Cash is evil. So says Liza Hale. We are back in 2125 with this post. USA is a memory. NUUSA tries to replace it but is weak, distracted by infighting, and disorganized. Cash is evil for Liza because the exchange rate is crazy. It moves around worse than the Venezuelan bolívar. A contract for peanut butter offered in the NUUSA dollar can swing 100x in minutes. The deal was kinda ok. She just had to catch it when the exchange rate was good.
It wasn’t for peanut butter. The deal was for a futures contract on Nebraska corn. It looked sweet. Liza could cover her monthly bills on this one deal. Rent was due in five days. She could stretch that to ten days without penalty. But then late fees and court fees would add to the balance due. Beyond the fifth was an uncanny valley where a move to a shopping cart and a street corner loomed. Her other bills for Internet, lights, water & trash are also due in the next few days. She thought she had it covered.
As usual, there is more to the deal. She bid on the futures contract because a friend of a friend asked for help. The friend heard that corn was going to go up and wanted to get in now before the rise. So Liza bid and was the top bidder. She had to use money reserved for personal bills like rent to cover the cost of the contract. Because the friend promised she was good for it.
Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Liza had heard the line. She knew what it asked for: an operating balance that could cover a week of ordinary leakage, living money kept separate from anything meant to accumulate, the rest left alone. A hot trading day and the retail therapy that followed felt better. The Nebraska corn futures had looked like the one completion that would let her skip the slow part and still clear the fifth. She tapped close anyway.
Fast money is a habit. Money is perishable. So the itch says, “spend it while you have it.” Fast money says an empty wallet is a good thing. Even better is debt. The thrill of the chase, y’know. That dopamine hit when the notification hits that the latest purchase arrived.
Always the drama, though. High reward comes with high risk. The friend needed the money from the sale of the futures contract to cover their light bill. Liza needed to pay herself back so she could cover the rent. One deal could pay well or put her in a bind. She’s in a bind. The friend’s money isn’t good.
In a World…
In this world, in 2125, there is no national currency because there is no nation. Instead, seven fiefdoms are at war with each other. Each has its own currency, traded on the AMEN Exchange. This could be ok and is not ok. Pacific Cascadia changes its leadership on the regular. They hold elections, right? Wrong. The current leader is assassinated and replaced by the next victorious warlord. Some victors keep the currency of the last one; some do not.
It’s big fun to have paper notes that had value until yesterday, when the new warlord declared the old boss’s money worthless, so this bag of groceries can’t be paid for with the money in your hand. So exciting. Other less chaotic fiefdoms have cryptocurrency that is backed by gold. Oddly, the new warlord’s paper money isn’t popular and the NUUSA dollar is.
Who cares? A deal is a deal, yes? No. Ninety-nine years from now, part of the deal is negotiating which currency will be used. Liza rushed into buying the futures contract because she was helping a friend. She didn’t ask how the friend was going to pay. PacCash, the latest cryptocurrency adopted by Pacific Cascadia, was trading at 8500:1 against the gold-backed NUUSA dollar. The friend offered PacCash. Great. On verifying funds, Liza discovered the friend couldn’t pay and PacCash was tanking.
Where Cash is Fairy Smoke
Awesome! Just f*ckin awesome. Some friend. Liza fell for the sob story and agreed to this. The pitch: if you are a true believer, you would want to help someone less fortunate. If KAOS means anything, then here is your chance to prove it. At 8,500:1, the friend showed a balance of 1,275,000 PacCash. That equaled $150 NUUSAD—enough to cover the deposit on the corn futures and still look like help. While they finished negotiating, PacCash fell to 25,000:1. The same 1,275,000 PacCash was now worth $51 NUUSAD. That would buy lunch. It would not buy the deposit.
25,000:1 is AMEN’s vote on the ability of NUUSA to govern. NUUSA struggles to govern because the leadership busies itself with internecine fighting. Pick an accusation, any accusation: misogyny, racism, transphobia, homophobia, lesbiphobia, Islamophobia, bougie, corrupt… these fly around the Capitol Building like gnats on meth. Because the energy is spent on the next charge and the next rebuttal, the ordinary work of governing never holds the floor long enough to matter. Currency decrees get issued between accusations; enforcement is interrupted by the next round; the gold-backed NUUSA dollar remains a reference while the paper that actually circulates is left to the local warlords.
The friend had nothing to trade. Her only cash was her PacCash. PacCash was fairy smoke. It had value on its better days. Then it didn’t. Using it to buy and sell was like gambling against bad odds. So nobody stable used it. This friend claimed to have nothing. Her shoes were worth Liza’s rent.
And Mercy is Expensive
Liza knew the vibe. Somehow this friend resonated dark. She picked the hardest, most conflicting path to a goal. There are stable, well-reputed currencies in 2125. PacCash isn’t one of them. The friend offered PacCash. Not a problem, right? So Liza tried talking to her. Every move to get her to commit to something solid was met with an evasion. All Liza’s offers had a reason why it wouldn’t work. Anyone else and Liza would just walk away. But the rent money was committed to the futures contract.
She had something the friend didn’t have—her gift for relationships and deal-making. She also had good friends. This friend of a friend reached out to Liza because behind her was a litany of broken promises and trashed reputations. The friend’s play was to borrow some of Liza’s rizz because it was strong. Friend of a friend promised that doing this favor would strengthen Liza’s rizz. No doubt, friend of a friend implied, not helping would trigger a social media thunderstorm that could wreck Liza.
Liza also knew the move. To accuse her of generational, systemic *ist, *ism, or *phobe. The specific *ist, *ism, or *phobe changes with the accuser’s mood. Thus, because of the accusation, Liza was obligated to make sacrifices and complete a struggle session. Nobody did that anymore. Mao’s Little Red Book was over 160 years ago. The Communists won their revolution and, since then, have made a lot of noise and accusations but can’t actually govern.
The Move is to Protect the Nest
Liza tapped The Pulse from her phone. The inbox had the usual stream of marketing spam. Ellis messaged asking for approval to buy parts for a busted dryer. She sent the approval. Then wrote to Mark and told the story of the friend.
She spoke her next move to the apartment: “Can I get a flat white?” Various rooTech devices began bustling about the kitchen to make a flat white. After a bit, her phone buzzed with a notification: Mark replied, “On it.” Then the apartment announced through a tablet, “Your coffee is ready.”
By the first, she had the futures contract covered. AMEN runs regular trading from Tuesday through Saturday. News of the friend’s insufficient funds hit on Wednesday. It’s Thursday morning as she sips her flat white and waits for Mark to tell her the “friend” has solved her money problem.
Hale EEEEEVULLL!
Predictable. On the Pulse a social, viral storm exploded. Everybody was jumping on Liza as a hateful bitch who oppressed brown people and ate roast babies. All the fashionable accusations flamed up. The thread went viral. She was a local celebrity because of her boss. Now everybody knew her name.
The friend expected that all this heat would move Liza to be sympathetic and pay the debt she owed. It had the opposite effect. Through Mark the friend’s provisional immigrant visa to Pacific Cascadia popped up as needing a compliance review. The locked-in outcome of the “friend” became a turnabout.
Things get scary; sometimes they get worse. The new address at a street corner with a shopping cart feels like fact. Then something breaks Liza’s way. This time it was a reputational shot at her from an enemy who didn’t have the rizz to make it work. Liza finished her flat white. She walked from her third-floor apartment to her second-floor office above the laundromat and started another Thursday at work.