Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Read online

  “And you used to be homeless.”

  “I was homeless for three years,” Laz said. “I can tell you that this place is like heaven by comparison. Hell, I know for a fact that there are tens of thousands of average folks right here in the Savannah area who don’t enjoy a standard of living this high.”

  “Yes!” Real-Life Justin screamed, startling everyone. “Get it, Laz! That was perfect.”

  Now came the moment Evan was dreading. His own face was staring back at him, and it was talking.

  “A huge part of why the system works is because of the tech Justin has poured into it.” He saw his on-screen self turn and perform a Vanna White gesture at the array of monitors and machines behind him. A few of the other administrative nerds were gathered around these machines, all of them pretending to be busy—per Smiley’s instruction—but all of them also painfully camera aware.

  “Here,” On-Screen Evan continued, picking up a packet the nerds had prepared for the occasion. “You can see the sheer amount of data we’re collecting from everyone’s wristwatches.” He fanned out the pages on the stack, lamely demonstrating the fullness of detail.

  “So the watches everyone wears automatically transmit transactional data to this room?” Smiley asked.

  “Instantaneously, yes,” On-Screen Evan said. “It’s important that we’re able to track every transaction in real time, as it allows us to adjust our inputs to keep the economy growing.”

  “It’s hard to believe that something this high-tech exists here,” Smiley said with a TV chuckle.

  “We look like a simple little farm,” On-Screen Evan agreed, “but what we have here is actually an advanced economic engine. But it’s so much more than this machine. The people who live here are poised to show the whole world how much better an economy can be.”

  Nora squeezed Evan’s arm, an act of affection he could hardly feel because he had gone totally numb while watching his televised performance. All things considered, he came off pretty well, but then, a quick glance at Justin said that the benefactor didn’t agree. Justin had gone sheet white.

  “What’s wrong, boss?” Valence asked. “I thought that was, you know, uh, fuckin’ great.”

  “No, it was,” Justin said, struggling to lend any conviction to his voice. “I’m suddenly just a little concerned about what this amount of attention is going to mean for us.”

  Now Evan shared in his employer’s trepidation. Carl had warned them about what it meant to challenge big banks and the Federal Reserve, and now, there Evan was, blathering on-screen about how the Farm was going to upend the status quo.

