January 18, 300

“In the Most Conservative Neighborhoods, Some Unofficial Currencies Have Already Been Adopted. The Results Are Mixed.”

“On February 3, Lyman will be voting on, among other things, its eighth referendum to institute a national currency that will radically transform the economy if approved, depending on how it's implemented. It's been an effort in the making since the Rapture days, and after generations of defeat, the movement could now finally be vindicated.”

“But deeper in Lyman’s more insular communities, some people have stopped waiting.”

“The two townships in question are Frement Valley, a farming community in southern Takoma, and South Meade, which lies deep in the Riley forests. Both have voted overwhelmingly for conservative candidates in the past 40 years, but up until this year, all of those candidates have been write-ins. Next month, their combined 600 residents are looking to turn out for David Taggart, who has seen a startling rise in polling numbers in recent weeks.”

“Frement Valley has been trading in the so-called ‘thatch,’ a square banknote printed in the district mayor’s hall that is named after Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Britain from Earth and fiscal conservative icon. South Meade’s trade has been with ‘Limen’ coins, which is made of a sparkly refinement of limestone, gold and nickel, resources that are abundant in their region. And yes, it’s pronounced the same way as ‘Lyman.’”

“The two communities are miles apart, yet they seem to operate in unison. They each accept both currencies and maintain them at the same value, which is done by a joint effort to track the money produced in their respective neighborhoods and the money spent in their combined marketplaces. They each have added a little bit to the overall money supply for the past eight years the currencies have existed, making the currencies less valuable and goods cost more, essentially mimicking the process of inflation that existed on Earth.”

“For such a sleepy and convoluted process, some residents are absolutely jubilant talking about it. Take Serhan Bardakçı, one of the Frement residents charged with monitoring the money supply.”

“‘Everybody I talk to loves what they’ve been seeing the past eight years,’ he told us from outside his century-old farmhouse. ‘This kind of social experiment hasn’t been done in, y’know, three hundred years now, so it’s very exciting to see that this little community of a few hundred people might soon be the model for the rest of the nation.”

“In the early days of their development, the communities were almost entirely reliant on state-provided resources and equipment and remained reliant on them going forward with key stipulations. Frement Valley got a particularly short stick in its agreement with the Lyman city government. For one, they keep only a tiny percentage of the food produced in their 240 acres of farmland, leaving residents with lengthy trips to their district’s respective grocery sectors to put food on the table. As a result, over a third of each township’s adult population is a public driver with their own car.”

"But residents moved quickly to amend that since their currencies were adopted. Starting in July 296, workers in South Meade began ramping up logging and quarry production, and Frement Valley bought up a swath of it to expand their agriculture. But the new farming plots were placed miles away outside city jurisdiction, in effect creating a new local food market that was exclusively shared with South Meade. Small businesses propped up across the townships, and by last year, they had essentially achieved economic isolation."

"But the developments between them didn't catch the eye of the Lyman government until earlier last year, and the Antonis Administration, eager to seize an opportunity to ease the supply disruptions in grocery sectors, immediately sued both townships. The case was appealed straight to the Supreme Court, where it is set to issue a decision on the legality of settling farmland outside Lyman's borders in the next four months."

"But come February, the decision may not matter. 'The state of Frement Valley v. Administration is of no concern to our state of economic affairs,' Owen Christy, mayor of Frement Valley, said in a letter to the township's business owners. 'We remain confident that Amendment #1 will prevail in February, and our plans going forward will revolve on the anticipation of that outcome.'"

"But it was from those court hearings where many of the cracks hidden under the surface have come to light. Because as much as local leaders will sing the praises of their money system, it has rubbed a lot more people the wrong way. The most obvious data indicator of this is in their population statistics. Data released by Frement Valley and South Meade on January 2 shows they've attracted close to 200 new residents from 296-299, 35% of their initial population. But in that same period, the total number of residents barely grew by 5%. And in 299, it saw a 2% drop."

