There are other strategies. Some enlightened governances cultivate the production of amusements and distractions of art, or research and development and design, or even practice the dusty sciences, as if probing the limits of the physical universe can tell us anything new at this late stage. Others work on terraforming, the production of biospheres aesthetically attractive and comfortable for our kind of life. (We may not be Fragile, but we inherited their body plan and psychology, and with them a preference for environments suffused with self-replicating fractal structures powered by entropic energy gradients and exhibiting complex behavior.) Successful systems with pleasing biomes and a viable local economy can actually charge would-be immigrants a landing fee. A modest interstellar tourism industry exists, catering to the independently wealthy.
But despite these options, in general the best way to pay off a system-wide debt is to pass it off onto another system. And thus has it ever been, until Atlantis colony tried to be different. One of my assignments, as I grew up working as an indentured child researcher in Sondra’s bank aboard the generation ship New California, was to hunt for failed slow money exchanges, identify what had gone wrong, then buy title to the escrow accounts at each end, or to the uncountersigned carnets, allowing us to neatly claim the funds floating in limbo—or to identify the heirs to the original recipient in the exchange, in order to charge them a commission in return for providing proof and completion of their good fortune. Legacy-hunting and heir-matching is an old and specialized profession. And as it happens, it is a profession through which I was exposed to various kinds of fraud, for nothing brings out the worst in human psychology like an opportunity to profit from someone else’s accidental misfortune.
As I have mentioned, I have had many opportunities over the decades to study the FTL scam in great detail. Usually, all advance-fee frauds, such as the Spanish Prisoner scam, end with a destitute victim and a vanished grifter. But—this is an important twist—in the case of the FTL scam, the payment doesn’t go directly to the con artist who convinces the mark into parting with their slow money. It can’t, by definition; it has to go to another star system. And this means it has to go to an accomplice whom the grifter trusts implicitly.
Things can go wrong with the scam, between the grifter skipping town and receiving their payoff. The accomplice at the other end may die, or defect, or (in one memorable case) even fall victim to a different FTL scam themselves. My specialty at the bank, tracking down dead transactions, led me over time to focus on the victims of FTL scams, to identify the recipients of the payment. I discovered that the proportion of slow money transfers that fail to complete is an order of magnitude higher in advance-fee frauds than in regular exchanges. And because I was on commission (my debt of instantiation having been long since redeemed), this in turn allowed me to turn a hobby into a lucrative little sideline.
Back to the topic at hand:
Atlantis went dark nearly two thousand years ago, after having solicited substantial inward investments that by some estimates totaled the almost unimaginable sum of five billion slow dollars.
That’s roughly the economic productivity of an entire mature, heavily populated star system—such as old Sol system—over five centuries. More realistically, it’s the productivity of ten new colonies over their first thousand years. On the order of fifty quadrillion or more in fast money. It’s an almost incomprehensible sum of cash, made even more incomprehensible by the fact that this was not some sort of strange derivative instrument but actual primary debt of the most raw and immediate kind.
Fraud is seldom bloodless; but the violence and turmoil that follows in its wake is random and incoherent compared to that associated with war or robbery. The Atlantis blackout caused several billion personal bankruptcies, millions of suicides, economic recessions in dozens of star systems, revolutions and civil wars and much raising of heads of heads of state on sharp pointy spikes when said rulers were found to have invested entire national insurance funds in the Atlantis project. The hubbub took centuries to die down.
The significance of Atlantis’s disappearance cannot be overemphasized. Some people—a sizable minority—clung to the delusion that Atlantis had in fact discovered something truly wonderful, and the Atlanteans had decamped for parts unknown at a high multiple of the speed of light. Others were convinced that they had screwed up and somehow unleashed a force that had scrambled the tiny minds of every neurocyte in the star system, and that consequently Atlantis should be left well alone. But other, more cynical, souls assumed that the Atlanteans, accustomed to living high on the hog thanks to their fat pipeline of incoming investments, had seen the end approaching and decided to mew themselves up for a millennium.
Starships were launched—three of them to my knowledge. It’s almost the only time in recorded history when starships were deliberately sent to an already-settled star system, and the only time when more than one took flight. One of the vehicles, named the Vengeance, even carried a brace of fast breeders, a few kilotons of unenriched uranium to process into plutonium along the way, and a nuclear weapons factory. No, I am not making this up: It had a military command structure—some of the investors were so crazed that they were actually thinking in terms of launching an interstellar invasion by force!
However, contact was lost with every one of the ships before they even finished the boost stage of their flight. My money is on sabotage by sleeper agents left behind by the Atlanteans, specifically to address such a reaction to their planned disappearance. And after five centuries had elapsed, nobody still in business felt like throwing away a couple of million in slow money on yet another feral-golden-goose chase.
Doubts remained, but only historians have the energy to get worked up over it these days.
As you may have guessed by now, given my specialty, it was probably inevitable that I and my long-haul pen pals would be drawn into investigating the possibility that the Atlantis blackout was the climax of the grandest fraud in recorded human history—and the biggest FTL scam ever, of course.
This is not exactly a new idea. Right from the outset, it has been a minority opinion among those who investigated the event. Evidence for it is thin on the ground, and all too often those who give public voice to the theory are dismissed as conspiracy theorists—how is it possible, skeptics ask, to found an interstellar colony mission (involving tens of thousands of minds), then run it for a century on the basis of a conspiracy? All it takes is a single leak, and the entire thing can be blown wide open. Also, where’s the evidence?
Well, for one thing, there would be no point to such a conspiracy if there were no way to launder the proceeds effectively—to profit from it afterward, in other words. For another, anyone who is on the inside and knows what was going on has a huge vested interest in staying quiet. Even outsiders like myself and my peers, stealthily tracing the financial evidence, can’t quite bring ourselves to talk too loudly for fear that someone else will claim-jump our uncommitted transactions. Only cranks, paranoids, and lunatics prate loudly about the possibility that the Atlantis blackout was the payoff to a gigantic financial conspiracy; and so the theory receives little critical examination in the public gaze.
But if you know how such frauds work, you also know that the key to unraveling one is ideally to work along the chain of financial transactions: to establish where the money came from, where it was sent, and who ultimately received it. Frequently, this is a matter of learning who laundered it onward to its ultimate destination (usually a systembank willing to turn a blind eye to large volumes of trade in return for a percentage off the top), and to do this, one searches for patterns in the traffic from that bank which cannot be accounted for by more mundane businesses . . .