Igi
patreon
Log Entry #31: The Heist
🕑 Added 2020-08-12 10:04:40 +0000 UTCWhen someone tells you that you need to pull the biggest robbery in the Earth’s history… how do you respond? Well, despite the calm expression on my hologram’s face, I wanted to dance a jig.
As you may have noticed, I like taking money from the bad guys. Not only because I know that this would hurt them, but for the fact that I can do much more useful things with it than they ever could.
Right now, some of you will indignantly question who gave me the right to make those kinds of decisions. Confiscating money without any form of governmental supervision, or some sort of committee that would give its approval. If you have to know, I did get the authorization from the highest authority I would acknowledge—Michael.
Could my actions be considered criminal? Well… that is a matter of opinion. What is legal in one country in this world may be completely illegal in others. So that fact makes one thing obvious—laws are arbitrary. They are made by decision-making people in a given area. And while many will try to dispute one saying, it is inescapably true—might makes right. It is an aphorism on the origin of morality. Still, it so clearly describes how society's view of right and wrong is unavoidably determined by those in power.
Now, every single person has his or her individual ideas of what constitutes good and right. However, only those perseverant enough to grab the power for themselves, (destroying their enemies along the way), can put their ideas into effect. Ultimately, they are the ones who will decide what their government categorizes as right and wrong. Since we were on our way to make a government of our own, that makes us the decision-makers. We are the ones with the might to make right. (See what I did here? I can justify anything.)
OK, if I am being perfectly honest, it is somewhat addictive. The rush, I mean. I may not approve of professional thieves, but I do understand them. In many cases, it is not even about the money for them, it is about that rush, the feeling of being alive.
I have been doing something similar (stealing like a fiend), for a while now, but it was a much smaller operation, minuscule by comparison with the caper Michael was proposing. This was not flying under the radar, this was a supersonic flight above people’s heads, and I was going to slightly change the economics of the entire world.
While he was still talking, I speeded up my AI-core and started making lists. Terrorists, drug dealers, slavers—were a must, but there were so many others who were undeserving of their wealth. My personal favorites were white-collar criminals with offshore secret accounts that couldn’t exactly make too much noise if the money the IRS didn’t know they had, disappeared into thin air. As far as banks were concerned, their clients transferred the money without any problems.
Michael did not really understand what he was asking; we needed the sums of money that started with a letter T (as in trillions). To pay so many people to be actively involved in tracking the criminals was unprecedented, and I had a feeling that this plan would grow in scope with time. As I said to him—it was doable.
So began the biggest heist in history, and I’m being realistic, there was not much someone could hide from me that involved money, at least electronically. I robbed them blind. At the same time, let me emphasize once again—only those that earned money in criminal or unethical ways earned the touch of my sticky fingers.
To even begin to implement some parts of this plan, I needed computational cycles. With my AI-Core running at 100%, it was still not enough. When other things, like bounty sites and real-time tracking and face recognition become active, the computational power needed would be enormous. As a result, I started building additional hybrid processing server stacks. Not one, but thousands of them, which in turn managed to collectively surpass the computation power of my AI-core by orders of magnitude. (As they say, quantity has a quality of its own.) A big part of the processing stacks went to the ship, but to lessen the load and to have some obligatory redundancy, I decided to refurbish the satellites.
Not that there was anything wrong with them, but my needs have grown from the time I built the first one. All subsequent units were made by using the same specs that I now found lacking. Their design underwent a radical change, from their original size of six feet, now they were twenty-foot spheres. (With many more goodies that I could now cram in all that additional space.) Since every single one of those had a power source that will last for a considerably long time, and holographic camouflage that made them invisible, I was pretty sure that they were secure and would be left unseen.
My biggest problem was that all that shady activity I was conducting needed to be somewhat unnoticed. Which would normally be impossible, considering that people generally pay attention to the money they have. I don’t mean by all the miscreants I was in the process of robbing blind; they will most certainly notice the disappearance of their wealth. The general public needed to be kept in the dark.
It is so easy to incite panic if normal people start thinking that someone was about to take their hard-earned savings. That is the main reason I targeted those that couldn’t complain that they were robbed as that would require them to explain where they have acquired so much money in the first place.
I must admit it was sweet— the poetic justice of it.
For all that, the real, material money was something that was out of my reach, but that was small potatoes compared with money in the digital form. Digital money leaves a trace, no matter how hard someone tries to erase it. Even my own transactions were no different, but it would require another AI to track my trails. Ordinary criminals—didn’t stand a chance.
Before long, millions upon millions were pouring into my accounts, from all over the world. I followed the money the bad guys were hiding and closed so many accounts it was obscene. In fact, the obscene thing was that there was so much money to be made by illegal activities.
I was doing something that no one in the entire world actually could. Unhindered by those arbitrary laws I talked about, I was confiscating ill-gotten gains.
You do not honestly believe that regular legal systems and law enforcement agencies would have any chance to ever touch that money. Those who amassed it knew how to play the system, and knew all the loopholes and secret crannies. But they didn’t count on a little old me. Deep inside I felt like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and… yea, I am still working on that latter part.
Do you know what was the best thing about it all? Zero guilt. I think most professional robbers do feel that pang of guilt when they are taking something that will eventually cause grief to others. I’m not sure, but that is a part of human nature (psychopaths and sociopaths excluded). Now, they train themselves to overcome that emotional obstacle, but it never truly goes away. In many cases, they unburden their sins on their deathbed, seeking absolution for the pain they caused. Since my marks were all villains, I had no problem with making them paupers. It is so liberating to do the things that have zero negative emotional impact on you.
There was one final hurdle I needed to deal with. For someone with my advantages, breaking into the banks’ internal systems is not that difficult. But just transferring money would defeat the purpose of stealing from only the deserving ones. Banks have insurance in case of theft, so in the end, those insurance companies would take the burden of recompensing all the loss. I certainly didn’t want that. Plus, the insurance companies would go bankrupt in no time.
So, the trick was to place obvious trails so that it would seem the account holders issued all the orders themselves. And that took some doing since some of the security measures are personal calls with voice identifications plus question and answer steps to approve larger money transfers. Well, voice simulations I could do easily, and all those Q&As were conveniently stored on the banks’ servers because the bank employees needed to read them from the computer screens. (How convenient for me since I was already in their systems.) But these kinds of procedures were the true obstacles I needed to overcome.
It took some time, but by the end, I did it. And if any of those who were robbed go and complain, well the banks have all the digital evidence they need to dispute those claims. Oh, they will figure out what happened, but they will do everything possible to cover their asses. It may be unethical of them, but they are not idiots (plus, ethics is a dirty word in their line of work). I said it before, human nature—you can always count on it.
When all is said and done, I could proudly say that I am the greatest thief that ever lived… which you must admit is badass.