"Part of it has to do with the backlash to the local government's handling of the economic change. According to a former business owner who privately testified to the Supreme Court, 'They tried to hit the ground running with no long-term plan and almost nothing to work with. All the cash from the mayor's hall was going to the logging people, so the rest of us couldn't last with what we were making. Both of my employees left for the city after five months, and I joined them. There was just no stability.'"

"And of course, with distributing money also inevitably comes those who will lack it. And while most have been able to make ends meet, others haven't, and no system was put in place to ensure the jobless wouldn't be going hungry. Neither was a minimum wage.”

“‘I had to get my whole family out of there,’ said a former Frement Valley resident over email who went by Maryam. ‘I couldn't make enough money anywhere to feed the kids and myself, and I only knew one public driver who was willing to take me to the grocery sector.'"

"Maryam was a familiar face at monthly town council meetings, insistently pleading for a minimum wage and welfare for the unemployed. But as she tells it, the pleas fell on deaf ears. 'There was just such a callous disregard for the people's wellbeing. They didn't listen to anybody if they weren't patting the council on the back.'"

"Despite the glaring problems, the Frement Valley council is planning on doubling down in the next month. They recently approved a measure to break from the national housing system and roll out paid rent, which could potentially destabilize the community even further and spawn even more legal challenges. It's already been opposed by a group of logging workers who sent a petition to the mayor's office."

"But as opponents to the system flee and supporters excitedly flood in, the 'culture of bullheadedness,' as Maryam called it, only grows stronger, and it's taken on two converse mindsets. One of them, which the local leaders hold, believes insistently that Frement Valley and South Meade will be models for the nation to follow if and when it approves the money referendum, and that all criticism of how they've handled the transition is an attempt to kill the broader movement. The second mindset, held by many workers, believes that the problems with the system are temporary, and if and when the money system is rolled out nationwide, everything will smooth itself out in time."

"So which of them will prevail if the amendment is approved? If conservatives triumph across the board in February and David Taggart is elected, there's certainly a chance the government will use these communities as a model to be replicated, leaving a long struggle ahead for those who will fall lowest on the ladder. Mark Andrews and Wayan Jesus have made rebuilding the city key components of their campaigns, so if either of them wins instead, there may be a steadier hand through the adjustment period that moderates the societal impact."

"But even if we get the best-prepared hand in the government who perfectly handles the economic transition, that's by no means a guarantee that any of Lyman's problems will be fixed or even tempered. For all the growing discontent on the left and right about modeling society after what we still know about Earth, this issue has proven to be both an untested leap away from tradition and a contentious exception. And in a divisive era of partisan bomb-throwing, the big question hanging over every other decision voters face in two weeks remains: are we ready?"

•••

The longer Graham stared at the sprawling mess of ambrose cane on the ground, the more he seemed to lose his already diminished faith in humanity.

At least six bags, each containing three sticks, were knocked off the display case, and two or three of them were opened. Broken chunks of cane and mounds of powder layered the floor around them, with dusty footprints leading away. Either somebody opened the bags to snap off a piece of ambrose and sprinkle it in their mouth (a common occurrence) and then somehow slipped and fell onto the display, or they loaded a shopping cart with these bags and that shopping cart fell over. Either way, the perpetrator of this is long gone.

Graham kicked away a near-empty bag. “I kind of hate this job. If you never talked me into this, I would never have seen the prevalence of this side of humanity. I would have remained ignorant and happy. But I can’t have that now. Every moment, I must look at the customers around me and know fully damn well that they are equally capable of this degree of chaos. There’s no erasing that part of my brain now.”

“Just get a broom and dustpan. This isn’t 9/11.”

“This is my 9/11. And it’s all I’m going to think about for the next week, so spare me your election talk until then. I have a lot of soul-searching to do.”

We swept up the mess for two minutes and gathered the trash and broken canes into a box to be thrown away later.

Graham sighed and stared longingly at where the mess once was. "I'm going to have a chat with security very soon. I will find the cuckold responsible for this, break into their house, and fucking waterboard them with a can of petroleum in front of their family."

"Good luck with that."

"I'll be counting on you to supply the petroleum. But until then, I have a lizard to drain. A president to shake hands with, if you will." He started walking down the aisles to the bathroom, then shouted, "I'm pissing!"

