The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 773

The first real money arrived on a Tuesday, and Richie brought the printout up the stairs himself because he did not trust himself to say the number out loud.

One million subscribers.

Twenty dollars a month, every one of them, on a service that had existed for eleven weeks.

"Twenty million dollars," Richie said. "A month. Recurring."

Behind him, Felicia had stopped in the doorway with a tray in her hands and forgotten she was holding it.

...

"And the corporate side?" Alexander asked.

"That's the other page." Richie turned it over for him, and his hand was not quite steady.

"Separate tier. Direct connection, machine to machine — the firms don't want a person typing, they want their own systems talking to ours. We've signed nine hundred and forty accounts, most of them on the mainland, four in the capital."

"How much?"

"Another twenty million a month. Give or take."

Forty million dollars a month, out of a two-storey building opposite a fish market.

...

Felicia put the tray down very carefully on the corner of the desk, as though a loud noise might make the paper change its mind.

"Prince," she said. "That's — how much is that in a year?"

"Nearly half a billion," said Richie.

"Half a—" She looked at Alexander. "Half a billion dollars? For us? For the island?"

"For the island," Alexander agreed. "Now go and cancel the lunch order."

"Why?"

"Because I'm spending all of it."

...

He meant it exactly.

Every coin of that money went straight back out again, and it went to two places only.

More power. More processors.

Another eleven hundred hectares of rock on the western headland disappeared under frames two metres high, and the sheep went under them the same week.

A second cable trench opened along the north shore. And out past the shelf, in eighty metres of cold black water, the sealed racks went down in rows, and then in rows of rows, until the survey ship's map of the seabed looked like a city drawn from above.

"Nothing to a reserve," he told Richie. "Nothing to a rainy day. Every dollar into the two things."

"Your Highness, most companies keep—"

"We're not most companies."

...

"Listen to me." Alexander tapped the desk twice. "There will be four competitors inside a year. Ten inside two. The only thing that keeps a customer is that we are the best, we are the fastest, and we make the fewest mistakes. That's it. That is the entire business."

"And that comes from?"

"Power and computation. Nothing else. There is no clever trick underneath it." He shrugged.

"So we keep adding energy and we keep adding processors, forever, and every time somebody catches up we are already further out."

Richie wrote it down.

He had studied finance for six years and worked at a firm in the capital for two, and he had never in his life heard anybody explain a business in four sentences and be right.

...

So it became a loop.

Money came in from the customers. The money bought panels and racks.

The panels and racks made the machine faster and cleverer, and a faster, cleverer machine brought more customers, and the customers sent more money — which bought more panels and more racks.

It fed itself. It got hungrier the more it ate.

And it meant that on paper, the richest man in the province was permanently, completely broke.

Everything that came in one month went out the next.

The account was swept flat on the twenty-eighth and full again on the fifth and flat again on the twenty-eighth.

Three months of that, and Harland had the fastest-growing technology business in the Empire and a territorial treasury you could have emptied with a wheelbarrow.

...

Then, on a wet evening in the third month, the phone on his desk rang with an outside number and no name on it.

"Governor Alexander?"

"Speaking."

"My name is Charles." The voice was old, unhurried, and extremely polite. "I am a financial manager. I represent certain families with interests across several countries, and I have been reading about your bank."

Alexander sat back in his chair.

"Go on."

...

"You have written a very interesting statute." A pause, warm and dry. "No audit. No names. No cooperation with any foreign revenue service. Is that an accurate summary, or is it merely a newspaper's summary?"

"It's accurate."

"Then I would like to test it." Another pause. "We are considering placing two hundred million dollars with the Bank of Harland. Would that be acceptable to you?"

Felicia was across the room, mending a cuff by lamplight, listening to nothing in particular.

"Sure," Alexander said.

...

"Sure?"

"Send it to our bank." He said it as simply as a man agreeing to hold a coat.

"And when you want it, take it out from wherever you happen to be. Any branch, any partner, any city. The same amount you put in, no deductions, no tax, no questions. That's the arrangement."

There was a silence on that line of perhaps four seconds.

"Governor," Charles said, "you are either very brave or very young."

"I'm both," said Alexander. "Send the money."

...

He put the phone down and sat with the rain on the window for a while.

Here is the part nobody on that phone call understood.

A bank that takes dirty money and hands it back out is not laundering anything. It is only moving it.

The money comes in dirty and leaves dirty, and the first serious investigation anywhere on the chain tears the whole thing open.

That was not what Alexander had built.

When Charles's people drew their money out — in the capital, in a foreign city, in whatever currency they liked — it would not come out of Charles's deposit.

It would come out of Gaia.

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