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Capital in the 71st Century

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May 15th, 2014
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  1. from Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross
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  4. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.
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  6. My lineage matriarch, Sondra Alizond-1, was instantiated well over two thousand years ago in another star system (I forget which; the detail is unimportant). Her progenitors were a credit union and a gambling cartel: An aptitude for figures was called for, and a near-photographic memory for facts and digits. When Sondra was twelve, nearly out of the crèche and her fourth body upgraded to proximate adulthood, she demonstrated her prowess by memorizing the value of pi to one hundred thousand decimal places; and indeed, to this day I can sum a column of numbers as fast as I can read down it.
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  8. (Yes, we have spreadsheets and calculating engines. But it helps to have a knack for figures. Without a sanity check, a calculator will lead you merrily astray, and you’ll never notice the error until your balance sheet doesn’t line up.)
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  10. Sondra worked hard, and within her first fifty years—thanks in part to an admirably inspired put option—she was able to pay off the interest on her education and construction debt and, furthermore, buy out the intellectual property rights to her lineage and invest her remaining equity in a starship cooperative.
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  12. An accountant. Signing up as a crew member aboard a new interstellar colony expedition. Why would she do that, you might ask? And more importantly, why would they want her?
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  14. Starships are all work and no fun. First, you toil for decades to raise capital and establish the debt framework and interest-repayment structure that will fund your venture. Even in this day and age, with thousands of years of experience to draw upon, building and launching a starship is one of the most eye-wateringly expensive activities anyone ever engages in: The cost is measured in planetary GDP-years, and will take the new colony centuries to pay off.
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  16. Next, you and your colleagues define a construction framework and (if possible) buy an off-the-shelf design and hire astronautical architects to refine it, abolishing whatever weaknesses and flaws caused earlier starships on similar missions to founder in flight. Then, while this is going on, you select a destination—one where no starship has gone before, and which no starship is en route to. (The last thing you want is to arrive as a claim jumper, or to be bushwhacked by same. Conflict is a negative-sum game, and fighting for ownership of a wild and untamed asteroid belt is the fastest way imaginable to squander the resources you brought along at vast expense in order to establish your new demesne, condemning yourself to centuries of grinding poverty, if not to a slow spiral into death.)
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  19. While doing this, you plan your mission profile. Commonest and cheapest is burn-the-boat: You fly to a new star system and dismantle the ship on arrival to provide the tools and equipment needed to build a colony. Rarer and vastly more expensive is the free-flight option: to create a new, self-perpetuating polity in eternal flight, able every few centuries or millennia to send out short-range expeditions to whichever star system its course is passing, who will in turn create colonies and repay the resources they consume by resupplying the mother ship. (New California was, and is, one of the latter.)
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  21. While all this is going on, you—the co-op member lineages, the families from which the crew are drawn, if you like—undertake strenuous training to learn all the myriad subspecialties you’ll need. With luck and goodwill, a dozen of your sibs can become proficient in different roles (butcher, baker, fusion-reactor maker). Then you need only take a single body and copies of your sibs’ soul chips, a library of traits and skills to merge at the other end. Needless to say, the internal lineage politics of deciding who should go and who should stay are fraught. The benefit is that a mission with only a thousand bodies can take ten or even a hundred thousand trained specialists along, creating extra bodies for them as and when it becomes necessary to have a full-time pair of hands devoted to the job rather than an understudy with strangely memorable dreams.
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  23. Finally, you fuel, equip, and crew the ship. Let us suppose it is a burn-the-boat mission. Your friends who stay behind fire up the gigantic array of fusion reactors and microwave beams that provide motive power during the fifty to a hundred years it takes the ship to accelerate to cruise speed. During acceleration, those of you who are along for the ride subject yourselves to the rigors of slowtime, your metabolic rate dropping to a hundredth of normal so that two standard years pass by in a subjective week. You had better trust your friends who crew the propulsion beams; if they falter or stumble into premature bankruptcy, your ship will drift for millennia between the stars, until resources run low, and you succumb to cannibalism or starvation.
