It was an odd day in the beginning of October. I had more money on my person


than some people earn or steal in a lifetime. I was going to go put a company out of

business. It was for their own good. The stock numbers would go way up as soon as

they were on the ticker under a new name. My name, to be exact.

Hortencia thought it was a good time for me to go public.

My lawyers thought otherwise. Good for them. I bought their office building,

broke their lease and evicted them.

You do the best that you can.


There was that year that I ran a small seminar business teaching would-be knee breakers and

and hitmen, ducking out with the profits before a special Federal Task Force rounded them

all up. One of my lawyers was an ex-Feebie and informed in exchange for immunity.

She now owns a hot dog stand in Palm Springs and is very happy.


I had died in prison. I was supposed to be executed at some indeteminate

point in the immediate future, but the Governor and the Legislature were having

one of those idiotic moratoriums on capital punishment that benefits no one

but their biographers. Anyway, they were doing some kind of test on using

artificial intelligence to help engage in inventory control for alzheimer's

patients and they were surreptitiously using convict's bodies and parts

for their research. My brain ended up in the project and in someone else's

body. I outsmarted the research facility's ID program, escaped and

later bought the entire company. Hortencia was very glad to see me. She

envied me my new body. I offered to arrange a transfer for her. She considered

a trans-gender transfer for awhile, but ultimately decided she was too old.


I bought up the rights to Stephen Spielberg's movies and had them all

converted to black and white with Cantonese overdubs and Swedish subtitles.

I bought an auto-making firm that I'd hated for decades and turned it into

the money-making manufacturer and marketer of some of the most dangerous

pieces of crap on the road, only nobody really minded because they were bought

by trendy aberrents who were the only one's killed when their vehicles

hit something else.


As I was writing, it was an odd day in October. It felt like spring in Nepal.

Only I was in Vermont. I had recently bought a small University near Montpelier

for use in the AI transfer experiments. I had decided we needed better quality

bodies and brains for the tests. I wasn't going to kill anyone that wasn't

doing their level best to win the Darwin award. I know it sounds like a paradox,

but idiots at colleges are slightly healthier and less amoral than idiots

at penitentiaries and the relatives, for some reason, don't get as upset

when the bodies don't get returned to them. Besides, it side-stepped that

whole law enforcement issue. There is no appeals process when you voluntarily

commit yourself to college.

The company that I had come to put out of business and make my own

was local printing firm that made "spirit" materials and uniforms for the university.

I needed their resources to gain access to student information that wasn't

in the university files. I also needed to surreptitiously impregnate certain

items of clothing ordered by certain individuals with chemicals that would

make them addicts of a suggestible sort. There are still some things you

can't do with computers and extortion is made much easier when you

have a tractable victim. As the firm also provided uniforms and t-shirts for the local

law enforcement, that also played into my hands.


The only hair in my soup was a reporter for a New York magazine who had

somehow divined that I was a rather busy non-existent person.

Since there isn't yet a reliable national database for ID, it is hard to make sure

you cover all the bases. My cover story wasn't too good, either, as I hadn't spent

much time or money on it, since the more people involved, the more places

for leaks. Anyway, I found her fascinating. She showed more guts than most

of the sheep that people seemed to want to be. If she turned out to be a

worthy opponent, I might play with her for quite a while. I was getting a little bored.

She had six languages, according to her CV and she had served in the Marines.

Her father owned a computing firm that ranked employee computer literacy through

a spy program for financial firms.

Her hair was blonde on in the back and red in the front and she drove an odd car

that I didn't recognize.


My first task was to convince the primary shareholder in the 'spirit' company

to take cash and a ticket out of the country for a little short vacation while

I swindled the minority shareholders with the voting proxy.

She was late and I wasn't worried. I knew that she was having a late lunch with

her girlfriend, something her life partner probably didn't know about.


I could sense something in the air. There was a tightness. Even the trees seemed

to be leaning away in anticipation of unpleasantness. And it wasn't expected from

me. Just as I began to respect my instincts, a VTOL craft rumbled into view

overhead and abscelling lines began to drop, with ant-like figures dribbling down

them bristling with weaponry. Time to run, I guessed.


I had always followed a dictum that Hortencia firmly believed in,

that "cowardice gets to sit back and have a drink while heroes are

still in the hospital". There was always a backdoor to any plan that I had.

The incident that got me put in prison that time I died doesn't count.

I actually wanted to be in that prison. It wasn't my fault that my lawyer

and my co-conspirator in the scheme had a stroke while playing golf.


At my signal, a small tractor pulling an insect fogger rushed out of the

trees and drew a figure eight in the damp grass, the gas from the

rattling compressor of the fogger filling the air and choking the men

rapidly falling from their ropes. I held my breath and ran to a drainage

culvert that led to a maintenance tunnel access hatch. At the hatch, I

flipped a switch that opened it, then turned and ran away.

I heard ground vehicles approaching the drop zone and I didn't bother

to look. I knew what kind of assets the Feebies had nearby. I had some assets

of my own. I ran toward a small decorative pond and kicked open a false

tree stump to reveal another maintenance tunnel hatch.

Carefully emptying my pockets of the packets of money, I made sure

the dye packs were activated and then went down the hatch.

Within a few hours, I was in northern Wisconsin, taking a nap.

The doorbell chimed and my footman answered the door.

It was the reporter, with a small tape recorder in one hand and a riot

shotgun in the other. She knocked my footman down with a beanbag round

and came toward me.

The floor tilted and she, the footman, and the furniture, all slid toward

the gilded french doors. She screamed, the footman moaned, and several

antiques were cracked and scratched. I just sat up on the davenport

and rubbed my eyes. The whole mess slid by me and out through

the doors and into the fake Capability Brown garden. Then the doors shut

and I went back to sleep.