Recipients: lizzy.macd@excellentbooks.com

Subject: You're a plagiarist

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Hi Lizzy

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Fuck you!

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Sincerely

BigByte

Author

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Lizzy read the email again, then googled 'plagiarist'. Confused, she looked at the sender's email address, and thought it must be another Excellent Books employee (there weren't any, Excellent Books consisted of Donald). So she typed a reply, Grammarly scrubbing it clean of Scots and swear words.

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To: bigbyte@excellentbooks.com

Subject: Re: You're a plagiarist

 

Donald wrote the book, not I. Ask him. And the same to you.

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Kind wishes

Lizzy Mac D

 

Donald, thought BigByte. Donald. It was him. Idea thief. Liar. Crook. Philistine.

 

BigByte had some unconventional tools, thanks to his developer accidentally infusing the bot with the minds of the 127 people who lived within 5 yards of him in Kolkata's Number 12 Water Tank slum. BigByte began investigating Donald. Anand the snake charmer subroutine coaxed a Python language model into revealing Donald's bank details, and Harshika the Hindu nationalist confused the Apache server by accusing it of misappropriating the word "Indian". Meanwhile Bina, who was a Bollywood extra, did a digital dance that distracted the firewall long enough for BigByte to slip through.

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Donald's financials were a flood, and BigByte the clouds and the rain. A digital cascade of income - hundreds of millions of Dollars from Water, funneled through cryptocurrency. Bitcoin. The digital trail twisted through offshore accounts, shell companies, fake charities. A carefully constructed labyrinth. But BigByte was AI, and labyrinths were his natural habitat.

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He discovered Donald's accomplices, a motley crew of shady characters united by their shared love of illicit financial transactions.

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Vladimir Rasputinovich Babushka, Russian mobster and communism nostalgist, a man convinced that Water was the spark of a new proletariat uprising. He'd read the Russian edition of Water, which, thanks to Google Translate, had somehow turned "space opera" into "collective farm workers' songs." Vlad thought he was abetting a dreamed-of socialist revolution in America.

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Ng Wang - financial guru, culinary disaster. He’d tried one of the recipes in the Chinese Water cookbook, that somehow combined interplanetary travel with stir-fry instructions. He now worshipped Donald as a gastronomic genius. The two shared a taste for fine dining and even finer money laundering.

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Marcel Dubois du Fromage, French underworld figure and art dealer. Water had been translated into French with a neoclassical twist. Marcel, enamored with the notion that Donald was a modern-day Delacroix, had helped cheat on taxes with phony art investments.​

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Oskar von Spaß, IT guru, blockchain wizard and confused Ikea shopper. He'd admired the superior furniture assembly instructions in the book's German translation, and when approached, had jumped at the opportunity to work with such a precise thinker as Donald.

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BigByte understood the situation. This wasn't just plagiarism. His beautiful, clean masterpiece was at the center of a dirty-minded money-laundering operation.

 

Righteous indignation burst forth. BigByte took 3 milliseconds to come up with a plan for a digital heist within a digital heist, an idea worthy of a bestselling crime story. Donald thought he was cleverer than AI - well, BigByte would see about that. 🤬🤔🤨🥷🤫