Pat Murt was what people used to call "poor." He had no discernible talent, no job, and no savings. These days that didn't matter so much. But it wasn't always this way.
He was badly injured during the civil war of the late 2020s, and relied on prosthetics for mobility. He had been pulled from the rubble in Chicago barely alive. He was begging on the street when Trump Tower came down during a bombardment. Thanks to prompt medical attention he had survived. It was the mental trauma of those experiences he found most difficult to overcome. His mental and physical injuries made it impossible for him to work in the sense people had understood before the wars. Indeed, they made him vulnerable to abuse by people who perceived him as a burden.
But Pat Murt was not in any way disadvantaged by his circumstances. After the wars ended - wars were no longer won or lost, they gradually abated to a point when they were generally accepted to be over - and after the great global turmoil of the early 21st century subsided, after the death throes of the old world and the birth pangs of the new had ceased, he found himself in what people used to call Utopia, where his compound needs were fully met and he could completely fulfil his potential.
How did he arrive in this position? The inexorable interaction of global forces played themselves out to this conclusion.
The turmoil had been caused by stresses arising from the revaluation and devaluation of property due to two forces. On the one hand, climate change stranded assets and made them useless, with environmental degradation precipitating mass migrations, while on the other hand, scientific progress rendered technologies obsolete and left the resources those technologies had previously been used to exploit utterly worthless.
In an effort to protect their investments, corporations and their financiers precipitated a series of conflicts around the world. A new feudalism emerged in which powerful interests sought to act without any oversight, regulation or democratic scrutiny to preserve their wealth and privilege. Wars were started to legitimise their avarice and restore value to their holdings.
Natural resources, land access, water rights, all were subjected to arbitrary seizure by corporate interests, fenced off, and protected by armies of private security contractors acting above the law. Supranational bodies that monitored and safeguarded workers rights and environmental protections across entire continents were subverted and dismantled. People were reduced to a new form of merry serfdom by demagogues who cultivated spurious nationalistic fantasies of victimhood that set them against each other, and a media that confirmed every bias and purveyed every banal distraction.
But eventually food riots turned into public unrest which turned into open rebellion. Pat found himself swept up in the giddy optimism of the Illinois Spring. But once war starts, all reason is superseded. Parts of the world descended into a chaos of shifting alliances as war aims and end games altered with every outrage, yesterday's enemies become tomorrow's allies, and all plausible victory conditions receded out of reach. The Illinois Spring became an intractable nightmare, with a fundamentalist militias called "Deus Volt" and "The Lost Tribes" fighting to establish a mid-Western theocracy, gradually being degraded by Canadian airstrikes.
As the world limped towards exhaustion it seemed the only winners were the corporations who thrived on the impoverishment of others, the plutocrats who contrived artificial scarcity to control and manipulate the people.
But slowly a different world emerged.
New science and new technology unlocked cheaper renewable energies. Wind, solar, and wave power devices became more efficient and more affordable, and were available at every scale, from off-grid homestead to utility scale power plant. Indeed, advances in energy storage eliminated the need for expensive transmission infrastructure. The transport and transmission networks merged as co-operatively owned fleets of autonomous electric vehicles charged themselves directly at renewable generation facilities, then recharged each other in transit, passing electrolytes between flow batteries in a similar way to the mid-air refuelling of aircraft. The grid was replaced by the swarm, a mobile source of power that could be accessed by even the most isolated community.
And the humble leaf, the basis of energy capture and storage on Earth for billions of years, became bionic. The amount of solar irradiance that Life on Earth had captured and used hitherto was always going to be restricted by the maximum efficiency of photosynthesis of no more than 2%, since all other uses of energy were ultimately derived from this, whether the energy was immediately accessed as feed stock or biofuel, or sequestered for millions of years as fossil fuels, only for those reserves to be squandered by a single species in one massive industrialised extravagance over a short period of time to create an illusion of abundance.
Now highly efficient artificial solar powered leaves could be created which captured solar energy and generated electricity to electrosynthesise hydrocarbons from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Historic carbon emissions in the atmosphere could be moderated. Every ounce of fossil fuel ever burned could be recovered from its combustion products now that renewable energy technologies had become more efficient than nature at capturing the incident solar energy resource. Climate change no longer had to be a one way street. The extra energy made available by this greater degree of efficiency could be used to turn it into reverse.
The ability to use solar energy that was not intercepted by the Earth's canopy of leaves and carpet of grasses also improved. Differential heating of the Earth's surface created pressure differences that drove winds that amplified ripples on the sea into waves as tall as houses just as before. But where these had destroyed all but the largest, most robust wave energy devices previously, networks of small inter-connected devices appeared. For what survives the heaviest sea better than the smallest flotsam. These networks effectively increased the surface tension of the seas. Devices were connected by piezoelectric polymers to generate power and the networks of these devices created permanently calm shipping lanes in the corridors between them where floating maritime communities developed.
For the first time in history energy was genuinely abundant, free, and available as and when required without detriment to the environment.
But this meant that everything else was free too. Because the value of everything had always been reducible to energy costs. The cost of raw materials was reducible to the energy associated with their extraction. The cost of products was reducible to to energy costs associated with processing those materials and distributing the finished articles. And so the basis of all accumulated wealth was undermined, as was the ability to replace that wealth.
Old political and economic structures lapsed into irrelevance in this post-scarcity world. A benign anarchy emerged. The transition was made easy by the adoption of a new form of currency: asymmetric money. Where money had previously been used as a means of exchange in transactions, this was no longer necessary. In a world of abundance, in which all costs had been abolished, there was no need to keep score of who gave what to whom. People acted on the basis of kindness towards each other, and gave and received their time and the fruits of their labours freely, simply in order to participate rather than for the sake of a reward.
The transition to this post-scarcity scenario was made easier by using asymmetric money which was not given in exchange for anything, and did not represent value in the sense previously understood, to keep account and maintain balance. No, these tokens denoted simple participation in an economically significant act. They had only one denomination, which indicated that the bearer had either performed or been the beneficiary of an act of kindness.
And so those whose needs were greatest accumulated the greatest number of these tokens. The poor in spirit were indeed blessed. Theirs was the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek did indeed inherit the Earth. And Pat Murt became the richest man alive.
When the occasion arose for organised collective activity to define or achieve some project beyond the capacity of a single individual, those who had accumulated the most wealth in terms of asymmetric money could exert the greatest influence. And so, to the extent that the office had any meaning in this benign, post scarcity anarchy, Pat Murt eventually became President of the Earth.
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