I took the dustpan and box full of ambrose cane to the prep room and dumped both into the trash can. We were barely halfway through our six-and-a-half-hour shift, and there was almost nothing in the back to put out. We were probably going to spend the rest of the time helping with the grocery department, so I ran out the cart of cardboard to the baler in the back. By the time I brought it back, Graham was already waiting in the prep room.

I pushed the cart against the wall with the others and said, “That was fast. Either you didn’t wash your hands, or you didn’t pee.”

“Some guy was already shitting in there. I’ll have to stay put for another moment.”

“Just one guy?”

"Do not second-guess me. My judgment is perfect and I am your intellectual slavemaster."

"Alright then."

Graham checked his watch. "Shit. Let's get to the sales floor, Lawrence is gonna be here any second."

"Lawrence Cleveland?"

He speed-walked out the door. "Is there another Lawrence character that I'm missing?"

I followed behind him. "Jesus. You have better connections with the people in my college class than I do."

"Oh, I'm sorry, would you prefer if I was meeting Alicia instead?"

"Screw you."

Graham peaked out from the bakery aisle onto the sales floor and stopped, darting his eyes between the five people still wandering around the department. He suddenly sprinted down to the store entrance and shouted, "Lawrence!" at the doors. Lawrence walked inside as I slowly approached.

Graham glanced at me once I joined them. "Finn? Lawrence? I believe you two have met at some point?"

Lawrence glared at me. "Have we?" Of course.

"He's one of the, like, four people in your politics class."

"Yeah, I know he's in my college class, I just don't think we've ever talked before."

I muttered, "Not the first guy to say that."

Lawrence looked back to Graham. "You got the goods?"

"Yeah, I left it at an empty spot in the soda case in Aisle 13."

"Sweet. I got a short walk out. Been a pleasure doing business." He did a handshake with Graham, a little wave to me, and then walked away to Aisle 13.

I asked Graham, "What the hell was that?"

"He's throwing a party for his sister's birthday at 10:00 and needed a bunch of last-minute supplies. We'll be providing the rest once the shift is over."

"You're bullshitting me. There's no way you're dragging us to yet another late-night party, you're going to fucking kill yourself."

"Of course there's no fucking party, you cretin. He's just picking up a shitload of organic cereal for his mom."

"Oh. And he needed your ID to bypass the quota."

"Bingo. So, what are we gonna waste the remaining hours here with?"

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"Beats me. I was thinking we were going to help with grocery for a couple hours, so I ran out all the cardboard."

"Fuck it, then let's bounce."

We both bounced to the back to look for any grocery workers. There was only Huan walking around the receiving area, not the most interactable of people. The lack of a human presence in the area suggested that the shipments haven't arrived yet, leaving us with nothing to help the department with.

Graham shouted, "Huan! When's the shipment coming in?"

Huan shouted back, "Don't know!" He continued moving boxes around.

"Guess we're waiting."

I sat down on the empty U-boat to my right. Graham was midway through preparing to sit next to me but jumped back up. "Hold on. The president is still waiting for me in the restrooms. Toodles." He sprinted down the hall past the balers and through the door for the bathroom just around the corner.

I scooted back and lied down on the row of U-boats behind me, staring at the ceiling and drifting off to the sound of footsteps and boxes being picked up then set down. I've never really looked at the ceiling here before, but it wasn't all that interesting. It's just pipes and vents sprawled about, although a lot higher than I would have expected. The tall ceiling provided enough interest for the moment.

Graham burst back through the door after less than a minute and rushed back to me. "I can't fucking believe this! The guy is still shitting in there!"

I sat up and asked, "So what?"

"So what? Does another man occupying a public stall just mean nothing to you?"

"Why can't you just use the urinals?"

"Use the urin—do you take me for some fucking psychopath? Do I really strike you as the type of degenerate fuck who would stand in front of a urinal, pull my dick out for everyone to see, and then just hold it there for twenty seconds as I piss into a hole in the wall? Is that something you would want to listen to from a bathroom stall while you're shitting? Would you want to endure the multiple minutes it would take for someone to loudly walk into the bathroom where you're visibly shitting behind the stall, piss into a urinal feet away from you, zip their pants up, walk to the sink, wash their hands, and dry it off for fifteen seconds in the hand drier because the paper towel dispenser is empty again? Would you feel comfortable in that situation from either perspective?"

