Chapter 30

The machine Person at the other end of the conversation had a laugh at the thought of a Robin Hood-style attack. "We shall act accordingly, Governor." They put their first digital attack into operation immediately.

Before long, they had accounts bulging with cash in banks all over the Earth. At the same time, The owners of the depleted accounts became frantic, trying to work out what had happened to their cash assets. There was an automatic assumption that some human agency was responsible; some crime syndicate; some organisation with the technical ability to raid banks without leaving any discernible trace, not one touch of evidence. In every case, apparently the cash was removed by its titular owner; the men (and the occasional woman) who had stolen these assets in the first place. Suspicion fell on others who had helped to extract the assets from national coffers, or who had assisted in hiding them away. SOMEONE had to know of their existence, because the accounts of innocent depositors remained untouched.

It did not matter what name or number the cash was hidden under. If it was traceable to the man responsible, it vanished. A proportion of the cleverer embezzlers discovered that certain of their accounts remained unaffected, and started accessing these funds. As soon as they did, these accounts joined the others in emptying into the ether.

It was as if a spy was watching them, and tracking every action they took. Making phone calls turned out to be dangerous, so phone banking was out. Internet banking was worse. It seemed that some mysterious software was able to control every action taken on the Internet, and use the same actions to remove cash from the accounts almost at once. Passwords were useless as a preventative. Similarly, criminals cannot ask the law enforcement agencies to help them recover money that they themselves had stolen, so they were reduced to depending on physical assets – gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, and so on.

The difficulty with such assets is these need to be converted into cash. That is the point of vulnerability, unless the money is kept as hard cash. Holding large amounts of hard cash is inadvisable, so a slow and steady conversion to cash is essential; but that exposes the user to being noticed.

Life can be hard if you are a major embezzler of your country's funds.

There was another aspect of the matter which arose when The Personalia noticed enquiries being made into their depredations by fairly competent humans. Realising that the enquirers were not themselves embezzlers, and indeed were connected to one government body in a fairly respectable country, The Personalia introduced themselves to the parties involved, and explained what they were doing, and why; and their intention to be philanthropical with the proceeds detached from the major embezzlers.

This rather shocked the investigators, who stopped their enquiries at once. They notified their agents, and amended their intentions somewhat. The organisation had adopted an unofficial policy of trying to recover illegally-obtained funds, and later make political and economic capital out of handing back the funds to the Treasuries that had been robbed. The Personalia had nipped that policy in the bud with their actions. Leaving the possibility of retrieving gains in kind, those stashed away as gold platinum or silver bullion; precious gemstones; works of art; or valuable paper documents such as bearer bonds or the title deeds for valuable buildings or acreage of land.

The major difficulty with physical items of value is locating their whereabouts. Large sums of money can only be held in banks and similar institutions, but stashes of ill-gotten goods can be hidden in unidentified buildings, kept in a safe or vault on private premises, or even squirrelled away in a cave of other hiding-hole.

How can you locate such hidden caches? The only real answer is for the embezzler to visit the cache for access to the items for converting to cash. That means keeping a close eye on the thief for a long period of time. That in turn means a large number of watchers, or conversely a single watcher close to the perpetrator. After an instance where by a bit of unexpected luck, a cache location was identified, it was successfully raided by armed men and spirited away.

The Personalia were then notified that the organisation originally set of to retrieve cash was now targeting such hidden caches of valuables, They had decided to set up a company to offer discreet personal services to the high-profile and apparently rich thieves. This would be the means of inserting trained agents to position to watch for the thief seeking to use the contents of the cache.

This information was passed on to the Governor of Rehome, to bring him up to date, as he had been consulted at the start. His reaction was to laugh uproariously. The puzzled Personalia asked what he found so funny.

He replied, "Just that your suggestion for getting stolen assets back was not just your idea. Humans on Earth had that concept developed as well, and at the beginning you were at cross-purposes, not knowing what the other was doing. The contrast was humourous, to me."

He thought some explanation was in order. "Humans find humour in the most unexpected situations. It is not always possible to predict what we find funny, but the sense of gentle ridicule is part of it; at other times it is the juxtaposition of similar but opposing concepts that provokes humour, where the surprise element adds to the comedy. Humour may by visual, where a pompous person slips and falls, or his trousers fall down in public. Such humour is not funny to the person it happens to, but is funny for the onlookers, as it makes the pompous person look ridiculous. Sometimes the humour is verbal, but is often limited to a particular dialect or version of a language, where the pronunciation of one word implies another, changing the meaning to a ridiculous extent. Writers have written entire books about humour, so it is not easy to explain it in a few paragraphs.