  He could only hope that the status quo wasn’t watching.

  ~~~

  “Are you watching this?”

  “Of course I’m watching it,” Elliot Larson said into his phone. He had never much enjoyed these unexpected calls from Lloyd Blankfein, but what could he do? The man’s bank had loaned his company a cool billion dollars at basically zero percent interest. He couldn’t exactly not pick up.

  “I don’t understand it. This program is supposed to trend toward our side. How are they going to sit there and paint the Farm in such a positive light?”

  Just then, the segment ended with a smiling, hopeful-looking Justin Wolfe before cutting away to commercial.

  “Ugh, I hate that stupid fucking clock,” Elliot said.

  “Forget the clock. Did you see that setup of theirs? All the computers and machines?”

  “That was certainly interesting.”

  “You ever see anything like that?”

  “I mean . . .” He didn’t finish the thought, because the dude ran one of the world’s most successful artificial intelligence and automation companies. Of course he had seen something like that. He couldn’t, however, have guessed that he would see it on a small farm in rural Georgia.

  “And all that shit about building businesses without external debt?” Lloyd bellowed. “That’s impossible. How are they going to start that restaurant the Pastor woman was talking about without a loan? Completely ridiculous.”

  “Completely,” Elliot agreed. He stood from his $15,000 lounge chair and stepped over to the tablet mounted on a pedestal centering the main deck of his fully automated superyacht, the third largest the world had ever seen. Damn thing had been the second largest until Bezos had gone and trumped him. Elliot Larson told himself that he would need to order another superyacht. Especially since this one’s on-deck television was getting a little wonky. And besides, the app that ran it had been buggy from the start. Even now, as he typed in commands for the ship to slow, it misinterpreted for a hard turn to port, throwing Elliot off balance to where he had to catch himself on the pedestal.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “That’s exactly how I feel about it,” Lloyd said obliviously. “They can’t just go on TV talking about how the Farm Dollar is different. They’re just completely flouting how they’ve created an illegal currency and it’s supposedly turning hobos into contributing members of society.”

  “That’s a problem.” Elliot was talking about how his yacht-navigation app had just completely shit the bed and crashed on him, but Lloyd took it as a continuation of the one-sided conversation he was having.

  “And all that hooey about how if they get the windmill up and running, they’ll completely remove themselves from dependence on the American economic system. What a load of frog bunk.”

  Elliot tried and failed in his effort to avoid imagining what a load of frog bunk would look like. Nothing good, he supposed. And anyway, who the hell says “frog bunk”?

  “This whole thing is . . . ,” Lloyd said, sputtering. “It’s just . . . it’s un-American.”

  In that moment, Elliot managed to get his tablet back online and his superyacht back on course. He wasn’t entirely sure what the course was supposed to be at this point, but as long as they were still bearing west on the Atlantic, some hundred nautical miles away from the hurricane brewing to the south, he supposed any old course would do.

  “Don’t worry,” he said calmly into the phone. “I think I have some ideas on how we can fix this situation.”

  Now Lloyd sounded hopeful when he said, “Media blitz? Smear campaign? All the usual tactics? Or hell, maybe we can send in the IRS for a deeper dive. There’s always funny business in the books.”

  “No, I have a better idea. Something subtler.”

  There was a long silence from the other end of the line.

  “And you’re just going to leave me dangling here?” Lloyd said finally.

  “No,” Elliot said. “I’m going to get to the nearest port, board my helicopter, and pay a visit to the Farm.”

  “And do what exactly?”

  Elliot broke into a grin. “Volunteer.”

  Dylan Elan Powers The Choice

  We all make choices, but when your future is dark, it’s harder to see why your choice should be for the common good.

  —Justin Wolfe

  There’s nothing more infuriating than being condescended to by an idiot. Who the hell even knew Dad had a fucking estate attorney? When that old fuck started talking to me about profit and loss on the diner and lecturing me about how it would be better to sell instead of try to keep running it, I lost it on him. How is that suit going to sit across his fat-ass desk and try to tell me how to run a business?

  “I’ve been working there since I could walk,” I told him. “I think I know what I’m doing.”

  He said something about how it’s been underwater for six years and is a distressed asset, and no amount of advertising or change in staff or menu is going to turn the place around.

  I told him to get stuffed. The restaurant was mine, and I planned to keep it.

  Why the hell did I tell him that? I don’t want this place. I hate this place. It represents everything the old man did wrong in life. And if I’m going to run it, I have to drop out of school.

