Infinite Dreams by Joe Haldeman

Author:Joe Haldeman [HALDEMAN, JOE]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9242-8
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

It’s not easy to stay penniless in New York City, not if you have a twenty-year-old body and over a century’s worth of experience in separating people from their money.

Within a week, the man who had been Harrison was living in a high-class flat behind the protection of the East Village wall, with enough money stacked away to buy him time to think.

He didn’t want to be Harrison again, that he knew for sure. Besides the boredom of living the same life over, he had known (as Harrison) by the time he was fifty that his existence was not a particularly happy one, physically addicted to the accumulation of wealth and power, incapable of trusting or being trusted.

Besides, Harrison was a five-year-old in Arkansas, just beginning the two decades of bad luck that would precede a century of nothing going wrong.

He had this sudden cold feeling.

He went to the library and looked up microfiches of the past few years’ Forbes and Bizweek. And found out who he was, by omission.

For less than a thousand dollars, he gave himself a past. A few documents to match counterfeit inserts in government data banks. Then a few seemingly illogical investments in commodities, that made him a millionaire in less than a year. Then he bought a failing electronics firm and renamed it after himself: Lassiter Electronics.

He grew a beard that he knew would be prematurely white.

The firm prospered. He bought a plastics plant and renamed it Lassiter Industries. Then the largest printing out-fit in Pennsylvania. A fishery after that.

In 2010 he contrived to be in a waterfront crap game in Galveston, where he lost a large sum to a hard-eyed boy who was fairly good at cold-rolling dice. Lassiter was better, but he rolled himself crapouts. It was two days after Harrison’s twentieth birthday, and his first big break.

A small bank, then a large one. An aerospace firm. Textiles. A piece of an orbital factory: micro-bearings and data crystals. Now named Lassiter, Limited.

In 2018, still patiently manufacturing predestination, he hired young D. Thorne Harrison as a time-and-motion analyst, knowing that all of his credentials were false. It would give Harrison access to sensitive information.

By 2021 he was Junior Vice-President in charge of production. By 2022, Vice-President. Youngest member of the board, he knew interesting things about the other board members.

In 2024, Harrison brought to Lassiter’s office documents proving that he had voting control of 51% of Lassiter, Limited. He had expected a light. Instead, Lassiter made a cash settlement, perplexingly small, and dropped out of sight.

With half his life left to live, and money enough for much longer, Lassiter bought comfortable places in Paris, Key West, and Colorado, and commuted according to the weather and season. He took a few years for a leisurely trip around the world. His considerable mental energies he channeled into the world of art, rather than finance. He became an accomplished harpsichordist, and was well-known among the avant-garde for his neopointillist constructions: sculptures of frozen light, careful laser bursts caught in a cube of photosensitive gel.

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