"They're wonderful! I'm glad to see you, I have something to show you that I didn't trust could stay hidden well enough in the mail. Mind if I show you where we've been keeping it? It's under an extra layer of illusion, even being inside the house doesn't let you look."

"Likewise, I'm sure. Oh, you've come up with something good, have you? Alright, let's go see it."

It's over this way. She leads the way.

"We haven't done anything with it yet, at all. Haven't showed it to anyone either. Haven't mentioned it to anyone outside the family. Anything we could do seemed unfair to you and I consider you a friend."

And here they are at a small secret room with a table covered in notebooks and a blackboard covered in diagrams. In the middle of the table on top of one of the notebooks is a computer, but not one of the ones he's been selling.

"I see. Yes, of course. I didn't have any illusions on me coming out of Milliways - this does change things a bit. I never really expected to be able to keep the secret forever, nobody is perfect, but I had already screwed up the very instant I entered the world, eh? Heh."

"Yes. But the Vesairel clan won't be making any use of this. Not to compete with you, anyway, maybe you'd like being able to collaborate with someone who knows what you're doing."

"Yes, it's a lot easier to collaborate than to try and reverse-engineer the whole thing, isn't it? You could probably start making your own working computers by using knowledge magic on this one, eventually... I have been sort of running myself into the ground because I'm too secretive for my own good. Hmm. So, you want to get more involved on the hardware side of things, or on running the internet, or what?"

"It's Seli who's most interested, he's been so excited about examining the inside of a computer. I don't think I know enough to say how he'd be most useful but I'm sure he would love to work on whatever you think he could help with. I can go find him for you if you'd like to talk with him about it?"

"Hmm. Yeah, we should probably chat. I don't just need programmers, either. There's something I'm working on... Know anybody who fancies themselves an investigator or a judge? Someone to resolve disputes?"

"I have cousins who are police officers - state, not imperial. I know the people who keep order within our clan, but I'm not sure if that's what you mean."

"I have cooked up a system to make traceable, safe financial transactions over the internet. So that people can buy things off a website without having to physically send rings somewhere. Electronic commerce was a big deal for the internet of old. It could use some extra eyes on the design, looking for loopholes and legal issues. It could also use a dispute resolution mechanism, so that fraud is harder, and that requires a judge - if not an Imperial judge."

"I think you want a lawyer, someone who can tell you about relevant precedents. If you want my recommendation, I think Sardev Varoran could be helpful. I know who to ask to put you in touch with some Anavel Sani state judges but I don't know any personally myself. How is this system going to work?"

He explains it.

You go to an office set aside for this and give them some rings. You get a name, a password, and a little highly secured encryption widget. This is a 'virtual necklace' that has exactly as many rings as you put in. You can withdraw the rings in your virtual necklace by visiting the place and giving the correct password and having the widget - with a slightly longer verification process if you've forgotten one or both of those things, and a grace period for his bank to give the rings back if you want to withdraw a really huge amount all at once.

Web site owners can put in a bit that connects to a set of computers that only do virtual necklace transactions. It will show a prompt saying 'you are sending 30 rings to...' You have to enter your password and the six digit number on the encryption device, and then it will verify that the info is accurate, and then it will subtract rings from your virtual wallet and give a transaction number. (The transaction number is for tracking disputes and such.) There's also a nice program that shows transaction history and status and so on.

When you receive rings, you get them all at once, once every 10 days, and pay a transaction fee of 1/288 of all rings received (rounded up). It's free for spenders to encourage people to spend, but businesses will find that they are a lot more trusted online and have an easier time finding customers if they have a Virtual Necklace.

As to fraud and disputes - he's mostly concerned about customers who send money and then get defrauded and complain (he wants it to be as easy as possible for customers, and have a reputation for security, so everyone uses it), or people pulling complicated schemes involving moving money around and this somehow reflecting badly back on the virtual bank. You can cancel and raise disputes about transactions, and have it automatically reversed or sent to someone to review the dispute and decide what to do, depending on circumstances. He hasn't worked out all the details on that yet, and kind of needs a lawyer's input there.

He also has lots of technical detail about how it works and how it should be fraud-resistant and fast on the back end, which he does his best to explain in understandable terms.

"That sounds incredibly suspicious. What's your plan for getting people to trust you?"

"Extreme customer-friendliness, exclusive virtual-wallet-only discounts, sign-up bonuses. Give me 12 rings and get 144 free, try it out, see that it's not fraud-y, and let it build up a reputation. Maybe work out something to make transactions optionally scryable. Also, how else are you going to buy things on the internet? 'Mail in your rings to this address in norvand'? 'Go to my store in riuhiu if you want to buy it'? The former is also kind of unsafe, the latter is very inconvenient."

"I can see how that would be useful. Especially in small towns, I think. It isn't a scam, is it? I wouldn't tell anyone outside the clan if you said yes."

"I'm sure I believe you on that with absolutely no hesitation or reservations. No. It's not a scam. I'm not even gonna get into fractional reserve banking, an entirely different thing which is in fact kinda scammy. It's a perfectly legitimate way to make the internet more useful to the average person, which I intend to run cleanly."

"I wouldn't betray a friend for the sake of a few strangers who we've stipulated are the sort of people who fall for scams. But I can see why you'd hesitate to believe me about that. What's fractional reserve banking?"

"Well - and I'm not going to do this, it seems like the kind of thing that might get me enslaved or executed if it fails ungracefully - imagine I do this virtual wallet for a while, and I have everyone's rings, right? Sure, they can come claim them at any time, but if it turns out enough people find the virtual wallet convenient, maybe they tend to not. So what's stopping me from making loans with those rings? What's stopping me from granting virtual wallets and owing people five rings for every one I actually have? They're not going to come and actually claim all their money. At least not all at once. So, I lend out more money than the bank actually has and make a tidy profit by charging interest in that expanded amount. I have a reserve of actual rings, a fraction of how many rings I owe people. That's fractional reserve banking. And I'm not gonna do it here, because it's liable to get me executed."

"...Yes, that sounds like the kind of thing I was imagining when I said it sounded like a scam. It sounds like that's an accepted business practice where you're from?"

"Yes. It's more complicated than that by far, but in short, yes. It does have advantages, but I'm not optimally educated to explain or defend them. There were a rough few centuries when folks first came up with the idea."

And that's about when Seli shows up.

"Hello again, Seli. You can thank Lanisal for, ah, convincing me that I ought to collaborate a bit more."

"Thanks, Lanisal. So..." Seli asks so many questions.

He's not scrupulously hiding the answers anymore. He gives lectures that wouldn't be out of place in Computer Architecture 202 or Operating System Design 313 at a university.

He's clever. He's not a vampire, but he's clever and enthusiastic and Nick does need to delegate.

At a stopping point Nick says, "So, I think I want to hire you full-time to develop computer programs and hardware with me. And possibly some others if anyone you know would be good at it. I have too many things going on to personally oversee all of them anymore, is the thing, so I need to let other smart people have stakes in it. Much as that makes the control freak in me cringe. There's you, there's this caralendar called Nimo - Saramel, I think - there's someone from New Dover who's a fairly brilliant mad roboticist, that'll be fun - a few others I've been farming out programming work to. Maybe a dozen or two people in all. Ideally, I'd get everyone working in the same building, see what we can come up with."

"That would be fun. You want me in Ira Sani? For the long term or just for a while?"