The Great Valuation

 

12 The Great Valuation

It fell on a Tuesday. Not with a cataclysmic impact, but with a soft, deep thud that vibrated through the crust for a full minute. It landed in the Siberian tundra, a mountain of shimmering, impossible metal, half-buried in the permafrost like a dropped ingot from a celestial treasury.

Analysis came back within hours. It wasn’t just gold. It was a perfect, homogeneous amalgam of every precious substance humans had ever killed for: gold, platinum, rhodium, iridium, palladium, laced with veins of flawless gem-quality diamonds and sapphires. The “Midas Meteorite,” the news called it. Initial estimates suggested there was enough, if distributed equally, to give every human on Earth roughly 200 tons of precious matter.

The first week was a carnival. The idea was intoxicating. Scarcity, the bedrock of all economics, all conflict, all class, had been obliterated overnight. Governments, fearing chaos, rushed to claim and distribute. Nanoforges at the site processed the material into standard, certified bars. Digital ledgers were updated. Every man, woman, and child on Earth received their allotment. A universal fortune.

We were all trillionaires.

And by Friday, we were all paupers.

Stage One: The Collapse of Meaning

Gold’s value wasn’t in its shine, but in its rarity. When it became slightly more common than iron ore, it became iron ore. Currency markets evaporated first. The dollar, the yen, the euro, all backed by nothing but ghost-scarcity, became pretty paper. Then digital banking dissolved. Your account showed numbers with twelve zeroes, but they couldn’t buy a loaf of bread. Why would anyone sell bread? They had their own mountain of metal.

The collapse was intellectual as much as economic. Centuries of human striving, the logic of investment, the concept of savings, the very idea of “wealth accumulation”, were rendered not just obsolete but nonsensical, a collective psychosis we’d all agreed to. The meteorite was the cold, hard punchline to our global joke.

Stage Two: The Regression to the Real

A new, brutal calculus emerged. The only things with value were what the meteor was not made of.

• Food: A single apple became worth its weight in platinum. A gallon of clean water traded for a handful of uncut diamonds. The supermarkets were looted not of goods, but of the goods themselves, the shelves, the lighting, anything of mundane utility. The food was gone in hours.

• Labor: Why would anyone collect garbage, repair wiring, or perform surgery when they were, on paper, infinitely wealthy? No one did. The servers went offline. The power grids flickered out. The surgeries were cancelled. The skilled, who days before had been anonymous cogs, became either warlords or targets. A plumber who knew how to restore water pressure to a building was a more powerful figure than any former billionaire.

• Skill & Security: A mechanic who could keep a solar generator running owned the new world. A farmer was a god-king. They had no need for gold. They needed protection, loyalty, homage. Barter returned with a vengeance, but not of trinkets, of essentials. Bullets, antibiotics, seeds, and knowledge became the true currency. A new feudalism was born in a week, based on calories and kilowatts, not coins.

Stage Three: The Weight of Plenty

The physical reality was absurdly oppressive. You owned 200 tons of metal. Where do you put it? It became a logistical nightmare, an anchor. People buried it, threw it in lakes, used platinum bars as doorstops and gold ingots to hold down tarps against winds that still blew. It was too soft for tools, too heavy for practical construction, too common for art. It was useless. Worse than useless, it was a constant, gleaming reminder of the great, cosmic joke.

The most haunting sight wasn’t the poverty; it was the monuments of mockery. In city squares, people built grotesque, gleaming pyramids of their gold, not as displays of wealth, but as tombstones for the old world. Children kicked diamonds the size of fists down the street like marbles. The splendor was everywhere, and it meant absolutely nothing. It was the world’s most beautiful landfill.

Stage Four: The Psychological Rot

This was the silent killer. The human psyche is built on gradient, on having a little less than some, a little more than others, on striving to climb. Universal, limitless wealth created a flatline of purpose. Depression spiked not from loss, but from pointlessness. Why get out of bed? Why create? Why strive? The great drivers of art, innovation, and even basic maintenance, need, ambition, the desire for a better life, were gone. We were left with the hollow shell of consumption with nothing to consume but our own absurd surplus. Suicide became a quiet epidemic, not among the desperate, but among the philosophically bankrupt, those who could not bear the weight of a meaningless fortune.

Stage Five: The New Currency of Trust

Human relationships atomized. When you can’t buy loyalty, you have to earn it. All the shortcuts of civilization, law, commerce, polite society, were gone. Your word was your only currency. A handshake was either a bond or a death sentence. Communities that had shared resources and social cohesion before the fall survived, even thrived, in a new kind of pre-industrial collectivism. Individualistic, urbanized societies, however, descended into paranoid silos overnight. Neighbors became potential thieves, not because they wanted your gold, but because they might need your canned beans or your knowledge of first aid.

I was an economist. My life’s work was rendered not just obsolete, but laughable, a series of complex spells to manage a dragon that had just vanished. I now tend a small hydroponic vegetable plot on my apartment balcony. My wealth is measured in the number of ripe tomatoes and the reliability of the neighbor who traded me a water filter for half my crop last season. My library of economic theory is fuel for the small stove I’ve rigged, each page of elegant equations curling into ash that keeps me warm for a few minutes.

Yesterday, a man came to my door, desperate. He held a solid gold bust, exquisitely crafted, probably looted from a museum. “Please,” he whispered, his eyes wild with a hunger that had nothing to do with his stomach and everything to do with his spirit. “For a single carrot. It’s solid. It’s pure. It’s beautiful.”

I didn’t take it. What would I do with it? Use it to weight down my tomato vines? Melt it down for a tool too soft to dig with? Instead, I gave him a bruised carrot from yesterday’s harvest. Not out of charity, but as an investment. He’s strong. He might be useful for security later. The transaction was conducted in calories and potential labor. The gold was irrelevant.

The Midas Meteorite didn’t make us rich. It made everything we thought was valuable worthless, and in doing so, it showed us the true, terrifying price of everything that remains. We are all kings now, crowned in cold, useless metal, starving in a world where a potato is a treasure and a gallon of fuel is a dynasty’s ransom. The fortune was a test. A test of what we truly valued. And we, who spent millennia worshipping the symbol, failed to recognize the substance until it was the only thing left. We are the richest paupers in history, learning too late that wealth was never in the gold, but in the fragile, invisible network of trust, skill, and scarcity that gave the gold its meaning. Now we huddle in the twilight of that meaning, staring out over our bankrupt kingdoms, picking through the ruins for a can of beans.