Featured image by DarkmoonArt_de from Pixabay

Gina turned her chair back around to her desk. She didn’t quite know what brought about that trip down memory lane. She also didn’t know why it was still so vivid in her mind. That was two years ago. Bobby had come up with the method of using only what was on the idiot phone to record dreams. It took a while to get it working reliably but once it was released in the free new game, it spread like wildfire. He had also come up with a round looking power distribution center which had a wireless charger on top. Best of all it included various signal boosters which not only dramatically improved a users wifi connection they exponentially improved the recording of the dream. Best of all there was nothing directly tied to the dream recording so the product could be sold for years after this part of the business was shut down. One of Bobby’s new paper shell companies was manufacturing that particular item.

The database of dreams was days away from topping the two trillion mark and work was underway to start removing the dream catcher software from the legitimate apps. Next week they would switch to a new code management system, dumping all of the source history. In a few months time there would be no trace it was even there.  Every app automatically updated so only a very old phone which hand’t connected to the Internet in quite some time could still have a dream recorder version.

Janet had wasted no time when it came to dragging Bobby down the isle. Honestly, who drug who was a subject of some debate for those who knew them. Mom seemed to be willing herself to live long enough to hold her first legitimate grand child. She was basically living with Bobby and Janet, helping take care of the other kids. In an odd way she seemed to draw energy from them. Part of her rebound might have been from getting out of her home. Every part of it had memories of her life with dad. Gina was very glad Bobby and Janet talked mom into cleaning out the house and putting it up for sale. She had to admit it made her sad to see it go and sadder still to return there with all of those things she remembered. She, herself, had tried to get mom to move many times. The lure of spending time with her grandchildren was what finally proved too much to resist.

In truth, Gina was itchy to get this legitimate business on the market. Both cleaning up and trying to keep things clean meant she couldn’t work on her next project and that was eating at her. She didn’t want to accidentally leave something behind. Something traceable. She had even toned down her stock plays after setting up the shells and accounts for Bobby. Instead, one of her illegitimate companies funded an algorithmic trading firm and both of them put money in it. The firm used a really complex Artificial Intelligence package to make stock buy/sell/short predictions. So complex nobody could find the back door Gina had put in so she could feed her information in. Any time investigators came knocking the firm just dumped the log from the days in question. Nothing like an application which could modify itself as it learned to leave investigators chasing their tails.

What bothered her most about staying away from her darker businesses was the fact she had nothing to do at this company. She attended a few meetings each day green lighting new features for the various apps and that was it. The rest of her time she was either idle in her office or aimlessly walking the halls and cubes. She couldn’t begin to know what had to be cleaned up in the lab. Bobby had to take care of that. He had handled it, or so he claimed. No real way to know until they sold the company and maybe not even then. The new owners might just take the developers, engineers and software. Everything else might just get thrown in a dumpster. That was really all they were buying. That and the reputation of the company. This little company had a great reputation and a loyal fan base. Every time they released a new app 30% of the fan base bought it within 48 hours. That percentage climbed to 70% in just about a week. Few app companies could make such a boast.

Dark money seems to always find a few good uses. Gina had taken a big bucket of that money and hired people set up a large number of servers running BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). There were quite a few research projects participating which used the idle computer time of volunteers to crunch through analysis of very large data sets. The projects Gina had her computers subscribed to were researching various cancer markers, proteins and drugs to combat various forms of cancer.

She wasn’t delusional. She knew even if one of those machines identified the perfect drug or protein to cure every form of cancer in the world the clinical trial process would take years to prove it and her mother didn’t have years. Part of her just felt guilty about not having done it sooner. She had billions after all. Keeping her contribution hidden meant she couldn’t put more than a million dollars into buying and running computers around the world. Any more would be noticed. You really needed a desktop computer and in it a video card stacked with CUDA cores to do the kind of crunching these projects required. True there were some hosting services one could buy providing such things. She bought a few, but that required another paper shell and someone she could trust. If she could ever publicly flaunt her ill-gotten gain she could pull a stunt like that Microsoft founder. “Please forget all of the crimes I committed, companies I underhandedly put out of business and people I outright screwed. I’m going to use some of that money to cure Polio!” If she could avoid going prison and paying taxes on it, Gina would gladly drop a billion dollars taking over a high end data center to crunch numbers looking for a cancer cure.

The sad reality was she needed a data center like that now for her life’s work, recording a human mind so it could be put into another body at a later date, fully in tact. Data centers like that took up a square mile, required massive black fiber connections to the Internet and, let us not forget about the power consumption. Anyone building one was going to turn up on regulator’s radar in at least one country. While the local politicians would drool over the jobs and tax revenue, the federal level in pretty much every country would want to know just how you acquired that billion dollars because they don’t have any record of you paying taxes on it.

People running big banks and stock trading firms of every size were natural born criminals. Tell them you want to park a billion dollars in their company for a few weeks and they will take eight percent then provide you with a long list of transactions and times to avoid setting off any alarms. Try moving a billion dollars all at once and you will trip every international crime alarm at every law enforcement agency around the world. Her paper shells were good and layered deep but when every dead broke government around the world is suddenly searching for loot, it’s amazing just how many they can shred at once.

No, not one of her shell companies, paper or otherwise, had the financial resources to build the kind of data center she needed. Gina had three different brokerage accounts which could do it and have money left over, but that would bring inquiries. Enough data centers of that type didn’t exist in the world for her to buy what wasn’t already bought.

She had received unsolicited offers for this company already. The price tags of the offers made her employees drool but Gina turned them down because $30 million was no where near what she needed. Word of those offers slipping out had made her rather uncomfortable as well. Silicon valley was starting to take notice. The camouflage of her clothing and ancient (by Silicon Valley standards) car wasn’t hiding her very well. Every wanna be start-up and  venture fund was sniffing around now. Keeping them at bay was getting difficult.

Supper tonight should help take her mind off things. Ordinarily she would call one of the burner phones and went to sleep pleasantly exhausted, but even that form of relaxation was risky now. Eventually one of her work out partners would either be turned against her or attempt to blackmail her. Sad that the family life she tired to avoid was now her singular source of comfort, but there it was, ugly as it was, the truth.

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