Illegible

Some inventions improve the world. Some make it worse. Possibly much worse.

The tech billionaire waited for his security man to give a nod before stepping out of the SUV. He was greeted respectfully by a couple of his host’s people—also security by their look. He glanced around. The pseudo-Victorian mansion dominated the site, but no one was walking near it. The ‘garage’ they’d parked at looked to be a cover for a tunnel entrance gently sloping down. Drones hovered overhead.

He followed the greeter’s lead toward the tunnel. A few hundred feet away some people had exited a helicopter and were heading the same way.

He stopped to stare. The bush they’d just passed was concealing a multi-barrel cannon with a small radar dome atop it.

“Please, sir, we’ll be more secure underground,” said the greeter.

“Right.” He walked a little more briskly. He’d expected high level security for this meet, but military-grade hardware was a step above.

The helicopter group joined them at the door to the tunnel. Just like his group, two of the host’s security men, two visitor security people, and—he recognized her. Another of his peers? He’d thought this was going to be a one on one chat.

After all, when one of the world’s ten richest people says, “Please come meet with me, it’s very important,” you come. Even if you’re in the top one hundred.

Seeing another of the top one hundred said this was going to be something very different. He nodded to her and said, “We met at the London Royal—”

The greeter interrupted, “No names, please.”

He gave her a shrug.

She replied. “It’s good to see you again. I hope.”

The tunnel sloped downward, merged with other tunnels, and after descending at least a hundred feet arrived at a surprisingly mundane set of offices.

“Sir, do you need a bathroom stop, water, anything before the meeting?” asked the greeter.

“I’m fine.”

They were led into a conference room, the kind with tiered seats giving everyone a clear line of sight to the front. The seats were mostly full. He recognized almost all of them. Not from personal meetings, but magazine covers, gossip pages, board of director reports. It wasn’t all of the top one hundred. There were a few faces who were missing. He recognized one as only in the top two hundred, though he’d been higher a few years ago.

He glanced at his smart watch. It reported ‘No signal: jammed.’

Unsurprising.

A man walked onto the stage below them. The tech billionaire recognized the one who’d invited them all.

“Thank you all for coming,” said their host. “I know you’re all very busy and this has been a significant disruption to your schedules. I think this is important enough to justify it. I hope you will agree.”

The eighty-some guests returned him a ‘get on with it’ look. One man shouted, “So what is this, my invitation to the Illuminati?”

A wave of nervous laughter showed he wasn’t the only one with that thought.

Their host laughed, too. “No, not the Illuminati. I’m afraid no one’s in charge. That’s part of what I want to talk about.”

Someone else said, “This better be good. Our combined bounties are probably enough to pay for a nuke being tossed in here.”

No one laughed at that. It was too true.

“Yes. Bounties,” said the host. “Let’s talk about bounties. Cryptocurrency has made it possible to untraceably pay an assassin. Back in the days of Bitcoin, there’d be a wallet, which was hard to connect to a person. Now there’s even more ways to break the connection. That’s led to the assassination bounties.”

The host cast his gaze across the crowd. “For any of you who haven’t been paying attention, someone can put money in digital escrow, to be paid on proof of a target’s death. The same technology allows the proof to be provided untraceably. Bounties can be crowdsourced, with small contributions being bundled together.

“It’s not so bad for us. We can afford security. We already needed security, against maniacs, anarchists, socialists, and sometimes heirs.”

The last word brought out a few grim chuckles.

“A stand up comedian who offended too many people? There’s four cases of crowdfunded bounties being collected on them. Activists, pundits, politicians, anyone on camera at the wrong moment—there’s bounties for them. It’s already suppressing speech. A hundred dollars isn’t enough of a bounty to pay an assassin, but it can scare someone into shutting up.”

In the audience, the tech billionaire shifted uncomfortably. He knew all this. They all had to know this. It was the government’s problem. Private citizens couldn’t do anything about it, no matter how rich.

