Eminence

“Eminence” first appeared in Chasing Shadows, edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts, Tor Books, 2017. It was reprinted in the June 2019 edition of Forever magazine.

Usually, Nathan felt his cares lift a little as he turned the car onto Yuculta Crescent. Today, he had to resist an urge to drive past, even just go home.

Nathan passed parked RVs and sports cars as he looked for an empty spot. As he walked back to a modest ochre house, he heard voices: teenagers talking about trading items in some online-game world. Nathan hesitated again. I could still go back to the car, let Grace find out from somebody else. The temptation was almost overwhelming.

The image was still with him from this morning, of Alicia stabbing her spoon into her coffee cup as she paced in the kitchen. “It’s all our money, Nathan! You didn’t just put your savings into it; you convinced me to put mine in too. And now you tell me the bottom’s falling out?”

The day couldn’t get any worse after that; so Nathan started walking again.

At one time this part of town was full of white working-class families with shared values and expectations. Now, the houses were worth millions and, Grace said, nobody knew their neighbors. The two aboriginal kids sitting on the porch stared at Nathan suspiciously as he walked up.

“Is Grace here?” he asked.

“In the kitchen,” said one, jabbing a thumb at the door. Nathan went inside, past a small living room that had been remade as office space. Three more teens wearing AR glasses stood in the middle of the space, poking at the air and arguing over something invisible to Nathan. Dressed normcore, in jeans and T-shirts, each also bore a card-sized sticker, like a nametag. SMILE YOU’RE ON BODYCAM. Little yellow arrows pointing to a black dot above the words: a camera. The kids on the front porch, he realized, also wore something like that.

Grace Cooper was sitting in a pool of sunlight in the kitchen, reading a tablet, her smile easy and genuine as she rose and hugged him. “How’s my favorite coder?”

Nathan’s stomach tightened. Shall I just blurt it out? The currency is crashing, Grace. We’re about to lose everything. He couldn’t do it, so he sat.

Nathan had known Grace for almost two years, but it was a long time since he’d had to think of her as the client. In fact, she was just the representative; the real client was an aboriginal nation known as the Musqueam who’d lived on this land for thousands of years. Small matter that they’d invited him into their community, their lives. He should have kept his distance.

A few years before he immigrated, Grace’s people had won a centuries’ old land claim that included a substantial chunk of downtown Vancouver. The University golf course, Pacific Spirit Park and much of the port lands south of that were now band territory. That and other settlements had finally given the indigenous peoples of the west coast a power base, and they were building on it. Until today, everyone had benefited—including Nathan.

She sat down after him. The sunlight made her lean back to put her face into shade. “Did you see the news?” she said. “Says Gwaiicoin is doing better than the Canadian dollar.”

It was. He’d checked it fifteen minutes ago, and half an hour before that, and again before that. He’d been up all night watching the numbers, waiting for the change. He shrugged now, glancing away. “Well, the dollar’s a fiat currency,” he said neutrally. “They’re all in trouble since the carbon bubble burst.”

“And because they’re not smart,” she added triumphantly. “Thanks to you guys, we got the smartest currency on the planet.”

“Yeah. It’s been... quite a roller coaster.” Maybe if he talked about volatility, about how most cryptocurrencies had failed... Even the first, Bitcoin, had only been able to lumber its clumsy way forward for so long. But all of them had weathered the bursting of the carbon bubble better than the dollar, the pound, or the Euro.

One of those currencies was Gwaiicoin. Nathan had first heard about it while couch-surfing in Seattle. He and six other guys had struggled to make the rent on a two-bedroom apartment while housing prices soared. The smart programmers left, hearing that living was cheap on Vancouver Island, and just west of the Alaskan Panhandle in the archipelago known as the Haida Gwaii. As Seattle priced itself out of liveability, the islands where the iconic totem poles stood suddenly became crowded with restless coders.

One result had been Gwaiicoin—and, when Nathan arrived here, unexpected and welcome employment.

“Gwaiicoin’s about to be worth a lot more,” Grace was saying. “Once my recruits have added Vancouver to the Gwaii valuation.”

Nathan looked through the serving window at the half-visible teens in the living room. “Recruits?”

She leaned forward, her nose stopping just short of the shaft of sunlight. “We’re talking with City Council about measuring the biomass in the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh parts of the city. These kids are my warriors. They’re programming drones to measure the biomass.”

Nathan nodded towards the street, throat dry. “Good place to start.” His mind was darting about, looking for a way to bring her down gently. Then he realized what she was saying. “Wait—you want to add the local biomass to Gwaiicoin?” Unlike Bitcoin, which had value because of its miners and transaction volume, Gwaiicoin was backed by the value of the ecosystem services of its backers’ territories.

She nodded enthusiastically. “Even the Inuit want to get in on it. The more biomass we all commit, the bigger our Fort Knox gets. It’s brilliant.”

Should have seen this coming, Nathan thought. As the dollar crashed, Gwaiicoin had soared. The government wanted it, but since the Haida were backing the currency with land that the feds had formally ceded through constitutionally binding land-claims settlements, the feds were beggars at the table.

“You know, you spent a whole day trying to convince me that a potlatch currency was crazy. Remember that?” Grace grinned at him.

“Yeah.” He looked down. “Who’d have thought self-taxing money would take off?”

She sighed. “And still you call it a tax. That was the whole idea—you get eminence points for every buck that gets randomly redistributed to the other wallets.”

“Yeah.” Despite being a lead on the project, Nathan didn’t have much eminence. He wasn’t rich, so his wallet didn’t automatically trim itself—but even some of Grace’s poorer neighbors voluntarily put large chunks of their paychecks into redistribution every month, via the potlatch account everyone shared. Redistributed money was randomly scattered among the currency-users’ wallets, and in return the contributors got... nothing, or so he’d argued. What they got was eminence, a kind of social capital, but the idea that it could ever be useful had never made sense to Nathan.

Ironically, it made sense now. If Gwaiicoin were to vanish overnight, the people who’d given it away would still have their eminence points. These were a permanent record of how much a person had contributed to the community.

And he had none.

He took one last deep breath and said, “Grace. We have a problem.”

Somewhere nearby a phone rang. “Hold that thought,” said Grace as she hopped up and rummaged for a phone among the papers on the counter. “Hello?”

Nathan watched the flight of emotions cross her face; they settled on anger. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said tightly, and put down the phone.

She avoided Nathan’s gaze for a moment. Then she said, “Well. One of my kid’s been arrested.”