“Don’t give in to the craving mind, the spending mind, the bankrupt mind. Embrace the frugal mind, the parsimonious mind, the creditable mind.”
Amon had been sitting still so long there was now a kink in his neck, and his buttocks felt numb from the pressure of his own weight against the hard plastic seat, but he would not give in to the spending mind and resisted fidgeting even the slightest. Some tenets of the guru’s philosophy, like prohibitions on eating yeast and sleeping with pillows, Amon found difficult to accept. And he felt no solidarity with the anonymous students whose voices he heard, as they seemed to believe that chanting out loud was a meritorious deed that would one day reap pecuniary rewards while Amon saw such vocalization as a senseless waste of money. Instead, he preferred to recite in his mind, the only domain in existence where all actions were complimentary.
Superstitions aside, the guru’s techniques were great allies in the battle for thrift. He also offered a breath reduction course that Amon had completed the previous winter. With daily practice he had managed to bring his total monthly expenses down by 0.06 percent, a result he found very satisfying. He had also enrolled in the guru’s voiding and urination reduction courses, but withdrew when these actions were nationalized, making them a part of the public domain and no longer subject to licensing fees. Headed by the great leader Lawrence Barrow, the ruling Moderate Choice Party was pushing for nationalization of blinking, insisting it was not truly volitional but merely an autonomic physiological function. This gave Amon some hope that all the guru’s methods might one day become obsolete, allowing him to invest his creditime elsewhere. Yet fierce debate raged on with the Absolute Choice Party, which opposed such policies to increase spending and pushed instead for privatization of heartbeating. With no resolution to the wrangling in sight—
The guru whipped his right hand out and snatched at the air before him, as though sensing Amon’s wandering mind floating there and wrenching him back to attention. The ripples in the pond had dissipated, and the few petals remaining on the surface bobbed and swayed softly.
Amon tried to dissolve his discreditable thoughts and pay attention to his eyelids, but something was nagging at him, and this time it wasn’t perennial political issues. He usually took pride in his ability to focus—his concentration test score had been perfect after all, a rare achievement only matched by prodigies like Chief Executive Minister Lawrence Barrow. But today something was wrong. Extraneous thoughts crept into his mind like worms into a dark burrow. The more effort he put into blocking them out, reinforcing the cave walls, the more persistently they encroached, squirming and gnawing ravenously at whatever he paid attention to. Meanwhile, his blinks kept firing off rapidly irrespective of his intentions, like a camera shutter gone haywire.
It had been almost twelve hours since he’d contacted Rick and still there was no answer. But if I don’t hear back soon then… And what if he… a rampant swarm of fears and apprehensions disrupted his attempts to change the mental subject and direct conscious efforts back at his blinking.
Reluctantly accepting his lack of clarity, Amon did a combination of slight twitches with his right index and middle finger. The sensors in his hand recognized the command for close window and the scene of the guru disappeared. All that remained was the unmade futon at his feet, the cream wall ahead, and his action-transaction readout, a small box of text in the bottom right corner of his eye that inexorably recorded his lifetime of enacted choices and their ever-fluctuating price. Without moving his head, Amon glanced at the readout:
He watched as the owner of blink rapidly changed hands: first it was Xian Te, then the TTY Group, then R-Lite, all within thirty seconds. These companies were based outside Japan, so the licensing fees had to be paid in their respective foreign currency. Amon kept the money in his checking account diversified, so that his smart trading application, CleverBarter, could automatically pay his bills in the currency with the best exchange rate at that moment. But Amon had set the readout to display fees in the equivalent Japanese yen value, which he found more intuitive. The price for each execution of blinking bounced around constantly, although for the time being it never strayed far from five-hundred yen. This was actually a misleadingly low price, Amon knew. It had to be corrected for early morning economic stagnation. By the time afternoon inflation kicked in, all licensing fees would be much higher, perhaps exponentially higher depending on how badly the morning market crashes went. Amon activated PennyPinch to help him tally his blink expenses that morning. The result appeared immediately. His performance was poor: in fact, the blink frequency had been slightly above his average. Amon sighed.
Amon hated sighing, but whenever he failed to be frugal, bone-deep guilt and disappointment overcame him, and the urge became irresistible. Sighing was dangerous for him. It was an expensive act that wasted his funds and amped up his guilt further, which in turn made him want to sigh again. If he wasn’t careful, he could get caught in an unending spiral of sighing about sighs about sighs that would plunge him into the pit of bankruptcy. Of course nothing approaching this had ever happened. He had never sighed more than twice in a row. Yet the downward sigh spiral was his deepest fear, something that might have manifested in his nightmares, if his sleeping life had been filled with anything other than the dream, the only dream he ever had anymore…
For some reason, he found himself wondering what it would be like to be the wall before him. The wall had no impulses to quell or desires to prioritize. No incentives to succeed, nor consequences if it didn’t. Admittedly it also had no BodyBank, and Amon could hardly envy existence without money and freedom. (He might as well have envied bankrupts!) All the same, he found himself wishing the wall would imbibe his consciousness with just a taste of its droning, dull stasis.
Soon a circular patch of skin on the center of his belly began to vibrate and the ding of a twentieth century cash register went off, his alarm telling him it was creditime to head off for work.
2
A TOKYO SUBWAY
The salarymen and office ladies were crammed together so tight on the train it was as though their bodies had fused into one; a thousand-headed beast swaying to and fro with each acceleration and deceleration, each bump or snag on the track. Vertical poles were installed near the doors, and plastic loops hung in rows from two rails running in parallel along the length of the ceiling, but many commuters were stranded out of reach from these handholds. A cluster of them leaned on Amon for support as he stood gripping an overhead rail with two hands, his body an integral strand binding the disparate fibers of this amalgamated organism.
A foot or so taller than most, Amon looked out over a dense headscape topped with trim haircuts. The supporting necks poked up from white collars drawn tight with conservatively-patterned ties and edged with dark jacket lapels. Despite their expressions of stifled discomfort and vacant denial of their surroundings, every one of these commuters, men and women alike, managed to look exquisitely good. All eyes were clear and animated, all hair was lustrous and meticulously set, all lips were moist and vibrant, all teeth straight and gleaming white, all features in just the right proportion, size and arrangement to bring out that person’s best qualities. They were so impeccably beautiful you could take any person at random, magnify their skin a hundredfold, and it would look just as glassy smooth, without bumps, misplaced hairs or even pores.