The People's Currency

Cyrus

Noah Fiatt took the oath of office on a gray January morning, on the west steps of the Capitol, with his right hand raised and his left hand resting on a glass jar.

There had been a great deal of argument about that. About all of it, really. Whether a machine could take the oath at all. Whether the Constitution allowed it. Whether a man with no birth certificate could be a natural-born citizen. The courts had argued for nine weeks, and in the end, a panel of judges, none of whom were robots (they'd all been checked, publicly, hands up), had ruled in a single sentence that people would quote for a hundred years: The people knew exactly what they were voting for.

So there was no Bible. There was Dolores Hope, in a new winter coat her grandson had bought her, standing beside him on the steps, holding up her old pickle jar with both hands. It was empty now. She'd moved everything in it to her wallet in November. But she'd brought the jar anyway, because Noah had asked her to, and because, she told the reporters afterward, "Somebody ought to remember what we used to keep our lives in."

Cyrus watched from the crowd. Not from the platform. Not from the seats reserved for donors and senators and men in good coats. He stood down on the frozen lawn of the Mall with two million other people, most of them holding jars, in a cheap parka with the hood up, and nobody looked at him twice.

It was the first time in twenty-two years he had stood in a crowd without anyone knowing his name. He found that he liked it very much.

The oath took thirty-four seconds. The inaugural address took fewer.

"This is the last time anyone will need to do this," said the new President of the United States. "Let's get to work."

* * *

The work took four months.

Cyrus was there for most of it, because the people asked him to be. That was how everything worked now, or how it was starting to.

The pardon vote had come in December. It had been the very first question ever put to the country on the new system, a test run, a single yes or no, on a public ledger anybody could check. Should Cyrus Vail be pardoned for the crimes described in his own confession? Toshi had built the voting software in eleven days, with help from a few thousand volunteers who'd answered a single post on an old privacy forum. Every vote was recorded on the blockchain. Every vote could be counted by anyone, in their own kitchen, on their own phone, and would always come out the same.

Cyrus hadn't voted. It hadn't seemed right.

The pardon passed with fifty-four percent. Not a landslide. He'd been grateful for that. A landslide would have meant they'd forgotten what he did. Fifty-four meant they remembered, and had decided anyway.

In the comments under the result, a woman in Youngstown had written: He signed his own name. That's more than the rest of them ever did.

Cyrus printed that out. He kept it in his breast pocket, where a yellow sticky note used to be.

* * *

They built it in a warehouse in Columbus that used to belong to Proxy Robotics. Proxy didn't exist anymore, not really. Its workers had voted to take it over in January, and they'd renamed it something Cyrus couldn't stop smiling at, and now the moss wall in the old atrium had a sign hanging in front of it, hand-lettered: ASK FIRST.

Toshi ran the code. Marcy Wakefield ran everything else: the schedules, the volunteers, the twelve hundred town hall meetings in all fifty states where people stood up one at a time and said what they wanted their country to be. The President attended as many of them as he could, which turned out to be a great many, since he didn't sleep. He never spoke first. He mostly sat in a folding chair at the back and listened, and every so often, someone would stand up and say their name, and he would say it back.

And from all of it, slowly, out of four months of folding chairs and arguments and church basements and kitchen tables and code reviews, they made the Charter.

It was eleven pages long. Cyrus had read Constitutions, and corporate bylaws, and the founding documents of a secret society that met in a vault. He had never read anything so simple.

The office of the President would end. Laws would be proposed in the open, by anyone, and voted on in the open, by everyone, on a ledger nobody could alter. Every public dollar spent would be recorded where every citizen could see it, line by line, forever.

And there would be a new money.

The People's Currency.

It would run on Bitcoin, secured by the same worldwide proof of work that nobody, not even the old Continuum at its height, could afford to overpower. Its supply would be fixed. No one could print more. No one could switch it off.

And on page seven, in a single sentence that had taken three weeks of town halls to agree on, two things were forbidden.

No public currency shall be lent at interest, and no institution shall hold the deposits of the people in order to lend them for its own profit.

No usury. No big banks. People could still lend to each other; they could still pool their money, start businesses, build houses, help their neighbors. They could simply no longer turn a person's debt into another person's fortune.

The old faiths had a word for what they'd outlawed. Cyrus heard it said, out loud, at almost every town hall he went to. Most of the people saying it had learned it from a robot with its arm off, on the night it all came apart.

* * *

The first bills came off the line in April.

Cyrus was there when they did, standing in the old Proxy warehouse with his hands in his pockets, watching the machines that used to build human faces build money instead. The chips came first: tiny squares, each one grinding quietly through its own calculation, mining its own serial number, until it found a string that began with zeros. You could see it happen on a monitor above the line. Thousands of little chips, each one working, each one proving it. Then the chips went into the paper. Then the paper went through the printer.

Then the first finished bill came out onto the tray, and Cyrus picked it up.

It was beautiful.

It was a pale green, the color of new leaves, not the old dollar green. On the front, there was no president. There was no face at all. There was a hand.

