Post Scarcity

In a post scarcity future dystopia a man finds solace.

You look up into a clear blue sky.  The sun is hot and bright on your face and you know you should cover up soon.  But, sitting on the Gulf of Mexico shore in December in Arkansas exhausted from your work is the most wonderful experience of your life and you don’t want to move, ever.

 

You were given the opportunity to go to Arkansas to work at the gaming palaces along the beach.  It had been a long wait since you lost your job and became an Uney, an unemployable, to now and you still miss your old job; the job that was promised to be irreplaceable by the college application adds on the network.

 

You thought all was lost, but nothing is ever complete.  For every change there is another change but sometimes those changes come real slow and sometimes they come real bad.  Now, this is the change, a chance to work sixteen to twenty hour days making beds and busing tables and trimming Crepe Myrtle bushes until they send you back.

 

“What are you doing?” you hear an angry voice yell from a second floor gallery in that new dialect all the boss class has learned from net videos.

 

You jump up from your day dreaming rest and you do it fast.  You know the drill but running makes so much more sense.  You run back to your quarters across the artificial beach for a block and a half from the shore and as you enter the common quad you are brought down by two security guards in tactical black.

 

The shock from their electric gloves squeezes the fillings out of two of your teeth.  You swallow them as your mouth foams.  You shake.  You know that even that doesn’t matter.  Your son can print new ones and glue them in when you’re home because by the time you get home you know he’ll probably have to print you a couple of completely new teeth and maybe a skin graph or two.

 

By the time you quit jerking from the residual amperage in your nervous system you are on an autobus with other Shakers and some very quiet, dejected riders.  The bus moves along without a driver and without security and it is a dangerous place to be.

 

This is not the freedom bus you think and you think what freedom bus?  History is dead.  There is only the future and the future looks like the past and freedom only lasted as long as there was something for people to do and they got paid for doing that something and they gave their money to other people who did things in return.

 

As you think these things your Genius Watch scrolls pages of information relevant to your thoughts just in case you’re interested in the information.   A mail message pops up reminding you that you are five years behind on your property tax payments.

 

You laugh.  The county took that home three years ago and they still don’t see the problem.  They don’t see that when you lost your job along with most everyone else in your neighborhood none of you could afford to pay property taxes.  But property taxes kept going up anyway because income taxes were going down for the boss class as part of a popular political philosophy and there was less income to tax from everyone else.  To top it all off, since so many of you and your neighbors no longer worked and earned money, the county had to pick up the tab for some of your care, or find some other way.

 

The other way, plain and simple, is slavery.  No one calls it that and even you are afraid to think that, but it’s true.  You live on property owned by another person and you only do work that would be too expensive to replace with a bot and in your well built plastic printed shack you can print anything you need except water and truly edible food.

 

When you need a new widget you just go over to the dump pile and pick out some suitable scrap, grind it up, melt it down and spit it out into the shape and color of whatever you need.  They call it Post-Scarcity; the age where every man would be rich.  You call it Money and Water are Pretty Damned Scarcity.

 

But you don’t have to work.  There is no work or hardly any work.  You have lots of time when the property owner isn’t around, or when you’re not contracted off to somewhere else and you can think of lots of new things to print, except weapons.

 

Somehow the code super geeks are able to corrupt those files no matter where they come from and the days of traveling bands of unemployed men and women with home printed plastic spears and nylon handguns and rifles are over, so you make s**t.  You make s**t you look at and admire so you can grind it up and melt it down so you can spit out more s**t.  Some s**t’s good s**t and you can trade that s**t for other good s**t but none of that s**t buys water.  Only the landlord and the French company he’s sworn his allegiance to have water.

 

You’ve heard rumors that in other parts of the world, maybe even in this country, the three big water giants are fighting over drilling rights and concessions but what does it even matter if it’s true.  Wars don’t have that same visceral appeal since nationalism is dead.  How do you hate the Jap who just shared his 3 D sex toy file with you?  How do you want to murder the Russian kid who sent you the 3 D file to spit out the brace for your daughter’s twisted back?  You don’t.  You fight wars when they tell you to because they give you some bio matter food and chemically treated water and medical care and some entertainment education and a place to set up your plastic shack to print s**t from.

 

You found a book with printed pages, the old kind of printing, 2 D printing, once and the book led the cheer for the glories of post-scarcity progress and you used it clean your bottom, but the same people who own all the water also process the sewage and they found the pages and you spent a while in a camp trying to explain where you found a book.  In the camp you helped turn that very same sewage into biological matter for Bio Printers.  Food is Bio Printed but you don’t even go there in your thoughts.

 

Chemistry has come a long way and that makes you happy.  A little box about the size of an Easy Bake Oven you printed from your big printer serves as a Chem Printer and you print off all the helpers you need and you need them because your wife will be home soon and she’ll smell of powder and perfume and she’ll have printed plastic sacks of food and s**t and water because there is and will always be some economic activity.  This activity the boss class really likes.  A loaf of yeast bread can earn them unprintable female pleasures from three generations of a woman’s family.  Yes, you think, thank God for the Chem Printers.

 

Of course some people still work and make money and they live like sultans.  There are bureaucrats and security guard overseers and technical people who design new machines and work on the old machines when the new machines fail to fix the old machines and some people even still work in manufacturing because not everything can be printed.  But most everything can be and that means that most everything has no value and with no value you can’t be paid and if you can’t be paid you sell yourself in to slavery for rationed water and bio matter to make fillets of dead brown things to eat and steady supplies of Chem goop.

 

A couple of weeks later you get contracted out to another owner.  You take a long autoplane ride to a place where there are a lot of real trees and the air is cool and dry.  When the breeze stops, mosquitoes, or at least that is what you are told they are, land on you and you laugh because it looks like they are trying to reverse print you.

 

You are told by some of the others that your new boss is part of an Indian tribe.  You laugh at that and even shudder a little and think of the tribes of blue and orange spear wielding men and women at home who used to roam the crumbling neighborhoods and fight until blood ran down the street gutters.

 

The dark skinned boss class guy takes you and some others away from the gaming palace and gives you metal axes and metal knives.  He tells you to be careful with them because they very expensive and hard to replace.  Immediately one guy who told you on the autoplane that he had studied to be a Randian Objectivist Economist falls to the ground and the sharp axe blade cuts through his groin and severs his femoral artery.  Someone near the fallen man laughs and says, “Would you look at that.  If they print him a new one it better be bigger than his last one.”

 

The boss class guy with high cheek bones and long dark hair walks you away from the dying Economist and a long way through the trees.  When someone complains about being thirsty he walks all of you to a big lake where waves lap the shore and you see birds falling out of the sky to scoop up food from the water and eat.  Everyone looks.  The sun glimmers off the lake and the air cools the sweat under the clothes and hat you were given to work in.

 

You look down to see that your Genius Watch has no service and it isn’t sending you any feeds on what kinds of birds those are or which landlord family or big goop company sponsors their existence.  You also see that everyone who was with you is running after the long haired boss class guy and they are begging to not be left alone.

 

You walk the other direction, around the lake away from the long haired boss class guy and the axe wielding Uneies and you keep walking.  You walk for two days until you find a hill with a clearing that overlooks a lake and you use your axe to cut trees and you use those trees to manual print yourself a small shack.

 

There is water but no Bio Box printers to spit out a patty and you are hungry and the hunger feels good and the bugs walking away from your hands on the water you cup to your mouth to drink make you feel alive.  And you think back to Arkansas on the Gulf of Mexico and you realize that, no, live or die, this is the most wonderful experience of your life.