FORESIGHT

August 2058

Alexa was unusually subdued as the autonomous car headed out of the landscaped grounds of the Shame Foundation, leaving Jordan to do the talking. Holding her father’s manuscript in her hands had clearly upset her.

Jordan, on the other hand, was feeling better about the visit they’d just made, in great part because of learning that his friend Bill Jones, Jr., had funded the enormous effort to rescue and store so much of the written history that society had rejected. “Bill Jones is a friend from my college days,” he said. “He’s still a friend—one of the Derangers gang.”

“Oh?”

“When we first met, he was studying property management. Now he’s one of the richest of the rich.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It is if he uses his wealth this wisely, don’t you think? I’d say what we’ve just seen is money well spent. No government agency would have dared to defy the culture-war activists in that way.”

“Depends how he made the money, and why he’s allowed to keep it. In case you’ve forgotten, Article Three of Agenda 2060 is supposed to limit private wealth accumulation. My father warned that the rich would get richer, and that they and the state feed each other. Your Mr. Jones is obviously well fed. And maybe he’s just virtue-signaling, or buying indulgences like a fifteenth-century Catholic merchant: the richer he becomes, the more sins he can have absolved.”

No, that didn’t sound like Bill, Jordan thought. Bill had gotten rich in spite of the state … or was that naïve? “Is that what your father’s last paper predicted—that the state and the super-rich would feed each other?”

“I don’t know what it said,” Alexa snapped. “I was scanning it back to your all-seeing, all-knowing computer, remember? I’m trying to find out if he’s alive, but I’m no closer. Maybe we could ask your friend Bill who at the FIB gave his museum a whole bunch of my father’s papers six months after he disappeared.”

“If Bill can help, I’m sure he will.”

She was right: she was no closer to finding her father, and the discovery that the FIB was the source of his most recent papers didn’t free her of Whitman’s leverage over her as they’d planned; it only made that leverage stronger. It was a two-hour drive back to the city, and the last thing Jordan wanted was for those hours to be spent speculating on what might have happened to the man.

“Bill Jones’s story is an interesting one,” he told her, “because people’s view of the rich is based on stereotypes, and sometimes it misses the simple ingredients that went into their recipe for success.”

“Are you going to tell me that everyone can be super rich if they work hard?”

“No, not at all. And I’m not suggesting that many of the one percent aren’t greedy, ruthless, and corrupt … but none of those descriptions could be applied to Bill. ‘Rich’ is a pejorative in this case.”

“So, how did this ‘good friend of yours from your college days’ become a billionaire without being greedy, ruthless, and corrupt?”

Holy shit, Jordan thought. This was going to be a tough ride home if he put a foot wrong.

“When Bill left college, he went into commercial property. He was qualified, personable, and black. To my knowledge, he had no money behind him. But he wasn’t afraid to apply for a mortgage if he could make a good case for a building, and he did well during the mid-twenties after the pandemic, when prices were low, but society was changing in a way that proved devastating for most owners of commercial property. For decades, people had driven their cars into the cities each day to work in office buildings. But most of those people didn’t do much more than shuffle papers around and hold meetings. Suddenly, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and automation began putting an end to that, providing far more efficient and cost-effective ways of getting things done. The only people left shuffling papers and holding meetings would turn out to be government employees. Bill had the foresight to recognize that was the direction things were heading, and he made it a policy to lease to government departments only—long-term leases, fully repairing, with buy-out clauses that were very generous to Bill. Bureaucracy, as Bill knows, is ever-expanding.”

“So, he got in deep with the government. Surprise, surprise.”

“No; Bill had foresight and a willingness to act on it. Take parking garages as an example. Once car ownership restrictions were put in place, Bill could see that parking garages were no longer going to be fat cows that delivered cream so easily to their owners. Even when they were required to install electric car charging stations on every level, their problems weren’t going to be solved. The electricity supply grid couldn’t cope with the drawdown from electric cars, and pretty soon, charging was being rationed to two days a week. As if that weren’t bad enough, bicycle lanes and bus lanes were making the roads impassable. People were forced to leave their cars at home. Policy makers were ecstatic, but parking garage owners were down on their knees sobbing—and there was no one to buy them out.”

“Except Bill Jones, Jr.,” Alexa anticipated, “acting on his foresight, presumably.”

“Foresight is easy to see with hindsight,” Jordan responded. “What percolated through Bill’s mind back then now seems so obvious to us when we see the enterprises he created, but the fact is that he acted swiftly on his forward-thinking ideas… My point is, all people are not the same, and equality will forever remain elusive.”

“So, what was your gifted intellectual friend’s big idea?”

“Bill is not a gifted intellectual, though he’s certainly no fool. The way he explained it made it sound simple. High-rise parking garages were very basic structures—just a series of concrete floor slabs interconnected with ramps, and some stairs and elevators for access. The floor slabs were open-plan, with no partitioning or fitout of any kind. They were heavy-duty utilitarian structures just waiting for a novel purpose beyond being a repository for redundant cars. Bill’s idea was to turn them into farms: marijuana farms. With charging stations now on each level, he had the juice to power the heating lamps, and the fire sprinkler systems could deliver water throughout. All he needed was some insulated cladding for the exterior walls, and appropriate ventilation.

