Jumping off the Planet

MONEY-SURFING

Everybody uses e-money.

You slide your card through a reader and you're paid. The money travels from your card into the store. It's a stream of numbers representing a sum of money, and wherever it goes, it's still the same amount of money. E-money carries its own verification codes, so anyplace you can send a block of data you can send e-money. You can send it across a wire, or you can pipe it into a card, or you can put it on a beam of light and send it off to Betelgeuse—like that crazy artist did last year. Or you can stuff it in the back of a toy monkey. But however e-money gets sent, as long as it decodes authentically when it arrives, it's money.

Weird says that at any given moment, twenty percent of the world's wealth doesn't exist. It's nothing but bits and bytes on its way somewhere else. I always thought that money had to represent something—like kilowatt-dollars are backed by electricity and potato dollars are backed by potatoes; but Weird says that e-money is backed by e-balances and e-potentials and e-futures, which are sometimes backed by e-stocks and e-bonds, and sometimes even by digital resources, but it's all so detached from the real world now that it really doesn't have anything at all to back it, except the whole world's mutual agreement. We all pretend that it's real and we pass it around like it's real, and once in a while, we turn e-dollars into plastic-dollars or chocolate-dollars or sugar-dollars, and sometimes even into paper-dollars or gold-dollars. The gold-dollars are the best; Dad showed me one once, in a museum. But it isn't real unless you make it real.

Eighty percent of the world's economy uses e-money now. It's almost impossible not to, unless you're bartering raw cocoa or something like that. It's estimated that four trillion dollars of e-money changes hands every day on the North American continent alone. I have no idea what it's like worldwide. But Weird says that if you could shut off all the electricity in the world at the same moment, you could destroy the world economy, that's how much money is in transit at any given instant.

I didn't fully believe that, but Weird said it could happen. If they break the Line, the world would never recover. But I didn't understand how that was so. All the buildings would still be there, all the people, all the crops and factories and stores and products in the stores. Why couldn't people just keep working anyway? And besides—wasn't there some kind of backup system to keep e-money from being lost in transit?

We'd studied e-money in school, but I'd tried hard not to pay attention and mostly succeeded in getting all the way through the semester without learning very much about it. It didn't seem very interesting at the time. But the important thing about e-money is that every transaction needs to be authenticated by the International Transfer System, which is kind of like an electronic post office for money, every transfer is insured.

Every time money is transferred from one person to another, it goes through an ITS node, which verifies and audits the exchange; this is particularly important when you need proof of payment for legal reasons. But the ITS also charges you one-twentieth of a percent—that's a nickel for every hundred dollars being transferred—which isn't all that much, I guess, because most people hardly notice it. But it's called the "transfer tax," because the more money you move, the more you pay.

If you move $2000, your transfer tax is a buck. But if you're a SuperNational, and you're moving around hundreds of millions of e-dollars, you're going to notice the e-tax real fast. If you want to move a billion dollars from here to there, it's going to cost you half a million in transfer charges. Of course, if you have a billion dollars, you can afford to spend half a million whenever you feel like it, but that's probably not the best way to stay a billionaire.

If the average daily flow of money is four trillion dollars, the government should make two billion dollars a day in e-tax alone. More than 70 trillion dollars a year. Almost enough to service the interest on the international debt.

Actually, the international authority only makes 1.25 billion dollars a day in e-tax. At least 750 million dollars moves through private services. Not everybody wants to pay the transfer tax. And not everybody wants the government auditing their finances either.

So anyone who has money that they want to move from one place to another without leaving a trail sends it through a transfer service, which is just like an anonymous remailer on the net. It strips the ID off the money and sends it on.

The e-money gets decoded into a service account, and a corresponding transfer is authorized to the recipient. The entire process is automatic. But for the few seconds or minutes it takes to send the money on, it's earning interest for the transfer service. That's why they're called money-surfers, they're riding the flow.

Most of the private services charge only a minimal fee, like a buck a transfer, no matter how much money is moving. Some of services are even free, if you're moving more than a million dollars a week. If you're a money-surfer with millions of dollars a day moving through your service accounts, at any given moment, you probably have a couple of million dollars in your pocket—even if it's somebody else's millions, you're still being paid interest on it. It's called your "average daily balance." A money-surfer with good clients can live quite well off the interest. It's like owning a perpetual motion machine that makes money just by sitting next to a river of it and sticking a finger in.

