The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “You’re upset because your friends served you fish and wine?” he asked.

  “We’re upset,” his mother said, “because they served us expensive, hard-to-get fish and wine.”

  “What’s wrong with that? It’s nice of them, right?”

  His mother exhaled harshly and rolled her eyes. “Oh, it’s nice, all right.”

  When Wes cocked his head, still unable to process what had gotten his mother so upset, his father said, “Son, there’s nice and then there’s showing off.”

  “But you wouldn’t have even known they were showing off,” Wes said, “if you hadn’t gone deliberately searching the feeds to see what they paid for things.”

  “Everybody does that, Wes. It’s what you do. The Duncans wouldn’t have served us grouper and Argentinean wine if they hadn’t known we’d track the prices later.” His mother—she was only in her late thirties on this day, though she’d seemed to Wes, then, both ancient and ageless—swept her blond bangs roughly out of her eyes and started jogging her foot against the rung of the bar stool she was sitting on. “OK, Dan, you’ve got to help me think here. We should have started planning this last week. We should have checked the feeds the moment we got back from dinner that night.”

  “I can get a nice Bordeaux from Lisa at work,” Wes’s father said.

  “We served them that last time they were here.” She tapped the tablet’s stylus against her bottom lip. “What if we did something kind of whimsical, kind of off the wall. Like, OK, we do the Bordeaux again, but we get a bottle of port for after dinner?”

  His father whistled. “That’s a lot of dough.”

  “Dough?” Wes asked.

  “Credits,” his mother said vaguely. “Yeah. But if we do the port, I think it would be OK to go cheaper on the meal itself. I could do my fresh ravioli with the good farmer’s cheese from Maple Street Market.”

  Wes found himself getting excited, the way he did on the rare occasions when a difficult mathematical proof suddenly yielded its solution to him. “Because the ravioli is labor-intensive,” he said.

  “Well, I suppose you could say that,” his mother said.

  He filed his homework feed and brought up the sketch pad on his own tablet, syncing with the wall monitor so that his doodles would be projected. He swept his mother’s pages thoughtlessly to the side, and when she started to protest, he said, “Shh, shh, shh. Let me think a sec.”

  “Young man, I wasn’t through with those feeds.”

  “I can get them right back,” Wes said. He wrote on the top of the screen, in all caps, COMPARATIVE VALUATION OF DINNERS.

  “Jesus Christ,” his father muttered.

  Then:

  Variables

  Cost (C)

  Rarity (R)

  Novelty (N)

  Complexity (X)

  “But there’s perhaps another, secondary set of variables, and that’s where it gets tricky,” Wes said, scribbling. “Because complexity in one sense is valuable, but maybe also simplicity is valuable. In the case of the farmer’s cheese, for instance. Mom, you called it good, and I agree it tastes good, but it’s not all that rare or refined.”

  “It’s made by local artisans,” his mother said. “It’s organic!”

  “So that’s another variable. I mean, it’s funny to me, because you seem to think the wine they served was so great because it was from Argentina, but you think the cheese you’re going to serve is so great because it’s from here in Durham.” He moved his initial notes to the left and started another column of secondary variables. “The derivations are going to be messy,” he murmured apologetically. “But the general idea, it seems to me, is that the equation you’re working on is Value of the Duncan Meal, in which the primary variables are Cost, in this case roughly 210 credits, not counting the sides and dessert and miscellaneous, and Rarity, because the fish and wine are hard to get, though of course Rarity is a variable that is already factored into Cost by the manufacturer of those particular products.”

  His mother and father exchanged bewildered looks.

  “That’s the thing about Cost as a variable: it takes into account so many other variables. But—” He paused. “Do you think you’ll spend as much as the Duncans did?”

  His mother shrugged impatiently. “I don’t know, Wes. Probably not. We couldn’t get our hands on a bottle of wine like that now if we tried.”

