The Ministry for the Future

84

After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation. It was adapt or die; there were only about eleven thousand container ships afloat, only two hundred of them in the Very Large class, and after forty of those were sunk the verdict was clear, the writing on the wall. They weren’t going to be able to stop the saboteurs, who still remained unidentified. Maersk and MSC (a Swiss company) both began to rebuild their fleets, and all the big shipyards followed. It was that or die. That one of the biggest shipping companies on Earth was a Swiss company says something about the Swiss, and the world too.

An ordinary container ship was massive but simple. They were very seaworthy, being so big and stable that even when caught in cyclones and hurricanes they could ride them out, as long as their hulls kept their integrity and their engines kept running. And of course their capacity for cargo was immense. They were well-suited to their task.

So the first attempts at transitioning to ships the saboteurs wouldn’t sink involved altering the ones that already existed. Electric motors replaced diesel engines to spin the props, and these motors were powered by solar panels, mounted as giant roofs over the top of the cargo. This could work, though the speed of the behemoths was much reduced, there being not enough room on them for the number of solar panels needed to power higher speeds. But if the supply chain of commodities was kept constant, in terms of arrivals at destination ports, these reductions in ship speed, and thus in economic efficiency, were just part of the new cost of doing business. “Just in time”—but which time?

Because they were slow. Fairly quickly there emerged specialized shipyards devoted to taking in container ships and cutting them up, each providing the raw material for five or ten or twenty smaller ships, all of which were propelled by clean power in ways that made them as fast as the diesel-burners had been, or even faster.

These changes included going back to sail. Turned out it was a really good clean tech. The current favored model for new ships looked somewhat like the big five-masted sailing ships that had briefly existed before steamships took over the seas. The new versions had sails made of photovoltaic fabrics that captured both wind and light, and the solar-generated electricity created by them transferred down the masts to motors that turned propellers. Clipper ships were back, in other words, and bigger and faster than ever.

Mary took a train to Lisbon and got on one of these new ships. The sails were not in the square-rigged style of the tall ships of yore, but rather schooner-rigged, each of the six masts supporting one big squarish sail that unfurled from out of its mast, with another triangular sail above that. There was also a set of jibs at the bow. The ship carrying Mary, the Cutting Snark, was 250 feet long, and when it got going fast enough and the ocean was calm, a set of hydrofoils deployed from its sides, and the ship then lifted up out of the water a bit, and hydrofoiled along at even greater speed.

They sailed southwest far enough to catch the trades south of the horse latitudes, and in that age-old pattern came to the Americas by way of the Antilles and then up the great chain of islands to Florida. The passage took eight days.

The whole experience struck Mary as marvelous. She had thought she would get seasick: she didn’t. She had a cabin of her own, tiny, shipshape, with a comfortable bed. Every morning she woke at dawn and got breakfast and coffee in the galley, then took her coffee out to a deck chair in the shade and worked on her screen. Sometimes she talked to colleagues elsewhere in the world, sometimes she typed. When she talked to people on screen they sometimes saw the wind scatter her hair, and were surprised to learn she wasn’t in her office in Zurich. Other than that it was a work morning like any other, taking breaks to walk around the main deck a few times and look at the blue sea. She stopped work for birds planing by, and dolphins leaping to keep up. The other passengers aboard had their own work and friends, and left her alone, although if she sat at one of the big round tables to eat, there were always people happy to talk. Her bodyguards left her alone. They too were enjoying the passage. If she wanted she could eat at a small table and read. She would look up and observe the faces talking around her for a minute or two, then go back to her book. Back out on deck. The air was salty and cool, the clouds tall and articulated, the sunsets big and gorgeous. The stars at night, fat and numerous—the salty air more than compensated for by the truly dark skies. Then the new moon fattened, night by night, until it threw a bouncing silver path out to the twilight horizon, sky over water, indigo on cobalt, split by a silver road.

It was beautiful! And she was getting her work done. So—where had this obsession with speed come from, why had everyone caved to it so completely?

Because people did what everyone else did. Because first no one could fly, then everyone could fly, if they could afford it; and flying was sublime. But also now a crowded bus ride, a hassle. And now, on most of the planes Mary flew on, people closed their window shutters and flew as if in a subway car, never looking down at all. Incurious about the planet floating ten kilometers below.

On the eighth day her ship sailed into New York harbor, a dream of a harbor, Cosmopolis itself, and she debarked on a Hudson dock and took a cab to Penn Station and got on a train headed west.

Okay, this was less interesting. But still she could work, sleep, look out the window. And the Americans had finally gotten some high-speed rail built, including this cross-continent line, so it was only another day and then she was in San Francisco, coming out of the ground and walking over to the Big Tower and taking an elevator up to the top, where she had met with the central bankers years before. Her trip had taken nine days, and she had worked every day as if home in Zurich, except that she got more done. And the carbon burn, as calculated by Bob Wharton’s own personalized calculator, had been the same as it would have been if she had stayed at home. And the ocean crossing had been beautiful. She had sailed across the Atlantic! And now stood before a picture window in the Big Tower, looking across a huge wedge of the Pacific. Amazing!

“We’ve been so stupid,” she said to Jane Yablonski, still chair of the Federal Reserve; she had been reappointed by a new president who had been terrified by all the changes. Yablonski looked mystified as she tried to parse which stupidity Mary might be referring to. Mary did not elucidate.

Not immediately, anyway. She needed to hear how they thought things were going first.

