“I am to guide you to Ana Graulle-90,” said the capsule, “and provide a briefing along the way.”
“Where is she!”
“I am to guide you to Ana Graulle-90,” it repeated placidly. “Waypoints will provide navigation updates along the way. The final destination has been omitted for security reasons at this time. I am to provide a briefing along the way. Commencing briefing.”
Its voice changed slightly. “Hello, cuz,” it said in my missing-presumed-dead sib’s voice. “Bet you weren’t expecting this . . .”
Here is a curious but little-known fact: After the collapse of Atlantis triggered an interstellar recession in the slow money economy, the rate at which colony starships were launched actually increased.
One might naively think that the removal of five to ten percent of the entire interstellar money supply via the abrupt bursting of a theoretically impossible bubble (or the bust-out at the end of a confidence trick) might cause investors to panic and shovel their assets into the red end of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, investing for the long term in the most stable assets imaginable. (Red dwarfs: They’re for tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after.) But that’s not what my sisters and I noticed when we began to study the macroeconomic fallout from the Atlantis debacle.
Prior to Atlantis, over the preceding five hundred standard years, a total of eighty-two colony starships had been financed and dispatched by forty-four star systems. (Most interstellar polities do not have the resources to finance colony schemes: Only those with mature domestic economies become preoccupied by the lure of repaying their foundational debt.) But after Atlantis went black, seventy-one starships were launched by fifty-five star systems during the next three hundred years. This represented a 30-percent increase in the rate of colony formation. The rate was initially low but climbed drastically to peak after nearly a hundred years, dropping back to the previous level three hundred years afterward.
It was impossible to follow the money trail from our remove, over two millennia after the crisis, but it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the wave of colonization was the outcome of a colossal shell game that effectively hid the debts racked up by the Atlanteans in the foundation of a wave of suspiciously affluent new interstellar colonies . . . Like Dojima System, orbiting a bright G-class star, replete with heavy isotopes and habitable real estate. The surface of the hydrosphere of Shin-Tethys alone covered more than ten times the land area of Old Earth, and was (as I had discovered) inhabitable to depths unimaginable to surface dwellers; and then there were the other moons and planetoids of the system. Over time, Dojima would likely mature into one of the wealthiest territories in Post-human space—and do so with far less foundational debt than any normal colony.
Do I need to draw you a diagram?
Well, yes. Yes, I probably do.
So picture this:
A group of dedicated criminals hatch a scheme for the most ambitious crime in human history, one that will take a couple of centuries of hard work to execute. The payoff is to be nothing less than fifty or more entire star systems: Every participant will end the game as an emperor or monarch, rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, as rich as or richer than my lineage mater Sondra Alizond-1, director and sometime chief executive officer of the systembank of a peripatetic interstellar colony. But first, they have a job to do—a strange and terrible task.
Their mission is to fake the existence of an entire interstellar colony mission, then, with the collusion of their own sibling-instances (scattered throughout the rest of colonized Post-human space), liquidate it. And there is no easy way to do that without executing the task for real from start to bloody-handed finish.
Imagine a starship funded and crewed by criminal masterminds. They raise funds, they work, they fly: And finally they arrive in a hitherto-unvisited star system. Here they build the usual infrastructure of a colony, the beacon station and bank and the necessary factories to supply them with raw material . . . and they issue currency and create a slow debt, and solicit immigrants.
. . . Whom they then slaughter. This latter element is supposition. And in any case, is it murder if you merely fail to download and reinstantiate a person in a body at the far end of an interstellar party line? Quite possibly they assuage their guilt by archiving the incomers on soul chips, with some vague idea of restoring them when it is safe to do so. Or then again, maybe not.
This is what happens: They generate mountains of debt, use the capital produced thereby to buy immigrant labor, and disappear the immigrants in question as they arrive. Accomplices in the systems from which the immigrants departed then unwind the transactions and quietly pocket the slow dollars as they ooze out of Atlantis. The Atlanteans, for their part, keep up a steady stream of media fabrications, vast and brilliant lies and forgeries documenting the progress of their scientific infrastructure. And who is there, in this degenerate age, to call them on it? True scientists are thin on the ground, for much of what we call science is a matter of archival research, of knowing where to look up a finding from a project concluded centuries or millennia ago.
Viewed from any angle, it was a monstrous crime. Atlantis solicited millions of immigrants over more than a century. There must have been thousands—tens of thousands—in on the conspiracy, at both ends of all the primary banking links. (Atlantis had no less than seven continuous laser links to other star systems by the end.) But there was an inevitable deadline counting down on the scam: Sooner or later, they would be expected to produce something or make good on some of their debt. A mendicant scholar might visit and, when they failed to return, the relatives might be upset and commence further investigations. (Or someone else might really invent an FTL drive and show them up for what they were—but that was probably the least of the conspirators’ worries.)
And so we come to the bust-out.
A decision is made to wind up the scam and cash out. Huge amounts of slow money have been generated and exported by the semifictional colony; now it’s time for the perpetrators to take their leave. Quite possibly, there is an inner cabal, a cadre of a few hundred conspirators that includes the team who operate the interstellar communications links and the systembank. The rest, a couple of thousand workers, slave away in early-days-of-a-better-nation conditions, keeping the energy and raw materials side of the colony going. Like many parasites, the false colony is perpetually stuck in a neotenous state, living in badly patched domes on the surface of an asteroid and spending its surplus productivity on the propaganda machinery it needs in order to convincingly portray a flourishing colony. In truth, it is sickly and etiolated, deliberately so—kept that way by an inner cadre intent on ensuring that no survivors remain behind to blab about their activities.
It’s anybody’s guess how the inner cabal makes its exit. But the members probably laid their plans many decades in advance: Now is the time to execute. Elections are lost, sabbaticals are taken, a careful disengagement from the body politic is carried through to completion. Perhaps false identities are assumed, mindless doppelgängers activated to run through the boring mundane semblance of everyday life while their role models escape. In any event, a blip in outbound uploads begins. The background rate of people leaving Atlantis climbs. Not that it has ever been a closed society—they have carefully maintained the fiction of a high standard of living to explain the low level of emigration, and equally carefully kept trustworthy insiders churning back and forth to give the appearance of free movement. But with hindsight the blip is noticeable, the interstellar lasers blazing away at maximum bandwidth for tens of millions of seconds.