Slumrat Rising

Truth ran through a number of options, before concluding that the fastest way to find out how the credit change-over would work was to just go and ask a banker. No need for any elaborate ruses, and really, nothing of benefit would come from just summoning some senior banker to his room through Mary. Assuming one would come for her at all.

“Attend me.” The maid quickly stood before him. Looking demure. Vulnerable. He kind of wished it would knock it off, but that was like wishing water would be less wet. “Arrange a sedan chair to visit whichever bank is most popular with the children of the very rich in this city.”

“Chutts, My Prince?”

“That will do.”

The bank building was stuck between the city’s undersea aesthetics and the conservatism of the bankers who commissioned it. Banks should be imposing, tall, fronted with glass. Impossible in a bubble of air a kilometer under the surface. Their next default was some sort of box, or a secularized temple of some kind. Bankers, he had once heard, were extremely creative in the managing of money, and absolutely nothing else.

The architects of Conjin Below, on the other hand, considered anything less than a neon colored recreation of an opium dream in an aquarium malpractice. The notion of putting function over form simply did not exist. If you wanted a concrete cube, you could have all the cubes you like on the surface. This was the City of Dreaming Waters. Exceptions would not be made.

The bankers, in their dull, uncreative way, played the universal exception maker called “I have the money and you can make it the way I want or I can find someone else.” The architects countered with “Good luck with that.” Eventually a compromise was reached.

Truth stared at the thing in undisguised loathing. It was a cube with the pox. He tilted his head and squinted, trying to guess what they were going for, and drawing a blank. After a solid minute, he landed on “Treasure chest that has sat on the ocean floor and grown barnacles. Then hallucinogenic, multicolored kelp grew all over it.”

Regretting bitterly that he was not here to beat the villainy out of the design team, he went and found a customer service rep. She was called a “Services Coordination Specialist” but it amounted to the same thing.

Truth, naturally, adopted his rich prick persona. Slightly different from the Prince. The rich prick wasn’t about violence, exactly. He was a product of the system, not one of the creators. Truth couldn't quite put his finger on why that conception didn’t feel right, but he had on expensive clothes, looked handsome and had a rough charisma to him. She didn’t question what she saw.

“So, Mr. Merici, you are planning on traveling overseas?”

“Yeah, you know how it is. Most of the money is in the trust. A fixed amount goes into my checking account every month. I still don’t understand how that’s all going to work with “credits.” I want to make sure I don’t have trouble when I check into a hotel or buy something, you know?”

“That won’t be any problem at all. Your bank transfer amulets will still work the same as before.”

“Will it, though? Because it’s not wen anymore, right?”

She smiled. It was a nice smile, she had clearly put in the practice. “There is less of a difference than you might think. It’s a little odd to imagine if you don’t work in banking, but really, it’s all just book keeping.”

“How so?”

She reached into her desk and hunted around for a moment. “I thought I had some cash in here for demonstration purposes. You aren’t the first person to ask about this. The very short answer is “It all works because the government makes it work.” Still want the longer answer?” She asked, hopefully. Truth nodded. She pulled out an envelope of mixed bills.

“This is one hundred wen.” She showed him the words “One Hundred Wen,” written at the top of the envelope. “In terms of the individual bills, it’s one fifty, one twenty, one ten, two fives, and ten ones.” She showed him the little boxes on the envelope where those numbers were recorded. “I will now write on this notepad “Tanya has One Hundred Wen.” She did so. “I will now put the envelope in the drawer. How many wen do I have?”

“One hundred.”

“Yes. But also no. I have zero wen. It’s in the drawer. I have a note saying I have one hundred wen. Would you like ten wen? For the purposes of demonstration?”

“Why not?” He gave her a smile in return. She looked a little flustered, but quickly wrote out a note. “Tanya gives Mr. Merici ten wen, Tanya has ninety wen,” then another note saying “Mr. Merici has one million and ten wen.”

“My God. I’ve been robbed.”

She laughed politely, but pressed on. “You can see where this is going. You both have, and don’t have, the money. You have a note about the money, and your bank has a legal obligation to give you the cash if you demand it. Terms and conditions apply, but that’s the idea behind checking accounts, bank transfer amulets, credit accounts- it’s all just ledger entries. All the movement of money happens here, on the page. The money itself never leaves the drawer. And if anyone goes and checks, the Bank can show them exactly how much of what bills they have in reserve.”

“Alright. I follow you.”

“Now, the current banking system is actually a series of loans. Customers loan the bank money in the form of deposits. The bank then takes those deposits and loans them to other people at a higher rate of interest than what it pays on the deposits made by customers. The difference between what the bank pays for money and what it earns for providing money is its profit.”

“Plus fees and a dozen other things.”

