We all knew our lineage owned a star and a bacteria; we also had significant debt with a bank not much younger than our name. But it was only after my father died and as the lineage chairperson I was finally able to decrypt our confidential records that I learned the bad news and the crimes we had committed to hide them.
Most of the collateral value of the star we owned, the reason we had invested on it before the still hypothetical technology to go there existed, came from a Super-Earth that had since been shown to exist well outside the habitable zone. We had bribed four astronomers over two decades — I learned the nature of the payments but will not repeat it here — to hide this from public records. We had then doubled down on a different bet and purchased the IP rights to one of the new hyperresistant bacteria that had resurrected as the permafrost went extinct.
The bet had paid off in the worst way: there were new and useful metabolic processes in our bacteria, some with intriguing human applications. And similar ones, some of them more effective, on a hundred other species bought by lineages and old corporations with access to better bioengineering advice.
Our collateral was almost worthless and the bank now knew it.
Our decadal rollover event was, literally, the next day.
My father's death did not seem an accident anymore. There's much that some men will do to avoid shame.
I did not spin up his deep avatar that night. Not because of the cost as I would have paid more than that for good advice. I was hurt and angry for the weight I had inherited and I knew our conversation wouldn't be productive or cathartic. I just tried to sleep. To my surprise I did. To my deeper surprise I dreamed and for the first time in my life I knew I was dreaming.
This is a nightmare I thought to myself with the inarticulate feeling that this was only to be expected. I was standing on a vast black plain that seemed to have no horizon. Nothing moved under a cloudless sky with more stars than I had ever seen. Far away from me there was a forest of black pyramids joined on their bases. I understood without knowing they were inhabited by monsters and then without any transition I was standing in a low-ceiled room at the top of one of the pyramids. In front of me and looking at me was one of the monsters. They were short but stronger than any human. Their eyes had the green shine of the tapetum lucidum and the mind behind them was old and strange.
The monster said a single phrase in a language I didn't know but understood. Then I knew their name and the knowledge woke me up.
The next morning the bank contacted me at the customary universal noon with the gentle curtness of a company mind: did I have new collateral for our debt or was I ready to pass control of everything we had and were to the bank for liquidation?
"Neither," I said, and then offered a third option. The bank took five seconds to mull it; I had never seen or heard of a company thinking through a reply for that long.
It said yes. I should have been worried, nervous, terrified, but I hadn't been.Unlike their reply, the bank's transfer was as quick as usual. It had even, on its own initiative, added an initial list of experts we might want to hire or adopt. I added most of them to our matchmaking platform. We had more liquid capital than before but were even deeper in debt. The decade before the next rollover would pass quickly and there was much to do. I didn't expect our star would be reachable by then but that was not the point of the business plan.
Our lineage had one again — if I could convince them of the strange dream. I expected the old people would accept it and the younger ones would not. To my surprise, almost everybody did. This added to my unwarranted certainty.
The lineage had accepted the dream. We would own a star, a bacteria, and blood born of our three-way marriage with them. There were many cold worlds around the stars humanity dreamed of reaching and we would own the way to live in them and if called upon it would be some of us who would be born fated to go.
It's a profitable dream and an inspiring one. I don't think anybody really believes it, not even the bank: that's not the point.
But I confess, only in this encrypted file, that I truly hope you are reading this with green eyes on a planet orbiting your own star.
(Originally posted on my blog.)