I built a castle to save the economy

You’re welcome.

This piece of short fiction was originally published for The Elysian. Follow my work there.

Back in the 2020s, everyone was in a tizzy about population collapse. The thinking back then was that if we didn’t have enough children, they wouldn’t grow up and generate enough money, and the economy wouldn’t be big enough to do expensive things like cure diseases and build space colonies and come up with teleportation.

They tried everything to get us to procreate, but we just didn’t want to. Anyway, it was never more people we needed, but more money to fuel the economy and the innovations that economy might achieve. So when our population finally started declining in the 2100s, the government came up with a much better solution: they passed the “Spend Excessively Act” (SEA) forcing us to spend most of our incomes every year.

By this point, the whole world was rich — we all made a ton of money working very little on very important jobs — so we did what any society would do when faced with the prospect of spending excessively: we all built castles — like excessive Marie Antoinette-style castles all over the world. Mine was a 3D-printed fairytale palace crowning the French Alps where I worked as an archivist, loading all of the knowledge into Alexandria, my globally accessed AI library of every book…