The Ministry for the Future

46

I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel. They had to decide by feel alone which things were equally useful to them. And so few things are equally useful. Indeed only two identical things are equally useful; two hearts, two livers, two drops of blood. So in people’s attempts to pass things around, there was friction. It was time-consuming and unsatisfactory. People would sometimes say “all things being equal,” but this was never the case, so I was judged to have a difficult and unsatisfactory body, until my blood finally came into me, and stomach acids. All the fluids of metamorphosis, of life. Then things dropped into me could be digested and moved elsewhere in my body to do something else.

My stomach made disparate things the same by way of digestion into blood. This made food of all the things brought into me, and I quickly grew. I am an omnivore. And as I grew I ate more and more.

Every thing fed to me made other things. I digested things and turned them to blood, which moved around in me and helped to reconstitute some other thing of use; bone, or muscle, or some vital organ. Helping in this process were my mouth, esophagus, intestine, arteries, and veins, all of which grew with me, making a whole body out of which new things also useful could grow, things people wanted. I grew and grew and grew.

In this process, as in any body, there were useless residues not taken up in the new process, which left me in the usual ways. Thus sweat, urine, shit, tears.

My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.