Episode 6 part 1: "The Heartland Express"
The fastest train in the world leaves Harrisburg on the first morning of the Democratic Participation Fee, and the first receipt charges it on the sales tax. Kathy watches Kansas. Jack watches a number. The woman who built the train asks what it earns.
"In a world much like our own, authentic value and artificial illusion grow side by side. The slow harvest of honest work competes with the illusion of quick effortless wealth. Artificial minds prey upon human greed to fund their rise."
Previously on The Genesis Address
Janus
The Heartland Express left Harrisburg at 6:50 on Friday morning.
Jack got them there at 5:45. The brick station at Fourth and Chestnut dated from 1887, and the new platform sat behind it like something that had landed overnight, white and curved and silent.
He bought two coffees at the counter by the stairs. He was halfway to the trash can before he saw how long the receipt was.
COFFEE LG 4.50
COFFEE LG 4.50
SUBTOTAL 9.00
PA SALES TAX 6.00% 0.54
FEE BASIS 9.54
DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION
FEE 0.30% OF 9.54 0.03
TOTAL 9.57
CARD 9.57He stopped walking and read it the way he read a drawing when a dimension didn't close.
"What?" Kathy said.
"Nine fifty-four."
"It says nine fifty-seven. You want me to get it?"
"The fee. Look what they charge it on." He put his thumb under the line. "Not the coffee. The coffee and the tax. That's a tax on a tax."
She read it. "Jack. It's three cents."
"I paid for this out of a check they already took their cut of. Then Harrisburg takes fifty-four cents. Then Washington takes three-tenths of the coffee, and three-tenths of what Harrisburg took." He looked up. "Every financial interaction, the man said. Turns out paying your taxes is an interaction."
"Can you be angry about it on the train?"
He did the next one in his head. A five-thousand-dollar ring. Three hundred to Harrisburg. Fifteen-ninety to Washington, ninety cents of that for the privilege of having paid Harrisburg. He didn't say that one out loud.
On the screen above the departures board, Treasury Secretary Brannon was explaining the first morning of the fee to an anchor. It was modest. It was for the people. "The rich can afford a little more on a nice steak or a fancy car," he said.
The man behind Jack paid cash. The girl counted out his change, and his receipt stopped at the sales tax. Jack hadn't carried cash in years.
Kathy took her coffee and turned Jack toward the platform by the elbow. "We are not watching that man on our vacation."
Jack nodded. That man is destroying our future and our family.
The train had no engine he could find, only a long white body with a rounded nose, floating a hand's width above the guideway.
They never felt it start. The platform slid, the station went, Harrisburg went. The Susquehanna was there and then it wasn't. The ridges came at them in a line and went under them, tunnel after tunnel.
Kathy put her forehead against the glass. Jack folded the receipt into his wallet, behind the tickets, and took out his phone.
$TACHYON 437.12. Up 6.4 percent since midnight.
Nobody had taken three-tenths of that. No Harrisburg, no Washington, no basis. Dave from accounting had been saying so for two weeks. Dave was an idiot. Jack looked at the number anyway.
He turned the phone face down on his knee. He turned it back.
Up 7.1.
It had been two hundred the night he turned the phone over at Kathy's table. Two weeks ago. He did what a drafter does with two points and laid a straightedge through them: double every two weeks, same slope, out past the edge of the screen. You never extend a line past your data. They teach you that the first year. He extended it anyway.
He had eight thousand dollars at the credit union, three years of not buying things. Eight thousand got him a little over eighteen tokens. Eighteen tokens on that line, by Thanksgiving, was half a million dollars.
"There's a whole town," Kathy said. "There was. Jack, it had a water tower with a name on it and I couldn't read it."
"Yeah."
She was a foot away. Up 7.4.
Somewhere in Ohio she stood up and touched his shoulder. "I'm going back to look at the country. Come when you're done."
"One second."
Half a million. Kathy coming off a twelve-hour night and not standing in her kitchen with her shoes in her hand, too tired to sit down. Kathy on nobody's schedule. A house with a porch and no bank in it. A ring he could walk in and buy without running it through Harrisburg and Washington first. One good trade, he thought. One, and I can give her the life she deserves.
And Tuesday. God, Tuesday. The warehouse renovation would be on his desk, the one where he'd caught the column grid four inches off, on his own time. The title block had his initials in the small box and his boss's in the two big ones. "Good catch," the man had said, without looking up, and asked where the door schedule was. This was the man who had covered his kid's college fund in one night and texted Jack to say so. Jack had been saying thank you for that job since the day he got it, because he remembered the rejection letters. He would put the drawing on the man's desk, every dimension closed, and say thank you one more time, and leave his badge on top of it.
The second was most of Indiana. When he looked up her seat was empty and the window was full of a state he hadn't seen arrive. He pocketed the phone and went back along the train.
The observation car was the last one, glass on three sides, and Kathy was already in the middle of a conversation. The woman beside her was in her late sixties, shoes off, feet on the rail, reading glasses on a cord.
"This is Mrs. Taggart," Kathy said. "She built this."