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  25. Subjective years—centuries, to the outside universe—pass unnoted while you drift along at almost 1 percent of light speed. A nearby supernova, or a pea-sized granule of dirt (packing the energy of a small nuclear weapon) can be a death sentence for you and all your crew mates during this stage of the expedition. The work is hard, dirty, and never-ending—years of it, until you near the destination system and fire up the fusion reactors that provide power during deceleration. Finally, you and your comrades face further years and decades of hard work as you establish a colony in a star system that has never known life before.
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  27. Why would anyone bother with such a messy, arduous experience? And what use might a starship crew have for an accountant?
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  29. Sondra wasn’t just an accountant: She was a banker. More to the point, Sondra spent four of her first five decades working in the arbitrage and escrow department of a beacon-station bank—the beating, slow money heart of the economy of the star system where she was created. She was low in seniority within the organization, itself grown fat and sluggish as the gatekeeper of an entire star system’s worth of accumulated intellectual debt. To Sondra, the only way to rapidly acquire seniority was to start afresh, somewhere new and free from the presence of troublesome patronage-seekers. Luckily, she was both young and flexible enough to undergo the rigors of an interstellar voyage, and adventurous enough to welcome the challenge of setting up a new Slow Bank for a colony upon its arrival.
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  31. I’ve mentioned the basics of what happens when a starship arrives in a new system—the years of toil, the mapping and the mining and the manufacturing and finally the birthing of new crèchefuls of citizens and the emergence of a new and wealthy civilization. But many are unaware that if there is one thing that is vital to the long-term stability and prosperity of a colony, it is the creation of interstellar debt instruments by means of a new Slow Bank.
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  33. Without a Slow Bank, it’s not possible to trade across the gulfs of interstellar space-time. It takes power and expert labor to run an interstellar communications laser beacon—lots of both. Nobody will point a laser at a new colony and beam libraries of design templates and cohorts of expert soul dumps at them without an expectation of getting something in return. All colonies must of necessity go deep into debt in the decades after their foundation: It costs a lot of slow money to acquire the vital new technologies and skills it needs to plug unforeseen gaps. Only once its population has increased enough to support a local education, research, and development infrastructure—which can take centuries—can it aspire to a trade surplus. It’s far cheaper in the medium term to borrow slow money from the neighbors and use it to pay for vital skills and minds in trade, to build the infrastructure to (eventually) pay back the loans with interest. So there is good reason to set up a beacon as soon as possible after arrival and to transmit the we are here tokens to the neighboring system banks that will prompt them to acknowledge the existence of a new issuer that can create currency and act as a guarantor of the new colony’s debt. (A partner whose very identity is proven by the direction and distance from which their signal arrives. Telescopes in neighboring star systems can see through any attempt to lie about a bank’s physical location.)
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  35. By the time of her subjective tricentennial, Sondra Alizond-1 was a self-made trillionaire. In fact, as a board member of the Hector SystemBank, she was worth nearly a million slow dollars—a sum that beggars the imagination. Of course, it took a century of hard work for her to amass that fortune: first as a semiskilled crew member aboard the Andromache, then as a construction hand laboring the first colony habs to take shape in the inner belt of Gliese 581c4, then as a founder and planner of the first authentication handshake to take place between Hector Beacon and its neighboring star systems, once there were sufficient resources to spare for construction of the first interstellar beacon transceivers . . . one would hesitate to call her life easy.
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  37. Which is why, I suppose, she invested much of her wealth in the New California, a vastly expensive permanent spacegoing ark. Like a stellar colony in its own right, an ark (a self-propelled world-ship with a population of millions) also needs a bank. Then, a couple of centuries later, long after she established herself as one of the ruling oligarchs of the spacefaring nation, long after she founded her estate on the shore of the Inner Sea . . . Sondra became bored with her comforts. And that’s when she started to sculpt her personality and study new skills, partitioning and editing her identity and spawning second-generation sibs—sisters like me.
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