10_Quantum Economy and Desire

Moonlight washed over the shattered dome like the flare of a cold welding arc. Following the faint glow of quantum-credit phosphor markers, Wu Yong descended to the thirty-seventh underground level of the imperial capital’s market district. A line of code flickered across his quantum retina: “Desire Index surging abnormally.”

Ten years earlier, the world had moved in lockstep to “Quantum Credits”—settlement units etched as entangled passphrases in vacuum fiber: no delay, no counterfeits. Economists proclaimed that limitless credit would smooth out every marginal utility, and that humanity would, sooner or later, simply lie flat. The SCO Quantum Security Union’s Fifth Bureau had even drafted plans to freeze surplus compute power, just in case a global “boredom riot” broke out.

Yet the stalls in front of him burned hotter than anything from the old era: a “Pain Experience Specialist” offering a precisely tuned 72 mA neural pulse so the rich could show off their “courage threshold” at banquets; “Hate-Stream Tickets” for a deep-sea drone array run out of the Stars-and-Stripes State, live-casting a high-seas pursuit where viewers could pay extra credits to drop decoy foam charges; a “Burn-Your-Credits Contest” where contestants posted their account keys, and whoever got wiped to zero first was the winner, while the crowd gambled on the result.

Wu Yong turned a germanium-silicon alloy card over between his fingers. Its owner, Li Xin, was hawking his next-gen “Sense-of-Loss” algorithm—using quantum random gates to erase a user’s memory of their last purchase so the comparison never really ends. “Demand never dies,” Li Xin murmured. “It just keeps cranking the resolution up to the Planck scale.”

Wu Yong remembered a formula from his days tuning lightsails at the National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center: thrust = light pressure × area. Once the sail’s area spreads to planetary scale, even a thin stellar wind can push you along. In the same way, once the selectable dimensions of desire seep into emotion, memory, and pain, every strand of human nature turns into tradable surface.

A faint tremor rippled through the market dome—the Euro-State’s orbital solar web was dumping surplus energy into geomagnetic conduits to power that night’s “Polar-Day Phantasm.” Neon speared through the cracks overhead like the moment a lightsail first snaps open, washing over tens of thousands of faces, all hungry, all ecstatic.

Wu Yong tilted his head back. A pale, aching crescent hung among the ruptured fungoid lamps. He understood then: money is just a star that keeps shedding and changing shells; the real perpetual-motion engine is the quantum entropizer of comparison and craving lodged in the human heart. As long as a civilization can still tell “more” from “less,” the universe will never get humanity to lie flat.

He turned and stepped onto the pulsed elevator to ride back to the surface. As he rose, the warning on his retina faded, replaced by a calm blue line: “Engine has locked a new heading.”

For a heartbeat, he seemed to see the whole Earth unfurl into a single vast market lightsail, billowing under a storm of starlight, drifting toward the unknown.