Chapter 23: What Happened to the Money

It came up naturally, the way most things did now that I had my info. I was walking through the hill neighborhood on my way to morning work, passing the houses with their gardens and stone paths, and I thought about the houses I'd known in Pacific Heights in 2027. The mansions. The three-story Victorians with the Tesla in the garage and the live-in nanny and the home gym and the wine cellar. The houses that cost ten or fifteen million dollars and that the people who owned them considered modest.

"What happened to them?" I asked, not even specifying who I meant, because my info already knew.

"The rich?" my info said.

"The rich. The billionaires. The people who lived in houses like the ones that used to be here. The people who lived in my building in SoMa. The Bartletts with their old Boston money. Everyone I knew who had wealth. What happened to their money?"

"It stopped being money," my info said. "That's the shortest version."

I was pulling weeds in the lower garden by then, on my knees between the lettuce rows, and I kept working while my info explained. That was the thing about having your own info. You could do two things at once in a way that didn't feel divided. The weeding and the conversation were both happening fully, neither one diminished.

"Nobody confiscated anything," my info said. "There was no moment where the government showed up and took people's wealth. What happened was simpler and, in a way, crueler. Money became worthless. Not overnight. Gradually. As the Mission for America created jobs and income for everyone, as the public AI utilities and the RFC provided credit and services, as the new economy took shape around work-credits — the system Helen had first explained to me over tea in the garden — and public provision rather than private accumulation, the old money just mattered less and less. A billion dollars in 2029 could still buy you almost anything. By 2035, it could buy you a smaller and smaller set of things. By 2040, there was almost nothing left to buy, because people had their own independent access to the means of making or acquiring everything important."

"But they still had their houses."

"They still had their houses. Everyone kept their houses. That was the deal. But here's where it got difficult. If you were a billionaire with a giant mansion, you needed people to maintain it. Groundskeepers, housekeepers, cooks, security, a whole staff. And where were those people? They were working on the Mission. They had purpose, they had income, they had communities. They didn't need to clean a rich person's toilets for wages. You couldn't hire them. Not for any amount of money, because money was becoming meaningless, and not for any other incentive, because the work they were already doing was more meaningful than being a servant."

I thought about the houses I'd known. The casual way my friends had talked about their housekeepers. The nannies, the gardeners, the personal chefs. An entire class of people whose labor existed to make wealthy people's lives comfortable.

"So the mansions just fell apart?"

"Slowly. Money wasn't instantly irrelevant so they were able to attract workers for years and years by offering higher and higher salaries. Rich people could maintain mansions and even keep flying their private jets for a while. But eventually it became highly impractical. And when workers could no longer be found. Well, a thirty-room estate with twelve acres of grounds? You can't maintain that alone. The roof leaks, the garden overgrows, the pool goes green, the wine cellar floods. And meanwhile, the new cities and neighborhoods being built everywhere were beautiful and comfortable and alive in ways that made a private mansion feel lonely and absurd."

"So they gave them up."

"Most of them made deals. Turn over the estate to public use: it becomes a retreat, a community space, a school, a gathering place. In exchange, you get to keep living in the main residence, or in a very nice apartment, on a lifetime lease. You live well. You just can't pass it to your children as private property. When you die, it becomes fully public. President Rosario-Reyes, was pragmatic about this. When people complained that it wasn't fair to let such inequality persist for a generation she said, 'Who cares? Let them keep their ugly houses. We have bigger problems.'"

My info paused, and I could feel it preparing an analogy it thought I'd appreciate.

"You might think of it as similar to what happened to the European aristocracy during the rise of capitalism. Have you seen Downton Abbey?"

I laughed. "I was a little young for that. But I know the premise."

"The premise is the reality. For centuries, the European aristocracy had enormous estates maintained by an agricultural economy that funded the upkeep. When industrial capitalism arrived, the agricultural model collapsed. The estates became impossible to maintain. The aristocrats were left with vast, crumbling properties and no way to pay for them. Many married their children to the daughters and sons of new industrial tycoons who wanted the prestige of a title. That's the whole plot of Downton Abbey. The old wealth making a deal with the new wealth."

"And in the transition?"

"There was no new wealth. There was no rising class of tycoons looking to buy prestige. There was just a rising of society that valued every person's mind and body the same. The old rich couldn't make a deal with anyone because nobody wanted what they had. Nobody wanted to be a billionaire's son-in-law. Nobody wanted a title. Nobody wanted to live in a thirty-room house with nobody to talk to."

I sat back on my heels in the garden and looked at the houses around me. These had been Pacific Heights mansions once, or some of them had. Now they were divided up but also transformed and expanded into smaller but still incredibly spacious and comfortable homes, each one different, each one beautiful, a mix of the original designs and the modern building materials, each one maintained by the people who lived in it and the neighbors who helped. No servants. No staff. Just people taking care of their own place.

"What about the Bartletts?" I asked. It came out before I could stop it. Edward's family. The old Boston money. The law firm. The museum boards.

"The Bartlett family's wealth followed the same pattern," my info said gently, knowing this was tender ground. "Their money became worthless on the same timeline as everyone else's. But they kept their house in Boston. Edward lived there after your disappearance and through the early years of the transition, and then he moved back out here to San Francisco."

"He moved back here?"

"He moved here. To this neighborhood, in fact. He helped build it."

I was quiet for a long time. Edward Bartlett, my Edward, had walked these paths. Had helped lay the stones I was kneeling on. Had maybe planted the garden I was weeding. The thought was almost too much to hold.

"I could ask him about it," I said.

"You could. His info is here."

"Of course it is," I sighed. "Not yet though."

I went back to the weeding, trying to put the original Edward out of my mind. The lettuce was coming in well. The sun was warm on my back. Somewhere down the hill, Oren was singing while he cooked, his voice carrying up through the terraces, and the smell of whatever he was making drifted through the garden like a promise.

"One more question," I said.

"Of course."

"The people who gave up their mansions. The billionaires who made the deals. Were they bitter? Were they angry? Did they feel like something had been stolen from them?"

"Some were. Some spent years raging against the new order. A few tried to use their remaining wealth to buy political influence, to fund opposition movements, to restore the old system. None of it worked, because there was nothing to restore. The economy had moved on. The people had moved on. You can't have a counter-revolution when nobody wants to go back."

My info paused again.

"But most of them, eventually, were fine. Their children grew up in the new world and couldn't understand what the fuss had been about. Their grandchildren didn't even know the family had been rich. And the former billionaires themselves, the ones who lived long enough, often admitted in private that they were happier. Not because they'd been freed from wealth, that sounds too neat, but because they'd been freed from the isolation that wealth created. They had neighbors now. They had community. They ate meals with people who weren't on their payroll. For some of them, it was the first time in their adult lives that someone had been kind to them without wanting something in return."

I pulled a weed and tossed it in the compost bin and thought about Freid Huffman in his mansion on Broadway, with his reclaimed timber and his brushed-metal sculptures chosen by a consultant and his house that smelled like cedar built into the walls and something chemical and cold. No family photographs anywhere. I wondered if he had ever eaten a meal with someone who wasn't trying to sell him something or buy something from him. I wondered if he had ever, in his entire life, been the kind of lonely that comes from having everything and no one to share it with.

Then I thought about Helen's garden, and the chair Adaeze built, and the food Oren brought up the hill, and the evenings listening to Tomoko play, and I went back to work.