In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
[...]
It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.
Excerpt from anthropologist David Graeber's article "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" Strike magazine August 2013
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"Another enforcement officer ping. I responded as directed and verified identity," Max said.
We'd been flying straight north over corporate owned fields for the last two hours. The airspace was restricted but a majority of the time we were saving by taking this route instead of taking the train was because we were ignoring such restrictions.
I let out a long breath, having come to a decision.
"Slow us down and bring us low, I want to see these plates up close a bit more."
"Shall I inform the enforcement officers following us what we are doing?" Max asked.
"Yes."
The hovercar slowed and then began a gentle decent. When Max was in control she kept us level. When I tried to drive the nose was pointing up and down and all over. I wasn't arrogant or egotistic enough to want to drive all the time but I had taken time to learn how to control the hovercar, something I'd never driven before.
There were huge towers set out in a grid a quarter mile or so from each other. The towers rose nine or ten stories tall, were mostly glass walled green houses, with the uppermost floor capped in matte black.
The plates surrounded the base of the towers and were elevated off the ground by twenty or thirty feet. The plates were made of plastic and glass. They collected water which was processed at the base of the towers making it safe to water the plants with. Mostly that was neutralizing the acids and removing a bunch of pollution. Spaced evenly on top of the plates were mirrors, solar PV cells, and foggy plastic sections. These all alternated in a even pattern around the tower in various rings.
The solar PV sections produced power. The foggy plastic sections reduced and scattered the light that did get through the plate to all the plants planted below thus reducing the light for all the plants that didn't do well in the direct sunlight. The mirrors directed sunlight up to the tip of the tower where temperatures reached hundreds of degrees. There, molten salt was heated. That salt was then used to boil water to produce even more power. Beneath the plate lights were mounted to provide light even at night.
Most of the power produced was used to treat and cool water. Misters on the bottom of the plates kept the air forty to fifty degrees cooler than the unprotected surface temperatures. Plants that could survive in direct sunlight filled the tilled fields outside the plates visible from the air.
I didn't have thermal capabilities with my current augs, but Max was able to pull a video from the feeds to show me the towers when I asked why we kept avoiding them by a wide margin if they didn't have weapons.
The mirrors heating the molten salt at the top during the day created a massive plume of heat that caused the air around the top of the tower to rise. That in turn created a slight vacuum below. The plates were semi-solid, so air rushed along them towards the tower, then rose up the outside of it in a constant wind, until it was heated at the top even more and created even more turbulence.
When there was enough dust or particulates in the air you could sort of see a tornado type shape around the towers. Unfortunately that same dust which created an interesting sight to see, had dangers of its own. Namely static charge that would build up into actual lighting strikes.
The lighting we saw from time to time looked like it came form the clear sky to strike the towers, when in fact the lighting was building on the towers and discharging into the sky.
Occasionally there were plates that were much higher off the ground. These covered not crops, but orchards.
In the very corners, farthest from the towers were small four story buildings where employees were housed.
Occasionally we might see a human in the tall glass towers, but we saw them much more often around the housing units. The only break to the well established patterns were in the garden plots around the housings. Everything else had a huge uniformity that was honestly a bit off putting.
I wondered if there were any wild places left, places untouched by human hands that were somehow surviving global warming and acid rains, loss of pollinators, and all the other horrors I'm sure I didn't even have a clue about.
"You can take us back up," I said out loud.
Max lifted us higher and accelerated to the safe limits of the vehicle.
"You think they are indentured?" I asked Sara. I'd turned my head to look at her so she knew I was speaking to her and not to Max.
"I can check, one moment," she said.
"No. It's-" I sighed.
"I was just trying to talk, to umm, bull shit or whatever," I said.
We had never been what anyone would exactly call friends. But we hadn't had a boss-employee relationship either. Most of the people in the office did their own thing. When there were issues with the bathrooms or kitchen Paula was the one to handle it. Now though it seemed like everything was growing more formal.
"I wonder what would happen if we swooped down there and stole apples from a tree?" Sara said.
"Do you want apples? I'm sure if we asked-" I cut myself off. I could see from her reaction that it wasn't about the apples. She was trying for small talk as well.
