Chapter 12: Morning Work

I joined the morning work.

I don't know why that particular morning was the one. I'd been watching from the edge of Helen's garden for weeks, standing there with my borrowed coffee while the hillside moved around me, people harvesting and weeding and turning soil and carrying things in the early light. I'd been invited every day and had declined every day, not because I was too good for it but because I was afraid of it, afraid that I would do it badly, afraid that I would be in the way, afraid, if I'm honest, that I would discover I was useless in a world that valued usefulness differently than mine had.

But that morning I woke early and went outside and Edward was in the lower garden, crouched between two long raised beds, thinning seedlings. Rows of greens and herbs stretched down the terrace in neat lines, and beyond them I could see the bean trellises and the root vegetable plots and, further down, the fruit trees that seemed to cascade all the way to the next neighborhood. The scale of it struck me for the first time. This wasn't decorative gardening. This was farming. Every terrace on the hillside was producing food.

I walked down to him and said, "Tell me what to do."

He looked up at me. He didn't make a big deal of it. "These beds need weeding. The cress is bolting and needs to come out, and the compost bin on the middle terrace is ready to be spread. Start with whichever you like."

I started with the weeding because it seemed the least likely to require skills I didn't have. Edward showed me which plants were cress and which were the young lettuces that needed to stay, and I pulled and sorted on my knees in the dirt, and the soil was dark and rich and smelled like something alive. After the weeding I helped him haul compost, shoveling the black, crumbling stuff from a bin that had been breaking down for months and wheelbarrowing it to beds that had been recently harvested. It was heavy, physical work. My shoulders burned. My hands blistered. I was glad.

I worked for about two hours. Edward was patient and specific and he corrected me when I was wrong without apologizing for the correction, the way a person does when they're teaching something they care about to someone they respect. He showed me how to spread compost evenly without smothering the soil microbes, how to tell when a bed was ready for replanting, how to check the beehives on the lower terrace without disturbing the colony. Everything he taught me had the quality of knowledge passed down and refined over decades, practical and precise and rooted in the actual behavior of living things.

Other people came and went. A woman named Lila brought a container of something to eat and set it on the wall near us and said good morning and moved on to her own work further down the hill, where she was pruning the fruit trees. An older man whose name I didn't catch stopped to talk to Edward about the community building project, their conversation rapid and easy, full of references to structural details I didn't follow. A teenager appeared, did something to a section of irrigation pipe with a tool I'd never seen, and disappeared again. Nobody supervised. Nobody assigned tasks. Nobody checked a clipboard or logged hours or asked anyone to account for their time. People came, saw what needed doing, did it, and either stayed or moved on.

"How much of your food comes from here?" I asked Edward, when we'd stopped to eat. I gestured down the hillside, at the terraces stretching below us in their rows of green and brown.

"Most of it. Eighty percent, maybe more. Every neighborhood grows the bulk of what it eats. The greens, the root vegetables, the herbs, the fruit, the eggs, the honey. Some things come from further out, grain mostly, and anything that needs a different climate. But the daily food, the things you've been eating since you arrived, nearly all of that grew within a few minutes' walk of where you're sitting."

"Even in the big cities? The ones downtown?"

"Even there. The towers grow food on every level. Vertical gardens, rooftop plots, interior growing rooms. It's different from this," he said, looking at the open terraces, "more engineered, more the info's work than ours. But the principle is the same. People eat what grows near them. It's fresher, it wastes less, and it connects people to the place they live. Moving food across oceans so that people could eat strawberries in January was one of the stranger things your era did."

"We also threw away about a third of it," I said.

Edward looked at me as though I'd said we burned our furniture for fun.

"Who decides what gets done?" I asked, changing the subject.

"Whoever notices it needs doing."

"But what about bigger things? The community building. The paths. The infrastructure."