“The double disconnect is defeating police. All levels of police. New laws have been passed authorizing national and international action, but all their efforts haven’t been able to break the double disconnects. A murder in New York City could be conducted by a drone operator in Mumbai. Someone in New Jersey sells a drone to a straw customer, who transfers it to an anonymous payer. Some of the straw buyers have been prosecuted, but they’re not the weak link. They’re easily replaced.”

The host paused a moment, as if gathering his nerve for something. “When targets are protected, bounties can be put on others close to them. One of us lost a relative recently.”

An old man raised his head. “My grandson, Peter.” The grief was audible in his voice.

“Yes. We can protect ourselves, we can try to protect our immediate families, but everyone we care about? Cousins? Classmates? Mentors? It’s not possible. The moment we establish a perimeter, anyone outside it becomes vulnerable because they have a connection to us. Even for the people inside the perimeter, how much can we protect them? You saw the security I have for this meeting. You know how you live. Do we want to force everyone we love to live that way? Science fiction writers looked at this problem and projected eight year old kids wearing power armor suits. Is that the world we want?”

The tech billionaire spoke up. “No. What’s the alternative you’re proposing?”

“Let me work up to that. I’ve already mentioned multiple cases where people have been killed to collect untraceable bounties. What tipped me into working on this was the San Francisco Massacre. For those not following US news, a set of drones killed one thousand street people in a six hour period. Then the drones landed on the interstate and were run over multiple times. Police have no leads. A three and a half million dollar bounty paid out.

“That terrified me. The technique itself was simple enough, common drones equipped with poison dart guns. It was the power. The increase in scale from the previous attacks. You draw an exponential curve through that point and pretty soon everyone who can afford it will be putting their kids in armor.

“I decided to do something.”

He flashed a grin. “My lawyer strongly objects to me saying this next part. I set all the data analysts I could get my hands on to looking for outliers. Someone with technical skills, of limited financial means, who was now throwing money around in a way that indicated they’d just come into three and a half million dollars.

“There were seven candidates. I had them investigated, from looking into their credit records to having surveillance operators chat them up at parties. Pretty soon it was apparent which one had committed the massacre.”

The crowd waited breathlessly for the shoe to drop.

“He has since been murdered. The police have no leads.”

The silence continued. The tech billionaire thought it through. No, that wasn’t a murder confession. Not even confession of being an accomplice. But it implied a hell of a lot.

A woman asked, “You didn’t turn your information over to the police?”

“What did some detective do to deserve a million dollar bounty being placed on his head? There’s already been detectives and prosecutors murdered, shutting down investigations. What do you think the City of San Francisco could do against someone in a different state, with no proof he had any connection to the murders? What could the FBI do?”

There were multiple people trying to come up with answers to that, by their expressions. Some even opened their mouths. But none spoke.

“Governments can’t handle crimes which have no visible trail between the act and the actor. The new developments in crypto have defeated them. There’s even discussion in the US government about giving up on the income tax and passing a constitutional amendment to create a national property tax. It’s just too hard to track cash flows now.”

Several voices demanded details on the tax proposal.

“Sorry, it was told to me in confidence. Obviously it’s not being publicly discussed yet. The point is, it’s impossible to track money moving from one node to another now. Or information, such as the assassination proofs, flowing back the other way. So this crime has to be fought another way. We have to look at when money appears. When someone has money who hasn’t earned it in some way. Illegible wealth.”

The host waved at the crowd. “For all of us, the source of our wealth is legible. Some of us even have people writing books about how we made our money.”

More laughter from the audience.

“But it’s known. Creating companies. Investing successfully. Inheritance.” He gave his ex, sitting in the front row, a wry smile. “Divorce. That’s true for most anybody who has money. They did something to get it, and that’s a public fact.”

The host turned grim. “Assassination bounties are not legible. Someone suddenly has unexplained wealth. That’s something we can detect. And respond to.”

