Quantum Economy and Desire

Moonlight swept across the shattered dome like a cold welding arc. Wu Yong stepped down into the thirty-seventh underground level market of the imperial capital, following quantum-credit phosphor markers; a strange code flashed across his quantum retina: “Desire Index surging abnormally.”

Ten years ago, the world switched in sync to “Quantum Credits”—settlement units inscribed as entangled passphrases in vacuum fiber, zero latency, zero forgery. Economists declared: infinitely available credit would flatten all marginal utilities and humanity would eventually lie flat. The SCO Quantum Security Union—Fifth Bureau even prepared to freeze surplus compute to forestall a “boredom riot.”

Yet the stalls before Wu Yong burned hotter than in the old era:—a “Pain Experience Specialist,” injecting a precisely tuned 72 mA pulse via neural flux coils so the wealthy could flaunt their “courage threshold” at banquets;—“Hate-Stream Tickets,” a deep-sea drone array from the Stars-and-Stripes State live-beaming a high-seas pursuit, where viewers could pay credits to drop decoy foam charges;—a “Burn-Your-Credits Contest,” where contestants published their account keys, and whoever got zeroed first won while spectators bet on the outcome.

Wu Yong fingered a germanium-silicon alloy card. Its owner, Li Xin, was pitching the next-gen “Sense-of-Loss” algorithm—wiping a user’s memory of the previous purchase via quantum random gates so comparison never ends. “Demand never dies,” Li Xin murmured, “it just raises its resolution to the Planck scale.”

Wu Yong recalled a formula from tuning a lightsail at the National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center: thrust = light pressure × area. When the area expands to planetary scale, even a stellar wind can propel you. Likewise, once the selectable dimensions of desire diffuse into emotion, memory, and pain, every strand of human nature becomes tradable surface.

A micro-tremor rolled across the market dome—the Euro-State’s orbital solar web was dumping surplus energy into geomagnetic conduits to power tonight’s “Polar-Day Phantasm.” Neon lanced through fissures like the instant a lightsail first unfurls, illuminating tens of thousands of faces, hungry and ecstatic.

Wu Yong looked up; a phosphorescent, aching crescent hung among ruptured fungoid lamps. He suddenly understood: money is merely a star that keeps changing shells; the real perpetual-motion machine is the quantum entropizer of comparison and craving inside the human heart. As long as a civilization can still tell “more” from “less,” the universe can never make humanity lie flat.

He turned and stepped onto the pulsed elevator back to the surface. As he rose, his retinal alert cleared, replaced by a quiet blue line: “Engine has locked a new heading.”

In that instant, he seemed to see the entire Earth become a gigantic market lightsail, billowed by a storm of starlight, sailing toward the unknown.