"Likely nothing," I said easing into the conversation, "Or they'd make us a care package just to get us to leave."
"Or record it and then say their produce is so good Samurai show up in person to eat it."
I smiled at that and figured she wasn't far from the truth.
We talked a bit more and the conversation seemed to naturally end up discussing the work that needed to be done at Helios Tower.
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"I'm sorry," she said, "I wasn't trying to talk about it, we were just talking about these towers, and engineering, and then-"
"It's fine," I said. Though I really would have liked to continue talking about things that didn't matter.
"I did want to speak to you about expectations, both yours and mine, and what role you'd like to fill moving forward. So far it's been with me, on my hip, helping keep me alive. Which I do appreciate by the way and I know I don't say enough."
We talked for a little while, the hovercar banking and weaving so gently over the long distances between towers that I hardly noticed.
"Can I point something out," she asked at one point. Somehow the conversation dynamic had changed and she had been asking me a series of questions.
"Of course."
"You aren't thinking like a Samurai. You don't need people you can trust in those positions. You have a Vanguard AI who can tell you if people lie, cheat, or otherwise work against your interests. When it comes to 'Trust but Verify,' you've got the verify part down. Putting myself or Paula or even Greg in those positions might make you feel good, but it will lead to sub-par leadership. You think Greg is a trained and educated leader or maintenance supervisor? He's a guy who lost his family in an incursion because he was getting drunk with his buddies across town. He fell into the role he's in because he is very good around a wrench and he doesn't bother getting high or getting drunk. He was the best they had when all they had was a building full of squatters and refugees. But he's not going to do as good a job in a leadership position as someone who has experience dealing with schedules, lead times, planning, coordinating with housing for outages, juggling money, material, and workforce. If you want to move quickly, and you absolutely should, it means hiring new people. Qualified people."
"Which means having living space for them," I said. "Credits to pay them, a plan for them them to follow, material, a space to work, and all the other things I don't have, or don't even know about."
"You can reach out to the Operators on this, but there are already guides on how to make credits. Most off the top suggestions are things only Samurai can do. Investigations into finances and crimes. If you find a guilty party you fine them large amounts of credits. Those credits bank roll everything else. There is also the Operator investment and loan program. It's a peer-to-peer lending and investment program, which you should audit to make sure no one is fucking with, and then consider as a place to get loans. The interest you pay back is going back to Operators. You can also start a bank or credit union. Investors will flock to a Samurai backed bank because they know you can just take the money you are owed if there are any problems in the future. More over you aren't going to loan money to risky applicants you can check out with a Vanguard AI, which means more money with less risk for investors."
"You've really been reading those guides," I said.
"You weren't the only one doing their homework on the train," she said with a smile.
"Max why don't you join us and weigh in on this. What is your recommendation on earning credits?"
"Auditing corporate finances will undoubtedly uncover wrong doing and violations of various laws, including tax laws. Many jurisdictions have bounty programs that share a measure of owed funds recovered with the agent or entity that informs the jurisdiction and the information results in successful recovery of owned funds. This process would both be legal, and require little effort on your part and only a very low expenditure of points."
I knew that because I'd been involved in years long court cases to get the whistle blowers their money. Those bounty programs didn't work because corps could tie up the payments for years and years. But as a Samurai I could just take the credits and transfer them to the jurisdictions they were owed to and then pay myself the bounty.
"What would I need to spend points on?" I asked.
"Hardware to act as a bridge between the cyberwarfare implant you have and a major fiberoptic network. The amount of data and traffic that I would have to deal with would be enormous and you are not equipped to deal with that. Further it is likely that I would need access to private air gapped networks as well. Which might require drones or personal exposure to access internal servers."
"Okay. Add it to the shopping list," I said with a sigh.
"Shopping list?" Sara asked.
"I don't want to buy things until I know if I need them or if I'll be getting rid of them for something more powerful, thus wasting points. There are also competing technologies. I can install a tier two nanite-sac implant or whatever in my gut to make nanites, or I can upgrade my," I paused as I shuddered, "my flesh enough that my natural anti-bodies and healing and everything is just super-hero levels of regeneration. Then there are tier three technologies that are a merger of both nanites and flesh upgrades. And some of the tier four things I asked about sound like crazy talk."
