Noting Paper

She nearly burnt it. It struck her fatigued regard as just another credit-line mass-mailing, which she wouldn’t qualify for anyhow. All such waste went straight into the firestarter bin, to be crumpled and twisted into kindling. This usefulness was the only reason mass-mailings hadn’t been ended yet by the eco-restorers. Though a clearly flagrant ecocidal unnecessity, the steady provision of kindling fuel to the message-accosted masses amid the abrupt wind-down of petroleum driven human practices and patterns had never been challenged with enough oomph to stop the steady flow of mass marketing paper mailings. 

It was the journal that caught her attention, so full of character in contrast to the quasi-anonymous corporate papers it had been included with. A simple, black, well weathered notebook, lightly adorned with a few abstract encrustations of hand-lain pigment. Filled with notes and sketches across what appeared from a brief riffle of its pages to span years, irregularly entered. 

Outside of usual. So she didn’t start the evening’s fire with it, but nor did she further delve the mystery just then either. Into the pile for when she had energy or attention at all, much less to spare. This day, like so many stretching before, and most likely so many of those yet to unfold ahead, had already been exceedingly and perhaps excessively interesting, arduous and anxious, full of joy, and entirely tiring. 

Once the fire was going steadily, starting from past weeks’ coupon mailings from the trade goods depot in the bustling town down river, she took a few pots from the icebox and set them atop the wood stove’s upper shelf to begin warming without scalding.  

It was nearly a week until she gave it another thought, as she worked through the pile-up with a cup of coffee. Having already dispatched the necessary day-begins tasks, her brain was smoothly humming when she again considered the folio. She spread documents and journal across the patina of her roughhewn workbench, composed of broken sections and offcuts of old growth lumber she had reclaimed from the barn as its scavenged remnants fell back into the earth. She and her neighbors had constructed the initial block of village structures here overlooking the riverbend, including her garden apartment, largely from the same wreckage-supplied cobblings.

Once the whole folio was spread in front of her, it was clear: no, this was not a credit-line solicitation. From her unfocused impression of the arrayed materials, it seemed to be a statement of account—with a developing digital currency? An account with a $20,000 balance and a deposit history going back three years and, apparently … in her name. 

She picked up the cover letter, probably a good place to start toward either confirming or correcting this bewildering theory. Excellent paper, small batch and unrefined, owing its consistency of surface to skill and patience rather than industrial process. A subtly serifed font, based on Griffo’s original Poliphili cuts, rather than the derivative Bembo. Amazing how much credence just these stylistic choices conveyed, before she had even begun to parse the prosings.

It seemed that an organizing blockchain cryptocurrency had been modeling and case studying around the activities of her and some unknown others, scavenging the externalized and extracted values of her economic and ecologic practices and then enumerating them in their developing coin, and were now inviting their test-cases to shepherd the currency into living flow.

The remaining documents consisted mostly of papers to sign and return regarding intended disposition of the account. It was clear enough that signing equaled acceptance of the correlating taxations, that acknowledging and accepting carried a real and not insignificant tax burden. A tax on what was, so far, an imaginary asset-valuation— in terms of the still-current financial regulatory frameworks. 

The journal entries begin formulaically, rigid in language. They are split between generalized noting, systemic musings, actuarial tables of her activities and expenditure, and interspersed summations referencing account deposits. Full of financial-instrument and economic-model jargon, most of which she is at least passing familiar with. She is able to parse, slowly, and start building an understanding of the undertaking of this launching coin. It is, perhaps, profound. She sits, still and stunned, hesitating to get excited, to let her hopes take reign … but she is excited, hopes are chompin their bits, and she doesn’t have it in her to fight this, to maintain reasonable expectations in order to stave off the full extent of the heartbreak that could, in real likelihood, come here as it has all along the way that she makes among her beloved but struggling neighbors.

The entries begin to change sometime before the middle of the journal. Doodles start in the margins and then grow beyond them, weaving the charts and words with something else, more.   

The sun has moved through a vast swath of sky before she sets the notebook down. Stretching and shaking out limbs gone numb and buzzy, she goes to refill her coffee, her mind never leaving the journal. Noticing the last drops as they splash softly into her mug, she lifts a jug of river water and fills the patinated pewter percolator, dropping in the brew straw and filling it with coarse ground coffee and a pinch of sage. She picks the journal up again as the water warms toward percolation.

The coin developers seem to be founding their currency within a model of pristine ecological health, using a complex systems perspective. Its unit valuation iteratively read through and stored in the collective state of the myriad world systems—human and not—and benchmarked in the DNA of yeast. Even tracking and capturing their synergistic ripplings upstream and downstream and out into the watershed, the ecosystem, the neighborhood. After three years in development, they are taking their modeled understanding public, beyond its sandboxes and training forests, into the living wild.

