She barked, a sharp pulse of sound that rippled through my guts as she flicked her taiclass="underline" “You would say that! They’re good people, Krina. I’ve been in this system for years, and in Shin-Tethys for long enough to have a handle on them. At first I thought I was lying low—literally so—that it was a convenience, that I could pay my way by organizing their bookkeeping at this end better to keep that bitch Medea from stealing them blind, and that in return they’d keep Sondra’s minions away from me while I continued the search. That’s what I was doing keeping their books in Nova Ploetsk, using techniques that ensured maximum security against everyone. But—do you know something? I think they’re better than we are. They fixed a lot of what’s wrong with our basic cognitive model. Made themselves over as new communist squid-folk. Yes, they’re still individuals, but the border between self and other is thinner. And they don’t hate. They own property but they don’t have strong social hierarchies—top-down control is a dangerous liability to a team trying to trap a runaway natural nuclear reactor—they’re instinctive mutualists. They understand money and debt and credit and so on, but they don’t feel a visceral need to own: What they owe doesn’t define their identity. They trade, and yes, they buy stuff from the laminar kingdoms above: medical tools, wetware, bright shiny jewelry to line their nests—but to some extent they keep mining the smokers because the folks upstairs want them to, and they like to please other people. They get a pleasure-reward for making other people happy. Even an abstraction of other people. Isn’t that freaky?”
“If you say so, sis.” I glanced around, wondering how much longer the lecture would continue. “But if you’re so happy, why did you invite me here?”
“Wha—” Ana did a slow double take. “I’m sorry. I got carried away.” She glanced around the spherical nest-office, as if seeing it for the first time. “Partly because you just weren’t safe up in the daystar waters. I’d hate to see you mindraped or kidnapped just because you didn’t know what was going on. Oh, and because they found it for me.”
“Found what?”
“The missing soul chip, sis.” In the twilit waters it was hard for me to tell for sure, but the tensing of her cheeks and the lustrous sheen of the scaly chromatophores around her face hinted at triumph. “The Atlantis transaction’s uncommitted counterfoil.” She reached over to a niche in the nearest wall and withdrew a filter-feeding animal’s shell, valves clenched tight against the threatening predators polluting the waters nearby with their vibrations. She offered it to me with one hand as she repeatedly tickled the edge of the bivalve with a finger of the other. The half shells began to loosen, a fringe of tenuous tissue appearing between them: Then it opened fully, a mecha-oyster relaxing to reveal the lambent interior of its shell, and a rectangular, flattish shard of glittering nacre within. “Oops, nearly left it in there too long. Not to worry, the pearl coating will rub off.”
I stared. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“No.” She motioned it toward me. “Take it.”
“What, the—”
“Just the soul chip: I’d rather you didn’t kill my pet.”
I reached in carefully and tugged at the chip. It came away easily. It was indeed soul-chip-sized, and my fingertip proximity-sense told me that it was active, full. “Where did you get it?”
“Like I said, they like to make people happy. If I hadn’t kept their books on water-soluble paper where they couldn’t get at them, one of them would probably have offered them to a local brokerage as a gift.” She tapped the open shelclass="underline" The animal within (mechanocytes imitating a long-extinct invertebrate) pulled its valves closed, and she returned it to its niche. “The People did it for me. I was here a few years and had barely begun to feel safe again when Gimmel glitter-of-slow-neutrons-beneath asked why I was unhappy. It took me a long time to open up and explain . . .” She looked down. “I broke. Told them the whole sorry story.”
“You. Didn’t.” I clenched my fist around the impossible, glittering soul chip.
She looked up again, met my accusing gaze: “I did, Krina. And you know what happened? To cheer me up, they went and found it for me. It’s the real thing. The primary soul-level backup of Ivar Trask-1, murdered more than nine hundred years ago, lost forever in a volume of ocean a thousand kilometers in diameter. An impossible search: You couldn’t buy that kind of service for money! I gather it took a half of a million-strong shoal almost ten days of searching in the bottom silt. They did it for fun, Krina. They’re too altruistic for their own good, when dealing with the likes of us. And I guess it’s all my fault that one of them sent a happy message to Sondra, thinking that would make her happy, too.”
I am told that one of the signs of an abusive relationship is the creeping normalization of the abnormaclass="underline" that one takes the most disturbing or painful circumstances as a meter stick for everyday life, and assumes that what one is experiencing is in fact the way everyone else lives, and not an aberration.
You could take it as a sign of our abnormal instantiation and upbringing (in a polity where child slavery and postinstantiation abortion were considered normal) that it took us nearly four standard years after our discovery of the incomplete Atlantean slow money transaction to admit to ourselves that our lineage mother, Sondra Alizond-1, was in fact a monster and a criminal.
A criminal! The thought itself, the mere idea that the most conservative, staid, wealthy citizen of a fabulously well funded financial polity might be a thief is so outrageous that it bankrupts the imagination. So let me try to explain . . .
As is the case with all other long cons, it is necessary for the perpetrators of the FTL scam to have a way of extracting value from their mark. And, value having been extracted, value must be liquidated and recycled in some entirely deniable manner that does not connect the practitioners of the fraud with their newly gained loot. In ages noted for war and disorder and violence, this may be relatively easy: Fungible coinage is readily available, anonymous money circulates easily, and nobody asks too many questions about where the soldiers got the cash with which they pay their bills. But that is not the character of this era: This is a peaceful period, and slow money is held to account in the balance sheets of banking institutions or harnessed but frozen in light-speed transition between star systems, locked to the identity tokens of the financiers who countersign the transactions to notarize a transfer of value.
It should therefore not come as a surprise to learn that every splendid and visionary fraud needs the collusion of a banker. Or, in the case of the Atlantis bust-out, several thousand of them.
Bankers are in the business of minimizing risk, and participating in an actively fraudulent scheme, especially as a money laundry, is nothing if not risky. Most sensible, experienced, staid bankers will ignore the temptation to get involved with any such thing. But Sondra, back in the day, was young and hungry and inexperienced and had little appreciation for the likely consequences of such a youthful adventure echoing down the centuries and millennia to come. Some careful digging among brokerage records revealed the sordid truth. Far from making her fortune in her first fifty years, then buying her way into a colony venture and thence proceeding by a hop, skip, and a jump to staid success, she had made a series of near-disastrous decisions, actually losing money for the credit union that spawned her.