  “So—wow!—that’s another variable, relating to cost but not overlapping perfectly with it. Something to do with exclusivity, accessibility.” He was glowing now with good cheer, nodding vigorously over his notations. He hooked his thumbnail on his bottom front teeth, chomping down hard to catch his racing thoughts, and his mother swatted at his elbow to make him stop. “For some reason, the Duncans can get a hold of something you can’t.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” his father said.

  “OK. What we’re dealing with here, then, is a situation in which Cost, Rarity, and Exclusivity on the Duncans’ side is, if I’m hearing you two correctly, getting balanced on your side by factors that aren’t individually as valuable but that, in combination, eventually add up to comparable value, like the fact that Mom’s going to use time and skill to make the fresh ravioli, and she’s going to go to a local merchant for the cheese. So another factor seems to be not value but the extent to which the purchase adheres to Values, in the moral sense, though—fascinating—that only means anything if the Duncans happen to share your middle-class liberal values, or if you can at least make them feel, for the space of a dinner, that your liberal values are superior to theirs, whatever they are.” Under “Societal Values,” he listed Environmental, Civic, Economic, and Nutritional.

  “What’s totally crazy to me is how you’re able to keep all of these different kinds of values in your head at once—how you can even value all of these things at the same time. If the farmer’s cheese contributes to the meal’s Societal Values, because the cheese is organic, and therefore healthier, and local, therefore better for the community and the environment, why would you even want to drink an Argentinean wine that has to be shipped thousands of miles?”

  “Oh, Wes,” his mother said miserably.

  “And for that matter, if you’re a person who cares about Societal Values in a liberal, middle-class way, why does it even matter to you if your meal is equal with the Duncans’ meal? Why not just enjoy your friendships?”

  His parents were glaring at him.

  He hit Save on the sketch pad of lists and equations, filed them, and shrugged. “Anyway, I’m going to go play some Land of Shadows before dinner,” he said, his mind, for now, already on to the next thing, which was whether or not he would be able to assemble enough Coin of the Realm to advance his clan to Level Sixteen before the coming Catastrophe that was being advertised in all of the LoS feeds.

  But in the coming weeks, those equations he’d jotted down for his parents started to nag at him. This certainly had much to do with playing Land of Shadows and analyzing his own desire to accumulate Coin of the Realm, and how that Coin, the quantity of which was visible to any player who wanted to check his stats, affected his influence in that virtual world, granting him powers (spell casting, life after death, speed, swordsmanship) as he played. He watched his mother and father carefully, listening to their desires and complaints, noting that so much of what seemed to aggrieve them in life was tied to money: how there was never enough of it to live as they wished, and how the culture of its use was abstract and unspoken, with rules that everyone was expected to follow without ever having been taught them. Why? Why did people live like this when they could just live like the Land of Shadows players? The LoS feeds reported to Wes, usefully, information such as “Clansman Zor Greatship acquired 5,000 Coin of the Realm by battling Clansman Dagon Quicksilver” and “Clan Leader Mero Redfinch spent 250 Coin of the Realm to acquire a Lifeforce Restoration Spell.�
�� It helped Wes strategize, knowing that it might be useless for him to battle Mero Redfinch if Mero could just cast the Lifeforce Spell if he lost. And that time he let Lissa Pollywog borrow 500 Coin to purchase a Silver Shield, he set his feeds to alert him when Lissa had gone on to acquire enough Coin to repay him along with the 10 percent interest he’d charged. At that point, he could either retrieve the money from her account or negotiate new terms. Why did the real world not work like this? One day, he overheard his mother complaining about her sister, his aunt Meg, and how Meg had still not returned to her the eight hundred credits his mother had loaned her for a rent payment, even though she (his mother) knew that Meg had since gone on a clothes shopping spree and come home with, among other things, a very expensive pair of suede riding boots. If the real world were more like Land of Shadows, Wes thought, then his mother could have simply collected the credits as soon as Meg had earned them rather than muttering about Meg behind her back and all the while acting to her face like things between them were hunky-dory.

