Jack of Harts

The vast majority of people in the Socialist Republic of Juneau never achieved Zero Balance on their Life Debt, but that does not mean they had horrible lives. Those with the highest Life Debts often did perform the worst of the jobs, and could only spend their ration cards in the lowest of the markets. But the lower your Life Debt was, the better the places that you could go to were. Fresh fruit or bread was not an uncommon sight in the higher class markets, and day-old bread sent down from the Zero Balance markets was always available for those who worked well and had high social awareness. They could even choose their service to Juneau from the available openings, and few who gained that amount of comfort and control over their own lives would do anything to risk it. They were the stable middle class of Juneau, and the public face they broadcast to the world of the standard of living their better and more caring society could build for everyone.

The key concept of the Socialist Republic of Juneau’s Life Debt system was that the very lives of those who owed a Life Debt belonged to Juneau. Juneau fed and clothed them. Juneau sheltered them. Juneau schooled them. And the schooling process including sorting the children into the jobs they would be most proficient at performing for the good of Juneau. Juneau assigned their service based on the very best algorithms the government-trained bureaucrats could generate, and those services worked off that Life Debt. The other key concept was, of course, that the majority of people could never work off the Life Debt. That would defeat the entire point of a system meant to formalize the public debt of all to the State. There had to be some Zero Balancers, to act as a beacon for all the other workers, of course. But they had to be the right people. Most people could not be trusted to know how to be their best person on their own. Most people needed others to tell them what to do, or they would never succeed. So Juneau took care to pre-sort those who would be allowed to gain Zero Balance status and those who would be kept in Life Debt for the rest of their lives, and then pass their Life Debt on to their children. For the good of the people, of course.

The Socialist Republic of Juneau ran into the same problem that every socialist nation ran into during the centuries before we developed fabricators. There were never enough resources to feed and clothe those who did not wish to work to generate them. They could always expand and acquire other peoples’ resources for a time, but sooner or later, they always ran out of other peoples’ money. Juneau ran into that problem within a decade of the formation of Pacifica, and those who formed their workers’ paradise had to quickly decide how to encourage people to generate more resources Juneau needed to survive. Luckily for those involved, the government employees they used to be were always exceptional at labeling and organizing things. So if resources were becoming increasingly expensive, and if human life was becoming comparatively cheap, the only way to balance the two was by putting an expensive price on human life. The medical costs to keep a person alive. Their food costs for a lifetime. What it would cost to keep them entertained. The average cost a person would impose on Juneau over the period of an average life. The debt every person owed Juneau for giving them life. They called it the Life Debt.