In the Time of Trillionaires

The year the first trillionaire arrived, nobody noticed at first.

The newspapers announced it in the same tone they used to report a change in weather, as though it were merely another season. Winter. Spring. Trillionaire.

The world weary women who remembered when money was still attached to things- wheat, labor, iron, rivers - shook their heads and muttered that numbers had become ghosts. But no one listened. The economists appeared on television to explain that a trillion was simply a billion that had attended graduate school.

By then, money was reproduced faster than invasive spotted laternflies and resources vanished faster than morning dew on a cactus flower in the scorching desert sun. Forests that took decades to grow took mere milliseconds to trade away to the highest bidder. Water reservoirs shrank while stock valuations expanded. Somewhere, an algorithm earned more before breakfast than an entire village earned in a century.

The trillionaire himself was rumored to live in a tower made entirely of reflected sunlight. Migratory birds crashed into it every autumn, mistaking it for the sky.

Meanwhile, ordinary people developed curious habits. They measured wealth in avocados, then eggs, then hours of electricity. Children asked whether snow had always been a luxury item. Grandparents described stable seasons the way sailors described faraway mythical lands.

The atmosphere, exhausted by centuries of service, began sending invoices. Hurricanes arrived with the persistence of debt collectors. Coral reefs faded like old photographs. In the almond orchards, spring blossoms sang eulogies for vanished bees, and produced fruit so butter,  all those who ate of it were overcome by an intense sense of melancholy.  Entire coastlines quietly packed their cattails, soft grass and estuaries and moved inland.

Yet the story most discussed was not the climate, nor the scarcity, nor the loneliness that settled over humanity like invisible dust.

It was that everyone kept insisting the system was working.

The priests of efficiency promised salvation through apps. The merchants of disruption promised abundance through scarcity. The politicians promised growth on a planet that had stopped growing several billion years earlier.

And so the trillionaire's fortune continued to rise, floating above the world like a second moon, even as his satellites crowed the sky and blocked the light of other celestial bodies. 

On clear nights people could see its glow reflected in empty reservoirs, burned forests, and glass office buildings where no one remembered why they were working so hard.

Some said the trillionaire owned more wealth than entire solar systems.

Others said he owned something far greater: humanity's imagination.

For in the Time of the first Trillionaire, the rarest resource was not lithium, fresh water, or fertile soil.

It was the ability to remember that enough had once been enough.