"We talk about it. As a neighborhood, usually. Someone says, 'The path to the lower terrace is getting bad,' and we talk about whether to repair it or reroute it, and then whoever wants to work on it works on it. For bigger projects, the info helps coordinate. It knows who's available, who has relevant experience, what materials are needed. But nobody assigns anything. You see what needs doing and you do it, or you don't, and nobody keeps score."

"Nobody keeps score."

"Why would they?"

It was such a simple question, and it stopped me the way Edward's simple questions always stopped me. Why would they keep score? In my world, the answer had been obvious: because keeping score was how you knew who was better. Who worked harder, who produced more, who deserved more. The entire apparatus of performance reviews and quarterly metrics and employee rankings and promotion committees and stock option packages existed to answer one question: who is winning? The question had seemed so natural, so fundamental to how organizations worked, that I had never considered the possibility that it was a choice rather than a necessity.

"In my time," I said, "there were entire industries devoted to measuring people. Rating them. Ranking them against each other. Performance management, we called it. Every company had systems for deciding who was a top performer and who was underperforming, and the underperformers got fired, and the top performers got promoted, and the whole thing was presented as objective and fair when it was mostly a way of making people afraid."

Edward considered this. "Afraid of what?"

"Of falling behind. Of being replaced. Of being seen as the weakest one." I set down the food I was eating. "I did it too. At Lumen, we had a ranking system. Every quarter, every employee was evaluated against their peers. The bottom ten percent were put on a performance improvement plan, which was a polite way of saying they were getting fired in three months. I designed that system. I thought it was fair. I thought it brought out the best in people."

"Did it?"

"It brought out the most desperate in people. Which looked like the best, from the outside."

I expect this sounds barbaric. It was. But in my time, this was mainstream — taught in every business school, practiced at every serious company. The cruelty was a feature, not a bug, though we never would have called it cruelty.

We went back to work. My shoulders ached and my hands were raw and I was happier than I'd been in weeks. There was something about the physicality of it, the smell of compost and turned earth, the feel of roots pulling free, that quieted the part of my brain that was always analyzing, always optimizing, always looking for the angle. There was no angle here. There was just food that needed growing and soil that needed tending and the slow satisfaction of doing something that mattered in the most basic way a thing can matter.

Around mid-morning, Helen came down the hill. She'd been working in another part of the neighborhood, she said, helping install something in one of the communal kitchens. With her was a man I hadn't met before, perhaps sixty, with a gentle face and flour still on his forearms. He was carrying a large ceramic bowl in one hand and a cloth bag over his shoulder.

"Juliana, this is Oren," Helen said. "He's one of the neighborhood's best cooks. He made the stew you had on Tuesday."

"That was remarkable," I said, and meant it. It had been one of the best things I'd eaten in 2100.

Oren smiled. "Helen told me you were from a time when cooking was women's work. I wanted to make sure you knew better."

"It wasn't exclusively women's work," I said. "We had male chefs. They were very famous and very well paid."

"Famous," Oren repeated, with the same gentle bewilderment I'd seen on Edward's face when I used words from my world that didn't translate. "Famous for cooking."

"Famous for being better than other cooks. For being the best."

"The best at feeding people." He said it as though tasting the concept. "In your time, you took something as simple and necessary as feeding people and turned it into a competition. Who could feed people most impressively. Who could charge the most for feeding people."

"We turned everything into a competition," I said. "That was more or less the whole idea."

Oren set his bowl down on the wall. It was full of something that smelled extraordinary. "Eat," he said. "You've been working. Everyone eat." This last was directed at the hillside in general, and within a few minutes several people had materialized from various tasks and were eating from Oren's bowl, sitting on stones and retaining walls and patches of grass, talking and laughing in the easy, unhurried way that I was beginning to recognize as the default rhythm of life here.

I watched Oren serve. He ladled, he tore bread, he passed things to people, he ate, he told a joke that made the teenager from earlier nearly choke on her food. He had the easy authority of a man who knew he was good at what he did and didn't need anyone to confirm it.