The group talked over events they often named—the Heat Wave, Crash Day, the Little Depression, the Transition, the Intervention, the Strange Times, the Super Depression—and she saw it again: these were the rulers of the world, if indeed anyone could be called that. Maybe not, maybe that was the change they were trying to catch with all their glib names: the system as such had escaped them. Change itself was changing.

Still, they undoubtedly held a lot of whatever power remained. No doubt about that. Because money mattered.

Now they were gathered to discuss the first years of their big experiment, what Bob Wharton called their Hail Mary: the carbon coin. It was very like meetings convened to discuss the Indians’ Pinatubo interventions: climatologists in those meetings, bankers in this one. Here too they had made an experimental casting into the air, in this case of gold dust. What had happened?

They listened to their assistants give reports on that for a couple of hours. Abstract after abstract, information crushed to crystalline density. Then it was back to them, looking at each other around the big table. Time for reckoning: had it done what they hoped it would? Had it worked?

Yes and no and maybe. The usual answer to any question these days. But in many senses, yes, it had worked. This was what Mary heard them saying to each other, cautiously and indirectly. Around this table set so high above the beautiful city, looking at each other, she saw that their faces were pleased, even when expressing nervous concern.

They agreed on these points:

The new carbon coin had stimulated many short-term investments in carbon sequestration projects, and many longer-term investments in the coin itself. It had caused some of the biggest carbon owners to cash out and keep fossil carbon in the ground, or use it for plastics if they could. Coal had become just a black rock you could turn into money by leaving it alone. They had created and paid out trillions of carbon coins, and yet had seen no signs of inflation, or deflation, for those who held that theory; no noticeable price change.

There were currency exchanges where they had seen efforts to manipulate the value of the carbon coin against the values of other currencies, including people trying to drive it down in value, in hopes of buying low and selling high later on. Combatting those efforts, if they needed to do that, had been best accomplished by attacking the manipulators in ways that would cause them to desist, while also warning others away from such actions. Tools existed to strongly sanction those who tried it. One report on this had used the phrase financial decapitation.

As part of altering the investment climate further, their staffs had written up draft legislation to propose to their governments several related reforms, including strong currency controls; attacking and eliminating tax havens; shifting all money from cash to digital forms tracked by blockchain technologies; and mounting the pressure on carbon by way of increased taxation and regulation. A lot of momentum on those fronts now.

This all sounds good, Mary said at the end of the day. So now, what else can you do?

They regarded her. You tell us, they said. What kind of thing did you have in mind? And why?

Mary sighed. They were never going to be the source of change. It just wasn’t in their DNA, either institutionally or individually.

She ran down a list that Dick and Janus Athena had made for her. Outlawing dark pools and killing them off. Putting significant delays in high-frequency trading. Creating high-frequency trading taxes big enough to get trading back to human speed. Calculating basic necessities needed and providing these gratis to under-served communities.

Oh dear oh my! Not what central banks do!

Their first response, as always. But they had already strayed far out of their lane, as one of them put it.

More like a bull over the pasture fence, she thought. A herd of big bulls off into the wild, looking around, didn’t see any more fences—this then so scary a sight that at first they tried to conjure back some fences, enclosure being so much more comfy than freedom. Of course trust in money must be protected, as their prime directive; and that directive itself was a fence, hurray!

But wouldn’t killing the dark pools create more trust in money, Mary inquired, rather than less?

They had to agree. And in general, less autonomy for loose money might increase trust in fiat money generally.

And high-frequency trading, Mary asked, wasn’t it simply rent, parasiting on productive exchanges?

She found it funny to be speaking of rent as if it weren’t the fundamental action of the economic system these people upheld, but they liked to think otherwise. Anything to get them to screw their courage to the sticking place. And courage was always necessary when contemplating regicide. Could anyone kill King Capital? Mary doubted it, but if anyone could do it, it was surely these insiders, the people running the system. These thirteen people were close enough to the royal body to get the knives in before anyone could stop them. Et tu, Brute? Yes, Caesar, me too. Die. Into the ash can of history.

So now they nodded as they discussed things, and translated Mary’s proposals into more respectable policy formulations. They avoided any large conclusions that would make them aware of their temerity. Just numbers, juggling some numbers, and all for the sake of stability. And since this was partly true, she could let them get on with it, encourage them more.

At the end of the meeting, the Chinese finance minister, Madame Chan, joined her at the west window, where the late sun was making the Farallons again look like a sea serpent’s spine. What was that rising, there in the west?

These are just trims, she said to Mary with a smile. Buttoning up the coat you already made. Surely you don’t mean to stop there?

What do you have in mind?

We’ve been looking at what India is doing. They’re leading the way now in all kinds of things.

They were radicalized, Mary said.

Yes, and who wouldn’t be? We don’t want what happened to them to happen in China, or anywhere else. So now they’re teaching us regenerative agriculture, and we need it. But of course it keeps coming back to how we pay for these good things.

I suppose, Mary groused.

Chan smiled. Of course. Think of it as land reform. That’s a financial arrangement too. So, land taxes, which in China means a tenure tax. Creation of a commons for every necessity. Also, simply the legal requirement that private businesses be employee-owned.

Mary shook her head skeptically as she listened, but she was smiling too, thinking that now the baton had passed to this woman. A woman with real power, huge power. We’ll back you, she said happily. Take the lead and we’ll back you. And Madame Chan nodded, pleased with her.

Afterward Mary had been planning to fly home, but she cancelled that, and got her team to book a train sleeper and then a clipper ship, New York to Marseille. She worked all the way home.