Gas Miner 3 (Patreon)

Do you like economics? Yeah, me neither, but the economy of a slave ship fascinates me...

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Oril stripped off his environment suit and, with a paw on his back, Geji led him through his new ship to a mess hall. He opened a supply cabinet with a flourish. “First things first, my friend,” he said. “You can find a strand in this drawer, we have a limited supply of tail bracelets, and a good variety of beads.” He pointed at a series of plastic organizers. “What color were your beads previously?”

“Blue,” said Oril, reaching for the bin labelled “blue”.

“Uh-uh-uh,” said Geji. He put a paw over the blue bin and waggled a finger at Oril. “One of our rules here is not to cling to what you’ve left behind. This is your chance to start over! If you had five beads before, try seven now. Were they round? Try squares. I bet red or yellow would go great against your fur.”

Oril’s ears hung low. His beads and tail ring had been a part of his identity for the past sixty years. How could he give that up?

“Please, Oril,” said the grey geroo, “try to reinvent yourself, starting today. Strip off that funerary crepe and make yourself a new necklace. You can always change later if you hate it.”

Oril set his jaw and thought about it a long moment. He didn’t want to reinvent himself. He liked who he was, but then again, he was making huge changes he had never made before. “Okay, I’ll try,” he finally said, “but no promises.”

“None expected!” yarped Geji. “I’ll leave you to it.”

About an hour later, Oril had assembled … something. He had five yellow beads and an orange one that reminded him of the one that Cheni had given him decades ago. He hoped that no one would hassle him about trying to replicate that one in particular. He might be reinventing himself, but that didn’t mean she needed to change as well.

Though Geji had cautioned him against it, Oril had dug through the blue bin and made mental notes to revisit a few that he coveted, if he found that he couldn’t live with yellow.

He heard a low rumble from the corridor and a couple dozen geroo meandered in. He touched paws over and over, introducing himself. He tried to remember names as the others gave them, but he warned them that it would take him some time to learn so many new faces.

“So, who’s the captain?” Oril finally asked when he realized that no one had mentioned their title.

Several of the crew chuckled. “Yeah, about that,” said Geji, “we don’t actually have one.”

“What?” Oril said with more surprise than he intended.

“Nope, no doctor either,” said another. Oril thought her name was Julaa, but he couldn’t be certain.

“Yeah, I heard about that—”

“No officers, no administrators, no landlords…” said Thippo.

Oril stared, wide-eyed. How could a ship manage without so many basic roles?

“No janitors,” Geji added. “Sadly. We all have to try and keep the ship clean.”

“No cook either,” said Julaa, “although thankfully, Geji is more talented with vegetable oil than he is with motor oil.”

Everyone laughed at that, and clearly there was more to tell, but the crew continued without an explanation.

“No teachers.”

“No garbagemen.”

“No farmers.”

“Oh jeez,” sighed Oril. “I guess I need to learn how to grow food, huh?”

“Nope,” said Geji, “our ship is too small to support a farm.”

“Okay, so our food comes from…”

“Other ships, of course,” explained Julaa. “We sell air to the gate ships and use the credits to buy essentials.”

“Oh, I see,” said Oril, “so, all of us are … engineers?”

Fuzzy heads in all directions bobbed.

“And, generally speaking, we really don’t need two dozen engineers to keep this ship maintained,” said Thippo.

“Although there’s been times when things have gone wrong and we’ve been thankful to have so many,” explained Julaa.

“True,” agreed Thippo, “but with so many paws and no officers trying to keep us busy with stupid make-work, we keep everything maintained, and it’s really rare that anything ever breaks.”

“Oh, hrm, sounds kinda boring,” said Oril. Various geroo nodded and Oril smiled. “I could do with a little boring for a change. So, what do you guys do to fill the rest of the time?”

