The Wasteland

We own it. Let's use it!

Chapter VI

Adon considered the structure he'd arranged, and tried to find ways to break it. 100 times, he'd done so, and every try had failed. There had to be a way.... If there was, and he didn't find it first, it'd bite them in the ass, he knew. The CFS had risen from the ashes of the transnationals, inheritor of a thousand years of banking expertise. They knew how to penetrate a hole, to take advantage of an exploit. He had to be perfect, or he might as well not even try.

Each account generated it's own crypto, and each crypto was valued in relation to the sum of all currencies, and therefore to each other. That made each currency exchangable for any other, and none of them were issued by anyone but the account holder. Each account could create an unlimited number of currencies, but only had a finite value, which could be split across currencies, or concentrated in any one of them.

As commerce was undertaken, currencies were inured to accounts per transfer activity, completely mixing possession of the currencies across the network in only a few iterations. Once the mixing began, there was no putting the cat back in the bag. It was practically impossible to track the roil and boil of the mixed currencies - over 10B of them, just to start with - even with quantum computing, which Adon knew was going to be used to do it.

He didn't have access to the hardware to test it, but the formulas he used to model the system were conclusive, and he'd looked a hundred times (101 now), for a flaw. He hadn't found one. As a whole the system totaled the reports of each account, which had to balance with each other. If an account failed to balance with any one other account with which it had transacted, the out of balance accounts were segued off into a separate fork that, in sum, did balance with the total, and all other accounts with which that fork transacted, concentrating imbalances within ever smaller regions of interaction, until those accounts could reconcile with each other, healing themselves (and ending the fork), or remaining forever forked, yet still able to transact with the universal system through the interface of the balanced fork.

There was no inflation, no taxation, no fees, no interest... There was no overall oversight, no central bank, no government, no nothing. There were only individuals, corporate concerns, etc., interacting of their own free will, on their own initiative, without anyone else having any say about what they were transacting, what they transacted in, or who they transacted with. Each account was staked based on the market value of the prior worth of the work that the account was linked to, but if such valuation was too high, or low, the market corrected it, as future transactions each revalued the account.

It was pure capitalism. Only profit increased the value of accounts, and no cronies, no swindles, no legal fictions, could create means of siphoning off resources to some scammers. If some accounts began to try to craft siphons, they'd create an imbalance, and get forked. If they wanted individual access to the network, instead of being behind the balanced point of entry, they'd have to reconcile their accounts, and get back in balance to do so.

If you wanted to make a sweetheart deal with your cousin, you were free to do so - but only with your money, or those you could convince to pay him/her extra - and that was fine too. If you tried to pass off that extra pay as larger value for future transactions, your cousin had better produce. Maybe no one else liked your cousin so much, and would find whatever crappy product you were trying to upmarket wasn't worth the price.

That was a weakness, but they had to start somewhere, and the weakness could only be exploited by someone with the keys to the kingdom, and right now he was the only king. The CFS had their own system, and their control was based on it being used to conduct transactions. They'd never be able to find out about the size of the network until enough transactions had been conducted to reveal enough accounts. The unique currencies being used to transact would not be valued until transactions occurred, and since the accounts were linked via IPFS, there was no central repository of value information.

The 'central' repository was the whole decentralized network, which was a hash the CFS wouldn't have, and could only crack after they had enough of it's subhashes, and even then it would take a... well, however long it would take, it would take a long time to crack, if it could even be done. He just didn't find credible the thought that the CFS could somehow manipulate the system and gain some sort of extractive exploit.

As the network arose, forming out of the void by virtue of transacting, the transactions controlled by the CFS would decrease. They'd still reckon that they possessed the wealth they had stolen over the centuries, but it really didn't exist, if no one transacted in it. Simply by not using their money, it became more and more obviously just the fantasy it was, and the real wealth of the world, the transactions, payments, and trades ongoing, would simply reflect the extant market value of what was transacted - no more fantasies, and no more gilded escalators for oligarchs.

Heresiarchs. That's what would replace them. Financial heresy, and autarchy. He liked it. It was going to work.

Vick took a bite of the Balaklava Mabel had made. It was so good, so sweet; the flaky crust, the nutty filling the perfect consistency. He didn't want the sensation to end. It was possibly better than sex - not that he'd know, he rued, since Sarah had been killed. Sorry Sarah, he thought.

However, he thought that if she tried Mabel's Balaklava, she'd have agreed with him.

Mabel made no pretense of her total dedication to AC. AC made no pretense of not being completely comfortable with being some sort of Don, treated like nobility by Mabel and the rest of the crew. Even Vick, her father, seemed to no longer have much of a parental role. AC didn't seem to be a little girl any more. She didn't do any girlie things, never once seemed to be concerned about fashion, or whether her friends felt this video was funny, or that guy was cute. She never mentioned her friends. She wasn't even wearing makeup.

"AC, I want you to know how proud I am of you. If you need a break, or..." Vick started. AC was looking at him like he was a speck of dust on a white glove. He wanted to crumple, to wither and die. She had been stripped of her childhood when she'd been stripped of her mother, and the illusions that had kept her alive to AC.

"I know Daddy." AC's voice was gentle. The stone behind her eyes never softened, but her face did. Her voice, just the voice of a teenaged girl, wasn't stone, obsidian, like her eyes, that revealed the ineffable fixity of her purpose, her resolve in the quest to destroy the CFS that had murdered her mother, but was as soft as her growing curves. She wouldn't be a little girl any more, he realized. She was growing up on the outside, and had already grown up on the inside.

She hadn't spent much time in that growth, and he mourned that, while also being relieved. It's never easy for a father to contemplate his little girl's shattered heart, and teenage love always shatters hearts, but it broke his own that hers had never been - and might never be - filled with the infatuation that so made teenage love affairs worth every bit of sorrow that followed.

AC rose from the table and took her empty plate to the sink, rinsing off the crumbs with a blast from the faucet, and setting the plate on the few dishes already in the sink, before walking over to the table and kissing her father on the cheek.

"We'll get a break soon." AC smiled at him, and Mabel, who was savoring her own Balaklava, seemingly unaware there was anything else in the world. She belied that impression when she said. "Yep. We've got a plan, and we're going to toss a few monkey wrenches into some gears." With that Mabel rose and tidied up her own mess from dinner. Vick, feeling a keen sense of loss as the last bite of Balaklava faded into memory, did as well.

AC was already back at the console, her fingers flying, her voice punctuating her commands with greetings, acerbic comments, and laughter, depending on what script she was working on. She hadn't mentioned her friends, but she hadn't forgotten them. She had been the rebel of her crew, her peer group, but she was going to be the iconoclast compared to the rest of them, now.

Now, they were all going to make her look like the CFS's greatest fan.