You were safe, of course, from all but one predator. For every transaction, it went without saying, was communicated to the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, the rebranded IRS. (Willing didn’t know why they bothered to change the name. If they’d rechristened it the Department of Bunny Rabbits and Puppy Dogs, within minutes the “DBRPD” would evoke the same terror.) The data storage capacity of federal super computers was now so infinite that the old reporting threshold of deposits over $10,000 had come to seem recklessly steep. Tax authorities were now instantly apprised when a six-year-old received the wherewithal from his mother to buy gummy bears. Two bags.
The chipped all seemed thrilled to see the end of tax returns. Rendering unto Caesar was effortless. Though that meant there was no more cheating on their tax returns, either. No furtive rounding up or disguise of personal frippery as business expense. This also went down well politically. For decades, the public had been convinced that a remote elite living the life of Riley paid no taxes whatsoever. Oddly, Willing had never met one of these people. They must have lived somewhere else.
Much the same reasoning had led to the complete elimination of the cash dólar nuevo in 2042. Cash was an antiquated store of value. It created logistical hardship for Main Street small business. It leant itself to counterfeiting. It was the easiest form of wealth to steal. Criminals had long conducted business in banded stacks, in bulging briefcases, in whole suitcases stuffed with greenbacks, and now these cinematic clichés were obsolete. For cash was also one of the only forms of wealth that eluded jurisdiction. Willing remembered the furtive spirit in which his mother had plied the plumber with a rustle of twenties, as if to exchange physical money for services were against the law. Because cash is so hard to track, to trace, to tax, to control, Willing was astonished it took the government so long to get rid of it.
Language, by contrast, did not respond to fiat. Americans continued to communicate with idioms grown insensible. When their chips were down, so to speak, people still claimed to be low on cash. A profitable business remained a license to print money, and its proprietor might make a mint, though all the mints had closed. Fifa continued to offer her laconic boyfriend a penny for his thoughts. A tax refund would have been pennies from heaven had anyone ever got one. Affronted benefactors cut off heirs without a penny, although ferocious inheritance taxes kicked in at such a low level that you were lucky to leave children your button collection. Jarred didn’t regard fully automated farm equipment as worth a plug nickel, though the latest safety features enabled driverless electric harvesters to stop on a dime. Democrats often described the economic stability and political disempowerment of the 2040s as two sides of the same coin.
A few optimists still bet their bottom dollar that the United States would rise again to world supremacy, though a digital construct could not be stacked. The rhetorical convention persisted, but making a bundle was now impossible. A property owner uneasy about a purchaser’s solvency might yet want to see the color of his money; as of 2042, American currency had no color. A unit of one hundred nuevos was a C-note, slang now easily mistaken for an allusion to music. However ethereal the quantity had become, the country’s linguistic Luddites insisted on regarding money as something you could roll in, throw at something, enjoy a sufficient excess of which to burn, or—a disconcerting image even in the days of the paper dollar—pour down the drain.
To Avery’s delight, secure chipping had restored the online marketplace. Exhilarated by the prospect of once more buying a toaster without leaving the house, his aunt was an early adopter. (It was clever, making the first wave of guinea pigs pay for the privilege of implantation. Steep charges turned chips into status items.) Unfortunately for the likes of Willing and his cousins, the rousing return of internet shopping was largely theoretical. They commanded too little discretionary income to buy much. The economy was overwhelmingly powered by the whims of the retired.
Socially, Willing kept any reservations about chipping to himself. Detractors of the liberating fiscal protocol were pilloried as crackpots. Although continuous government access to your exact location might have seemed an infringement of civil liberties, most Americans were long accustomed to having their movements tracked by commercial entities like Google Maps. For decades, bicycles had been chipped. Pets had been chipped. People being chipped seemed inevitable. Buying goods with a mere tap at a terminal went back to smart phones, so the technological leap was minimal, while the security leap was huge. Now no one could appropriate the means of effortless purchase without chopping off your head, and nothing destroyed the functionality of a chip more instantaneously than its host being dead. Yet Willing felt not enough had been made of the chip’s location. Its biological safeguards would have worked equally as well had it been embedded in an upper arm. The purpose of installing the thing right up against your spinal column was to keep you from digging it out. Employing shady surgeons, a few refuseniks had tried. They were recognizable for being paralyzed.
Nollie’s disappointment that her grandnephew had freely become “their creature” was probably harsh. Nollie herself had an old-fashioned bank account, and made purchases with an ancient fleX. (Because it didn’t auto-report, she also had to file old-fashioned tax returns. The dodgy throwback documents were systematically audited with a rolfing thoroughness that led to multiple senior suicides.) But the unchipped constituted a dwindling minority: the elderly, the far-flung and rural, a few expats abroad. Such anachronisms drew an accelerating suspicion and contempt. They couldn’t buy a quart of milk without hauling out some device. Willing had noticed that customers behind Nollie in supermarket lines would fret. The unchipped inspired the widespread impatience that once greeted holdouts who spurned fleXes or their predecessor smart phones. In short order, the whole population would be chipped, and savings, checking, and investment accounts would be eliminated altogether—at which point it would be impossible to buy anything, sell anything, or possess any monetary wealth whatsoever in the absence of a pinhead-sized spy rammed into the back of your neck. That was certainly the plan, and Congress was unapologetic about this intention—a benevolence portrayed as akin to the nationwide polio vaccinations of the 1960s.
Naturally, the web bubbled with the feverish imaginings of paranoid kooks: chips would turn the American people into an army of hollowed-out robs that would do whatever a mad dictator in Washington commanded. True, research was under way to expand the implant’s capacity by directly connecting the brain itself to the internet. This breathlessly anticipated “cognitive access” would obviate the chipsite, allowing you to check your balance by merely calling your bottom line to mind, and to make monetary transfers with a cerebral calculator pad. Perhaps in the near future, then, you would be able to read webzines, play games, and watch cat videos in your very head.