The waypoint was spartan in its amenities. In form, it was a cylinder full of buoyancy wax hanging vertically in the water: Cables dangling from it supported a mesh platform, which in turn held smaller packages. As I swam tiredly toward it, I recognized another guide capsule, and a tub of what appeared to be food.
“Hello, Krina.” It was another prerecorded message from Ana. “I’d like to apologize for the roundabout way of bringing you in. As you have doubtless inferred, we have fallen among scoundrels and thieves: All will become clear when you arrive. For now, all I can tell you is that you have a few more waypoints ahead. As long as you rest at each one to eat and allow your pressure modifications time to recalibrate, and as long as you remember to ditch each used guide capsule on arrival, it should be difficult for anyone to follow you. When you activate each new guide, you trigger a watchdog timer: Eight hours later, a heater will melt the wax in the buoyancy platform’s floatation device, and it will sink. Expensive, but as long as you follow instructions, it will be very hard for anyone to follow you.”
Expensive? For a moment I felt a hot spike of rage at Ana and her accomplices: They’d had me abducted and surgically violated, then sent me on a drudging mystery tour of the abyss, and now Ana was worrying about expense? But then I looked around. In the dim glow of the pilot light, I saw food, a net to nap atop, and an inductive coupler to recharge my half-exhausted electrocytes. Ana was trying to take care of me, after a fashion. And I couldn’t ignore the number of dubious characters searching for my sib, from Rudi to the mutinous clergy by way of my stalker. If Ana was keeping book for some dubious characters, what of it? I was here, now, and on the trail of the lost checksum of the Atlantis Carnet. It was, I supposed, an adventure although I have never considered myself an adventurous person, much inclined to wilderness hikes or associating with piratical scoundrels.
I ate—pasty, foamy tubespam, tasteless and with a tendency to dissolve if I didn’t squeeze it straight down my throat from the wrapping—and lay down to sleep on the induction charger. I hadn’t felt particularly tired, and the inky darkness of the open waters around me felt anything but reassuringly safe; the next thing I knew, the new guide capsule was vibrating against my hip.
“Krina, wake up. Krina, wake—”
“I’m awake.” I rolled over. The red pilot light above me was flashing. “Hey—”
“This platform will scuttle in three minutes. You must leave now.”
“Give me a flashlight beam. And warn me if I’m approaching anything dangerous.” I looked around, seeing nothing beyond the faint outlines of the platform’s mesh. Just then, I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else—not here, perched on the edge of a shelf suspended over nothingness, with a long trek ahead of me. “The platform will scuttle in two minutes and thirty—”
I twisted round, flexed lazily away, and turned in the water to watch.
The end, when it came, was not dramatic. For a few seconds, a red glow lit the underside of the buoy. Then a seal of some sort melted. In the flashlight beam I’d asked for, I could just discern a plume of smoky liquid rising. The buoy crumpled in on itself and began to sink, very slowly, trailing a thinning cloud of differently textured murk into the choking blackness behind it.
“Krina, please follow the guidance beam—”
The torch winked out. I would have sighed with frustration if I had lungs and air to exhale. Instead, I rolled round again and followed the beam down into the darkness.
Picture a circle of pen pals, corresponding across a gulf of light-years as they try to construct a forensic analysis of the biggest financial crime in human history.
We started by working backward: starting with the supposition that the purpose of the Atlantis scam was to fund the post-Atlantis burst of colony formation. That the goal, and the effective result of this monstrous crime, had been to make an emperor of every thief.
It follows that, by the present day, over two millennia later, many of the conspirators will be either dead or refactored, flensed of earlier memories, their identities so modified that they are no longer the same people. Those who survive will, however, be wealthy beyond belief, stuck in their ways, not easily susceptible to change. Some of them will have founded lineages. And others will—
—Have gone missing.
Consider the circumstances of our criminals as they prepare to receive their payoff. They have just put in more than a century of hard toil in a self-imposed penal colony, clinging grimly to a radiation-drenched rock, working long hours every day to paint a confabulatory vision of success for the outside universe to throw money at. Finally, they come to the bust-out. But are they, then, to inject themselves straight into another colony mission, to sign up for and join a starship crew, just to do it all over again, this time for real?
No. They are criminals—or, to be more precise, they are victims of the mind-set that underlies the perennial get-rich-quick scheme: in this case, of the idea that in return for a century of hard labor, they can retire on the fruits of a millennium of effort. They have mistaken a journey for a destination and suffer from an outsize sense of entitlement. They want to enjoy the luxuries they feel they have earned. So even if they have invested their stolen blood money in starship partnerships, they’re not going to be visible on the founders’ roster. Rather, you can look for them to show up decades or centuries after the hard work is done, second-wave immigrants looking for an easy life. But where do they wait in the meantime, for the centuries it will take for their investment vehicles to reach their destinations and take root?
There’s one obvious answer. They’re going to spend as much time as possible in transit, bouncing expensively between widely separated beacon stations. Human space is an expanding bubble almost fifty light-years in radius by now. Even sticking to the well-established core systems, you can easily spend half a century in transit between two stations. Arrive, decant into a new body, spend a couple of million seconds as a tourist, then bounce on to the next destination—you can while away half a millennium in a subjective year, and thanks to the durability of slow money, your assets will travel into the future with you.
But there are problems with this. Put yourself in the skin of an Atlantean: Being too directly traceable back to Atlantis would be dangerous since there will be angry creditors looking for you. So you want to change your face, change your name, change your identity—and meet up with your money down the line, centuries in the future.
Now, here’s what Ana and Andrea and the rest of us did:
First, we went looking for the immigration logs at those beacon stations that received outgoing traffic from Atlantis. (We were not the first people to do this.)
Then we looked at the outgoing traffic logs. And the census archives. And looked for inconsistencies between them: new identities popping up, mismatches between immigrant/emigrant numbers, notarized instantiations of new persons, and actual numbers.
And we looked for uncompleted slow money transactions originating at those beacons both before and shortly after Atlantis went dark, to beneficiaries who had departed earlier.
Of course, we found some interesting very dusty orphan transactions to claim title to—that’s what we were supposed to be doing. But then, to our surprise, we found a clear signal in the noise. We picked up the trail of an investment instrument that left Atlantis fully formed, and traveling by way of three different systems, to a colony venture launched from Hector System—Gliese 581c4—and thence to the vaults of SystemBank Hector, the institution where Sondra Alizond-1 made her fortune and subsequently bought a plutocrat’s share of the migratory habitat New California, aboard which I was instantiated. And which, our subsequent discreet investigations determined, was stalled in the suspense accounts, like any other slow money transaction in progress—only most transactions tended to complete in rather less than the over eighteen hundred years that this one had been hanging fire for.