  Programming was a bit of a hobby for him, and he had to submit an honors dissertation to be approved for early graduation, so in the next year he created the architecture for what would essentially become Pocketz Beta. The system was based on two core ideas: transparency, so that conspicuous consumption became regulated and systematized; and nearly fail-safe accountability, meaning that credit exchanges could happen person to person, without a lending institution acting as a go-between. Money was entirely virtual now, had been since well before Wes was even born, and so what point did banks serve, anyway? A credit was not a dollar. It was not substantiated, however arbitrarily, by some gold reserve in a vault. It was, he had learned that day of his parents’ conversation about the Duncans, an abstraction, an emotion, potent as love and as impossible to harness or define. So why not create a system that made apparent those abstract qualities that gave a credit its power, that made plain who had the most Coin of the Realm and how they were willing to spend it? Why not make the unspoken rules spoken, and reveal rather than obscure the power dynamics driving value exchanges? If the child is spending the parent’s money, the parent knows on what. If the debtor has the funds to repay the lender, the lender can reclaim what is owed. If more participants in the feed are spending credits on BoostJoose than Rola Cola, let that determine the relative credit value of energy sodas, at least until the trends shift. By the time Wes submitted his honors project, he had created, he believed, the framework for an economic utopia, an entirely self-regulated market system that resisted fraud and inflation and made apparent the true nature of Societal Values, however contradictory those values may prove to be.

  “This is very inventive,” his honors advisor, Professor McGregor, said. Her voice was brittle and nasal, her tone patronizing. “It’s a clever idea, though perhaps a cynical one. You’ve taken the relationships out of social networking and left the ads.”

  “I think that’s a gross simplification,” Wes said.

  She crooked an eyebrow.

  “In fact,” Wes said, “the system subverts advertising, at least in the current sense of the word. What’s the more powerful argument for the value of a product: a manufacturer-financed image or video for how great it is, or the clear evidence that it’s selling two to one over the competition?”

  “Value is subjective,” Professor McGregor said.

  “Of course it is,” said Wes. “That’s the whole point of Pocketz.”

  She huffed. “OK. Let’s move on. The project itself is fine—totally adequate for the purposes of an honors thesis.”

  “Adequate,” Wes echoed.

  “Adequate,” Professor McGregor repeated. “But the Review of Literature is quite poor. You only mention five economists specifically—Smith, Mill, Veblen, Krugman, and Odhiambo. It reads a bit like an EncycloFeedia entry. In fact, when I conducted a search of some of the sentences in your Review of Lit, I found that you had cut and pasted whole paragraphs from your source materials, including EncycloFeedia.”

  Wes waited calmly for her to make her point.

  “That’s plagiarism, Mr. Feingold.”

  “So?”

  She laughed disbelievingly. “You wrote in your Significance of Project section about ‘Societal Values’ and how those compare to value in a more general sense. Or, rather, how ‘values’”—she made exaggerated air quotes—“influence value.” She sipped from a mug of coffee like an actor using a prop. “Academic honesty is a Societal Value. Perhaps it’s one that doesn’t have much capital in certain circles of life, like the world of web feeds that you seem to want to be a part of, but here, at this school, it has premium worth. This place cares if you plagiarize your sources. And since this place has the task of determining whether or not you graduate with a high school diploma, which determines whether or not you will be able to go to university, our value becomes your value, at least temporarily.”

  “So what are you saying?” Wes asked.

  “I’m saying that I want you to rewrite the Review of Literature and the Theoretical Framework portions of your thesis. You need at least ten more sources, and you certainly need a refresher on how to properly cite your sources. Here’s a hint: if you didn’t write the sentence, you better put it in quotation marks.” She synced her tablet so that a calendar appeared on the wall beside Wes. “I’m thinking five months should be sufficient time, though I can give you longer if you think you need it. So . . . August fifteenth. You send me the doc by no later than noon that day. I read and get back to you by mid-September. And maybe we can still have you walking the line by the December ceremony. What do you think?”