Later, walking home with Helen, I asked something that had been bothering me since the "nobody keeps score" conversation with Edward.

"What about people who can't work? People who are sick, or old, or just not capable. If nobody keeps score, what happens to someone who can't pull their weight?"

I heard myself say "pull their weight" and noticed that Helen noticed it too, a faint registering around her eyes, the way the family reacted whenever I used a phrase that revealed assumptions I didn't know I was carrying.

Helen walked for a while without answering. We were climbing the last stretch of hill, and the city was spread out below us in the midday light. I stopped for a moment to look at it. From up here I could see the two San Franciscos. Up on the hills, where we were, the old residential neighborhoods had kept their character, houses and gardens and winding paths, but the roads were gone. Not just the cars, the roads themselves. What had been streets wide enough for two lanes of traffic and a row of parked cars on each side were now narrow stone paths threading between gardens, wide enough for a person or a handcart but nothing more. It was a village. That was the word I kept reaching for. The houses were still individual houses, each one different, each with its own garden, but they were knitted together by paths and terraces and shared spaces in a way that made the whole hillside feel like a single organism.

Below, toward the flats and the waterfront, it was a different city entirely. The towers I'd seen from the rooftop on my first day rose in clusters, their surfaces covered in the living green material that made them look grown rather than built. Some of them were enormous, thirty or forty stories, with terraces and bridges connecting them at various levels, and I could see people moving on those bridges even from this distance. That was where most of the city's people lived, Helen had told me. The towers held thousands of residents each, with communal kitchens, workshops, gathering spaces, and vertical gardens integrated into every level. I hadn't been down there yet. From up here it looked like a forest of living buildings, something between a city and an ecosystem.

I could hear somewhere the sound of someone hammering, rhythmic and unhurried.

"The question your era got wrong," she said finally, "is the question of what people are for. You believed people existed to produce. To generate economic value. A person who could produce more was worth more. A person who couldn't produce was a burden, to be carried by charity or left behind. The entire moral architecture of your society rested on the idea that a person's value was determined by their output."

"And yours?"

"A person's value is determined by the fact that they exist. That's it. That's the whole argument. The same for you, the same for me, the same for the child who was born this morning and hasn't done a single useful thing in her life."

"But people do contribute. Edward works every morning. You work. Everyone works."

"Everyone contributes because they want to. Because it feels good to be useful, to build things, to feed people, to take care of the place where you live. But if someone couldn't work at all, couldn't contribute in any way, they would have exactly the same claim to food, housing, comfort, dignity, companionship, and care as anyone else. Not as charity. As a right. Because there is no such thing as a person who owes the world their labor in exchange for the right to exist."

She said this last sentence with a force that surprised me. Helen was usually measured, careful with her words, precise in the way of someone who had spent decades thinking about exactly these questions. But this one she said as though it were the floor of the house, the foundation stone, the thing you didn't move.

"In my time," I said, "that idea would have been called socialism. Or communism. Or naive idealism. People would have said it sounded nice in theory but it could never work because someone has to do the hard work and if there's no incentive then nobody will."

"And yet here we are," Helen said, "and the hard work is done, and the incentive is that people like doing it, and the ones who can't do it are loved just the same." She paused at the gate to her garden. "Your economists believed that without the threat of starvation, people would lie in bed all day. They were wrong. The threat of starvation didn't motivate people. It terrorized them. Remove the terror, and what you get isn't laziness. It's people who are free to care about each other."

"But what about recognition?" I asked. "If nobody keeps score, how do you know who's good at things? In my time, we had rankings for everything. Employee of the month. Top performer. Best in class. Even if you took away the money, wouldn't you still want some way of knowing who's the best?"

"The best at what?" Helen asked.

"At whatever they do. Building things. Cooking. Organizing. Whatever."

"And what would you do with that information, once you had it?"

