Dispatch from a Colored Room

It all comes back around in the end

Here I will digress briefly to give you a sense of how I, a sniveling functionary, might be empowered to direct the actions of Dawnroad Bank from a stinking boondock on the sinistral sixth. I imagine your first thought would run to the beams, and I have reason to believe that the synod does license a certain amount of communication to run through that system; it makes their eavesdropping much easier. But the cyturgy involved in both transmission and reception is expensive, tightly regulated, and very easy for the beams themselves to detect, meaning that breaking the law to piggyback on it is as far as we know scientifically impossible unless, maybe, adapting to the beam network's countermeasures is literally all you do. In other words, if you're the Dandelion Knight. Dawnroad isn't a player on that scale and doesn't have the authorizations.

The system, which Dawnroad is neither the first nor the only one to use, takes advantage of the rail lines -- basically the only electrical distribution system still functioning in this moribund shithole of a civilization. There's always current running through the rails, of course, and it didn't take the technicians too long to figure out that you can get in there and add little pulses on top of the huge amounts of current it takes to power the trains. The embroidery on top of the insight is a little complicated; these messages are not actually that reliable, since the signal drops out at long distances and is invariably ruined if and when it runs into a train. So there's a whole system of receipts where a station verifies that it's received a message; and those receipts are also messages, so you have to figure out a way to keep the system from being overrun by receipts; and on top of the technical problems, you have to figure out an accounting system, so all the rail technicians in the value chain get their piece and the system keeps running on.

It's a long value chain. Sniveling functionaries are not thought to provide particularly valuable services. When a person who does not provide valuable services incurs a large expense, you can see how that person might worry about how his net worth will be viewed by the bookkeepers. 

And I'll digress one more level to point out the obvious, which is the following: I was about to do good business. The only reason anyone bothered to expend a day of my admittedly pitiful salary sending me to the sinistral sixth was that the bookkeepers saw an upside in seducing Aimee Leblanc. They didn't give me numbers down to the shekel, but I knew the interest on Aimee Leblanc's assets would pay for a rail-mail in a matter of days. 

But I also knew it might not matter. If someone hasn't decided you're smart enough to make the call, you can find yourself out on your ear in a heartbeat. And I wasn't so rich back then that I could just discard a job.

I also wasn't so rich that I could afford to fail, though. So in some ways that made the decision easy.

I'm sorry if this all seems off the point. But this crowd -- you know my stories. You know it all comes back around in the end.

Speaking of which.