“By murdering them?” called someone.

That was greeted with a shrug. “I consider it self-defense. But call it murder if you want. If assassins keep collecting those bounties, they’ll get better at the tasks. They’ll move on to bigger targets, such as us. Or wider targets. There’s already bounties offered for ethnic cleansing. It’s hard to tell if those have been claimed. If someone of a particular ethnic group is murdered by a drone, how do we tell if it’s personal or random or because of a bounty?”

Another shout from the audience. “What does your lawyer think of this?”

“He mailed me a package. I opened it. It was a Batman costume.”

That received the loudest burst of laughter so far.

“I’d use it, if this was a problem that could be solved by punching people.” He paused a moment, waiting to see if there’d be more heckling.

“I’m asking all of you to join me in fighting the threat of assassination bounties. Call it the Society for the Elimination of Illegible Wealth. The mission is simple. If someone suddenly has lots of money, and there’s no explanation for it, they need to go away.”

“Be murdered,” said the one who’d brought up murder earlier.

“Fine. They need to be murdered. For the good of society. For our survival. For the survival of whoever they may target next.”

“To keep them from killing our families,” said the grieving grandfather.

“Yes. We need to help each other with analyzing spending patterns. Identifying people with sudden new wealth. Trying to identify the source if we can, so we’re not killing someone who doesn’t deserve it. Cooperating to remove the threats we’ve identified.” He hesitated. “Murdering them, if you don’t like the euphemism.”

“Which makes us all accomplices,” said the woman who’d insisted on the word ‘murder.’

“The ones joining my effort, yes. The ones who don’t will have no knowledge of any crime that will be committed. My lawyer assures me that speculating about possibly murdering unnamed persons in the future is not a crime. It’s a great way to get the cops to keep an eye on you, but you have to do something to someone for it to be a crime.”

The host paused. Waiting for questions?

“So this is an Illuminati meeting after all,” said the man who’d wondered about an invitation.

Another shrug from their host. “Call it that if you want. I’m looking at a narrowly defined mission, not trying to run the whole world. I don’t have enough of an ego for that. Despite what’s been said about me.”

The ego comment drew a few chuckles. No one in this room had a small ego, or even a merely big one.

The tech billionaire stood up to ask his question. “There’s other sources of illegible wealth than assassination bounties. Drug money. Political corruption. Counterfeiting.”

The host nodded. “I’d consider those acceptable collateral damage. They’re not an immediate threat to us or our families, but I think the world would be better off without them.”

No one disagreed out loud.

“What about genocide? Will your society stop that?” someone asked.

That put a thoughtful frown on the host’s face. “Every organization has to deal with the problem of mission creep. Sometimes that can be successful. Start selling one product, branch out into related ones, keep expanding. More often it leads to losing focus and failing to succeed at the original goal. I think the danger of assassination bounties deserves an outfit focused solely on that. If we kill a drug dealer by accident, oh well. It’s the assassins I want to focus on. It’s a well defined problem. And genocide . . . that started out well defined, but lots of people are trying to change the definition to suit their own pet cause. That’s another way to get mission creep.”

Another question. “Are we the only people you’re telling about this? There’s some people I’d expect to be in this crowd. One in particular.”

“There’s people I invited who couldn’t make it. Whether to tell them later is something which should be decided by the organization, not just me. As for the one . . . if I’m thinking of the same one you are, he’s not here because I don’t trust him to not blab.”

Nods.

“Any more questions right now?” A long pause. “Then thank you all for coming. If you want to help organize the Society for the Elimination of Illegible Wealth, please remain. Everyone else, your escorts are waiting outside the room. They will take you to your transportation, or provide you with whatever else you may need.”

Some rushed to the exits. Some rushed to the front of the room.

The tech billionaire stayed in his seat, thinking. Murder was wrong. But he had children. After a few minutes he stood and went down to the front. He had a lot of data analysis resources he could bring.

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.