"Not exactly."

"Then shut the fuck up."

Huan poked out from behind a pallet stacked with boxes. "Quiet down! I want to play music!"

"My apologies, Huan. I would love to listen to the scratchy garage tunes from your Chinese diaspora. Go on."

Huan turned on a speaker out of view and blasted low-production Chinese folk music at max volume, loudly singing along with it at an unchanging vocal pitch.

I told Graham just loud enough that only he could hear over the speaker, "You really are a fucking masochist."

"It's called 'reaction formation,' it's a coping mechanism."

Graham sat beside me on the U-boat and laid back. After a long five minutes of disingenuously humming along to the dozen obscure instruments playing at once, Huan poked back out and pushed a loaded U-boat towards us.

He shouted, "Go, take this if you want something to do!"

Graham leaped up and grabbed it. "Absolutely! Thank you very much, Huan!" He dragged the boat out the door where we came in and stopped halfway. "Hold on, where does all this shit even go?"

I pulled out my box knife and opened a box stacked on the top. "Pasta. My favorite."

Graham snorted. "Damn, we really need more slurs for Italian people. Do you think the medieval crusader guys thought of any good ones?"

"I don't think that brand of racism existed in medieval Europe."

"Didn't they all hate Jews, though?"

"All the Jewish slurs started in the United States"

"Goddammit. Americans really did do everything better."

We took the U-boat to Aisle 4 and began unloading the boxes. With no empty shelf to put the broken-down cardboard on top of, Graham had us resort to tossing all of it on the ground. The whole aisle was essentially unwalkable, but at this hour on a Tuesday, that was hardly a problem. For about twenty minutes.

A customer strolled by with an empty shopping cart, stared awkwardly at the sprawl of cardboard, and didn't move for several seconds.

Graham, kneeling with a box of angel hair pasta, side-eyed him, noticing the look of judgment on his face. "Yeah? What's it to ya?"

The customer looked down the aisle and pointed somewhere in the back. "Uh... could I...?"

“You could do anything, but should you?”

“Um… I just want a type of spaghetti.”

“If your goal is to have one of us to grab it for you, I’ll need a little more to work with.”

“Just, like, a small thing of spaghetti. I’m not gonna be able to finish a big box.”

“Well, you took the ‘little’ part of my request at face value. There’s quite a variety of spaghetti here if you haven’t noticed.”

“I don’t know if it’s, like….”

“The different spaghetti types are quite distinct. What am I missing here?”

“I just….” He moved his head around to see better at the shelves.

“Why don’t I just throw random boxes your way and you take which one you like?”

“No, I don’t think….”

“I know you don’t think, that’s why this is taking so long.”

I cut in, “What kind of spaghetti is it? We have six different ones here.”

He started waving his hands around. “I don’t know, it’s not really like a….”

Graham asked, “Do you have a color in mind? Maybe a vague visual? Do you need some colored pencils and a notebook? They’re on Aisle 11.”

The guy made his best deep-thinking face, and Graham threw a random spaghetti box off the shelf at him. It bounced off his chest into the shopping cart, startling him. He looked at it and stammered, “No—no, it’s not… it’s not something like this, I’m trying to….” He threw his arms in the air and tried to walk through the cardboard on the ground. He took one step on one of the smaller broken-down boxes and slipped forward, crashing flat on the ground without even trying to break the fall with his arms.

Graham groaned, “Come on.”

As he pulled himself up by the shelf next to him, another grocery employee Ainsley appeared in the aisle to check what was going on.

Ainsley helped the guy up and said, “Jesus, what happened here?”

Graham responded, “He wants a kind of spaghetti which is apparently so special that its name can’t be said out loud.”

The guy exclaimed, “No! I’m just trying to… I’m trying to think.”

Ainsley asked, “Is it the organic spaghetti?”

“Yes! Yes, that’s what I was thinking of!”

