Olz Hap in the style of Mikhail Vrubel, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Chapter 6: Sextidi

  Mikla metropolitan area

  Year 5638 of the Confluence

  Countdown: 17

  Olz Hap

  Still nothing happening. Olz could feel her frustrations mounting.

  The probably most significant difference between the Confluence and what came before it was about wealth. Back then, people would fight over material possessions, and having expensive things conferred status upon the owner and was one of the trappings of power. This had changed in fundamental ways, although the basic dynamics probably remained.

  Life in the Confluence was what the magisters of the pre-Confluence era would have called post-scarcity. Olz remembered learning this term in one of her history classes, and she’d thought it was a good one and kept it with her forever.

  At the beginning of the Confluence, with the dawn of magical consciousness, scarcity had simply ended. People discovered affinities for Conjuration and Transmutation magic and could just produce whatever they needed, basically out of the thin air.

  The transition period was kind of amusing, because when people with the old wealth-focused mentality discovered they could make gold and diamonds, they spent a lot of energy doing just that. For a while, celebrities showed up at events wearing several kilograms of jewels. People turned massive boulders into diamond and hollowed them out to make diamond houses. That kind of thing.

  Ironically, Conjuration and Transmutation were the largest fields of magic, in terms of the number of people who had affinity for them, by a wide margin. More than two-thirds of the twelve billion Confluence citizens belonged to these fields.

  The creation and manipulation of material substances were therefore fairly low status – Conjurers and Transmuters were something like the working classes of the pre-Confluence world, except that they controlled their own means of production and were basically free to do what they wanted.

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  Both types of mages possessed the ability to achieve complete material self-sufficiency and could sustain themselves independently, in full isolation from society if that was their preference.

  Still, fairly low status, and yet almost everybody remained in society. Of course, some Transmuters in particular would get famous for making fabulous works of art, but generally they were satisfied with doing mundane tasks like energy production and construction work.

  Olz had always found this fascinating, and she had spent a lot of time thinking about why it was so. First of all, she believed, there was an economic dynamic at play, which in some ways resembled the old exchange dynamic involving what they had called money. In the money economy, you would do some work and receive money in return, and then you could give this money to other people to get them to work for you.

  Today, people who contributed to society would be prioritized for housing and other goods, so that you could live in a house that Transmuters had spent a lot of time on instead of in a house they had just set up as efficiently as possible. Obviously, areas with fine residences were also higher status than other areas, so people wanted to live there for that reason, too.

  Furthermore, as long as you show up for work reasonably often, you would be eligible for promotions, which would give you access to even finer housing in higher-status neighborhoods (and maybe more interesting work).

  Nevertheless, if you were a Transmuter with a talent for architecture, you could just construct your own beautiful house. But then you would have to live on your own somewhere, not in a high-status neighborhood.

  Land in and around cities was communally owned, so you could not just build what you wanted where you wanted it. In the wilderness, you could do that, except that some areas were protected as natural reserves, but then you would have to live on your own out in the wilderness.

  In sum, most people wanted to be a part of Confluence society, and they invested time and effort in mundane work so that they had a chance of doing more prestigious and meaningful work in the future.

  There were also norms at play, with one basic one saying it was selfish to just think about yourself. If you lived on your own out in the wilderness without contributing to society, you could still show up at a Conveyer node and ask to be transported somewhere, and they would do it, but some of them would think of you as a freeloader, as a selfish person who is happy to take but not to give anything in return.

  Being a freeloader was low status, although of course many people who did not contribute had disability issues or mental health problems and could not really be blamed for it. Some people believed that everybody who dropped out from society had mental issues – that removing yourself from human society was basically a symptom of mental unhealth – and therefore we just had to make exceptions for them.

  As it turned out, just about 3-4% of Confluence citizens dropped out for extended periods of time, and many of those removed themselves completely and made no demands on society.

  People with disabilities and other problems would generally find ways to contribute at least a little bit, and most bottom-rung jobs were overstaffed so you did not really have to show up every day. Show-up-when-you-can arrangements meant that even severely disabled or low-functioning individuals had a job to go to when they felt up to it, although sporadic attendance was generally not the path to promotion.

  It was not lost on Olz that this generous yet efficient system might be vulnerable to the Blight. Eventually, so many people would skip work because of exhaustion that things stop functioning, and, she thought, we are not prepared for that. The societal machine has always been working for us – if it breaks down, we move into uncharted territory.

  She was still waiting, but she was getting impatient, and she was thinking about her next move.