Authors / Charter / Boast 21 Futures: Financial Fallout

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-9916-7-4933-3
Verlag: 21 Futures
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

Currencies debased. Privacy under attack. Cash goes underground. The crushing weight of debt. We were never prepared. Welcome to a system designed to keep us poor. The harder we work, the less we gain. And as we struggle, the noose only tightens. And then, when we have nothing left to lose, we turn on those who rigged the game. We stand and fight. These 21 stories portray unfortunate yet brilliant heroes fighting the powers that triggered financial fallout. Money is broken, but hope is not lost.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Authors

Authors, 21

Charter, Philip

Boast, Alex

Leseproben

The Big Slash

by

I was in a grocery store when The Big Slash happened. I was bagging my own groceries at the self-checkout stand, as is the right of every post-AI human. It was the end of the workday and near closing time, so the place was packed with tired, oblivious office workers who’d gone from one rat race to another. Some of them were like slow zombies, and some of them were fast, shoving and snarling like they needed to get somewhere other than a honeycomb pod motel.

I was uncomfortable and anxious. Some hulking gym bro who was ‘just buying a six-pack’ was breathing over my shoulder, the smell assaulting my personal space like an uninvited back rub. I’d just managed to stuff the last of my groceries into a biodegradable bag, gray veggie-plastic stretched almost transparent, and I just wanted to get out of there and back to my crappy apartment.

I punched the checkout button, swiped my hand over the reader, and grabbed my stuff. ‘Hey, buddy!’ the dude with the beer cans said, catching my elbow before I’d taken a second step. I flinched at the touch, turning with cosmic reluctance toward the possibility of confrontation, but Mr. Pecs-too-big-for-his-wife-beater was pointing at the register. Payment declined.

‘Sorry,’ I said without making eye contact, and I put my hand back on the terminal, making sure the RFID scanner got a good look at the chip in the meaty part of my hand. Payment declined.

Cold sweat dripped down my spine. Have you ever had that feeling? Sudden impotence. I turned to apologize to the man I’d been belittling in my head only moments before, but again, he wasn’t looking at me, so all I saw was the back of his head. He was looking at all the other registers, where dozens of other formerly confident and self-sufficient customers searched, helpless, for an attendant.

I don’t think I ever saw his face. I just remember the smell — sweat and halitosis. It was the first waft of a new world. The Big Slash had come for us all.

???

I woke up the next morning in my small apartment. Well, not exactly mine. I owned an eighth of a year in a room that barely fit a single bed, some shelves, and a portable stove. Shared bathroom on every floor. It sucked.

Oh, and the door was broken. The lock had been keyed to my share tokens, and my chip still didn’t work. I was tired, hungry, and pissed off, so I did the manliest thing I’d done until that point in my life. What? No, of course I didn’t break the door down. I borrowed a pry bar from my ex-con neighbor, and it was scary as hell. Still better than sleeping in the hallway.

I’d woken up, hungry and still tired, immediately reaching for my tablet to sign into my chip. It was still locked, both main account and subaccounts, same as the dozen times before. I still remember that feeling. Not even anger or frustration, although there had been no shortage of that the night before. No, that morning, I felt a sense of doom that I can only describe as wide-eyed certainty my life was over. The chip was dead. My life went with it.

If you grew up after the Slash, you might not understand what I’m talking about, but the thing in my hand was called a wallet although, for reasons that don’t matter anymore, it should have been called a keyring. It held the keys to my money, my property, and my government ID. It unlocked proof of my bachelor’s degree, my work history, and my failed marriage to Jenny Larsh. I’d lost access to my streaming account, my music, and my books because I didn’t really own any of them, I just owned the right to access them. I could only log into the tablet as a guest, so I’d lost all of my contacts, and even if I’d had them, I could only call emergency services. I’d become a non-person overnight.

I hugged my arms across my chest, staring up at the ceiling, literally trying to get a hold of myself.

After a few hundred thunderous heartbeats, my faith in normality gasped for air. I could open a new wallet. I could get people who knew me to vouch for my existence. My family lived in a different town — so did I, seven-eighths of the year — but if I could get to them, I could partially prove my identity by association and maybe get my pre-college education restored.