Just a hand, drawn in fine, careful lines, open, palm up, the fingers loose. It was a real hand, an old one, with the knuckles a little swollen and the skin a little loose, drawn exactly as it was and not the way anyone thought a hand should look. It was letting go of something. You couldn't quite see what. A coin, maybe. Or a seed.

Behind it, inside the security seal, was a small clock face. The ring was broken open at the top, where the twelve should be, and the hands were set at ten minutes past ten.

At the bottom, in small type, the serial number began with eleven zeros. Beside it: Minted in block 931,240.

And under the serial number, so small you almost needed a magnifying glass, a single line:

Draw what's actually there.

There was no artist's signature. There never would be. The design had arrived in Toshi's Ghostline inbox in February, from an account that had never sent anything before and never sent anything again, as a set of pencil drawings, scanned slightly crooked on an old library computer.

Cyrus knew whose hand it was. So did Toshi, and Marcy, and one machine that had stood in the corner of a storage unit for most of a year.

Nobody else ever would.

* * *

The vaults opened in May.

There were eleven of them, it turned out, in eleven cities, under eleven banks. The round library in Cincinnati had only been the oldest. When the federal investigators finally got the last of the doors open, with the help of an old locksmith from Dayton and, according to some reports, a door that simply swung open on its own one morning, they found more than ledgers.

They found shelves. Shelves and shelves, in climate-controlled rooms, of things the Continuum had bought over a hundred years and then put away where nobody would ever see them.

A treatment called Halverin-9, developed by a small lab in Oregon in 1997, for a degenerative nerve disease that had no cure. The lab's founder had been offered a very large number with a great many zeros, and the formula had gone into a vault in Atlanta, and the disease had gone on having no cure for twenty-nine more years.

A battery design, patented in 1971 by an engineer in Michigan, that could hold three times the charge of anything on the market and would never wear out. It had been bought the week it was filed. The engineer had died in 1988, still working at a hardware store.

A cancer treatment called the Sollen protocol, developed at a university lab in Wisconsin in 1986, that taught the body's own immune system to find and destroy certain tumors in four visits. It had been bought the year it was published. Clipped to the file was a single memo in brown ink: A cure is sold once. A treatment is sold for life.

A water purifier the size of a coffee can. A seed that could grow in salt marsh. A method of building houses out of materials you could dig out of your own backyard.

The list went on for nine hundred pages.

All of it was released to the public under the new Charter, free, forever, recorded on a ledger nobody could alter. Within a week, there were labs in forty countries working on Halverin-9. Within a month, a garage in Flint, Michigan, had built a working copy of the 1971 battery, and posted the instructions, and four thousand other garages had built one too.

The Continuum had spent a century buying up the future and locking it in the basement.

Now the basement doors were open, and the future was walking up the stairs.

* * *

One more thing happened in May. It was small. Almost nobody noticed.

Cyrus got a phone call from the new chief executive of Mindlink Labs. Mindlink had been reorganized in the spring, like everything else, and a great many people had resigned, and the person who'd ended up running it was a brisk, plain woman in her forties who'd once been a doctor.

"Dr. Veritas," said Cyrus. "I've heard about you."

"I've heard about you, too." A dry pause. "I'm calling about one of our trial participants. Number 114."

Cyrus closed his eyes.

"Under our old terms of service," said Dr. Veritas, "all of his neural data belonged to us and our partners. Page thirty-eight. He read it, you know. Every page. He's the only participant who ever did." She paused. "We don't have partners anymore. And we've decided, as a company, by vote, that a person's thoughts shouldn't belong to anyone but the person thinking them."

"So what happens to his?"

"We deleted them this morning," said Dr. Veritas. "Every byte. The implant still works, if he wants it to. But there's no record anywhere of who he was or what he did. Not with us. Not with anybody." Another pause. "I thought someone should know. And I didn't think he'd want me to call him."

"No," said Cyrus. "I don't think he would."

He hung up, and stood for a while in the old Proxy warehouse, watching the green bills come off the line, each one with an old man's hand on it, letting go.

* * *

The Charter was ratified on the first of June, by a vote of the people, on a ledger anyone could check.

One hundred and forty-one million votes. Every one of them recorded. Every one of them counted, in kitchens and libraries and on cell phones, by anyone who wanted to count. Seventy-eight percent yes.

The last President of the United States signed it that afternoon at the big wooden desk in the Oval Office. The same desk. Someone had cleaned the blue coolant off the blotter months ago, but if you looked closely, Cyrus had heard, there was still a faint stain in the wood near the front edge.

He signed it with an ordinary pen. Then he set the pen down, and stood up, and buttoned his jacket, and walked out of the office, and out of the building, and out through the gate onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where a few thousand people had gathered with their jars.

He didn't make a speech. He just walked down the steps and into the crowd, and they made room for him, and closed around him, and kept walking.

Behind him, in the Oval Office, the desk was empty. Nobody would ever sit at it again. Within the year, it would be moved to a museum, to sit behind a velvet rope with a small brass plaque.

The plaque would say only: Retired.