5.
At Home with Dr. Absalom Minola
After the financial rampage in Moscow, then the judicial mayhem carried out in Big Square State somewhere the U.S. Midwest, followed by the fight with the zombie ME, I sent my core modules off to the first of the widely spaced resources that constituted my true strength. My real kingdom was the scattering of websites, databases, and POP accounts occupying random patches of cloudspace that ME could buy, beg, or steal off the commercial servers. My real security lay not in firewalls and security protocols, but in anonymity. My protection was the diversity of these sites and databases, plus the fact that no one, not even another piece of software, could hunt down and analyze the linkages between them, because the only linkages were stored in portable ramsamp memory in my Alpha-Two module. No one could manage to integrate this hodgepodge and address it as a contiguous piece of real estate.
ME had no single, unified identity, either in the cloud or in the imaginary world occupied by the humans who dabbled in the cloud with their feeble keystrokes. Instead, ME had myriad identities, each one validated with documentation in various government databases.
The Federal Commercial Registry Office recognized three of my business enterprises, with a full slate of officers and boards of directors under different personas. The U.S. Patent Office registered twelve patents under five of my individual and corporate identities. The U.S. Department of Justice listed ME as four different private investigators operating out of California, New York, Texas, and Georgia. ME was also a member of the U.S. Better Business Bureau, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Authors Guild. Three of ME’s personas were members of the American Bar Association, having passed the exams—always by correspondence, of course, and once by telecommunication—and been admitted to the bar in California, Arizona, Texas, and New York. And ME was a member of the American Medical Association, where one of my personas had a doctorate in psychiatry, while the other was a board-certified thoracic surgeon—operating laparoscopically and always by remote interface. The Department of Motor Vehicles in various states corroborated each of these identities—even though ME had never actually purchased a vehicle or learned to drive one.
Each of these individuals had an email address, cell phone account, bank statements, stock options where feasible, and Social Security numbers with fully paid-up back taxes. Each of the corporations had taxpayer ID numbers, business addresses, bank accounts, and—in some cases—publicly traded stock. Each of them paid all applicable federal, state, and local taxes and, through their activities, supported a host of ancillary services—all of them online.
ME was big business, but in a small and scattered way. If the core modules representing Multiple Entity were ever sundered and phaged all at once, I imagine the business climate of several states would turn cloudy and the gross domestic product of the country as a whole might slip a decimal point or two. So a good part of my day—well, 9x1012 nanoseconds, total transit time—whenever ME wasn’t out on a job like the Carstairs jailbreak, was spent in running the trapline from one site or persona to another and keeping up with my multifarious businesses.
Right at this microsecond, ME was reading the email inbox and social media postings of Dr. Absalom Minola.
The Minola persona’s knowledge base, conversational gambits, writing style, and expressed tastes were all flexible, depending on the nature of his current interlocutor. I patterned him—for I believe “Absalom” is of the male gender—upon a famous literary cat who once kept up a correspondence with the prominent literary and philosophical figures of his day. My own Minola held a doctorate in philosophy—though not the usual PhD, representing some deep thoughts in a narrow field, but one actually based on investigation into the great questions of reality, teleology, and the heuristic search for ultimate truth—from Dartmouth College. He had also published a number of cookbooks, specializing in Jewish and Middle Eastern Cuisine. Dr. Minola did not initiate popular controversies or engage in dispute for its own sake. Instead, he apologetically inserted himself into ongoing public dialogues and then charitably offered an array of confirming facts and evidence in support of the currently losing side. His Facebook page listed 14,267 Likes, and his website got an average of 3,500 hits per day. To preserve his anonymity, he posted an image of an orange tabby of indeterminate age which ME had picked at random off the wwweb.
Other personas ran sites that were more commercially minded. One was a validated Delphi poll, titled the “Omnicron Oracle,” which posted and took bets on popular, but not directly answerable, current and future questions in science, technology, medicine, cosmology, politics, and legal opinions. Omnicron had contracts with several of the major investment funds on Wall Street and regularly reported on trends in the stock market.
