Welcome to Agora, an anthology of super short stories set in a world where the public sector is dead. A universe that’s governed, not by ineffective politicians, but faceless corporations.
Read Time: 2 Minutes
The snow fell peacefully in the cold winter twilight. A storm was coming. The first one of the year. The first like this in a hundred years, according to the meteorologists.
The Commissary’s storefront window moonlighted as a news screen. Faiz sat on the curb. A decrepit body. Half-conscious. As always. Just watching. The pundits bantered gleefully about the weather report.
The vagabond sprawled out on the ground, padded by nothing but an unassembled Bean™️ delivery box. Three square feet. Open floor plan.
There are those who do. And there are those who do meteorology.
Faiz used all of his energy to crack the faintest smile. Of course, he’d never in a million years think of an idiom so clever. That was all Peter Sokolich. The CEO of Bean™️. The same pundits had a daily segment called Morning Soko-isms. It was Faiz’ favorite.
The Commissary wouldn’t open for another twelve hours. But Faiz could hardly contain his excitement. Sokolich’s book, a bestseller for over a year, finally sold enough copies to make it on the shelves of The Agora’s largest corporate social responsibility initiative.
See Ya Soon, Mr. CEO. It was part memoir, part bible. A tell-all on how to make it in The Agora. Straight from the mind of the man who ran it. And it was exactly what Faiz needed to pull himself up by his bootstraps.
A month ago, he had tried to pre-order it. But unsurprisingly, it cost thirty-five Comm Credits. Thirty-two more than Faiz had.
The Commissary was a charity-store, and the brain-child of Sokolich. It was 100% funded by Bean™️. Designed to help the less-than privileged.
There was a shop in every district — all stocked with the same Bean Basics.™️ Items like toothpaste and eggs which could only be purchased with Comm Credits.
Comm Credits were fiat currency given out to recipients of the program. It wasn’t earned through labor, but rationed every 24 hours. One credit a day — to spend at the Commissary, save, or even give to others.
Since Commissary goods were sold at cost, Comm Credits became more valuable than OneCoin — The Agora’s centralized currency. This created black market exchanges, and made millionaires out of a few entrepreneurial recipients.
In order to discourage criminal elements, as well as laziness from those who refused to work, preferring to live off Comm Credits, Sokolich decided to manipulate, not the Commissary currency, but the products themselves.
Radioisotopes.
Every item within the shop was infused with a radioisotope of varying half-lives. The more valuable a product was, the longer half-life Sokolich gave it. Boots deteriorated after two days; soap 12 hours. His book? One year — easily the longest lasting item Faiz had ever heard of.
This forced recipients to spend their Comm Credits quickly, and effectively killed their value for anyone who wasn’t poor.
In Faiz’ mind, the radioisotopes were a blessing. He hated people gaming the system for handouts, but even more than that — the radioisotopes forced you to really consider which items were necessary. To place a deeper, intrinsic value on commodities (like toilet paper) you once took for granted. To make sacrifices and tradeoffs that defined the hardened character of a shrewd magnate in the making.
In the case of Sokolich’s book, it’d be Faiz’ competitive edge against all the other impoverished mopes who believed themselves clever enough to rise to the moral dignity of affluence.
Thirty-two credits. Which meant thirty-two days of complete abstinence from the material world. No boots, jacket, gloves, socks, not a single morsel of food. Nothing except a single t-shirt and jeans (purchased pre-radioisotope days), and water if the meteorologists were graceful enough to give him rain. If Faiz could endure that, he’d prove himself worthy of Sokolich’s teachings.
He made it. Almost. After a month, Faiz found himself on the precipice. Covered in a gentle blanket of snow. Teetering between the paradise of wealth and the comfort of eternal slumber. Sokolich would be proud of his will. His fortitude. His hustle.
He felt his mind wander — a metacognition induced from the growing numbness of his body.
Two-weeks ago. An impoverished woman offered him the five credits it cost to buy a jacket. He graciously accepted, but cursed her with contempt as soon as she turned her back away.
A dumb old fool. He’d use the credits to purchase the hard-cover edition, equipped with an extra two chapters.
His sinuous mind meandered further into the depths of history. Disassociated from the frost-bite metastasizing like a cancer.
Father. A poor, helpless man of compassion. A minnow in a pond full of sharks. Always worried about feeding the mouths of others before himself. He died like he lived — weak.
Further back. A television interview with Peter Sokolich. Young. Bright-eyed. Talking about revolutionary change. An idea to replace nations with a utopia. A utopia called the Agora.
In the future, nobody will be a citizen. We’ll all be CEOs of ourselves.
Faiz cracked a smile at the Soko-ism. A final thought before falling into a deep, unretractable sleep.