  Maybe that’s why I’m keeping it. The universe returns to balance. Everything equal
. Every myth in history that shows man stealing knowledge from the gods ends with man’s eternal damnation. Eden. Prometheus. Faust. It’s all there. And they’re all telling me the same thing: no sense in trying to stand up to the gods. No sense in seeking knowledge. To truly make your mark on this world, you have to make a choice. You either create or you destroy.

  I guess that’s what Dad’s diner will be for me: the great equalizer. Or maybe the great decider. Either it will succeed, and I will have created something where a weak man like my father failed, or it will go under, and I’ll have destroyed his life’s work.

  Either way, that sounds like victory. Sounds like a legacy I can live with. Son makes good on tired old restaurant, or son runs father’s tired old restaurant into the ground. Wouldn’t be the first soiled offspring of a business owner to do one or the other. Everything diverges into two paths. Success or failure. Strength or weakness. Good or evil. Might as well let the fates decide which path is supposed to be mine.

  “I’m keeping the restaurant,” I told the estate attorney. You should have seen his face. Disappointment. I’m used to it.

  Then I got to see that same face on Mr. Jackson when I told him I was dropping out.

  “It’s understandable that you would react this way,” the counselor told me. “You’ve been through a great deal this year. But, son, dropping out now, when you’re just starting your senior year would—”

  He shouldn’t have called me son. I stood and jabbed my finger into his chest, hollering that he was done telling me how to live my life. Fucking loser’s path took him to high school guidance counselor anyway. It’s hard to imagine a weaker occupation or a weaker human being. There’s no good or evil in that role. Just perfectly average. Just painfully average.

  This is the last thing in the world I ever want to be. I’ll die first. I’ll kill first. Good? Evil? I’m fine either way. But average? Death is the only cleanser for that.

  Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and Other Tragedies

  The thing about credit is that it affects everyone, even those without debt. Debt impacts everyone because the cost of doing anything goes up from all the debt spending. There is no place where this is more evident than housing, where we find a constant march toward an ever-higher cost of living.

  —Justin Wolfe

  Ten years ago, if you’d asked Dan Pastor if he ever thought he would see what amounted to tent cities full of hobos on his farm—and that he would be happy about it—he would have told you to go eat a spoonful of sand. As the former owner and operator of a genuine, salt-of-the-earth, fully operational, independent farm, there had never been a man more passionately conservative, or for that matter, passionately Savannahian. The idea that his farm would play host to an economic experiment where a bunch of former gutter dwellers would get free money in exchange for working whenever they felt like it?

  Young Dan probably would’ve taken a swing at Old Dan.

  And Dan was old. He’d genuinely been starting to feel his age of late, deep in his marrow. Even at sixty-two, a man who’d embarked on a lifetime of active labor in the fields often enjoyed the bounce in his step of a man twenty years his younger. Dan had always benefited from that extra bounce. But recently, it had gone out of him, replaced by the problem nobody needed to know about just yet.

  Nobody but Nora anyway. Poor Nora. God.

  Dan was just glad he’d sold the farm after all, because he couldn’t imagine what his only daughter would have done with it if she’d been forced to inherit the damn thing.

  He’d inherited the damn thing himself from his grandfather back in the late 70s and had run it more or less profitably for almost thirty-five years. Through that time, he’d witnessed the slow and unavoidable changes to the local farming community. It had appeared along the fringes at first, but eventually, there was no stopping it.

  The sadness that accompanied the notion of those first local, family-owned farms selling out to Big Agriculture had been lesser in the early years—mostly because nobody back then could have foreseen that Big Agriculture would become Big Agriculture. Nobody could’ve known that it would suck the soul right out of East Georgia’s farm country. Back then, they used to just call it consolidation. It was a matter of progress. The future always looked brighter for every Tom, Dick, and Harry, even if the folks who were suddenly running and working all the surrounding farms were nothing like Savannah’s own Tom, Dick, and Harry.

  But the sadness only deepened as the years went on. When the local feed and seed store sold out to a national chain, all of Dan’s old feed and seed buddies moved their daily conversations out to the local bar. Later, when Dan’s buddies started selling their farms one by one, their group dwindled. Eventually, so much of the land had been bought up that the only men still tending the group’s flame were Dan and his one last buddy who’d remained, a buddy whose name, in a case of pure cosmic coincidence, was Tom Dickey.

