On Accounting as Slow-motion Necromancy

Anybody could've done it, given enough time.

Only bits and papers are capacious enough to hold real wealth. They sit on one end of document trails and whispering correlation patterns, on the other end most often a crime, and somewhere to the side a corpse or a million. From blown hospitals to weapon systems to stock holdings to trust funds, from a famine to carbon to oil to a New York penthouse. None of the steps secret, not really, most of them public and boring, some of them nearly invisible next to a drying pool of blood.

With enough time all links could be found and put together, a careful data set assembled of whose riches had been built upon whose bones, and they had began their work before the century started. "Panama" and "Paradise" had been leaks of leaks, crumbs fallen from an old and busy kitchen top.

They built it, and they kept building it. Unreleased, for what purpose would it serve to shame the shameless and accuse the untouchable?

But they kept it always up to date as the world warmed and its walls creaked, waiting for that moment of anger between fear and death.