I also had a physical copy of my passphrases buried in my parents’ back yard, but I wasn’t sure if that would fix this. The terminal wasn’t giving me the option to recover anything. I was just locked out without explanation or recourse, and that threatened to freeze me up again. First things first, I told myself, dragging myself back from the edge of hopelessness. I need to find someone who knows me, and maybe ask to borrow their tablet. As sad as it might sound, the only place for that was corporate headquarters since I worked remotely from my hometown most of the year.

I walked down the hall to take a quick shower, pulled some clothes from the suitcase I was living out of, and headed for work. I was expecting an hour-long walk — I didn’t have a way to pay for a self-driving commuter, and even public transportation required payment or a residency pass — but after just a few steps onto the sidewalk, I realized I had misunderstood the scope of the problem.

There were people everywhere, and they were lost, glassy-eyed, and vacant. They looked like I’d felt after checking my chip that morning. It was a feeling that hit us over and over in the days and weeks after The Big Slash, and we came up with all kinds of names for it — going tharn, blue screen of death, the freeze, or the deep chill. It was the response we all had to our lives going from math-driven economics to complete unpredictability. People only had what they wore or clutched to their chests. The very notion of ownership had been upended. And we didn’t know why.

It wasn’t all bad at first. There were some good people who hadn’t been Slashed and tried to help the rest of us out. The bus driver for Line 46 was one of them. She was an older lady called Sam, a veteran who didn’t get online much, and she let me ride to work for free.

???

The office was a mess. I worked at Coinbase’s local campus, and normally, I never would have gotten through the front door, except the security team had all quit.

It turned out that the ability to protect physical property had just gotten a lot more valuable than the ability to program a computer. The speed of the change was stunning.

I made my way through the lobby. Big place, lots of glass and polished wood, and people standing in groups of two or three talking about the end of our world. These weren’t the hardcore devs who were all upstairs with the CTO trying to hack into our own systems.

I didn’t care about saving the company or the world. I just wanted my life back, so I headed to HR. That’s where I met Phil.

Phil was having a hard day. Phil was a non-technical guy in a technical company trying to explain to technical people why the technical stuff had been Rekt. Bricked, actually, because Rekt implied an attack, and Bricked was just incompetence or bad luck. Our bad luck had rushed together, pooled, and poured down on Phil’s head, which, in my mind, might have been why he was bald.

I don’t know that, mind you. And Phil wasn’t bald. He had a healthy crop of thick hair on the sides of his head, which he was clutching with his elbows on the table.

‘Hello?’ I said, leaning partly through the door.

Phil looked up at me, releasing those beautiful clouds of blond puff. ‘I can’t help you.’ ‘Oh.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ Phil said, apologetic and a little horrified. If I’d learned anything in the day since my chip went dead, it was that people — six-pack guy, ex-con neighbor, Sam the bus driver, and Phil in HR — were fundamentally more decent than I expected before I was forced to talk to them.

‘The computers don’t work,’ I offered.

‘I, uh,’ he started. ‘I made that mistake. I was told the computers work fine. Loudly.’

‘We just can’t access them.’

‘Yes,’ he said, brightening. ‘That’s what they said, too!’

I nodded. It had happened to me. I just didn’t realize it could happen to... I was going to say the whole company, but then I remembered the people on the street. It was happening to everyone. ‘Do you mind if I sit?’ ‘Please,’ Phil said.

Phil had been working late when The Big Slash hit, and he stayed to help people, only to spend the whole night and three hours of the morning getting yelled at by people who were smarter than him (his words, not mine). From my experience, seeing hidden patterns in code can blind you to other things.

Their loss, my gain, because Phil was the kind of HR guy desperate to help people, a real social worker type with an unstainable core of hope. While most people would have absorbed all that abuse and broken down, Phil had somehow pieced The Big Slash together before almost anyone else simply by being open-minded at the crossroads of competence and panic.

‘I think we’ve all been blacklisted,’ Phil said.

‘Okay,’ I said, trying not to look...