"Like what?"
"I can't remember it all, but one of the systems that stuck out basically makes cloned parts and teleports them in pieces swapping damaged bits for undamaged in real time, while you are moving, thinking, everything. It drags around a sort of pocket universe thing where time is accelerated and it prints these clones in pico-seconds and then swaps parts out. And it's quick. Like it could swap damaged bits forever every three seconds."
"Three point two seconds," Max corrected, "and only until power sources ran dry, which would be a long time, but not forever."
I saw wonder, and then a hint of envy in Sara's eyes before she turned away to look out the window.
"And the idea about turning Helios Tower into an Arcology is good, but in truth it's not a large enough goal. You aren't outfitting a building with points. You are getting printers yes?"
She turned back to me and I nodded. Once I'd looking into things printers seemed like the best way to be a force multiplier. A hundred points, a thousand points even could only get you so many things. But with printers-
"And the only difference between one floor or a thousand with printers is time, power, and materials," Sara said, finishing my own thoughts. "Which in the end comes down to time, as you can make PV cells for power, and trucks and diggers to harvest land fills for materials. Facilities to sort trash, recycle, transport, all of that."
"I'm overwhelmed by just the work needed to bring the Helios tower up to date and transform it into an arcology where we are mostly self sufficient."
Sara gave me a look and I sighed.
"Which is why," I said slowly, "I'm not the best person for the job."
"A single person couldn't do the job. You'll be hiring corps. Plural. All of that takes credits. Hundreds of millions, like billions of credits."
"Billions-" I said with a bit of surprise.
"Tens of billions," Sara said. "Which means you need people to manage that money, track it, make sure people get paid, make sure you get paid, check to make sure you aren't being cheated, all of that. Again your AI could do it, but better to give people jobs and just check in on them from time to time. At least in my opinion. But of course that means housing and water and payroll."
"So where does it all start?" I asked.
"Credits," Sara said.
"How would you do it?" I asked her.
"Get a line of credit from the Operators peer-to-peer system- After you check it out to make sure no one is fucking with it."
"Max can you check that out for us?"
"By asked to see their books as it were or by a more direct route without asking for permission."
"Ask I guess," I decided.
"Not many places would give you credits without a solid plan on how to make that money back. Even the Operator's Network vets loans for the Operators that use the program, but being a Samurai, I'm betting if you offered 5% interest paid back over three years, you could raise millions. I think you should offer rates more in line with what a bank would offer. You'll be able to afford it and the loans aren't really to raise capital. They are to pay back the operators that work for free for the betterment of man kind."
"I see it now," I said while squinting at her. "All this saving my life, making me a better Samurai, it was all a money scheme all along."
She didn't crack a smile.
"Have you read the Samurai Only Guides?"
"I'm not sure, Max summarizes everything for me."
"Max what's the first couple lines of the Money Guide? The Samurai Only restricted version?"
She looked at me and continued, "They gave me access to it because of my proximity to you."
"Samurai are above credits and currency. Those concepts are beneath you. You can literally never pay for anything ever again. You can take what you need forever and there is no one who will stop you. Accept that the only currency that matters to you is points and tokens. Then ask yourself what can you do with credits that makes humanity better, or at least the lives of individual humans better? We will go into the proofs later, but the best thing you can do is create jobs and give out loans to individuals while holding larger entities like corporations and governments accountable to the money they owe. In furtherance of-"
"Thank you Max," Sara said cutting the AI off.
"What's that?" I asked seeing a break in the endless miles and miles of towers, plates, and farmland.
The building took the same area as a plate would but there was no tower and it was several stories taller than the plates were.
"Fungi and other plants that need to be grown in sterile rooms," Max said.
"Neat," I said watching it as we passed by.
We passed over a six or eight lanes of train tracks that seemed to run perfectly east and west as we needed north.
"I wonder if there are Samurai who just sort of travel around to see things."
Neither Max nor Sara responded.