I opened my mouth and closed it. What would you do with it? In my world, the answer was obvious: you'd reward them more. Promote them. Give them more power, more money, more status. But those levers didn't exist here. There was nothing to promote anyone into.

"You're describing a hierarchy of merit," Helen said. "Replace the hierarchy of money with a hierarchy of talent, and it feels fairer. But it's still a hierarchy. It still sorts people into better and worse. It still tells the person at the bottom that they are, in some measurable way, less than the person at the top. And that's a lie. A person who is very good at growing food is not more valuable than a person who is very good at listening to someone who is sad. A person who can cook a stew that makes people close their eyes is not more valuable than a person who can sit with a dying friend and hold their hand. These things can't be ranked. The attempt to rank them is itself the error."

She paused, and then said something that rearranged things for me.

"I'll grant you this. In your time, you may have needed something like a hierarchy of merit. You had no choice. Humans were the ones who had to figure out the systems. You were the computers. You had to do the calculations, run the organizations, manage the logistics of feeding and housing billions of people. And to do that you had to sort yourselves, figure out which humans were the best computers, put them in charge, and hope they got it right." She looked at me. "But think about how well that actually worked. Even with your smartest people running everything, even with your hierarchy of merit selecting the most capable leaders, you had billions of people living on the brink of starvation. You had tens of thousands of homeless people in this city, one of the richest places in the history of the world. You were flying strawberries halfway across the planet while people starved an hour's drive from where the strawberries were grown. Your hierarchy of merit, even if it was the best system available to you, which I'm not sure I believe, was a terrible system. Because humans are terrible computers. You were never meant to do that work. You were forced into it because there was nothing else to do it."

"And now the info does it," I said.

"And now the info does it. And what a relief that is. We don't have to sort ourselves anymore. We don't have to figure out which of us is the best calculator, the best organizer, the best optimizer. We can just be people again." She said this last part with a warmth that was almost fierce. "We can do what humans are actually good at. Taking care of each other. Taking care of our communities. Being present. Making music. Playing with our children. Growing food with our hands in the dirt. All the things your era treated as secondary, as what you did after the real work was done, those turn out to be the real work. They always were. You just couldn't see it because you were too busy being computers."

"So how do people know who they are?" I asked. "In my world, you were your job. Your title. Your ranking. Your credentials. If you took all that away, what's left?"

"You," Helen said. "Just you. The person your friends love. The neighbor who remembers to check on the old man down the street. The one who makes everyone laugh, or the one who knows when to be quiet. The one who grows beautiful food or cooks beautiful meals or plays music on the terrace in the evening. You're not ranked against anyone. You're not measured. You're just a person, living as well as you can, and the people around you see you and know you and that's enough."

I stood in Helen's garden and looked at my hands, which were dirty and scraped and beginning to blister from the morning's work, and I thought about all the things that had defined me: CEO, founder, Stanford MBA, Forbes 30 Under 30. The awards and the articles and the speaking invitations and the investors who wanted to meet me and the competitors who wanted to beat me. I had carried those things like armor. I had believed that without them I was nothing, that they were what made me matter, that if you stripped away the titles and the credentials and the rankings, there would be no one underneath.

But I had spent the morning on my knees in the dirt, weeding and composting and learning which plants to pull and which to leave, and I had been no one, and it had been the best morning I'd had in 2100.

That afternoon, Edward asked if I wanted to see the towers.

We walked down from the hilltop neighborhood along paths that wound through terraced gardens and groves of fruit trees, and the character of the city changed as we descended. The stone paths widened. The houses gave way to larger structures, still covered in living walls but taller, denser, with more people moving through the spaces between them. And then, turning a corner where the hillside flattened out, I saw the first tower up close.

