The image was still with him from this morning, of Alicia stabbing her spoon into her coffee cup as she paced in the kitchen. “It’s all our money, Nathan! You didn’t just put your savings into it; you convinced me to put mine in too. And now you tell me the bottom’s falling out?”
The day couldn’t get any worse after that; so Nathan started walking again.
At one time this part of town was full of white working-class families with shared values and expectations. Now, the houses were worth millions and, Grace said, nobody knew their neighbors. The two aboriginal kids sitting on the porch stared at Nathan suspiciously as he walked up.
“Is Grace here?” he asked.
“In the kitchen,” said one, jabbing a thumb at the door. Nathan went inside, past a small living room that had been remade as office space. Three more teens wearing AR glasses stood in the middle of the space, poking at the air and arguing over something invisible to Nathan. Dressed normcore, in jeans and T-shirts, each also bore a card-sized sticker, like a nametag. SMILE YOU’RE ON BODYCAM. Little yellow arrows pointing to a black dot above the words: a camera. The kids on the front porch, he realized, also wore something like that.
Grace Cooper was sitting in a pool of sunlight in the kitchen, reading a tablet, her smile easy and genuine as she rose and hugged him. “How’s my favorite coder?”
Nathan’s stomach tightened. Shall I just blurt it out? The currency is crashing, Grace. We’re about to lose everything. He couldn’t do it, so he sat.
Nathan had known Grace for almost two years, but it was a long time since he’d had to think of her as the client. In fact, she was just the representative; the real client was an aboriginal nation known as the Musqueam who’d lived on this land for thousands of years. Small matter that they’d invited him into their community, their lives. He should have kept his distance.
A few years before he immigrated, Grace’s people had won a centuries’ old land claim that included a substantial chunk of downtown Vancouver. The University golf course, Pacific Spirit Park and much of the port lands south of that were now band territory. That and other settlements had finally given the indigenous peoples of the west coast a power base, and they were building on it. Until today, everyone had benefited—including Nathan.
She sat down after him. The sunlight made her lean back to put her face into shade. “Did you see the news?” she said. “Says Gwaiicoin is doing better than the Canadian dollar.”
It was. He’d checked it fifteen minutes ago, and half an hour before that, and again before that. He’d been up all night watching the numbers, waiting for the change. He shrugged now, glancing away. “Well, the dollar’s a fiat currency,” he said neutrally. “They’re all in trouble since the carbon bubble burst.”
“And because they’re not smart,” she added triumphantly. “Thanks to you guys, we got the smartest currency on the planet.”
“Yeah. It’s been... quite a roller coaster.” Maybe if he talked about volatility, about how most cryptocurrencies had failed... Even the first, Bitcoin, had only been able to lumber its clumsy way forward for so long. But all of them had weathered the bursting of the carbon bubble better than the dollar, the pound, or the Euro.
One of those currencies was Gwaiicoin. Nathan had first heard about it while couch-surfing in Seattle. He and six other guys had struggled to make the rent on a two-bedroom apartment while housing prices soared. The smart programmers left, hearing that living was cheap on Vancouver Island, and just west of the Alaskan Panhandle in the archipelago known as the Haida Gwaii. As Seattle priced itself out of liveability, the islands where the iconic totem poles stood suddenly became crowded with restless coders.
One result had been Gwaiicoin—and, when Nathan arrived in Vancouver, unexpected and welcome employment.
“Gwaiicoin’s about to be worth a lot more,” Grace was saying. “Once my recruits have added Vancouver to the Gwaii valuation.”
Nathan looked through the serving window at the half-visible teens in the living room. “Recruits?”
She leaned forward, her nose stopping just short of the shaft of sunlight. “We’re talking with City Council about measuring the biomass in the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh parts of the city. These kids are my warriors. They’re programming drones to measure the carbon.”