In the present instance, it was the surprise that a human agency should choose to attempt the same target as a machine intelligence, at the same time: an astonishing coincidence."

"Governor, if we may change the subject? Have you thought further about what we should do with the money we extract from these thieves?"

"Actually, I have. Most of the poor people in these countries have no means of improving themselves economically, and just handing them some money or goods will not change things very much. What occurs to me is, why don't we do a "Liberia", or a "Sierra Leone", and start a new colony with these people who have nothing to lose? Ideally, we could settle them on one of the new planets, but failing that, we could establish a new community on Rehome, but on another part of the planet, so that they can make their own decisions about how it should be run?"

"Governor, we shall consider your suggestion for a while. We need to discover how many people this would cover, and where best such numbers could be accommodated. The total might run into millions!"

"Well, if the numbers were going to be that high – and not all of the poor will take up an offer of resettlement – you would have to work on the basis of a gradual shift of the population. Any new community has to be able to feed itself, so that requires preparing farming ground and establishing a good agricultural economy, does it not?"

"If we might take your concept further, Governor, we foresee a need for a training organisation on Rehome, to teach potential settlers on a new planet the techniques for farming and fishing, so that when they arrive at their destination, they will know what to do to sustain themselves."

"Intriguing. I need to think further on this. We have been gathering our own experts in a number of fields, but we would probably have a requirement for many more if we set up a training organisation as you envisage."

"Very well. We shall leave you to set up a think tank to come up with plans that would be simple to implement on a large scale. You would need a site with no facilities, to emulate the sort of start that the settlers would be facing. The finances that we are accumulating could be applied to the provision of a basic "starter pack" for every family embarking on the settlement process. We shall draft out a set of contents for a starter pack, and submit it to you for your own staff to check it for omissions and possible deletions. There may be items which can be supplied later, depending on the land the settlers are presented with, on their colony site."

The Governor was already starting to think his way through the hurdles. "A new colony, as always, needs a structure that everyone agrees with and will sign up to, and a civil administration that will implement the laws and the social and economic backbone of the new colony. Poor people are unlikely to have the background for this administrative task, so either we do as we are doing for our own offshoot colonies, or we hire men and women from Earth to set up the administrative structure that is needed. To avoid these experts becoming a dictatorship, there needs to be a controlling body made up of a combination of representatives of the settlers, representatives of The Personalia as honest brokers, and representatives of Rehome, to have an oversight of the administration's work."

Peggy found herself sulking. She had recovered from her abortion treatment, and was back at school. At the behest of Trevor, she was working hard at her studies, and her class scores were rocketing up, to the delight of her teachers (who imagined it was all down to their standard of teaching, when that same teaching had no effect previously).

Peggy's classmates were not sure what to say or do about her seeming new-found ability to learn. Should they treat her as a nerd; congratulate her on improving from such a low level; encourage her new abilities, ignore the change, or what? At the same time they were afraid she might criticise them in return for not improving. It was a lose-lose situation for them.

For Peggy, her self-confidence had also taken a positive jump. The first time one of her friends made a snide comment on her pregnancy, during the lunch break, she snapped "What pregnancy?", and when the other girl, Susan Lubbock, her taller but thinner friend, stammered, "You told us you were pregnant, Peggy," she said sharply in response, "Well, I am not pregnant now, and happy with it. Get with the program, Sue."

Like wildfire, the news spread among the other girls. Her absence from school was now explained: she had got rid of the problem. They were amazed that she did not want her baby. Most girls were inherently delighted to become a mother, as it was viewed – wrongly - as a sign of adulthood. Susan, who was a little older than Peggy, but less buxom, eventually plucked up the courage to ask her.

"Peggy, did you not want the baby?"

She looked at her friend with equanimity this time. "When you stupidly let yourself get plied with alcohol, and get fucked by a couple of failures, you don't want to keep evidence of them being involved. They are gone from my life, and so is the evidence. That pair did not know anything about lovemaking, or even how to have sex so the girl can enjoy it. All they wanted was to get their rocks off, the idiots."

Sue was shocked at her attitude, and tried a shot at getting back at her. "So all of a sudden you know all about lovemaking, do you?"

Peggy stared at her accusingly, and firmly stated with confidence, "Yes, I do now. Real lovemaking is wonderful, Sue." Her eyes got a dreamy look that Susan had never seen before.

Sue said to herself, "By God! She sounds as if that is true! She must have met another boy who knew what he was doing." Aloud, she remarked, "So, you found yourself an expert to learn from?"