My five-day literary "sprint" began yesterday on Substack: Five Stories in Five Days. Yesterday was the first story, "When Mr. Fusion Finally Arrived." Here's a snippet:
Fusion had been the sacred goal for so many years that, when it finally arrived, there was a global sigh of relief. No more worries about massive amounts of radioactive waste that could only be buried: Waste from fusion was called low-level waste, and it tended to decay quickly and harmlessly. And with so much energy now being released from the wholesale crushing and melding of atoms, people immediately thought of ways to attach monetary incentives to this new fuel source. Environmentalists were among the loudest voices, saying that people’s fuel dumps into these drives could be tracked and, depending on the amount contributed to the machine, given back to the contributor in the form of instantly usable credit. Dump in energy, get paid. Never mind that payments were in credit, and thus electronic, and thus easily trackable. Others argued the opposite, i.e., monetizing access to the drives. In different countries and cultures, people found different economic solutions to this new, reliable, and seemingly boundless source of energy. Some solutions worked better than others.
Entire mountains of trash from landfills began to be emptied. Every scrap of street litter got collected; there were sometimes friendly competitions and sometimes ugly fights, large and small, as different people set their sights on the same trash: Everyone wanted credit (both credit-as-fame and credit-as-money) for cleaning up dumps and litter. In under two years, wherever people were paid to find and dump their trash offerings into Mr. Fusion, the problem of plastic-clogged rivers disappeared. With pollution-catchers now in place on smokestacks, the pollution itself was collected and recycled, helping to clear the world’s air. Construction sites once filled with piles of scrap soon began to throw their scrap into the larger Mr. Fusions.
Today is Day 2. At 5 p.m. Seoul time, another story will appear, totally different in tone and content. I hope you enjoy it. If yes, leave a comment and/or subscribe to my Substack for free. Or become a paying subscriber and enjoy the benefits.
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