I sat obediently and accepted the fiber-optic cable. “Where does this go?” I asked, holding up the free end.
“Right here. If you’ll allow me—” I nodded, letting him stab the cable into my medical port. Then everything suddenly went away.
Every interstellar colony is founded on a Ponzi scheme; but the architects of Atlantis were the first to make this principle explicit.
Normally, the founders of a new colony are motivated by the opportunity to be among the earliest settlers and shareholders; the earlier you get there, the more real estate and energy you can lay your hands on. But to be able to enjoy the fruits of your land grab, you require a functioning, self-sustaining civilization. It’s entirely possible to lay claim to a gas giant planet all by yourself, but what do you do with it thereafter? There’s the rub. Civilization is complicated and expensive and surprisingly difficult to transplant to a new star system, even for such as we—never mind our Fragile predecessors who couldn’t survive even a little bit of hard vacuum and ionizing radiation. Hence the incentive for founders to go into debt if necessary, to hire in the extra workers it takes to expand from a couple of hardscrabble tents on an asteroid into an interplanetary civilization in only a couple of hundred years.
And this explains the incentive to launch further colonies in turn, so that they can go into debt borrowing labor from you in return for slow dollars which you can use to pay off your own founders’ debt.
But why don’t we, the founders of Atlantis thought, try to come up with a better, faster way to collapse our foundational debt?
(This is inference. I do not know for sure what was going through their minds: This is purely my own highly speculative reconstruction of what happened roughly two thousand years ago. Let me emphasize this: Nobody now living knows for sure.)
Paying off the founders’ debt can take centuries, and the grinding investment of resources required to build and launch starships. The new colony may go into debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of slow dollars drawn on the banks of their neighbors. How can this debt be made to go away?
One way to do it is to arrange a Jubilee—a global remission of all debt. But it takes pressing circumstances to impose such a thing on an open-ended trading network. Investors tend to dislike having their creditors evaporate like mist for some reason. You can make a Jubilee work in a closed system, by decree, but because of the debt-driven pattern of expansion of interstellar colonization, it’s almost impossible for everyone to get out of debt simultaneously. Some utopians campaign for a galactic Jubilee; in my opinion, they might get one sometime after the stelliferous era gutters to a darkening end, and the lights go out throughout the universe.
On a smaller scale, a really well-established colony system with a good economy and a stable sun might aim for autarky, the practice of total isolationism and autonomy. In effect, they could declare a local Jubilee. Cut the interstellar communications links, and nobody will be able to call in their debts—not by any reasonable means, anyway. (Sending a starship to demand repayment is a ludicrous idea.) However, attempts at autarky generally founder when there is a change of governance; the old oligarchs ossify or die, or the young demand their imported entertainments, or unforeseen new circumstances generate demand for hitherto-unneeded skills that can most easily be imported, or, or, or. Autarky is unstable. A system rich enough to make a serious play for autarky is probably so rich that it has already paid off its foundational debt.
And that more or less exhausts the legal ways of escaping a system debt.
Which leaves fraud. It is almost impossible to fake the establishment of an interstellar bank that issues slow money. For the money to be recognized as such, the issuing bank must satisfy its peers in two or more neighboring star systems that it’s really there. This is a straightforward process—point telescope at newly colonized star system, look for laser light—so it is very hard to imagine a conspiracy duping two or more systembanks in perfect synchrony, even with a timetable of false transmissions prearranged years in advance. It has been tried a couple of times, but it fails as soon as one of the duped banks tries to get the “new” bank to sign a slow dollar received from another dupe. You can’t defraud the speed of light.
But the speed of light offers another opportunity to escape a slow money debt. If a faster-than-light drive really did exist, then the whole slow economy of settled space would be jeopardized. All the equity locked up in light-speed transmissions could be short-circuited; there would be no further need for slow money. Confidence in slow money would collapse, and with it, the value of any debt denominated in the old slow currency. It would, de facto, create the circumstances for a global Jubilee—by changing the rules and destroying the old economy.
It is my belief that the founders of Atlantis knew this full well, and moreover knew that everybody else was aware of it: And so they willfully decided to use this global assumption as a lever to move the universe.
First, they went through the usual growing pains of a new colony, importing labor and knowledge and skills and incurring debt.
Then they imported a bunch of natural philosophers and historians and scholars and established, very publicly, a gigantic and diverse research enterprise. They went further into debt, issuing bonds denominated in slow money to fund the expansion and operations of their Academy for High Energy Research. In the course of which they cautiously admitted that, yes, developing a faster-than-light space drive was a major systemwide economic goal, to which all else was subordinate.
Needless to say, this caused much speculation and analysis throughout the whole of settled space: Opinions ranged from mirth and skepticism through to genuine alarm, not to mention triggering attempts at scientific espionage (and, it is rumored, sabotage). Financial markets became jittery, and sharp-witted fast folk turned a profit by designing hedges against the impending collapse of the slow money–based trade system. There was actually a drop in the frequency of colony starship launches for the first time in millennia, as everyone postponed their plans in order to wait and see.
Then, after spending half a century on what an earlier age would have described as a war footing, on the eve of a widely publicized announcement of some importance . . . Atlantis went dark.
Depth Charge
I am not the most perceptive person with respect to threats against my safety.
Because I had asked the concierge to arrange for my security and to have the hotel doctor attend to my needs, I naturally assumed that the presence of a doctor-shaped individual in my suite was entirely legitimate: and not, for example, a sign that the hotel’s security protocols had been breached.
Bad mistake, Krina.
In the past year I had acquired more experience of being kidnapped and deceived than the rest of my lineage had managed over a period of several centuries. But I freely admit that what happened after I unwittingly gave the false doctor access to my morphological-control firmware was probably the most drastic of all my abductions.
At the time, I didn’t know anything. I was switched off, effectively as dead as a downloaded soul dump in transit between star systems. Which was, when I revisit the incident with full hindsight enabled, a mercy.
An invisible observer would have seen the “hotel doctor” hand me a fine cable, then wait for me to sit down and attach it to the nape of my neck. At which point I would have fallen over, limp as a hank of leviathan grass on dry land. The doctor stood, walked across the suite to an inconspicuous service hatch, and opened it, then pulled out a body-sized cargo cylinder. Into the cargo cylinder I went, then into the service hatch and out of the hotel.