“Yeah, all our organic variants are down Aisle 16 at the end of the store.”

The guy immediately rushed away without his shopping cart.

Graham sighed, “‘Organic.’ He couldn’t remember the fucking word ‘organic.’”

Ainsley looked at the cardboard mess on the floor. “You’re supposed to put the cardboard in a shopping cart, not… everywhere.” He pushed the guy’s cart against the U-boat and walked away.

Graham heavily exhaled for five straight seconds and started scrunching the empty box in his hands. “I just want one goddamn day here without some fucking idiot trying to argue with me and then injuring himself. Am I truly unreasonable to expect this from a job at a grocery sector? Am I some snobby perfectionist for expecting basic human intelligence?!” He aggressively crushed the box into a ball and chucked it down the aisle, hitting a can of rauschenberry sauce off the shelf and breaking it open on the floor.

Graham stared at it for a second, then marched down the aisle past it and shouted back, “I’m gonna go piss on the bathroom floor. Be right back.”

Once he was gone, I went to work gathering all the cardboard on the floor and dumping it in the cart, along with putting the spaghetti box back on the wall. And after little over a minute, as I was on my knees midway through wiping up the sauce spill, I saw Graham’s lower body reappear from the corner of my eye.

I looked up to see the frighteningly blank expression on his face. Good god.

He said monotonously, “You are not going to believe this.”

“He’s still shitting?”

He whisper-yelled, “He’s still shitting! It has been forty-five minutes, Finn, I don’t know how to fucking rationalize this. Nobody stays on the goddamn toilet for 45 minutes unless they’re constipated and extremely patient or fucking dead. Is he just dead? Did he fucking die shitting in a public stall?”

“If it’s been this long, I’m sure plenty of other people have walked in and used the bathroom. It’s not a big deal.”

“What part of my rant about urinals did you not understand? I will be marched to the motherfucking gallows outside Auschwitz’s-Birkenau by Allied soldiers after personally gassing 40,000 Polish children before I even think about stepping foot to a fucking urinal to take a piss.”

“There were a lot of better ways you could have worded that.”

He pulled me to my feet by my shirt collar and stared fiercely into my eyes. “I’m just making a simple point, Finneas. I am loyal to my principles as an individual.”

"I don't doubt it. And if you want to let some random guy taking a shit make your day miserable, then have at it."

He pushed me back. "I will not let him win. I will stand my fucking ground firm. I'll hold it in until I get ammonia poisoning if I have to."

"Good for you. But we still have a lot of boxes left on the U-boat, so if you don't mind, it'd be better if we did something productive."

"Absolutely. I love repetitive work."

And with a new buoyant enthusiasm, he tore apart box after box and dumped their respective items onto the shelves as I failed to keep up due to my lack of an effort to. And after barely 15 minutes, the U-boat was empty and the shopping cart was full. But rather than help take them both to the back, Graham ran off down the aisles to find another U-boat waiting to be torn down. So I took the cardboard to the baler and left the empty U-boat in the receiving area, then found Graham and Ainsley working in Aisle 2, putting up the different bakery items. I joined them.

Ainsley put up all the bread bags off a separate cart while Graham and I went to town on the boxes for the other side of the wall, including a wide variety of jellies, donuts, cake mixes, and frostings. The whole selection is basically heaven for anybody addicted to ambrose. Everything on the shelves was fatally disorganized, leaving us with the extra chore of scooting it all to the correct position and pulling it to the front of the shelf. It all took a hot minute, but once Ainsley started helping, the supply of boxes fell to zero in no time. Less than two hours of the shift remained by the end.

Graham, sufficiently tired, took the shopping cart of cardboard this time while I took the U-boat. As I left it in the receiving area, I saw Graham ahead rush out of the door for the bathroom after disposing of the cardboard. I decided to follow him this time. And lo and behold, right as I was about to go through the door myself, Graham burst through them again, looking particularly distressed.

"He's still there. He's still in the bathroom. He's still on that fucking toilet after an hour and a half! I'm going to lose my fucking mind!"

"How do you even know it's the same guy? He could have already left and somebody else came in after."