Not everybody can be a money-surfer, though. It can be dangerous. Two of the private services were hit very badly by a virus that scrambled some of their incoming data, and another company was hit with a counterfeit e-check. They still aren't talking about how that was done. The one that was hit had been "double-dipping"—transferring the money to a second account before sending it on, so it was collecting twice the interest. There wasn't anything really unethical about it, and it added only two or three minutes to each transfer, but somebody didn't like it, that was for sure. Anyway, there are a lot of companies providing transfer services, and some of them work through international pipelines—connected series of accounts—making it impossible to trace an exchange of money, even if you had a dozen international subpoenas.

According to Mickey, Alexei was an interplanetary money-surfer. That meant he had to be at least a millionaire—maybe more. That's why I began to wonder if there was more to this than Mickey was saying.

See, Alexei was helping us break the law. If we were caught, he'd go to jail too. He didn't have to take this kind of risk.

So why was he doing all this for us?

And just what was in the monkey anyway?

It took us more than an hour. We stopped once to pass a canteen around and catch our breaths. This canteen had water in it and a nipple over the opening; I sucked at it thirstily. Doug whispered to me, "Slow down, Chigger—don't pull a Stinky." He was right. I passed the canteen on. It was a very short rest; as soon as everybody had had a drink, we were on our way again.

At the top, or the far end, there was a wall blocking further progress. We had to climb up through a narrow tube and through a series of thick air locks.

"Okay, comrades," Alexei said. "This is where you must each make a prayer to Saint Vladimir—" We were at the final hatch.

"Saint Vladimir ... ?"

"I made him up. He is the patron saint of smugglers. I smuggled him into heaven. Now let's see if he is appropriately grateful." Alexei took out his clearance card and swiped it through the reader slot. He inhaled. He exhaled. The panel turned green, and when he tapped it, the hatch popped open.

"Thank you, Saint Vladimir. I shall light candles at your altar," Alexei said to the ceiling. "As soon as I can find candles. And build an altar." We passed through—into the top or bottom of a brightly lit shaft lined with machinery. It was deep and the walls were lined with tracks and service bays. On one side, we saw seven or eight elevator cars, each one docked and surrounded by lights and equipment and service gear. None of them had their cabins spinning; all had their lights on.

"Ann," said Alexei. "I have done good. Very good. And Saint Vladimir has done good. I was afraid I was going to have to replace him. See there? We are almost at the beginning of your journey. This way, citizens. We must not be seen."

There was small chance of that. There weren't any people on the outside of the cars. There were two spider-jeeps inspecting hulls, but they were all the way down at the bottom of the bay.

Nevertheless, Alexei led us around to the backside of a thick service pipe, where we would be out of sight, and we lowered ourselves down it. Bobby was clinging to Douglas's back and the monkey was still on mine.

Halfway down, Alexei and Mickey stopped to whisper hurriedly to each other. Mickey pointed. "That one. Number 1187. According to the tickets, that's the midnight car."

Alexei shook his head. "Are you sure? It looks like it's in the wrong position. There are too many cars ahead of it."

"That's what the tickets say. Wait a minute—" Mickey pulled his phone out of his pocket and spoke softly into it. He listened for a moment, then nodded, closed the phone and put it back in his pocket. "They're sending extra cars out to Whirlaway. VIP traffic." To our puzzled looks, he said, "I might be fired, but I still have friends."

"Hokay. Let's go." Alexei pointed. "We go around here, go across this catwalk, and enter through the left-side hatch. Any questions?"

"Why aren't they spinning?"

"They only spin them for passengers. If they were spinning, we couldn't do this; all the access through the transfer pods is too tightly controlled. Hokay, enough talk. Mickey, you lead."

We entered 1187 without incident. It was a lot like the car we'd ridden up in. We pulled ourselves in through the left-side hatch; it was the cargo hatch, the bottom. I wondered which way it was going to spin—clockwise or counter-clockwise? Would it make any difference?

Mickey led us directly to our cabins; Olivia had booked two, and there was a connecting door between them.

