Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

The action-based global economy was devised at the Tokyo Roundtable, a meeting held in the aftermath of the Great Cyberwar by the Old Powers of the West and the New Powers of mainland Asia. According to the FlexiPedia article Amon had read about it, the new system promised an effective way of ensuring that owners could profit off their properties at a time when data heists, hacking, and widespread tampering with financial systems had made all assets nearly worthless. But to realize this economy in practice, the government needed complete knowledge of every bodily movement on earth at every moment. Since information about what a person was doing at any given time was itself a kind of property that each individual was entitled to hold or sell as they wished, and practically speaking the government could not be asked to pay licensing fees to all citizens for the privilege of watching them, action monitoring would amount to constant uncompensated infringement of proprietary material, or in other words, theft. To prevent the terrifying possibility of such a klepto-surveillance state, the Roundtable faced the challenge of somehow protecting property rights in general without overriding each citizen’s claim to ownership of their own action-data, that is, without compromising privacy.

The result was the enshrinement of anonymity rights and the division of GATA into seven parts that performed different functions. A democratically elected parliament called the Executive Council was put in charge of drafting new legislation and performing internal oversight. The Fiscal Judiciary made sure such legislation was constitutional and gave verdicts on credicrimes. The Ministry of Records safe-kept the Archives, where AT readouts and the digital memories of bankrupts were stored. The Ministry of Access oversaw the ImmaNet network and identity registration. The Ministry of Liquidation, where Amon worked, saw to the capture of bankrupts. And finally, two independent institutions were established: the Ministry of Monitoring and the House of Blinding, which together became the central module around which the action-transaction system and the other institutions of GATA were built.

The BodyBank of all Free Citizens was assigned a unique string of characters called an identity signature. When any action was undertaken, the data gathered by the individual’s BodyBank sensors were attached to their signature and sent directly to the House of Blinding. The House then encrypted this signature, turning it into a blinded signature, and routed it together with the action-data to the Ministry of Monitoring. Without any knowledge of the individual’s identity signature, the Monitors matched this action-data with an action-property description saved in the Ministry of Access, and authorized the property owner to withdraw the corresponding action fee. The owner then attached the Monitor’s authorization and the blinded signature to a withdrawal request and sent it to the House of Blinding. The House then decoded the blinded signature into the original actor’s identity signature, withdrew the requested credit from their account, and sent it to the property owner. The whole process usually happened in a fraction of a second when AI could handle it. If human judgment was required, it might take about ten.

This procedure allowed the Monitors to watch each citizen’s every move without knowing who they were. A new blinded signature was created for every action, so that neither the Monitors nor the property-owning corporations would ever have access to the identity of the individual. They would only know that an isolated action had been performed at a certain time by an unidentified somebody guised in layers of cryptography. Moreover, although the database of all these disparate, unidentified actions had to be stored in the Archives to allow for verification of past transactions, harvesting it for marketing purposes was strictly prohibited. In this way, action-transactions could be completed without violating the inalienable right to individual anonymity and thereby opening the door to publicly-sanctioned pirating of information about each citizen’s endeavors.

So although Amon was in charge of marking individuals as critically illiquid if he thought they were due to go bankrupt, he knew very little about the people he was marking. When Illiquidity Alert put someone in the Gutter, the Blinders exposed only the bare minimum about them: a blinded name, their bank account balance, the total value of their assets, their income, and their recent action-transaction readout edited to exclude personal identifiers. The credilaws decreed all other information must be hidden and the Blinders invariably obeyed.

Using these scarce, fragmented hints of a life, Amon searched for risky spending patterns. First he checked the bottom of the list for blinded names that had remained in the Gutter for a while or that kept falling in again and again, in order to locate chronic squanderers. Alternately, he looked for the plunging account balances of rampant spendthrifts on self-destructive action-sprees. Once he located a financially precarious person, Amon looked through their AT readout and bank account. By checking their action-transactions and balance fluctuations over the past few weeks, months, and sometimes years, he could begin to see an abstract picture of their routine, their job, their hobbies, and their addictions. Amon almost felt a sort of monetary personality manifesting from the vague bundle of activities like a face spotted in the clouds. From this he guessed whether they were critically illiquid and likely headed for bankruptcy, or were showing signs of recovery.

After skimming through several AT readouts, Amon picked out one subject of concern, blinded as Z98. For weeks now, Z98 had hovered just three spaces from the bottom of the list. It was miraculous that the subject had managed to stay there so long without going over the bankruptcy threshold or climbing up to a more stable slot. He (Amon didn’t know his subjects’ gender but had a habit of thinking of them as males) was constantly lying motionless in the bed of his capsule apartment, hardly eating, drinking, or using the bathroom. His job was blinded but Amon watched as a measly smidgen of income would roll in now and then, whereupon Z98 would go out to the local pool hall and throw it away within minutes on squid jerky, beer, and billiards, saving just enough money for the walk home. There he returned again to a stupor and started the whole cycle over.

In some ways, Z98 had the qualities of frugality that Amon admired. He was living a simple, almost catatonic life to save for his true joy: squid jerky, beer and billiards apparently. But unlike Amon, there was a desperation to it. Such gutterfolk went on action binges until the threat of bankruptcy was close and palpable. For most, it was only a matter of time until they scratched one itch too many or failed to hold in one last cascade of farts and went over the edge, although Amon had seen a few climb their way out through restraint and perseverance or the charity of a friend. At heart he was optimistic and hoped that subject Z98 might be one of those.

Amon marked Z98 as critically illiquid. He was now out of Amon’s hands. The computers in the House of Blinding would automatically expose his text address and FacePhone number to action counselors, gangs of which would nudge him encouragingly towards financial recovery or thoroughly harass him as needed, like sharks that smell the red, vital liquid of unpaid loans. Since GATA was responsible for reimbursing the creditors of bankrupts for a portion of their bad debt, and dispatching Liquidators to apprehend bankrupts was costly, contracting counselors was worth the expense if they could prevent them from crashing. This meant that Liquidators could reduce government expenses by accurately distinguishing irreversibly profligate souls from temporary high-rollers and recommending contracted help only when it was cost-effective. Amon’s talent in making this distinction accurately was part of the reason he had been promoted to Identity Executioner.