Woven in so fully that she does not note it at first, is this: their ecological model appears to consider humans similarly as other animals, extrapolating primate patterns to render best guesses. Then—and this is where she starts to get excited—the model appears to account for human activities and impacts in both directions, enrichment and impoverishment. These parameters are illustrated with examples like the Amazon; having come into its wildly abundant biodiversity over a co-formative history with its human inhabitants stretching back over at least 26,000 years.

She pours new coffee but it gets cold as she follows the threads. The model’s appreciation path seems to be singularly enriching overall, even though incredibly nuanced and contextualized, whereas its depreciation path takes many different forms of impoverishment; extraction, exploitation, toxification, and so forth. By integrating both appreciation and depreciation in dynamic interrelationship with the systems considered, is it possible this algorithm avoids the ubiquitous pitfall of absolutist declarations of entities and interactions, which befall and then fell all the other ecosystems modeling she’s ever seen, economic or otherwise? She’s opening fully now to the risk of hope.

This hope rumbles even deeper as she groks how the modelers seem to be integrating cascading compoundment into the currency itself, gathering credits and debits both upstream and downstream and rippling throughout the ecosystem. And more? It integrates, rather than internalizing and externalizing, a latent fidelity royalty system, in part via checksums against the activity of a units blockchain for a current valuation, organically involving concurrency of resources more conventionally viewed through commodity extraction lenses.

Up now, and puttering momentarily at simple tasks to dissipate some of the wondering whirling of her souls, thinking aloud “… have they transcended both the circle and the square… created a currency that is an ecosystem unto itself, in constant deep learning so in interaction it has evolving complexifiying interrelationship with other ecosystems … Like it’s … alive? Aware?” She sits back down.

Coming to the last page, she slows. Her huge excited tension is tiring. Breathing deeper, slower, she turns the final page, now with something more akin to tenderness … reverence.

There, beautifully lettered and decorated, are two simple sentences, writ larger: “It is Good that you are. Thank you for being.” Her breath shudders and she does her best to not tense in fight against the welling sobs. The release of untold years comes, embracing the suspended despair she has fought off longer than memory. Catalyzed and catharsized all at once, through this ten word missive from an unknown beyond, breaking into her exhausted existence. 

Someone has attended and charted out an intimate map of her being, and having come to know her, has also come to know love of her. Someone has not withdrawn from the discomfort of their own reflections mirrored by her very being. 

Rifling through the formal documents she finds the cover letter, dials the phone number included, uncommonly, in the heading. While it rings she waits, having no idea what she might say. A voice answers, no video.

“Why Hello! How nice to hear from you. Am I right to assume you are calling about the invitation? How can I help?” Warm and personal, this is already a conversation.

“Well,” she starts, “I am very intrigued, and even more impressed, by what y’all have undertaken. I do have further questions, I am looking —”

Almost as if anticipating her, they quickly interrupt “I would be thrilled to answer what I can, however, please understand that both the ongoing research and modeling needs of our development program, as well as the dictates of financial regulation, limit us rather severely at this stage in what we can disclose. As director I have an extensive view of the program as a whole, but not an intensive familiarity with each individual aspect or account. I may not have the ability to answer your questions, even if program needs and regulatory dictates would allow. Only the case manager for your account could do so, and at this point in our progression, we could not identify nor connect you with them, as that would counter both program needs and regulatory dictates. If you were to become aware of the nuanced considerations at this point, in order to preserve our potential, your accounts with us would likely be frozen indefinitely if not forever.” 

“Ah, thank you. That actually answers some of my questions, however, I did have a few more—”

Again, they interrupt with a seeming intent on preempting her next words, “Yes, of course. At the moment, however, I am quite involved in an un-postponeable effort. I wanted to receive your call myself, but can’t spare time to speak at length until later this week. In the meantime, I suggest you again look through the mailing I sent you, as I am certain there is enough there to facilitate answers to your questions. Good Day, and thank you for your existence!”

So. Not just the signer but also the sender. They almost certainly knew the journal was included but were intentionally sidestepping any on the record acknowledgment of it. 

Something about the exchange, more the friendship and genuine care in their voice rather than their words, has shaken the remains of her hesitancy, and she stands up rather more emphatically than she has in longer than she can remember.

With dawning trust slowly swelling in her cells, bathing fizzing quarks in soothing seas of ease, she picks up the journal, lifts the front cover gently. There, right where expected, in the blank following the pre-printed “In case of loss, please return to:” is a tidily handwritten number, digits broken up by parentheses and a dash. All thoughts of the $20,000 balance, and possible invalidation of her rights thereto by the action she’s in the midst of taking, are eclipsed by the swells she now surfs, flowing together in ease. Entering the number, tapping “Dial.” Circuit connection clicks, rings. “Hello?” a voice sings.