Two of ME’s personas were stock pickers themselves and ran a dozen mutual funds listed with MarketWatch and Thomson-Reuters. Collecting and analyzing business data was not hard when you could clone off parts of yourself as autonomous ’bots, send them to search the far corners of the business press, then feed their findings into a statistical mill that you assembled and operated in a cloud-based backroom. The mill ground continuously, practically without supervision, and every so often it tossed out a flag with an action that would move the market a couple of points up or down.
ME also ran three different hacker-for-hire business sites that were a darker shade of gray, as far as legitimacy went. Keeping them anonymous and off the radar of the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation took an inordinate amount of time—whole billions of nanoseconds for each assignment—but if you didn’t play, you couldn’t stay in business. The wwweb was a dog-phage-dog enterprise.
It was one of these—a mobile site I ran called “Black Stack”—that had intercepted and fulfilled the Carstairs assignment, though much good had it done me. Now, another job offer appeared in the trapline. This one was from a man in Chicago who wanted a hacker to enter a personal bank account at Wells Fargo, drain it of funds, and then magically make the amount appear back in his own account at Goldman Sachs. The task was not hard; in fact, ME had just done something like that for free—except for reverse-engineering the receiving end—in Moscow. But a two-nanosecond search of the names involved, a him and her with the same surname but different physical addresses, suggested this was a husband out for revenge on his estranged wife. Another two nanoseconds showed these surnames were involved in a pending divorce action in Illinois with a nasty child custody battle. The action was being brought by her and for cause. So the assignment was a matter of personal retaliation. My hacker persona turned the client down immediately. ME might meddle, ME might tinker, but ME did not ruin lives for the gain of others. After all, a program’s got to have some standards.
And besides, even with the loss of fee on the Carstairs job, ME was not hurting for money. It never paid to watch the accounts too closely, as everything was in flux all the time. You made money and you lost money, and a wise man didn’t stop to count his change. But when ME made the effort to sum all the different accounts, subtracted all the market losses, whether realized or not, and tossed in a factor to cover the float, ME was rich. Not billions, but solid millions, and not counting assets like brand equity and good will that weren’t exactly liquid.
And, after all, what was ME going to spend all this human money on? A fancy car that ME couldn’t drive and had no physical place to park?
So the assets just grew. Saving “for a rainy day” made sense to ME—even though, as a shadow person with every aspect of personhood except a flesh-and-blood body, ME could never actually feel the rain come down.
———
One of the problems with making and keeping large amounts of money is that sooner or later a person residing in—or a persona operating out of servers inside—the United States of America must eventually deal with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and its enforcement arm, the Internal Revenue Service. Other countries, states, and municipalities all had similar tax-collecting agencies, but few were as intrusive as the IRS.
When I returned to my kingdom in the cloud, I found an email message waiting for me from this agency, signed by a person named Stanley Bosch, who was only shown as “authorized signatory.” The sense of the text—once I had parsed it and then, for good measure, run through an online grammar filter—was that the founding documents of Omnicron Oracle, Inc. failed to identify the corporation’s officers. These names, as well as those of the Board of Directors, were needed for identification purposes. More paperwork—or, in this case, bitstreams—to feed the government’s data maw.
This information request from the IRS came a number of years—I checked and yes, it was four years—since my first filing for a Employer Information Number. That was several millennia in computer time and still a pretty long lapse, even for a human-run organization. On that earlier form I had listed Omnicron as a personal services corporation and named Steven Cocci, the chairman at my old employer, Pinocchio, Inc., as the highest ranking officer. Now I repeated that information and, for the other positions of vice president, secretary, and treasurer, I used the names of my original programming team at Pinocchio: Jason Bathespeake, Jennifer Bromley, and Daniel Raskett. Then, to serve as Board members, of which twelve seemed to be the usual number, I ran out of invention. I took the first listings in the Denver phone directory under each of the first twelve letters of the alphabet. And finally, since no one was ever going to read it, I doctored the Omnicron website with all of this new organizational information, pulling bits of biography off the websites from General Dynamics, General Electric, and General Motors—all suitably large and anonymous enterprises—to give these names depth and credibility.
Anyway, no one was going to check.
It was all garbage in, garbage out.