Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

There's an old old con, where you sell the Eiffel Tower again and again. Just play on the marks greed, give them an out, and then close it down and leave with the cash. The script is pretty simple: "I work for the Mayor of Paris. It's going to be torn down - massive structural problems. We need someone to scrap it all. It's very important to keep it quiet, the pride of the country. Preferential bidding status? You know bribery is illegal? Why, of course I'll take your million euros. Shit, les flics. Bye..."

Of course you still need a crew, and an office (or two), along with all the props. Documentation is important, and you'll need convincing paperwork, along with enough people in the right places to inspire confidence. But as they always say, you need to invest some money to make lots of money. And in this game, you can make lots and lots of money. The only problem is, well, getting caught. Not by the police. After all, griftings not the sort of crime that sends you down for ten or twenty. Three years in an open prison is plenty time for a few cushy mail order scams. It's the marks you want to avoid. The motto is "You can't con an honest man", and sadly, the dishonest men often have big men with baseball bats on their team.

Jason had sold the Eiffel Tower once too often. The mark had turned out to be ex-FSB, and his Russian steel holdings were a front for a mafia mob in Moscow. They wanted their money back, with interest. Jason cursed his faulty intelligence, bought a one-way ticket to Canada, and disappeared across the US border on a fake passport. He'd been playing back room poker in Vegas for a month or so when he had his big idea.

Walking down Las Vegas Boulevard in the morning you feel you're walking through a city with a hangover. The bright neon of the Strip is washed out in the bright desert morning, and the few cars staggering down the wide street seem to have places to go that aren't here. Jason watched them roll off, carrying last night's losers to the airport. It wasn't his hangover. In fact it was a pretty good morning. The sun was shining over the wall of casino hotels, as he stood by the Bellagio lake, sipping a coffee, and feeling the comforting weight of a hefty bankroll. The cards had spoken to him last night, guiding him to the right hands and to the right tables. He'd won big. Not enough to get rid of the mobsters on his back, but enough to see him through a few more months in hiding. He'd just allowed himself a smile when he heard the explosion.

On the skyline the Stardust was coming down in a cloud of concrete dust.

The smart money was remodelling Vegas again, tearing down old casinos and making them new. Across the Strip new bright lights clad the old Aladdin, while whining cranes added more levels to the massive complex the MGM folk were building to fill the gap between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo. The word was that some of the newer casino complexes were ready for the imploders' TNT.

Leaning back on the wall, watching the dust cloud rise above the towering hotels, Jason knew what he'd do next. It was right in front of him, towering over one of the largest casino resorts. He'd do what he was good at. The seed money he needed was in his pocket, and the con, well, the con was one of the oldest. A smile wasn't enough for this idea. Jason grinned and laughed. He was going to have some fun. He was going to take a large chunk of that smart money.

Jason was going to sell the Eiffel Tower again.

Only this time it was built into Paris, Las Vegas.

The teaser trailer for Ocean's 13 is out.

And I'm looking for clues already...

I've been watching a lot of films that deal with the art of the long con recently. Last night's, "Matchstick Men" managed the trick of wrapping one con inside another, while the recent "Ocean" sequence have produced some truly complex and intellectually stimulating puzzles.

It strikes me that one of the roots of SF is the puzzle story, and the long con is one of the ultimate expressions of the puzzle - one where only a handful of characters have the full picture, and one where misdirection is a key concept. In "Ocean's Twelve" the reveal sequence shows that what appeared to be a failed con was in fact part of a complex swirl of events that were actually directed at solving a puzzle that was only hinted at by the opening moments of the film.

So how can we come up with an innovative long con for SF readers? It'll need to be one that won't trip up and deliver the pay-off before the final reveal, that keeps the readers hooked, and at convincing them that they know what's really going on, while the characters do something completely unexpected - in full sight of the reader. It's something that's puzzling me - I feel there's some scope here for something that could be humorous, yet thrilling, and able to tell a story about some of the more unsavoury elements of the human condition.

I'm wondering about constructing something in the shape of the classical artefact archaeology story, using a variant of the classic gold salting scam. However, this is one where the folk running the con actually know that there are real artefacts on site, but are unable to put together the resources needed to recover them - and so run a long con that not only has to convince the marks that they want to recover the artefacts, but that once recovered they are in fact worthless, and then to hand them over to our protagonists. We can dress things up with a touch of the post-human to make things harder for the protagonists. Like the best long cons it'll need a big team of players - the key actors, and then their support infrastructure. The later is actually critical - and could make in an interesting focus for the story.

It's something that could be worth trying out. There's the prospect of constructing an appropriate milieu, as well as designing the story state machine in order to construct the appropriate loops and place the characters (both the grifters and the marks) in the right places. The trick seems to be covering up the obvious cog wheels that drive the con - perhaps by throwing in something unexpected that leaves the grifters having to improvise, or affecting the support infrastructure in the middle of the con...

Hmmm. That last one would work well in a story from the point of view of the support infrastructure folk, with the front office grifters out on the job, and the under-briefed folk at the back-end of things having to rapidly develop front-end skills in order to solve a problem...

Hmmm...

OK...

Nothing to see here...

Move along now...