  “What do you think it means?” Tom had asked over a Michelob one rainy afternoon in what must have been ’04 or ’05.

  “What do I think what means?” Dan had asked helpfully.

  “All our lives, we been men of the earth. We made our way tillin’ the land and sellin’ our crops. What do you think it means, how we lost our ability to choose?”

  Dan didn’t follow, so he took a swig of his Michey.

  “Used to be we could decide when we wanted to sell to these conglomerates like Jack Norton runs. Hell, it used to be if, not when. Now . . . well, she-it, Dan, ain’t you seen the writin’ on the wall?”

  Of course Dan had seen the writing on the wall. It had looked bright and loud as drippy railroad graffiti for a long time. He’d just never wanted to actually read it.

  “What made Jack so powerful in the first place?” Tom asked.

  Dan shrugged. “Guess it was the banks probably. I know he took out a loan to buy his neighbors’ operation. And he’d have had to take out loans for all that big, fancy equipment that helped him keep growing.”

  “Shit, if I could get a loan . . .”

  Tom Dickey sold his land to Jack Norton’s massive consolidated farming operation the next week. Like all the rest of them, he and his wife quickly retired to Florida or Puerto Rico or Belize. Tom’s farm got folded into what had used to be six others, land owned so long ago by independent farmers that Dan had forgotten the old bastards’ names. So then Dan’s little group became one. For a while, he kept going to the old bar, at least until it occurred to him how uncomfortable he was to be seen drinking alone all the time. He didn’t have a problem. Not with the drink, anyway.

  Dan made it another eight years before he sold out. And he didn’t sell to no Goddamn Jack Norton, either. Those were two things he could always be proud of, even if he’d had to hold his nose about how weird and liberal his ultimate buyer had turned out to be.

  At least Justin had let him stay on and operate the place. At least Dan could die a farmer, just as he’d been born.

  And yeah, he would die soon. Sooner than he and Nora would be ready for. And he’d die as an operator of a farm full of hobos that, against all odds, always made him smile.

  Dan’s smile faded when he crested the hill and saw them. To the west was a trio of rusty, sky-blue buses. He could see that they’d just been emptied of their occupants, because those occupants, dozens of them, were currently heading east toward the machine shed. The skinny, bespectacled fella waving his arms at them could only be Evan. Poor kid was jerking and darting around this giant group with all the grace and panache of a pheasant in heat. Dan was so busy puzzling over the sight that he failed to notice Laz’s approach until it was over.

  “Laz,” he said by way of greeting. “Helluva lotta people on this busload, wouldn’t you say?”

  Laz grunted.

  “I mean, I expected there’d be a bounce in population after 60 Minutes, but this . . .”

  “This ain’t natural,” Laz agreed. “Ain’t no way Justin okayed all these people at once.”

  Dan spi
t sidelong, a habit he’d held onto despite being at least ten years removed from the rich, oily satisfaction of chewing tobacco. Nora. God.

  “Evan’s gotta be losing his shoes,” Laz said.

  “Can’t quite tell,” Dan said. “I mean, kid always runs around half-cocked like that.”

  Laz grunted a laugh.

  “You mean to tell me, though, that we ain’t planned for all these people?”

  Laz’s bulbous eyes went all buggy. “You kiddin’? I mean, we need folks to help with the harvest, but how the hell we gonna house thirty-five new residents? Never mind how we’ll feed ’em or keep ’em busy or even pay ’em. I for one am—let’s call it interested—to hear what Evan plans to do.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  “Anyway, it’s gonna bankrupt us.”

  Dan felt a quick seizing of his heart. Since round about 2010, any word that even sounded vaguely like “bankruptcy,” and particularly ones that shared the root word, gave him the involuntary tremors. He’d been saddened by thirty years of watching his friends sell out to Big Agriculture, but he’d always been able to take comfort in the notion that those men and women and families had made their nest egg and gotten themselves into sunny, carefree locales. It was nothing more than pride that had caused him to hold onto his farm despite that enormous, juicy, delicious-looking nest egg. So he’d held on too long and faced the very real prospect of his own bankruptcy. He might have gone gracefully into that good night, were it not for Nora’s impending culinary school bills.

  Funny how life works. A rich liberal had swooped in to save a penniless conservative from bankruptcy, and that penniless conservative’s big-city-dreamer of a daughter had decided to stay on at the farm after all.

  “Don’t you use that word around me, Laz,” Dan said. “I’ve told you.”

  Laz threw up his hands. Those had always been grimy hands, as Dan could recall. In Laz’s early days on the Farm, they’d been grimy owed to a life hard lived. But now, they were grimy from hard labor. “Sorry, boss.”