Bobby Sorensen

 

 

Skin Pittance

It was a State Senator from the Rust Belt who discovered the truth of the golden people. He initiated the discovery with his fist during a fight with his neighbor over an HOA regulation. The Senator got lucky with a right cross and his neighbor’s body went limp the second his head hit the sidewalk.

The sound was the strange thing. The sound the struck body made on concrete was all wrong. It sounded like someone had dropped a suitcase full of silver dollars.

Emergency response found a crowd gathered thickly on the sidewalk, everyone on all fours around the dead neighbor, picking through grass like someone had lost a contact lens, filling their pockets.

The corpse was full of gold. Not little scraps of it sandwiched between internal organs, no. His entire body cavity was full of investment-grade, unalloyed gold. Organ-sized chunks of gold, 206 bones of gold in the shape of a skeleton, and all of it suspended in colorless, scentless slime. This had once been a man.

Prior to this incident, he’d been a normal, unremarkable family man like any other. Quiet, no kids. Watercolored sometimes.

This particular neighbor’s name is lost to us. He was the first confirmed and documented golden person. He was logged as GOLD0000001a.

It’s unlikely that GOLD0000001a was actually the very first golden person in Earth’s history, but, at the time, this was an exciting novelty. Of course, some wags on the internet will assure you that nearly all of Earth’s supply of gold has been plundered from sopping, still-warm bodily cavities, and anyone who says differently is “part of the coverup.” Judge for yourself.

In any case, the unplundered parts of GOLD0000001a’s body were well-studied thereafter. Biologists, chemists, doctors, surgeons, and even a few geologists rushed in to explain how people made of gold could walk, talk, work, raise children, and send emails (the mundane answers to these questions are located in Appendix C). But the more interesting questions were speculative. E.G.: Were there other golden people? And was it ethically wrong to mine golden people for their constituent materials?

Gold is, after all, just an unfeeling metal. An atom, box number 79 on the periodic table. The State Senator was not actually charged with any crime after the incident with GOLD0000001a — there’s no law against assaulting what amounts to a rock, as it turns out. Incidentally, he was charged with violations of federal statute regarding mining permits.

GOLD0000001b was found out, as was GOLD0000002a, and then GOLD0000002b through GOLD0000006f. It turns out that anyone might be made of gold. Reports of more discoveries spread fast. Speculators plundered morgues, mortuaries, and funeral homes — the dead wouldn’t mind if they just took a quick peek inside to see if it was Midas or just boring old meat.

But that well ran dry quickly. Families eyed their dying or old or infirm and considered possibilities.

After my poor Pappy’s funeral, we pointed the congregation towards the repast, shut the doors of the nave, and got to work on Pappy with a couple of steak knives. No luck. Grandma had been so sure.

For the record, metal detectors are confounded by the slime, and it’s the same with X-rays. We tried both on poor Pappy’s body before resorting to the knives, thanks very much.

In short order, all the graveyards, mortuaries, funeral homes, and hospice centers were completely mined out. A few millionaires were minted. Not a lot, but just enough to shoot the spot price sky-high. The rush had begun.

Once the easy pickings had been made, a few of the people who weren’t yet millionaires recalled that the State Senator hadn’t been subjected to the indignity of rooting around through Grandma’s chest cavity looking for a nugget — he’d only punched his neighbor. Anyone could do that — anyone with a fist and a neighbor.

Of course, your neighbor might be made of gold, or he might not. You might go to jail for life for murder, or you might not. There still weren’t laws on the books for the goldens, so if you sliced open your kill and hit paydirt, you’d walk free.

If this makes you squeamish, then take a moment at this juncture to look up the market price of a troy ounce of gold. Now consider your own body weight (or the weight of your neighbor, or your boss, or your brother-in-law, or your spouse) and do some quick math.

It’s a big number. Enough to warrant some real reflection. More than one neighbor, boss, brother-in-law, and spouse was throttled, bludgeoned, electrocuted, or otherwise maimed in a mad rush for gold.

It was a big enough number to send hordes of gold-mad speculators into tenements and projects everywhere, big enough to warrant tearing families apart, big enough to set mothers keening on streetcorners in sheets of rain. A number to burn down blocks that smelled of spice but not of elusive Atomic Number 79, big enough for them to split naked screaming unshriven tissues apart searching for just an ounce, just one lousy ounce. For the sake of this fluctuating number orphans were made, widows and widowers were made, homes were unmade, entire neighborhoods were unmade, all of the above and more was smelted down and made into chainlinks, fillings, and watchbands.

Yes, you couldn’t walk around with two coins in your pocket without a rabid street speculator trying to slice you open. Gallons and gallons of blood were spilled for each living karat extracted. The sewers overflowed.

It was a tribulating time.

Eventually, a clever entrepreneur developed a cheap, foolproof test which could determine, with 100% accuracy, whether or not someone was golden (and which did not involve splitting anyone in half nor any separation of limbs). It was tremendously convenient.

With the advent of the testing, a complete census of the global population was undertaken. All the golden people would be logged and charted.

It was discovered that the goldens comprised about ten-to-fifteen percent of the world population. There was absolutely no external mark on a golden person to give them away nor any clear pattern of geography or colocation.

The Gold Census took years. We stood in great lines at the testing centers and each of us held our breath anxiously as we stepped forward to receive the judgment. Eighty-five to ninety percent of us walked away relieved. The rest learned that they no longer had legal protection against being murdered.

There was no great conspiracy among the goldens but it turned out that most of them knew each other. They’d coalesced quite by accident, made golden families by chance. There were golden streets and neighborhoods. Or sometimes Mom was the only one in the family.