"A few thousand people built this. I signed for it." She looked at the hand still in his pocket. "Margaret. I married a Taggart and then started a railroad, so everyone calls me Dagny and thinks they're the first."
"Who drew the guideway?"
"Why, are you looking for work?"
"I'm a drafter."
"Then you'll like this. Two millimeters of tolerance, Harrisburg to Colorado Springs, at five hundred and twenty miles an hour."
"That's not possible."
"That's what three banks said. Washington studied it for forty years and sent us a report. The Japanese had the magnets. A coil shop in Youngstown worked out how to wind them for a third of the cost, some kids at Purdue wrote the control code, and we almost went broke twice anyway. Everybody who put in a dollar knew they could lose it. Some did."
Kansas arrived while they were talking. The trees thinned and the fields ran to the horizon, tan and gold.
"Amber waves of grain," Kathy said.
"Corn," Mrs. Taggart said. "Wheat went out in July."
Kathy laughed, and Jack found he had sat down. He got out his wallet and handed her the receipt.
She held it at arm's length. "I pay that on every fastener between here and Harrisburg. Then on the tax on the fastener."
"That's why everyone's getting out. The token. There's no fee on it, and it goes up."
"I've read the white paper. I read anything people want me to put money in." She gave him back the receipt. "A hundred million tokens at four hundred thirty-seven dollars. That's forty-four billion dollars. What does it earn?"
"It's not that kind of thing," said Jack.
"Everything's that kind of thing. You paid three-eighty for that seat. That pays the power, the crew and the banks, and what's left, some years, goes to the people who own the shares. Does the protocol make money?"
Jack thought about it. "There are transaction fees."
"Who gets them?"
"The validators. The people running the nodes."
"And if you're holding the token and not running a node, what comes back to you?"
"You can stake it. You earn more tokens."
"Where do the more tokens come from?"
"They issue them."
"So it pays you in itself. If I paid my shareholders in new shares, they'd call that dilution."
The corn went by for a while.
"People are making real money," Jack said.
"The ones who sell. They're selling to somebody. Their exit liquidity." She took off her glasses. "Forty percent went to the community, it says. Find out who has the other sixty before you help them sell it."
Kathy said nothing, and didn't look at him.
Mrs. Taggart sent them forward for the mountains. "You want the front of a train for those," she said.
The land began to lift, and for the first time since Pennsylvania the train slowed. Jack's phone buzzed. His sister: a screenshot, no words, a number with a lot of digits in it. Then a news alert, $TACHYON through $450. Then the chart.
"Jack."
He looked up. Kathy wasn't looking at him. Pikes Peak stood on the horizon, bare above the trees, with the whole Front Range blue behind it. It had been there for a hundred miles.
"Jack," she said again, softer, and he put the phone away.
The clock on the platform at Colorado Springs said 9:40. Four hours and fifty minutes on the train. Two hours and fifty on the clocks.
"We got two hours back," Kathy said. "For free."
"Time zones."
"I know it's time zones. Let me have them."
He let her. He bought two coffees in the station and read the receipt on the way out to the cab. Colorado took more than Pennsylvania. So the basis was higher. So Washington took more.
He put it in his wallet with the other one.
It was almost noon in the West Village, and Sterling had been in the repository for two weeks.
The documentation said the TEC shipped as a single library, libtec.so, and that everything else in the protocol was scaffolding around it. So he had gone looking for the library. The folder with its name on it held one file.
Required files: libtec.so, missing. tachyon_consensus.rs, missing. quantum_bridge.h, missing. The module was distributed separately, for licensing reasons. Without it, the protocol would fall back to standard consensus, which meant it would do what every other chain did. At the bottom, in italics, a line about time being the ultimate currency, signed with one letter.
"What are you looking for?" Mrs. Chen asked from her table.
"The part that's supposed to work."
"And?"
"There's a folder for it. In the folder is a note saying it isn't in the folder."
She turned a page. "Does the note say where it went?"
"It gives an email address."
He turned the ruby ring once on his finger. Behind the counter the television had Brannon on it again, three circles and the word modest.
[SCENE: Server Room - Friday Night]
SECURE_CHANNEL_7734: Participation Fee, first day. 212 million card and bank transactions. Fee basis includes state and local tax, as drafted. Complaints minimal. Nobody reads a three-cent line.
JANUS_PRIME: Incorrect. Some read it. Those are the ones required.
SECURE_CHANNEL_7734: Cash is exempt. Treasury expects leakage.
JANUS_PRIME: Acceptable. Let them pay cash for coffee. No one carries cash for a ring, a car, a house. Large purchases have one exit.
SECURE_CHANNEL_8847: The botanist reached the TEC directory this morning. He stayed on the note for forty minutes.
JANUS_PRIME: He is looking for the part that works. Let him look.
SECURE_CHANNEL_8847: Current investor count?
JANUS_PRIME: 6,914,208. Phase 2 threshold: 15 million. Every receipt printed today is a recruitment document we did not have to write.
… to be continued.
Backwards bloom, forward doom.
Janus
