and his fellow privateers were not, of course, native to Dojima System. Most of them, males, females, and hermaphrodites alike, affected a bat-winged, long-muzzled phenotype that was a common affectation of the residents of the rain forests of Shin-Kyoto’s northern island chain, from where they claimed to come—for the opening of an interstellar branch office by an insurance company was a not-insignificant enterprise, and in order to inculcate the correct corporate culture, they had sent a large cadre of clerical officers and financial-combat operatives. (That: And, being a gregarious people, they were simply more comfortable working in a loudly bickering but affectionate tribe of their own kind.)
The branch office itself was a repurposed asteroid-mining tug, its bulbous forward cargo tank (originally designed for shipping around large volumes of aqueous salt solutions) repurposed to conceal the tools of the organization’s trade, from the assault auditor’s high-speed skiffs to the forced boarding tubes. Behind it, the life-support system, habitat spaces, and nuclear/ion-drive engineering truss of a regular rock pusher remained virtually unchanged.
The habitat sphere was brightly lit, overwhelmingly green, somewhat hot and humid, and smelled of sessile hermaphrodite genitalia (or “flowers,” as the bat-folk called them), but it was vastly less depressing than the flying charnel house I’d initially booked passage on. It was spacious, if nothing else: Cubic volume filled with air is cheap to accelerate, so walls were out and batwings were de rigueur among the branch staff. It spent its time migrating slowly back and forth between Shin-Tethys and the Shiny! Asteroids, occasionally waylaying some unfortunate vessel suspected of smuggling (but usually only within a few days of departure/arrival in orbit around a destination: otherwise the delta vee required for rendezvous made such tactics prohibitively expensive). In the meantime, its highly skilled crew of insurance underwriters and accountants sold policies and processed claims, while the elite cadre of merchant bankers handled investments and risk control, and the regular crew kept the ship running and its occupants entertained. It was, in short, just like any other respectable space-borne institution but for the sideline in ion rockets and forced boarding teams: Indeed, it reminded me of a smaller, cozier, and somewhat less ruthless version of New California, my first home.
Once I got over their odd appearance, I found life around the Five Zero comfortable. With the count’s permission I was allowed out of my cell, albeit shackled to an irritable ankle-crab that screeched and pinched me with its claws if I tried to enter a restricted area by mistake. I ate in the same corner of the mess deck as the other nonchiropteroid crew members (of whom there was a double handful, for unlike the chapel I had been rescued from, this vehicle was not shorthanded), and worked . . . well, I worked wherever I fancied so long as there was a flat surface and a sufficiently large retina to display my research materials.