Hellsborough Exposed — hellsborough-economics

Getting trapped in Hellsborough is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I say that as someone with a degree, a PhD and, back in the off-world, a ton of debt to show for them. Nobody starves here: you're too important to The Nascenti for them to allow it, and you'd make too much of a mess for them to clean up. Your average jellyhead takes the deal without complaint, working for the nascenti in return for DPDC-issued bio-feed, a pub visit now and then and a pork roll for lunch a couple of days a week. None of them dare stick their heads above the parapet, and the joke is they don't need to, because there are plenty of ways to earn ¢hits for anyone who bothers to look. I thank Dunlockslyn I found those semagrams and made The Hinge so unstable I can't go back. I've no intention of apologising for that, either.

My rules for earning ¢hits were settled early, in a flat above Corner News on the Middlewood road too small to hold stock: no face on the posters, no staff to manage, nothing on the shelves. Pulling pints or digging holes in the road trades your time for ¢hits and never scales, so I keep hunting for the work you do once and sell many times over.

Dark Peak District Council fines you in chits for not clearing up after your barker, and the organic network watches for it with total coverage across The Dark Peak proper - but Hellsborough's roads and pavements are inorganic enough to blind the network down to maybe one reading in ten, the closest thing to a loophole this city's surveillance state has ever handed its residents for free.

Any time in Hellsborough is a time when rigorous professional reasoning is going to run up against the economics of this place — and lose.

¢hits — Hellsborough's murk-charged cryptocurrency — do not look like money in the physical sense; they look like a quality in the space around you that is slightly denser, slightly warmer, slightly more organised. Accumulate enough of them and you risk becoming what the old players call a crypto-blub: a murk-entity so saturated with ¢hit-charge that the distinction between what you are and what you own becomes, as the manuals put it, "technical rather than practical." The murk notices the transfer. The murk always notices.

Ming Shalom does not keep her wealth in coin: the ¢hit is not a physical object but a unit of murk-charged value, and her fortune sits suspended four metres above the vault floor of the Hellsborough Hole in a managed murk-field lattice — outer nodes smaller than you'd expect, total larger than you'd like. The vault's builders apparently intended that anyone who stayed long enough would start thinking about money when they hadn't been before, which I find either elegant or extremely sinister, and have not yet decided which.