Nathan nodded towards the street, throat dry. “Good place to start.” His mind was darting about, looking for a way to bring her down gently. Then he realized what she was saying. “Wait—you want to add the local biomass to Gwaiicoin?” Unlike Bitcoin, which had value because of its miners and transaction volume, Gwaiicoin was backed by the value of the ecosystem services of its backers’ territories.
She nodded enthusiastically. “Even the Inuit want to get in on it. The more biomass we all commit, the bigger our Fort Knox gets. It’s brilliant.”
Should have seen this coming, Nathan thought. As the dollar crashed, Gwaiicoin had soared. The government wanted it, but since the Haida were backing the currency with land that the feds had formally ceded through constitutionally binding land-claims settlements, the feds were beggars at the table.
“You know, you spent a whole day trying to convince me that a potlatch currency was crazy. Remember that?” Grace grinned at him.
“Yeah.” He looked down. “Who’d have thought self-taxing money would take off?”
She sighed. “And still you call it a tax. That was the whole idea—you get eminence points for every buck that gets randomly redistributed to the other wallets.”
“Yeah.” Despite being a lead on the project, Nathan didn’t have much eminence. He wasn’t rich, so his wallet didn’t automatically trim itself—but even some of Grace’s poorer neighbors voluntarily put large chunks of their paychecks into redistribution every month, via the potlatch account everyone shared. Redistributed money was randomly scattered among the currency-users’ wallets, and in return the contributors got... nothing, or so he’d argued. What they got was eminence, a kind of social capital, but the idea that it could ever be useful had never made sense to Nathan.
Ironically, it made sense now. If Gwaiicoin were to vanish overnight, the people who’d given it away would still have their eminence points. These were a permanent record of how much a person had contributed to the community.
And he had none.
He took one last deep breath and said, “Grace. We have a problem.”
Somewhere nearby a phone rang. “Hold that thought,” said Grace as she hopped up and rummaged for a phone among the papers on the counter. “Hello?”
Nathan watched the flight of emotions cross her face; they settled on anger. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said tightly, and put down the phone.
She avoided Nathan’s gaze for a moment. Then she said, “Well. Jeff’s been arrested.”
“I’M GOING DOWNTOWN anyway,” said Nathan. “I’ll drop you at the station.”
“I could take a driverless,” she said as she hastily gathered up her stuff. “They got those new self-owned ones, too, just cruising around looking for a fare.”
“They’re creepy,” said Nathan, and she grinned briefly, nodding. As they passed the kids in the living room, Grace said, “Lock up if you go out.”
Nathan glanced back from the porch. “You know them well?”
“These ones? No. But to use this hackspace at all you gotta wear a badge.” She patted her own lapel. “And the house knows what’s in it, and what shouldn’t go out the door.”
Supposedly there was some new privacy protocol in play, but Nathan had been too immersed in Gwaiicoin protocols lately to explore the technology. The kids seemed comfortable having eyes on them all the time, but he wasn’t used to it, any more than he was used to passing empty cars driving down the road.
He preferred to keep his own hands on the wheel, but as they drove now he found he was twisting his hands as if trying to strangle it. Grace didn’t seem to have noticed. “Who’s Jeff?” he made himself ask.
�
��One of the kids. He’s Haida, his uncle’s a carver on the Gwaii. Probably should introduce you.”
“But he’s been arrested...?”
“It’s just harassment. You know they do that to us all the time.” She glared out the window, but her expression gradually softened. “It’s getting better. Gwaiicoin gives the poorest of us some money every month, and the richer the rest of us get, the more goes to them. No Department of Indian Affairs doling it out. Less harassment. It’s working, Nathan!” She rolled down the window and cool air curled in, teasing her hair.
When they pulled into the police station’s parking lot, Nathan hesitated. “Why don’t you come in?” said Grace. “This won’t take long. Then you can meet Jeff.”
“All right.”
Of course, it took longer than it should have. Service systems hadn’t made it to the Vancouver Police Department yet; any other government office, and Grace could have called in her request or used her glasses and let the computers facilitate it. Here, she had to speak to a desk sergeant, and then they waited in the foyer with a number of other bored or frustrated-looking people. While they stood there (all the plastic chairs were full), Nathan said, “Is Jeff a carver?”