The census data was all public. There was a website you could consult. Even the noblest bleeding-hearts couldn’t resist checking to see which of their neighbors were gold, which of their friends.

The only golden one I’d really known was a beautiful boy from back in my college days. I hadn’t kept in touch (wish I had).

World governments assured the increasingly nervous goldens that they were hard at work determining their legal status and they expected to produce some kind of resolution any day.

It turns out that Atomic Number 79 doesn’t have voting privilege in many countries either, so their demographic was easy to ignore.

The initial orgy of the first great gold rush had produced enough to dilute the gold market horrifically and, as such, the violence settled down. This is just simple economics at work, of course.

There was a lull for a year, two years. But to the golden people’s horror, the price of a troy ounce began to rebound. Slowly, at first, but the price on their hides was rising each day. No one can really predict or explain the markets but you can’t keep a good commodity down.

All eyes were glued to the market price of gold. It went on rising, in defiance of the golden one’s prayers. If a local gold market got too lucrative, then violence would begin like a top set spinning by an invisible hand.

Consider the free city of Austin during the rush of 20__. If you’d been hiding under a rock, you’d have thought it was a riot or a pogrom. In fact, it was just simple market forces at work. Much easier thanks to the census data. The skins and slimes of the city’s goldens were burned in street bonfires and the gold was carried off. Austin was briefly the richest city in recorded history, at the cost of only ten-to-fifteen percent of its residents. Liberal world governments reacted with horror expressed through strongly-worded statements and resolved to redouble their efforts at determining legal status.

After Austin came Hamburg. It was picked utterly clean of every karat. Then Sochi, then Shenzhen, then Addis Ababa, then they tried it again in Hamburg. A few became millionaires, probably.

The goldens, bless them, eventually formed a lobby. They were well-funded: a golden could always transform themself into an overnight millionaire just by lopping off a forearm or a calf and emptying out the gold within. After much hardship, the goldens remembered that in fact gold does vote and it always has. They called it the One-Armed Lobby.

In 20__, after long, hard years of fighting and dying, the goldens became the proud recipients of Rights.

Unfortunately, these Rights did not change the fact that each one of them was walking around with generational wealth stored just inside of them. The market adapted to the Rights. Markets will do that.

You see, you couldn’t kill the goldens outright since they were now considered “living,” but you could still traffic them, trade them, assess them, and speculate on them. What did it matter that the gold was walking and talking and liked to be tucked into bed at night? Gold is gold.

Gold is gold even if it wears overalls and plays with crayons. Gold is gold even if it asks for a bandaid after falling off of its bike. Gold is gold even if it’s struggling to stand. Gold is gold whether it’s formula or breast-fed.

Goldens were aggressively recruited for federation into actively managed funds. They were told that it was the smart thing to monetize the gifts they’d been given. They could flip themselves into living capital. They’d get branded or tattooed with such-and-such firm’s QR code and entered into a secure database as leased assets. They’d receive a stipend for as long as they were still walking and talking (monthly amount proportional to their body weight, assessed quarterly). Then at the time of death, ownership of their innards would revert back to the firm.

One startup attempted to gather as many golden souls as possible in one physical location and then have them breed. The idea being that golden infants could be birthed and then added to the balance sheet, much like printing money. The first attempt at gold growing.

The first crop was lost entirely, however — keeping that many assets co-located was dangerous. An entire small-cap-index’s worth, all in one compound — too juicy of a target. The compound was raided, the assets skinned and seized by an unknown actor (likely a nation-state), and the project was shut down. Lots of red on the books.

Still, the goldens were bought, sold, branded, leased, and mined out by the million. The big firms ran the show. There was no entrypoint for Joe Retail anywhere. Dilution had ruined everything. Goldens weren’t even worth the trouble of murdering anymore, which was good news for the goldens at least. An entire family of goldens would barely cover a month’s rent.

A widely-circulated editorial presented a fascinating question — suppose other valuable materials were present in other populations of humanity? The testing process was only germane to gold and wouldn’t uncover someone theoretically composed of, say, silver, diamonds, or jade.

Thus began the next, final wave of speculation. Nearly everyone was suspected of holding some incredibly valuable commodity just behind their skins. Murder rates again skyrocketed as speculators left no stone unturned. One man split his wife open like a sausage, sure that he’d find her stuffed full of Class A voting shares of various tech stocks (he was disappointed).

Even as the speculative violence roiled and spread and the scaffolding of society began to collapse, it’s interesting and a little ironic to note the widespread incident rates of depression and suicidal ideation among the golden people of the era. They weren’t worth so much as a dime on the open market — golden people were listed among the penny stocks. Their worth was set, built-in, but they were the only ones not being hunted by future millionaires.

On the porch of a house in a golden exurb, two wizened old goldens sat and watched the grandkids play on the lawn.

One of them persisted that the worst days were behind them. He recalled the years before when they’d been harrowed by gold-lusted mobs, hunted down like dogs and sliced open like sides of beef and plundered as if they, too, didn’t have hopes and dreams. Him and his golden, starving family had once huddled under stairways and in alleyways and in cornfields and prayed that flashlights and pickaxes wouldn’t find them.

His friend, rocking next to him on the porch, smiled at the memory. “Yes sir — we were worth a long chase back then, weren’t we.”

Coming from downtown were faint sounds of violence and shrieking sirens. Plumes of withering smoke rose up from the city’s heart. Here in the yard were three golden toddlers playing freely and safely, oblivious to the faraway violence and innocent of their rock-bottom valuation.

 

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