Chapter 7 - In which financial means are procured

In which financial means are procured The sense of empowerment I felt after my prolonged romp with Jessica was perhaps the greatest feeling I’d ever had. Now I knew with certainty that my life would contain pleasures the likes of which I had only ever fantasized of. I had the means at my disposal to turn my life into a living paradise, full of any pleasure I could think of.

Mostly, I could think of sexual pleasures, but I felt I had to restrain myself and not immediately seek out pleasure where I could most easily find it. I would have to pace myself and plan ahead if I wanted to fully capitalize on my opportunities.

Carefully, I started drawing up plans for how to get rich in a manner that would leave law enforcement agencies none the wiser. I had no fine-grained control over other people, but unlimited capabilities to control their brains on a very basic level, if I could only infect them with NanoReps. Get someone on a money transport to hand over their cash? Get an employee at a bank to walk into the vault and bring me a bag of money? A casino? Gain the confidence of a billionaire and make him draw up a new last will and testament, then switch off his brain and tell the NanoReps to dissolve after? Get hundreds of thousands of people to transfer funds to my account, but never a large enough amount from any one person to draw suspicions?

I contemplated all of these, but finally arrived at a rather simple and elegant solution. It took a long time to set up and execute though.

First, I got myself a white van and a lab coat and some papers and certificates that looked adequately realistic and impressive, saying I worked for a government funded science project about bovine immune response. With these and a bit of help from my NanoReps, I gained the trust of a local dairy farmer and installed some technical equipment in his cooling tanks where he stored the milk between visits from the local dairy truck. I infected his cows - hundreds of them - with NanoReps programmed to replicate themselves and then secrete themselves in the milk. Twice a week, right before the dairy truck came to collect, I myself collected a bucket or two of NanoReps that had been filtered from the raw milk. Within a few weeks, I had enough NanoReps to infect a large city.

Next, I did just that. Fortunately, I lived in Europe at the time (I won’t say which country, for obvious reasons). People here usually drink tap water, not bottled water. I infected the workers at the local waterworks and put their brains on hold for an hour while I stirred in a bucket of NanoReps in the municipal water supply. I also went to a local dairy producer and infected the milks and cheeses, to other local suppliers of juices and other beverages, etc - each got a bucket of nano-scale robots.

All such NanoReps were programmed to infect the host organism they ended up in, set up the basic connections I had used on Jessica, then remain active for six weeks before dissolving and leaving the host through the urine. After two months, little evidence of my tampering would remain, if any. In order to be able to affect one person at a time, not having my commands affect everyone within my casting range, I had activated a set of instructions that would make each NanoRep system create a randomly assigned eight-letter hexadecimal identity. The function was already built into the NanoRep API-libraries that I had stolen. Now I could just lean back and watch my interface as more and more systems came online and cast their identities to me though any nearby wifi they could access.