You and I, sis, and Andrea: to Sondra we are merely truffle-hunting pigs, turned loose in a forest where she knew there would be many truffles to be found, ahead of her own arrival to collect the fruit of our searches. Specialized extensions of her identity, tailored for the task and to be used and disposed of with no more heed than a glove or a sock. Yes, Andrea found the evidence: My research post was made possible by a donation our lineage mater supplied through a cutout. Just as your study pilgrimage was nudged this way . . .
But that’s not all. Why did Sondra expect us to find lots of juicy truffles in Dojima System?
More to the point, Krina, have you wondered what Sondra did to become so wealthy in the first place?
Andrea found Sondra’s records by chance, while researching orphan transactions from SystemBank Hector, where Sondra got her start. What we had not realized is that Hector’s SystemBank underwrote the Atlantis colony expedition. And that Sondra actually forked and sent an instance of herself along with the colony vehicle! She was not merely laundering the proceeds of a fraud—she was, at the other end, one of the directors of Atlantis SystemBank! She was able to sign currency transactions in both directions. I don’t think that has ever been done before.
Now, as to the precise nature of the Atlantis fraud: I think you can see where it’s going? Atlantis was not a boiler-room operation. It was a genuine research colony, populated by real scholars, dedicated to the goal of constructing a causality violation engine—a device that could connect points in spacetime instantaneously. The appearance of fraud that we attribute to Atlantis is due to two factors:
Firstly, that our lineage mater, and various collaborators among the founders of Atlantis, were using her relationship with her trusted counterpart (concealed by the growth in Atlantis SystemBank’s interstellar debt) as a license to print slow money. Yes, she—our Sondra, the one at Hector—was forging slow dollars. Which requires collusion across interstellar distances: almost impossible, under normal circumstances.
And secondly, the reason Atlantis went dark is not that the conspirators who had established the colony as a fake investment vehicle were planning a blowout. Atlantis was not a fake after all. Rather, it’s because Sondra attempted to kill them all to protect her fraudulent, largely forged, fortune. The scholars of Atlantis hadn’t invented an FTL drive. Sondra’s records are incomplete, but if anything, they appear to have proven once and for all that FTL is impossible. But in the process, they discovered how to use quantum entanglement to move macroscopic objects—such as entire colony habitats—between widely separated locations at the maximum speed permitted by physics, the speed of light. Quantum teleportation on a macro scale, in other words.
Do I need to diagram for you what happens to our interstellar financial system once a cheap, effective light-speed-propulsion system becomes available?
It’s not as disruptive as a true FTL drive, of course. But it will instantly cause a collapse in the slow money system. Slow transactions are caught in a liquidity trap and can only be completed by a three-phase-commit process, so that they travel no faster than a third of light speed. A true light-speed drive would allow direct conversion of fast-currency systems, with no liquidity issues. To make matters worse, it appears that the teleportation drive is cheap, compared to the cost of the propulsion systems currently in use for starships and in-system vehicles. The foundation of a new colony world would no longer require huge investments of slow money. Sondra’s little scheme—printing slow dollars on the side, to line her nest—would not only be devalued; it would rapidly be exposed.
I’m not sure exactly what she did to the poor scholars of Atlantis, but I imagine it had something to do with their SystemBank, and their beacon stations, and a drastic and simultaneous application of nuclear explosives. Nor am I certain which instance of Sondra did the deed. (If indeed it makes sense to talk about them as different people: Perhaps she’d arranged some bizarre protocol to merge her divergent states regularly, much as Queen Medea kept her different instances synchronized.) It’s possible that the Atlantean sib uploaded a copy of herself to her sister, then suicided. More speculatively, it’s possible she contrived to seize control of the first of the vehicles equipped with the light-speed drive and used it to escape. But however it played out, direct contact with Atlantis System was interrupted, under circumstances likely to induce extreme paranoia among the survivors.
We pick up the story over a century later, with the launch (and loss) of the various physical missions to Atlantis System. As you can imagine, New California—literally Sondra’s investment vehicle—was instrumental in bankrolling all three missions. This ensured that Sondra was in a position to control the selection of their flight crew. A close reading of the reports of the inquiries into their loss reveals that what was lost was communication with the vehicles—they stopped transmitting, true, but as they had completed their boost phase and were drifting, and contact was lost when they were already more than a light-year outbound from their launch sites, it was impossible to confirm that they were destroyed: It is simply not possible to obtain useful images of a cold object a hundred meters in diameter at a range of over ten trillion kilometers.
My suspicion is that Sondra was again responsible. All three vehicles carried beacon transceivers capable of transmitting and receiving uploads, and during the drift stage of their mission, most of their crews would have entered slowtime: A small, coordinated cell of saboteurs could wreak havoc, then transmit themselves to safety.
I stress that this is speculation, Krina. But we may have been overestimating both the size and the audacity of the Atlantis fraud, and underestimating the ruthlessness and reach of its perpetrator. Who, along with her accomplices, has for a long time now planned a final liquidation meeting, to be held at Shin-Tethys, where the final proceeds can be divided up and the last of the conspirators killed.
Why killed?
Consider: The three-phase-commit model used to transfer ownership of a slow dollar transaction means that the donor must be able to find the recipient in order to complete the acknowledgment of transfer. Between systembanks, across interstellar channels, this is unremarkable. But for a covert transfer, at short range, it is unsafe for the recipient: The risk of robbery is not inconsiderable. Hence the use, in the Atlantis Carnet, of a cutout—the banker Ivar Trask-1—and the scandal of his subsequent disappearance. I think Sondra was testing a means of finding and murdering her coplotters: requiring them to reveal their location in order to receive their final commission. Of course, if this is what she planned, then it would result in a number of high-value orphan transactions that would require tracing and unwinding . . .
We were created and trained specifically to mop up the loose ends, after the murderous termination of the biggest fraud in history. If not for Andrea’s prying—which was emphatically not part of Sondra’s planning—we would be unaware of this. We would have pursued the Atlantis Carnet, it’s true, not to mention the other missing transfers: but only under her direct control, and without insight into what it was about. And I very much fear that after locating them, we would have no future in her world.
Which is not to say that our lineage mater is going to succeed, sis. There is another player in this game, of whom Sondra appears to be unaware.
I think it’s time you asked Foxy Rudi where Branch Office Five Zero really comes from . . .