“Yes, but the loans are the important thing. It means that at any given time, there is actually less cash in the drawer than money deposited. We have to take the money off one ledger entry to move it to another, after all. We just keep enough on hand to cover routine payouts.”

Truth frowned. “That doesn't sound safe, but you also make it sound like it is standard practice.”

“It’s been incredibly effective for hundreds and hundreds of years. There have been problems at some banks, but the system is well tested.”

“Alright. So. Not to be a jerk but-”

“What does this have to do with you buying cocktails at the swim up bar in Khalo?”

“Hah! Yeah, basically.” Truth chuckled.

“Do you trust that, if you send me a message saying “take twenty wen from my account and transfer it to the account of the Grand Surf Khalo Hotel and Resort, I will do so? That I have both the money and capacity to make that happen?”

“Yes? You do it all the time.”

“Right. Chutts has been around for four hundred years. People have confidence in our name.” Tanya nodded and smiled. Her teeth were paper white.

“Okay?”

“What happens when people freak out? Definitionaly, they have lost their confidence. They want to feel safe, which means having everything directly under their control.”

“Ah. They withdraw the money.”

“Yes. And if everyone withdraws their money at the same time?”

“You are screwed and so are they, because you don’t actually have that cash.”

“Right. And if the people we loaned money to can’t pay up because the economy is cratering…”

“You are screwed and so are your depositors. Sorry, why are you so calm about this? And telling me this?”

“It’s been all over the financial news for months. It’s no secret at all. Deposits are now all government insured in case of a bank collapse, and loan repayments are likewise guaranteed for verified and approved borrowers. In other words, confidence in the bank is irrelevant. What people are confident in now is that Jeon will endure.”

“And confidence is the key?” He smiled, letting his own confidence show. It jolted Tanya out of her teaching groove, but she had a lot of experience. She got back into it smoothly.

“Yes. Remember, all this is taking place as entries on a ledger. Everyone involved must believe the leger in honest and working as it should, or the whole system collapses. We are straight back to a barter economy, because even those paper wen are really just bookkeeping. Records of someone’s work.”

Truth grunted. “So the government is cutting out the middleman. It’s saying “since we already guarantee both sides of the ledger, we are taking over the ledger. And since we print the money, that’s one unnecessary expense we can get rid of. Everyone goes in the ledger, all the money goes in the ledger, all the transactions happen on the ledger, and if I need to spend money overseas, the government will ensure that the Jeon ledger can talk to the Mavides ledger. Or whoever.”

Tanya clapped. “You got it! So you can see why the new System rollout was so crucial. Everything is being combined into one giant government mega-ledger. Your sigil will be your proof of identity. This includes your Tier, which will have a direct impact on how much credit you can obtain, incidentally. You show your sigil to any talisman reader with the right enchantments, and all the book keeping happens invisibly.”

“Like the Starbrite pins, but tattooed on your arm.”

“Exactly the same, yes. You won’t even need to go to a specific checkout point. Just walk in, grab what you want, and go.”

Truth nodded, swearing internally. It was going to be a complete pain in the ass going forward. Spoofing a reader that was just looking for a given sigil was one thing. Fooling the whole damn ledger was going to be something else entirely.

“So what are the banks going to do?”

Tanya’s customer service smile turned brittle for a moment, but she recovered quickly. “We are moving out of the retail lending space. We do provide other financial services, and plan on merging with investment firms, accounting firms and the like to provide a holistic financial services experience to both high net worth individuals and our corporate clients.”

Truth nodded slightly. No wonder she was scared. Even her bosses didn’t know what to do. It was a very, very bad time to be unemployed, and a glorified, specialized, sales rep did not have bright prospects in the market. Really, her best play would be-

“So, when are you taking that trip?” She asked, gently biting her lower lip.

It wasn’t until he was back in the sedan chair on his way back to the hotel that he remembered the “con” in “con job” was short for “confidence.” He could visualize it- an inverted pyramid of confidence, each layer scamming the one above and scammed by the one below. He knew he was being unfair. Most of the people weren’t trying to scam anyone. They probably took their personal honesty very seriously. But the whole system was built on confidence. On the belief that everyone in that pyramid was as honest as you.

What would you do if the foundation block, the point of the pyramid, turned out to be made of dung? How long could the system hold together then? For that matter, magic was already faintly thinning. How long until people realized that the magical sigils couldn’t keep the magical ledger going any longer?

He hoped Tanya had a spear, or a machete. He looked up into the inky black waters around the city. He hoped Tanya got out ahead of the collapse. But he wouldn’t bet on it. She needed to believe in the system, in that pyramid of confidence. Everything she defined her life by was bound up in it. She would keep on believing until the water filled her lungs.

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