Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

“I don’t know. He—”

“Forgot to take his crazy pills maybe. I mean, did you see those eyes? He looks about ready to go berserk.”

“Let’s try to get in his head space before we move in. Otherwise, there’s no telling what might set him off.”

A few seconds later Kitao grabbed his next victim, a buxom office lady in a blue mini-skirt. Seeming to sense his strength, she fearfully submitted, not resisting even as he took a second whiff before releasing her. They watched him repeat his deranged and inscrutable routine a few more times, grabbing someone, picking them up, sniffing their head, putting them down, and then completely ignoring them as they ran off or shouted at him in perplexity and disgust, before pausing to hunt about with his eyes and starting over. None of his victims were alert enough to evade his gangly arms nor strong enough to break his clutch, and no one noticed the holster at his hip—highlighted in glowing white for Amon and Rick—or they might have been more afraid.

“His readout says he’s been doing this repeatedly for several days,” said Rick, “with eight hour breaks here and there where he buys a hooker and checks into a love hotel over there.” Rick pointed up Dogenzaka, a hill covered in buildings with tinted windows. “But the hookers always leave after a few minutes, and then he goes straight to sleep.”

“After a quick bedtime sniff.”

“Sure. Why not?”

Amon pulled up a detailed breakdown of the minister’s AT readout during his peak spending periods. Sure enough, there was a lot of grabbing , lifting , and sniffing . Kitao was re-enacting his habitual pattern of discreditability before their eyes. These intrusive actions were especially expensive since his victims had given no consent, making them credicrimes like assault or harassment depending on the verdict of the Judicial Brokers.

“We’d better figure this out and deal with him fast,” said Amon, and Rick nodded in agreement.

Although stopping credicrimes wasn’t the responsibility of Liquidators, bankrupts still had to be apprehended quickly. Credicrimes were just like any other action-property, aside from two crucial differences: they were owned by GATA instead of corporations or individuals, and the fee for performing them was fixed by credilaw rather than the market. When a Monitor found that someone’s action matched a credicrime, the data was sent to the Fiscal Judiciary, where a Judicial Broker gave a sentence in accordance with credilaw. Judicial Brokers were so-called because they worked on commission. Every time a credicrime was enacted (committed), they brokered the deal (case) between GATA the action owner (court of law) and the customer (criminal), taking a cut of the fee (fine).

All the freedom you can earn meant that everything was permitted so long as you could afford it, and that included credicrimes. Policing died when the Free Era was born. To arrest, jail, or interrogate citizens was an atrocious obstruction of their freedom, no matter what they had done. Instead, justice was better entrusted to the market whenever possible. In the Free Era, creditable citizens who worked hard and acted within their means were granted the chance to earn limitless freedom, and discreditable citizens who didn’t went bankrupt. That was all. Credicrime fines admittedly interfered with the free operation of the market, but only to protect the market itself. They were a necessary evil to prevent particular kinds of actions that infringed on personal choice, disrupted social cooperation, and impeded voluntary exchange between individuals. No other remedial measures were required; the natural, ineluctable flow of money was its own reward and punishment.

Stopping crime, therefore, was not part of the Liquidator job description. On the contrary, fines for illicit behavior were a major source of government funding to be encouraged in moderation. If it filled the public purse, said some, occasional lawbreaking was a tolerable transgression; others called it a civic duty. Either way, citizens always did right so long as they stayed solvent. Only bankrupts could do wrong. Bankruptcy itself was the only wrong, the discreditable actions that lead there odious by association. Minister Kitao’s perverse ritual would have been perfectly acceptable had he not slipped irredeemably beyond financial salvation. Yet now he could never settle his loans and so long as he continued in his exorbitant doings, he was an insult to his debtors, a drain on the economy, and an affront to society. To keep his already burgeoning bad debt from growing any further, it was imperative that Amon and Rick cash crash Kitao quickly, if carefully, as his political prominence made discretion almost just as pressing.

“Rick, I found something in his readout.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you notice the custom overlay he uses when he does this? He keeps it on the whole time.”

“Seriously?” Rick found the entry Amon was talking about. “Shit. Well that’s where all the money went.”

The membership dues to use subscription overlays, like gaming environments or nostalgic, historical cityscapes, were higher than the flat hourly rate for the default, public overlay, but were nothing compared to custom overlays. Graphic artists and programmers charged ludicrous sums to build up every projected detail from scratch and usually retained their copyright, charging a second-by-second access rate.

“I found the password to get inside his overlay,” said Rick.

“Hit me up.”

Once Rick sent the password, Amon pasted it in, and the vista before him immediately changed.

A night sky stretched overhead, pure starless black broken only by a full moon where the sun had been. The skyscrapers still rose, billboards winking around them, but the concrete below was gone. Instead there was a rich, reddish soil atop which swathes of humanoid plants moved. Their torsos were fibrous trunks of vibrant green, their limbs thick stems, their hands blade-like leaves with five jags, and a purplish-red stalk rose from their shoulders. Pointed tendrils like elongated thorns sprouted from this neck-shaft and wrapped upwards along its length, converging and intertwining tightly together at the tip to form a bulb-shaped bud of a head.

In the middle of Hachiko Plaza, a lone human prowled. Minister Kitao, left unaltered in his world, was stalking someone. Unlike the other plants, his prey’s reddish-purple bud-head was deforming, the bundled tendrils composing it uncoiling outwards like a many-fingered fist opening. When Kitao was only a few paces away, the head fully opened, blooming into a radiant white flower of sharp petals arrayed in three concentric circles, the outermost ring a mane of longer, thinner petals. Kitao grabbed the blooming person below the shoulders, lifted them up, stuck his nose into the center of the flower where delicate white strands rose, and inhaled the fluffy, yellowish pollen smeared on the tips. The moment he put the blossoming plant-person down and released them, the sky grew light, the sun rose, night turned to day, and the petals shriveled into desiccated brown refuse, falling off as his victim ran away into the crowd. Then the sun set, the moon returned and night fell again, all in an instant.

“I’ve never seen an overlay so detailed before,” said Amon. “The design alone would cost a fortune. And I can’t believe he’s paying to cancel the ads.” Amon gestured up at the darkness overhead. “He’s got to be violating the sky estate image rights of like half the corporations on earth.”

“FlexiPedia says the flower is called Fair Lady Under the Moon. AKA: orchid cactus. It blooms only at night and withers by morning. The fragrance is supposed to be sweet and intoxicating.”