She shook her head. “That’s his uncle’s thing. No, Jeff’s studying ecology and law, like any decent Haida these days. Today, he was supposed to be adding new sensors to the downtown mesh network.”
Nathan nodded and they sat there for a while. Finally, Nathan said, “Grace. There’s a problem with Gwaiicoin.”
She’d been chewing her lip and staring out the window. Now she focused all her attention on him. It was quiet in the waiting room, with no TV, no distractions. Nathan squirmed under her gaze.
“There’s been a Sybil attack,” he went on, feeling a strange mix of relief and panic that made the words impossible to stop now. “It’s supposed to be a one-person, one-wallet system. Otherwise the rich can just make millions of wallets for themselves and when their full wallets trigger a redistribution, chances are the funds will end up back in an empty wallet they already own.”
She crossed her arms. “I thought that’s why you made the deal with the government. It’s one wallet per Social Insurance Number.”
“Yeah,” he hesitated. “Somebody’s hacked the SIN databases. Made, well, about a million bogus citizens. And they’ve built wallets with them.”
Grace’s eyes went wide and she stood up, fists clenched.
“Maybe... Maybe it’s fixable,” he said, spreading his hands. “I mean, the Sybil attack... it’s never been solved, every cryptocurrency is vulnerable to it, we’re no worse than Bitcoin was in that sense but of course the potlatch system is critical in your case...” He knew he was babbling but under her accusing gaze he couldn’t stop himself. “I mean, when Microsoft looked at it they decided the only way to prevent Sybils was to have a trusted third party to establish identities, so, so—” He was desperate now. “That’s what we did, Grace! We used the best approach there was. And you know, it’s not just a problem for us, the government’s got to fix it or the whole SIN Number system is compromised...”
He could see she wasn’t listening anymore. Instead, she was putting together a reply. But just as she was opening her mouth and starting to point at Nathan, an officer behind the counter called out, “Grace Cooper!”
She glared at Nathan, snapped her mouth shut, then went behind the security screen with another officer. Nathan could see them through the glass, and debated whether he should just go. But he was a big name on the development team, and the others—well, they were all quiet today. Hiding in their beds, he’d bet. Leaving him to take the heat; but maybe that was the way it should be. He waited.
Grace’s conversation with the cop was surprisingly brief. The officer didn’t look happy, and when they bent over a laptop together and he read something there, he looked positively furious. Grace came out a few minutes later, looking darkly satisfied. “He’ll be right out.”
“What happened?”
“He was in one of the ravines in the University Endowment Lands, nailing sensors to trees. Somebody heard him or saw him and called the cops. They found five hundred dollars in his pocket. Figured an aboriginal kid wouldn’t have that kind of money ’cept by stealing it. So they trumped something up and brought him in.”
Nathan looked past her at the cop, who was now angrily talking to another officer behind the glass. “And what did you just do?”
“I fixed it.” She crossed her arms again and pinned Nathan with accusing eyes. “What are you going to do, Nathan?”
“Fix it! Of course, Grace, why do you think I came to you? All my money’s in Gwaiicoin! Mine and... Look, if this goes south I go down with it. I know I gotta fix it.”
She didn’t reply. A few minutes later a young man with shoulder-length black hair and a wide-cheekboned face came out, lugging a backpack. “Hiya, Grace,” he said, unsmiling. “Hell of a day.” Then he squinted at Nathan. “Hey.”
“This is Nathan. He was just leaving.”
“Right. Just leaving. Listen, Grace, I...” Her face was an impenetrable mask. Nathan’s shoulders slumped and he turned away.
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
ALICIA WAS WAITING for him when he walked in the door. “Tell me why I can’t pull my money!”
While Nathan visited one development team member after another, she had been texting him with this exact question, and he’d been fending her off as best he could.