We pushed and pulled ourselves into the biggest one, the suite, and bounced into chairs. Mickey showed us how to release the seat belts, and we belted ourselves down. Douglas wrapped a blanket around Stinky, who promptly curled up and fell asleep wrapped around his monkey. The monkey snored softly for a moment or two, then fell silent.

Mickey glanced at his watch and grinned. "We made it. With time to spare. Now all we have to do is wait for Mom."

Alexei was already pulling rations out of his backpack. "I thought you might like a snack while you wait. I have cheese, fish-sausage, bread, grapes, little tomatoes, carrots. Eat hearty. Bon appetit." He bowed from the waist, difficult to do in micro-gravity. "I must return now—they will be looking for me. I must not disappoint them. Otherwise, it spoils the game. Besides, I need to collect some things. Including my alibi." He handed the backpack to Mickey. "Mikhail, please make sure my father gets this. If I am not able to deliver it myself. Hokay? Thank you." And with that, he was gone.

"Where's he going?"

"Back down."

"The same way?"

"He can do it in fifteen minutes. He was a finalist in last year's no-grav Olympics. It's those long arms of his. And all the practice he gets." Mickey explained, "He'll probably go back to the ice cream place, or walk around the promenade for a while, whatever it takes, until he's sure that whoever is watching knows that he's not with us anymore. Then he'll disappear again. At least, that's my guess. Charles, do you want some grapes?"

"No thanks." I pushed the plate away. "All the grapes I've ever gotten have been sour."

"Yes, and you've done a fine job making sour whine." It was the first time Mickey had ever said anything rude to me. I looked at him surprised. He looked right back at me. "Don't you ever put a cork in it, kiddo? Do you know that you are no fun to be around?"

"So what?"

"So look around you and stop acting like a spoiled brat. Your family is coming apart—"

"It came apart a long time ago."

"Shut up, stupid. Try listening for a change. You might learn something. In case you hadn't noticed, your brother, Douglas, is having a very difficult time of this. And your dad isn't doing too well either—he hasn't spoken two words to anyone except you since we left my mother's. And you shut him down. The only reason Bobby hasn't thrown a tantrum is that we slipped a sedative into his chocolate soda. We should have done the same for you. You're not doing anything to make this easier for anybody."

"Nobody's trying to make it any easier on me," I snapped back.

"Excuse me—?" Mickey pushed in close, getting right in my face. "Douglas wasn't there for you when you got free-fall panic? Your dad didn't lift you up when you needed it? Your dad hasn't been trying to reach out to you all evening? Or was I hallucinating? You're acting like a selfish dirtsider, Charles. And I don't like you very much, right now."

"So fucking what? None of this would have happened if you hadn't—"

"Don't go there ... " he warned.

"Mickey, please—" That was Douglas. "There's more to this than you know." He stepped / bounced over to Mickey and put his hand on his shoulder; they looked at each other and something unsaid passed between them. Mickey looked frustrated, but he nodded and backed off. Douglas turned to Dad then. "Okay, Dad," he said. "What's in the monkey?"

Dad shook his head. "I wish you hadn't found out about that."

"Yeah, well—it wasn't too hard to figure out. Is there anything else you want to tell us?"

Dad shook his head. He looked beaten, frustrated, angry, unhappy. "No, there's nothing else. I just thought—that maybe we could have some time together that wasn't a fight."

"Why would you think that?" asked Douglas. "Every time we get together, it's a fight. That's all we ever do. Why would you think this time would be different?"

Dad looked across at Doug and his expression was as straight as I'd ever seen. He spoke slowly. I guess it was hard for him to get the words out. "I thought that because it would be ... the last time we'd all be together as a family ... that maybe we'd all try to make it something good to remember."

"Why should we? What do we owe you? Or Mom? You've both been using us—and using us up. Between the two of you, Mom and her tirades, you and your passive-aggressive bullshit, you've turned Stinky into an incontinent little pissant, and Chigger—well, he's well on his way to becoming a sociopathic hermit with surgically attached earphones. I'm sorry, Chigger, but Mickey is right. You can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes."