  “I think,” said Wes, “that it’s bullshit, and I could give a rat’s ass about a high school diploma.”

  Her face and neck bloomed with red heat. “Excuse me?”

  “What possible value could a certificate declaring me a high school graduate have if a person like you has the power to withhold it from me? I just brought you a system that’s going to revolutionize the world, and you’re concerned about whether or not I pulled some quotes from EncycloFeedia. It’s fucking ridiculous.”

  Professor McGregor was practically shaking now with rage. In later years, Wes would register some guilt over this meeting. Not over the fact that he had, as she called it, plagiarized; the Review of Lit was bullshit busy work, he knew it and so did she, and the fact that she would delay his graduation over it revealed an appalling lack of vision. But he shouldn’t have cursed, and he shouldn’t have raised his voice. He should not have said, as he went on to, “In a few years’ time I’m going to be rich and famous, and you’re still going to be sitting in this room lording yourself over kids who are smarter than you are, because you know it’s your last chance to do it. So keep your stupid degree. I’m out of here.”

  And, in the time it took him to gather his tablet and turn his back to her blotchy, ugly, shocked face, he was. When Pocketz went live the next year, and when the stock went public four years after that, the news stories always began with a version of the same theme: “High school dropout Wes Feingold,” “Unlikely CEO Wes Feingold.” It was a part of the myth now, and Wes thought sometimes that it would have been worth doing the revision, which would not have been all that hard anyway, just to live without hearing those qualifiers before his name. He wasn’t some lucky idiot who screwed up his life and later stumbled upon success; he was simply beyond Professor McGregor’s petty moralizing and worthless degree. But that didn’t make for a good headline.

  —

  Ten years later and here he was, doing this crazy thing, this OLE Fall Color Tour, a trip valued at one hundred thousand credits. Now this was an expenditure that defied most rational theories about relative value. In a society that placed safety at its highest premium, that had withdrawn itself into zones, each with its own strategies for fighting or deflecting the advances of an epidemic of aggressive parasites, what did it mean for rich men and women like
him to spend extravagantly on a trip right into the midst of that epidemic?

  He had more credits than he could spend in his lifetime. Pocketz, as he anticipated, was operating now mostly on its own momentum, and the innovations he periodically made, such as refining the stock market Projectionz interface, gave him none of the thrill of engineering the system’s initial structure. Nor had Pocketz changed the world in exactly the ways he had imagined it would. As a teenager he had theorized that systematizing conspicuous consumption would reduce the cultural capital of spending. Remove the mystery, make it so that his parents could have known before going over to the Duncans what was for dinner and exactly how much it cost, and maybe the credits spent wouldn’t matter as much. Maybe, just maybe, the friendships would matter more, and value would be derived not from the selection of fish and booze but from the quality of conversation, the number of genuine laughs. That had been his hope. No, his premonition.

  He was wrong, of course.

  His board of directors had pressured him to move into interactive advertising. Someone goes to a movie, you hit Explore, and a trailer for Rubber Meets the Road III starts playing. Someone has dinner at Felipe’s Mexican Cantina, you “explore,” and the menu scrolls through your feed to the accompaniment of mariachi music. Your best friend Jake claims a coupon for a buy one, get one free latte at Pappy Chino’s, and your feed offers you the same deal. It was the obvious evolution of the software, but it wasn’t what Wes had in mind the day he stormed out of Professor McGregor’s office. Nor had he imagined then what would eventually become the site’s most popular feature, the daily roundup of Deep Pocketz and Big Spenderz, sortable by country, zone, city, and even personal friends list, though it was Wes himself who had suggested that some system of rewards, however trifling, might help to solidify the program’s popularity. Now, each day the news feeds reported the top five in each national feed. Wes was ranked seventh in Deep Pocketz as of yesterday morning—his usual slot—and he usually didn’t even rate in the top 100 of Big Spenderz, though booking the OLE tour a month ago had edged him briefly into the eighty-third slot.