“The banks and investment funds were clamoring to get into the booming pot industry, but Bill didn’t need them. He had his construction costs paid off before the invoices were even due. The trick was to pick up the empty parking garages from distressed owners before anyone caught onto his plan—and he achieved that with a combination of deferred settlements and confidentiality clauses. The government loved it. Estimates of the taxes to be collected from legalizing marijuana far exceeded anything that was lost through declining tobacco sales. And with Bill’s setup, they could collect their excise as if every building was a purpose-built bonded warehouse, and they didn’t even have to drive out into the country to keep an eye on it. That’s how Bill first made money.”

“By growing pot?” Alexa asked scathingly.

“You don’t approve? Marijuana is the very emblem of progressive liberalism. Do you object to him being rich on moral grounds, or because you’re against recreational drugs—or because you don’t think anybody should be rich?”

The Alexa he thought he knew would have softened at this point, but she was not in the mood.

“Alright … maybe you’ll like how he made his second fortune a bit better,” Jordan suggested.

“Cocaine?”

“No: meat alternatives. Meat, as you know, is offensive to vegetarians, vegans, and those who can no longer afford it, particularly since the United Nations encouraged a boycott of livestock farming to reduce methane emissions and convert farmland to forestry. But the problem with plant-based protein substitutes is flavor, energy costs, and scale. Another friend of mine, a biologist named Hedley Payne, solved the first two problems with a unique processing method that uses a formulation of hydroponically grown green feed, but it still needed scale to be cost-effective. So, Bill, thinking of the heat, water, nutrients, and growth involved in his marijuana farms, wondered whether a parking garage could also be converted into a meat substitute farm.”

“I take it the answer was ‘yes.’ ”

“It would be three years before that question was answered unequivocally. In that time, Bill sold his cannabis operation to the Government Pension Fund for a neat five billion in Crypto Credits, which put him right over the edge into that hated one-percent wealth bracket. Meanwhile, acting on nothing but faith in foresight and Hedley’s convincing expertise, he traveled to every major city across the continent, quietly acquiring failing parking garages on the same terms he had successfully used for the venture he’d just sold.”

“… With five billion of the state’s money in his back pocket.”

“Correct. Bill’s son, Bill Jones the third, was put in charge of marketing, and the first meat substitute farm opened in Chicago, the meatpacking capital, in April 2048. Within a year, ParkFed steaks and burgers were the ubiquitous protein of choice throughout the homes and restaurants of Illinois. In quick succession, forty-nine more plants opened interstate. As I recall, you were eating a ParkFed burger the other night in the Hope Café.”

“And ParkFed is the name of the foundation that funded the Shame Museums.”

“Exactly. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had predicted that the world would need to grow seventy percent more food by 2050 if it was to conquer malnutrition, and while GM corn and soy had comfortably met that growth challenge, the missing ingredient was protein. Then along came Bill’s ParkFed meat substitute farms, each one capable of supplying protein for one and a half million people. When Bill was led on stage at the eightieth International Earth Day gathering in April 2050—you may have seen it, it was broadcast everywhere—the applause was deafening. It was announced that by reducing public consumption of beef, pork, and poultry, ParkFed had eliminated 328 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Bill was declared a Guardian of the Earth, the highest award recognized by the governing body of the United Nations at that time. His ParkFed operations ticked every box on the ecology and sustainability checklist and were granted the protective status afforded by the UN to suppliers of essential resources. His position is now sanctioned and protected by their governing body, as provided for in Article Ten of Agenda 2060.”

“Which is?”

 “To place essential food, energy, raw materials, water, and technology resources under the protection of United Nations-approved suppliers to eliminate supply risks.”

Alexa looked unconvinced. “What I get from that,” she said dourly, “is that your Mr. Bill Jones, Jr., made it into multibillionaire territory by getting in bed with the state and the One World elites.”

Jordan gave up; she wasn’t going to be convinced. “I guess you could also say,” he joked, “that without your demon marijuana, none of this would have been possible.”

She didn’t see it as a joke. “Does it not occur to you,” she asked, “that he’s used his position among the world’s elite to acquire an enormous collection of art that once belonged to public galleries? Where does he hoard his gold?”

Jordan tried to think of a change of subject that would get a better response from her, but time passed, and he failed to think of one. It wasn’t until they were almost back to the city that she revealed what was really on her mind.

“That paper we just scanned, supposedly written in May 2039, was either written by someone else, or written by my father as some sort of forced confession. If he was alive, he’d never have put his name to it. When you read it, you’ll know what I mean. As soon as I get back, I’m going to get back into that room I told you about, where I found the minutes of the Action Committee meetings at the time of the Overthrow. I believe they killed him, because he knew who they were and what they were doing.”