I had seen them from above, and I'd thought I understood the scale. I hadn't. The tower rose maybe forty stories, and its surface was covered in something that looked like it had been grown rather than applied, a green-brown material with the texture of bark or living wood, dense with moss and flowering vines that cascaded from terrace to terrace. Balconies jutted out at irregular intervals, each one a garden. The whole building looked like an enormous tree that had decided to become architecture.

"What is this made of?" I asked, and reached out to touch the wall. It was warm, slightly yielding, and unmistakably alive in some way I couldn't define. Not stone. Not concrete. Not wood exactly. Something else.

"We call it biostock," Edward said. "The info designs it at the molecular level. It's grown in sheets and structural forms, like a plant growing into a mold, but the mold is just a set of instructions. It's stronger than steel but it feels like wood. It insulates, it breathes, it repairs itself if it's damaged. It can take any shape."

"It repairs itself?"

"Small damage. A crack, a chip, a surface wound. It grows back, the way skin does. For structural damage you'd need to replace a section, but that's rare. These buildings are designed to last centuries."

I thought about the buildings of my era. The glass towers of SoMa, which had been designed to last thirty years and look dated in ten. The drywall and vinyl siding of suburban houses. The planned obsolescence of architecture.

"In my time, buildings were made to be replaced," I said. "Not on purpose, exactly. But nobody built anything expecting it to be here in a hundred years. The materials were cheap, the construction was fast, and when things got old or unfashionable, you tore them down and built something new. The whole construction industry depended on it."

"Here, tearing down a building would be considered a kind of violence," Edward said. "These towers were designed by the people who live in them, working with the info. Every floor, every common space, every garden. It took years. People don't want to tear down something they designed and built together."

We went inside. The lobby, if you could call it that, was an open space three stories high, with a living wall rising the full height of the far side, covered in ferns and flowering plants and fed by a thin waterfall that trickled down the surface into a shallow pool at the base. Light poured in from a glass ceiling above. Corridors branched off in several directions, and I could see into communal kitchens where people were cooking together, and a workshop where someone was building something from the same biostock material, and a large open room where a group of children were playing while their parents talked nearby.

"How many people live in this building?"

"About three thousand."

In my time, a building housing three thousand people would have been a luxury apartment complex with doormen, a gym, maybe a rooftop common space and nothing else. This felt more like a village turned on its side. Every level we climbed had its own character. One floor was mostly food production, rows of greens growing under full-spectrum light, herb gardens in raised beds, a small orchard of dwarf fruit trees. Another was mostly living space, with wide corridors and doors opening onto apartments that looked spacious and warm, each one different, each one clearly designed by the person who lived there. Another was given over to a communal kitchen and a gathering hall that could hold hundreds.

"San Francisco is smaller now than in your time," Edward said as we stood on a terrace high up, looking out over the city. "About four hundred thousand. A lot of people moved during the transition, when the new cities were being built. The ones who stayed liked the hills, liked the fog, liked the scale of it. This isn't a mega-city. It's a small city that decided to stay small."

"And the people who live in the towers?"

"They chose the towers. Some people prefer them. More community, more energy, more people around. The hill neighborhoods are quieter. It's just preference."

I looked out at the cluster of towers extending toward the waterfront, each one a green-walled ecosystem connected to its neighbors by bridges and walkways, and I tried to imagine the city I'd known superimposed on this one. The traffic. The parking lots. The empty storefronts. The construction cranes and the chain-link fences and the jackhammering that started at seven in the morning. All of it gone. Replaced by this.

"Who built all of this?" I asked. The question had been forming all day. The info could design it. Biostock could grow into shape. But the sheer scale of what had been transformed — every road ripped up, every tower raised, every watershed restored — that was physical work. Someone had moved all that earth.

"The industrial army built a lot of it," Edward said.

"The industrial army?" I stared at him. The phrase sounded like something from a dystopian novel.