“Because the news hasn’t hit yet,” he said as he kicked of his shoes. “Until this goes public, anything you or I do is going to look like insider trading. Hell, it would be insider trading. That’s why nobody else on the team has bought out yet.” He went straight to the kitchen and rooted around in the fridge for a beer. “But trust me, they’re all sitting at their desks with hands hovering over the mouse, waiting for the news to break.”
“But don’t you know when that’s going to happen? The bottom’s going to fall out of Gwaiicoin. We’ll lose everything if we don’t sell now.”
He stalked into the living room and sat down. The couch faced out over Blanca Street, and the forested campus of the University of British Columbia. You could see Musqueam lands from here. “We all know that.” He savagely yanked the cap off the bottle and took a deep pull, glaring at her. “It’s up to the government to make an official statement and they’re sitting on it for now. And for the rest of us... none of us can be seen to be the first to bail. Who’d want to be known as the guy who kicked off the biggest crash since the Great Depression?”
“It’s not that big,” she said.
“It is to us. To the Haida. And the Musqueam and the others.”
“So you’re all holding your breath. But should I?”
He blinked at her. “Insider trading. Besides, do you want to be known as the one who brought down Gwaiicoin?”
She thought about it. “I would if I had to. It’s my money.”
“And that’s why it’ll go all the way down when it goes. But your reputation—your career—isn’t riding on this. Mine is. Just... just hold off for an hour or two.” He made a patting gesture with both hands, as if to keep the whole issue down. “I’m sure it’ll hit the news tonight.”
Her lips thinned; she whirled, and went back to the kitchen, to bang around in the cupboards.
A year ago Nathan’s safety net had been this condo and another one—an investment property in the suburbs. No matter how the Gwaiicoin experiment did, he had wealth sunk in real estate. Now, housing prices were collapsing in the downtown core. There was general flight from one of the priciest markets on the continent. He’d seen little signs of the decay just now that only a local would notice: the paint was peeling on the garage doors, the exhaust fans in the wall weren’t running. Homeless people were living under the neighborhood’s bridges.
So he’d sold off his investment property and put the money into Gwaiicoin.
Rather than turn on the TV, he put on his AR glasses, w
ent to stand on the balcony and gazed through the damp air at the park.
Shadows leaned in from the right as the sun neared the waters of the Strait. He loved to sit out here and watch the sunset proceed, the lights come on in their thousands as night fell. The city’s gone quiet even since I moved here. The incessant hum of distant internal combustion engines had become rare as electrics took over. Some said that quieter cars were also responsible for more people strolling, not walking, in evening light like this.
Nathan sighed and called up the Gwaii overlay in his glasses.
The heads-up display showed a silent aurora above the city, its rippling banners of light made of thousands of thin vertical lines. Each line signified ownership—of houses, cars, shops—inferred by algorithms that constantly rifled through public databases and commercial stats. The lines joined and rejoined overhead, becoming fewer, showing how most of the houses were really owned by this or that bank; how businesses were in debt to other businesses. All those relationships of ownership and debt consolidated and narrowed as the line rose, joining in private and public corporations, and these sprouted lines to names. Compared to the dizzying complexity at street level, there were very, very few names up there at the top.
Nathan hadn’t built this overlay, and didn’t know who had. Whoever it was, they designed in a subtle gray-white background that you could only see by standing in the dark and looking up. The image was one of the Art Deco cityscapes from the old movie Metropolis.
He turned on Fountain View, and now the lines pulsed faintly in rising waves. Those ascending glimmers represented money. Some of it rose only to fall again, but some kept on rising, clustering, concentrating, fleeing far over the horizon or ending in the tangle of names above the city. You could change the lights into numbers, and they would show more money going up than was coming down.
Lately Nathan imagined an invisible line coming out of his own head, gutting him like a hooked fish. It was his debt, tugging on him day and night. Money flowed up that line and never came back. If not for the Gwaii, it would suck up his car and his condo; so he turned on the Haida view. It usually reassured him.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 13