Of all the things that anyone had said to me—even the load of crap Mickey had just dumped on me—what Doug said was the one that hurt the most. It shriveled me instantly. I'd never really thought about Doug's feelings before; I'd always assumed he didn't have any feelings at all. Seeing him angry like this, I felt so bad about every nasty thing I'd ever said to him, I wanted to cry, but I didn't dare, not now, so I turned away from him and wrapped myself up in a ball on the couch. Between Mickey and Doug ... I wished I was dead.

Now Doug turned back to Dad. "And me—? Well, just look at me, Max. I'm your son. This is how I turned out. A big fat nothing. With the social skills of a virus. I don't know how to talk to people. That's why I hide out in C-space. You should've seen how clumsy I was when I tried to talk to Mickey. I don't even know how to flirt. I'm pathetic. I hate myself because I'm so geeky. I still can't believe that Mickey really likes me. I keep wondering what's wrong with him." Mickey started toward Douglas at that, to comfort him I guess, but Douglas put up a hand to stop him. He wasn't through talking. "Chigger is right," he said. "I am a geekoid from hell. We're all of us fucked up, Dad—and this ... this isn't an answer. It's more of the same. It's you running away again. Only this time, you want us to run away with you. How can we run away with you when it's us you've been running away from all this time?"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing from Douglas. He was almost in tears. But he just kept on and on, letting it all out, all at once, and Dad—poor, stupid Dad—he just sat there and took it. I uncurled myself and sat up again—

"They say that parents are supposed to prepare kids for adulthood—well, I'd say we're pretty well prepared now, Dad, aren't we? We've learned all the different ways to run away." Douglas stopped, exhausted. He just floated there limp. Finally, he drifted back down into a chair—right toward Mickey's lap. He bounced off Mickey and started to push himself up again, but Mickey pulled him back down and held him with one arm firmly around his waist. Douglas looked uncomfortable for a moment, but Mickey whispered "shhh" at him, and Douglas finally let himself relax on Mickey's lap. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a moment, exhausted. Tears were running down his cheeks and I felt so sorry for him I didn't know what to do. I'd never seen him like that before in my life.

"Charles?" Dad looked at me. "Do you have anything you want to add?"

I thought about the opportunity. Yeah, I had a lot to say. But it wasn't necessary anymore. "No. Doug said it all."

"Is it my turn now?" Dad asked. "Do I get to say anything?"

I shrugged. "I don't care." Douglas just put a hand over his eyes.

Dad took a breath. He was gathering his strength, and his words. Then he said, "You're right, Douglas. Everything you said. You're right. And yes, I was trying to kidnap you. And yes, I knew it would hurt your mother and I didn't care anymore. At this last court hearing, this last nasty custody fight, I finally stopped caring about her feelings—yes, after all this time, do you know I still love her? Loved. It's finally over. I finally gave up—and gave in to the urge to hurt back. Yes, I was selfish. So what? I'm fifty-two years old and I'm tired of having to be Mr. Nice Guy every day. I'm tired of making payments—I want something in return, something that's mine. Yes, I got impatient—I got tired of working and working and working while everybody else around me is riding the money-flow. I want to eat food that doesn't taste like wallpaper. I've earned it."

Dad stopped to catch his breath. He looked across the room, as if suddenly remembering who he was talking to. "I remember when you were born, Doug—when Charles was born too. And Bobby. How proud I was of each of you, how much I cherished you. I used to wake up in the morning, promising myself every day that I'd be the best dad I could for my boys. And I really did try. I really did. Now I wake up every morning wondering how I screwed up so badly. And what I could do to make it right. And it always came back to money. I don't have any. I'm a million and a quarter in debt. And no matter how hard I work, I just keep getting deeper and deeper. And nothing is fun anymore. Not even the music. Everything is a chore. Sometimes even taking the next breath is a chore.

"So when they offered me this chance to be a courier and get off the planet and make some money—and give my sons a second chance too—I didn't have to think about it too hard. It was a way out. I was drowning. What would you have had me do, Doug? Charles?" He added, "I don't know what's in the monkey, I don't even care, but someone is paying for this trip. Whatever it is, we'll deliver it and we'll be done. Then you can do whatever you want to. I'm through trying. I'm beaten."

Doug didn't say anything to that. Neither did I. There wasn't anything to say. And I was through trying to figure things out. I looked at my hands and clenched them into fists of frustration. I couldn't even figure out my left from my right.