Edward smiled. "It's an old term. From the transition. It just kind of stuck. Almost everyone serves in their twenties. Four years of genuinely hard physical labor, on big projects, usually far from home. Dredging rivers, replanting forests, restoring damaged land, building infrastructure. Work that's good for humans and good for the planet. The info always has better judgment and robots are better workers — but deploying billions of robots for every task would be ecologically destructive, absurdly expensive, and frankly ridiculous. Humans need this work."

"Wait," I said. "Robots? I haven't seen a single robot since I woke up."

"You've seen dozens," Edward said. "You just didn't recognize them." He pointed down toward the base of the hill, where a new section of terrace was being built. From this distance I could see huge articulated cranes moving with fluid, uncanny precision, holding walls in place while people worked beneath them. Something that looked like an enormous spider was climbing the side of a half-finished structure, placing biostock panels with limbs that were clearly not human but clearly not clumsy.

"Those are robots," Edward said. "Every construction site has them. Cranes that hold a wall steady for twelve hours without fatigue. Machines that climb vertical surfaces and place material with sub-millimeter precision. Devices that bore through rock or weave structural fiber or work inside places where human bodies can't go. They're custom-built for specific tasks, and they're extraordinary at those tasks."

"But no humanoid robots," I said.

"Why would you build a machine shaped like a person? The whole idea of the humanoid robot was a fantasy born from a culture that wanted servants, not tools. What you actually need are machines with twelve-meter reach, or hands the width of a needle, or bodies that can work inside a volcano. Humans chose not to replace themselves with eight billion mechanical copies. They chose to build tools that extend what human bodies can do, and kept for themselves the enormous amount of meaningful work that human bodies are perfectly made for. The industrial army is not make-work. It's some of the work that matters most, and it will never run out."

"And people volunteer for this?"

"Everybody serves." He said it with a warmth that caught me off guard. "Part of my service was six months in the Sahel, replanting the southern edge of what used to be the Sahara. Hardest thing I've ever done. I still think about it nearly every day." He leaned on the railing. "You're twenty-two, twenty-three, hauling soil and digging channels shoulder-to-shoulder with people from Lagos, Hanoi, Buenos Aires, Reykjavik. You come from completely different worlds. But you're doing the same work, eating the same meals, sleeping in the same camps, and by the end of it those people are your family. Half the lasting friendships in the world start in service."

"In my time, that idea was called national service," I said. "We proposed it endlessly and never did it. Though a lot of people joined the military for exactly those reasons — to get whipped into shape, learn discipline, do something hard that mattered. To belong to something bigger than themselves."

Edward nodded. "That's not a coincidence. Early in the transition, the leaders had a serious problem. The world's standing armies had nothing to fight. Millions of trained soldiers with no mission — and dangerous if left idle. Some of the people who built this era —" he paused, the way he did when he was deciding how much history to open up — "they understood you couldn't just disband all of that. You had to redirect it. So the first units of the industrial army were organized along military lines. Ranks, units, discipline. They took that energy and aimed it at building instead of destroying. And the people who might have fought the transition ended up constructing its foundations instead."

"And it stuck."

"It stuck because the work turned out to matter in a way nobody fully expected. Not just the output — the forests, the towers, the restored rivers. The work itself." He straightened up. "Right after university, everyone serves. The hardest jobs go to people in their twenties because that's when your body can take it. It's not year-round. About six months of full-time work each year, with the rest of the time for other things. But those six months are intense. Real work. The kind that leaves you so tired you fall asleep before you finish eating."

"And it's worldwide?"

"Just about every country in the world participates. It's formal, it's organized, and honestly, it's part of what holds the world together. You take young people from everywhere on earth and you put them to work side by side on projects that matter — restoring land, building infrastructure, replanting forests — and something happens. They come back different. They come back knowing that the person next to them, the one from the other side of the planet, is someone they'd trust with their life. You can't teach that in a classroom."

I thought about the morning's gardening, the way my burning shoulders had quieted something restless in my mind. The satisfaction of dirt under my fingernails. I was beginning to understand it.