“I’m so glad you asked!” Geji grinned wide and the rest of the geroo pulled up chairs around the boxes of beads that Oril had yet to put away. “We have a lot of fun playing arbitrage…”

“Arbitrage?” Oril asked, his ears upright. A single set of tiles could be played in a variety of manners, but this version sounded unfamiliar. “I’ve never heard of—”

“Back in the days of Medieval Gerootec,” explained Geji, “they had a very simple system to avoid inflation—it was called a closed economy.”

“A closed—?”

“Yes, Oril, all their money was in the form of gold and silver coins, so apart from when a coin would be lost or a new one might be minted, the number of coins remained fairly constant. Coins moved from paw to paw as things were bought and sold. But the king—the government—had bills to pay too, right? He needed roads built, soldiers to protect the people, castles to maintain…”

Oril had no idea where any of this was going. He scratched at the longer fur on the back of his neck. “Okay, sure, but he was the king, right? He could just take stuff or make someone be a soldier, right?”

“That wouldn’t work,” said Julaa, raising a single finger. “Those soldiers had bills to pay too, and if you take bricks away from a brickmaker without paying for them, the brickmaker will starve. Everyone needs to be paid for their work, even if that work is for the government. So, the king was paid through a tax on every citizen, they all shared the burden of financing the government.”

Oril shrugged, totally lost. “So, the king took the money from the people and then gave it back by buying stuff, like coolant circulating in a refrigerator. Is that why it was a closed economy, like the closed loop of coolant?”

“Yes, exactly!” said Thippo, clapping his paws together so hard that the bang echoed off the mess hall’s walls. “But the gate ships don’t have a closed economy, do they?”

“Uh,” Oril mumbled with a shrug.

“The ships are owned by the company which plays the part of the king,” said Geji. “There’s no tax, but the company is still active in the economy. The crew pays for company resources like rent on the apartments and food from the agriculture decks and the company pays the crew for their wages.”

“That sounds the same,” said Oril. “That’s a closed loop.”

“It would be,” Julaa explained, “if the money were coins, but instead, the ships use digital credits, and there’s no mechanism to make the company re-use those same credits they received for rent and vegetables to pay everyone’s salary. Essentially, each credit paid to the company is deleted from the system and each credit the company pays out is generated on payday. It’s not a loop. It’s more like a hose where the company pours coolant in one end, and it splashes out on the deck at the other. Thus, each economy is unbounded and may grow or shrink independently.”

Oril looked nervously around. Everyone was staring, and he had no idea what they were expecting of him. Eventually, he managed a well thought out, “So?”

“Let’s simplify this way down,” said Geji with a wide grin. “Pretend you were the only crewman aboard the Fart Sniffer, and that every day you ate only a single loaf of bread.”

Oril sat back in his seat and frowned. “Sounds like punishment.”

Geji ignored the comment and continued, “You buy your bread loaves from the ships. On some ships, the bread is ridiculously expensive, and on some it’s so cheap, it’s nearly free. You can’t control their economies, but you can control your service schedule. So, what order do you visit them in?”

Ugh. It had been a very long time since Oril was in school, and he was so senior at work that no one ever really challenged him. He stared at Geji for a moment, trying to guess what he expected, and he glanced around at some of the others too. “Well, I suppose I’d break the ships into two groups; those with cheap bread and those with expensive bread.”

Geji nodded but said nothing.

“I wouldn’t want to visit a whole bunch of expensive ships in a row, or I’d go broke.” More nods as he rolled the problem around in his head. “I guess I’d do expensive ships on odd days and cheap ships on even days … and then buy two loaves from the even ships so that I wouldn’t waste my credits on odd days.”

Some of the crew murmured agreement, but they generally remained silent. They were waiting for … something. “And I might even…” he said, thinking aloud, “buy three loaves at a time instead of two. Then, on an odd day, when prices were high, I could sell someone that extra loaf and make a profit.”

“And that’s arbitrage!” said Julaa. Everyone was grinning now. “You made money not by doing any work or by trading from one location that had excess to another where there was a shortage, but by taking advantage of a broken currency and buying something—anything—that was cheap and selling it where it was expensive.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ek0pIe9ydZwlA0fFW60mgbdeRyxD2DCEr3kJPclQegc/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?