"You expect me to believe that there were two consecutive people in this grocery store on a Wednesday that had to take a shit in the same bathroom, and they just happened to switch places in the time between the moments that I checked inside? You expect me to buy those odds?"

"What even is it about this bathroom that matters so much? There's another one you could be using right now at the end of the store."

"No. No, no, no. He's not scaring me off that easily. If it's a war that he wants, he can fucking have it. Come with me. We're settling this once and for all."

"What? What the fuck does that mean?"

Graham ran back out the door and turned to the bathroom hall, and I chased after him. He stopped right by the entrance to the men's bathroom, seemingly preparing to sneak around the corner inside and jump the guy in the stall. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him around.

I whispered, "Are you fucking insane?"

"Go on. Peek inside, see for yourself."

I glared at him for a second, then tiptoed down the entryway and tilted my head to see inside. Two legs were casually planted on the ground behind the stall, but I couldn't tell if his pants were rolled at his ankles. I felt Graham sneak around behind me but shot my arm out to keep him from going further. He retreated outside after a few seconds, and I went with.

Graham whispered, "I think he's dead."

"I don't even know if he was sitting down. He might not be shitting in there."

He sighed and rubbed his eyes, struggling to process the situation. "You know, this actually reminds me of a time when I was 13 and had to take a shit while I was on a walk, so I went to a bathroom in a restaurant close by and ended up with pretty bad diarrhea, but there wasn't any toilet paper in the stall and I didn't want to rush out of it with my pants down to grab paper towels and risk someone walking in, so I decided to take my shirt off and wipe my ass with part of that and then wash the shit stain off in the toilet water without drenching the whole shirt, but the stain kept dirtying the water so I had to flush the toilet at least six times, and after ten minutes of that I said, "Fuck it," and rushed out of the stall shirtless to wash the shit stain off in the sink and scrub it down with soap, which just made the shirt even more wet and discolored, and I held it under a hand drier for like five minutes until the wet spot was barely visible, but by then the shit particles had already settled in thanks to me dampening it so much, and the smell of dry and warm shit followed me the entire sprint home."

I couldn't even bring myself to stare at him in shock. "You could have kept that to yourself, and I would have viewed you exactly the same."

"I'm just saying, something like that isn't out of the realm of possibility with this guy."

I stared emptily at the floor. I could only wonder how the fuck my life choices ended up leading me to the moment that I find myself in.

"Alright, I'm going in." Graham tried to walk past me, but I snapped back to the present and swept in front of him.

"Hold the fuck on. Yelling at customers is one thing, but you're talking about dragging a guy out of a bathroom stall when he could be in the middle of trying to shit."

"After an hour and a half? He's either doing some illegal shit in there, or he's dead. Either way, I have a responsibility as a citizen of this great nation to march the fuck in there and get some answers."

"You don't need answers! Just use the other bathroom! You can even sneak into the women's bathroom if you want!"

"Hey, if I'm going to be screamed at by anybody today, I'd rather it be from a guy hogging a bathroom stall for hours with his pants down than a horrified teenage girl who gets me arrested. Now get out of the way."

The second he prepared to push past me, the toilet flushed. He froze in place. We heard the stall door creak open. The sound of footsteps led to the sink. The water turned on. A few seconds later, it turned off. He pulled out three paper towels from the dispenser. He scrunched them repeatedly in his hands and dumped them in the trash. He walked out from the entrance and past the two of us, then vanished behind a wall to the rest of the store.

Graham bolted inside the bathroom and stopped at the open stall. I walked up behind him as he stared at the toilet. "It's... it's clean." He looked at the walls, at the floor, at the ceiling, and the door, but there was nothing to see. There was virtually no sign he was even there. "What... what did I miss? What happened? What was all this for?"

"Nothing."

"It was... all for nothing." Graham stood frozen as his existential crisis deepened. It was hard to tell if the gears in his brain were spinning into overdrive or if they had crashed altogether. But once enough time passed, he finished rebooting and turned around. "I've changed my mind. I don't even need to piss anymore. Let's just go on break." He walked past me and out of the bathroom.

Alright then.