TIME Domestic
SPECIAL ISSUE, Spring 1995 Volume 145, No. 12

BY NEAL STEPHENSON
Hard to imagine a less attractive life-style for a young man just out of college 
than going back to Bismarck to live with his parents - unless it's living with 
his brother in the suburbs of Chicago, which, naturally, is what I did. Mom at 
least bakes a mean cherry pie. Joe, on the other hand, got me into a permanent 
emotional headlock and found some way, every day, to give me psychic noogies. 
For example, there was the day he gave me the job of figuring out how many jelly 
beans it would take to fill up Soldier Field. 
Let us stipulate that it's all my fault; Joe would want me to be clear on that 
point. Just as he was always good with people, I was always good with numbers. 
As Joe tells me at least once a week, I should have studied engineering. Drifted 
between majors instead, ended up with a major in math and a minor in art - just 
about the worst thing you can put on a job app. 
Joe, on the other hand, went into the ad game. When the Internet and optical 
fiber and HDTV and digital cash all came together and turned into what we now 
call the Metaverse, most of the big ad agencies got hammered - because in the 
Metaverse, you can actually whip out a gun and blow the Energizer Bunny's head 
off, and a lot of people did. Joe borrowed 10,000 bucks from Mom and Dad and 
started this clever young ad agency. If you've spent any time crawling the 
Metaverse, you've seen his work - and it's seen you, and talked to you, and 
followed you around. 
Mom and Dad stayed in their same little house in Bismarck, North Dakota. None of 
their neighbors guessed that if they cashed in their stock in Joe's agency, 
they'd be worth about $20 million. I nagged them to diversify their portfolio - 
you know, buy a bushel basket of Krugerrands and bury them in the backyard, or 
maybe put a few million into a mutual fund. But Mom and Dad felt this would be a 
no-confidence vote in Joe. "It'd be," Dad said, "like showing up for your kid's 
piano recital with a Walkman." 
Joe comes home one January evening with a magnum of champagne. After giving me 
the obligatory hazing about whether I'm old enough to drink, he pours me a 
glass. He's already banished his two sons to the Home Theater. They have cranked 
up the set-top box they got for Christmas. Patch this baby into your HDTV, and 
you can cruise the Metaverse, wander the Web and choose from among several 
user-friendly operating systems, each one rife with automatic help systems, 
customer-service hot lines and intelligent agents. The theater's subwoofer 
causes our silverware to buzz around like sheet-metal hockey players, and 
amplified explosions knock swirling nebulas of tiny bubbles loose from the 
insides of our champagne glasses. Those low frequencies must penetrate the young 
brain somehow, coming in under kids' media-hip radar and injecting the 
edfotainucational muchomedia bitstream direct into their cerebral cortices. 
"Hauled down a mother of an account today," Joe explains. "We hype cars. We hype 
computers. We hype athletic shoes. But as of three hours ago, we are hyping a 
currency." 
"What?" says his wife Anne. 
"Y'know, like dollars or yen. Except this is a new currency." 
"From which country?" I ask. This is like offering lox to a dog: I've given Joe 
the chance to enlighten his feckless bro. He hammers back half a flute of Dom 
Perignon and shifts into full-on Pitch Mode. 
"Forget about countries," he says. "We're talking Simoleons - the smart, hip new 
currency of the Metaverse." 
"Is this like E-money?" Anne asks. 
"We've been doing E-money for e-ons, ever since automated-teller machines." Joe 
says, with just the right edge of scorn. "Nowadays we can use it to go shopping 
in the Metaverse. But it's still in U.S. dollars. Smart people are looking for 
something better." 
That was for me. I graduated college with a thousand bucks in savings. With 
inflation at 10% and rising, that buys a lot fewer Leinenkugels than it did a 
year ago. 
"The government's never going to get its act together on the budget," Joe says. 
"It can't. Inflation will just get worse. People will put their money 
elsewhere." 
"Inflation would have to get pretty damn high before I'd put my money into some 
artificial currency," I say. 
"Hell, they're all artificial," Joe says. "If you think about it, we've been 
doing this forever. We put our money in stocks, bonds, shares of mutual funds. 
Those things represent real assets - factories, ships, bananas, software, gold, 
whatever. Simoleons is just a new name for those assets. You carry around a 
smart card and spend it just like cash. Or else you go shopping in the Metaverse 
and spend the money online, and the goods show up on your doorstep the next 
morning." 
I say, "Who's going to fall for that?" 
"Everyone," he says. "For our big promo, we're going to give Simoleons away to 
some average Joes at the Super Bowl. We'll check in with them one, three, six 
months later, and people will see that this is a safe and stable place to put 
their money." 
"It doesn't inspire much confidence," I say, "to hand the stuff out like 
Monopoly money." 
He's ready for this one. "It's not a handout. It's a sweepstakes." And that's 
when he asks me to calculate how many jelly beans will fill Soldier Field. 
Two hours later, I'm down at the local galaxy-class grocery store, in Bulk: a 
Manhattan of towering Lucite bins filled with steel-cut rolled oats, off-brand 
Froot Loops, sun-dried tomatoes, prefabricated s'mores, macadamias, French 
roasts and pignolias, all dispensed into your bag or bucket with a jerk at the 
handy Plexiglas guillotine. Not a human being in sight, just robot restocking 
machines trundling back and forth on a grid of overhead catwalks and 
surveillance cameras hidden in smoked-glass hemispheres. I stroll through the 
gleaming Lucite wonderland holding a perfect 6-in. cube improvised from duct 
tape and cardboard. I stagger through a glitter gulch of Gummi fauna, Boston 
baked beans, gobstoppers, Good & Plenty, Tart'n Tiny. Then, bingo: bulk jelly 
beans, premium grade. I put my cube under the spout and fill it. 
Who guesses closest and earliest on the jelly beans wins the Simoleons. They've 
hired a Big Six accounting firm to make sure everything's done right. And since 
they can't actually fill the stadium with candy, I'm to come up with the Correct 
Answer and supply it to them and, just as important, to keep it secret. 
I get home and count the beans: 3,101. Multiply by 8 to get the number in a 
cubic foot: 24,808. Now I just need the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field. 
My nephews are sprawled like pithed frogs before the HDTV, teaching themselves 
physics by lobbing antimatter bombs onto an offending civilization from high 
orbit. I prance over the black zigzags of the control cables and commandeer a 
unit. 
Up on the screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from 
behind a window, then draws it back. No, I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic - this 
is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my 
escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where 
thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an 
ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically 
engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like 
bunches of grapes in an amber fluid. 
The animated sprite comes all the way out, and leans up against the edge of the 
infomercial window. "Hey!" it says, in a goofy, exuberant voice, "I'm Raster! 
Just speak my name - that's Raster - if you need any help." 
I don't like Raster's looks. It's likely he was wandering the streets of 
Toontown and waving a sign saying WILL ANNOY GROWNUPS FOR FOOD until he was 
hired by the cable company. He begins flying around the screen, leaving a trail 
of glowing fairy dust that fades much too slowly for my taste. 
"Give me the damn encyclopedia!" I shout. Hearing the dread word, my nephews 
erupt from the rug and flee. 
So I look up Soldier Field. My old Analytic Geometry textbook, still flecked 
with insulation from the attic, has been sitting on my thigh like a lump of ice. 
By combining some formulas from it with the encyclopedia's stats . . . 
"Hey! Raster!" 
Raster is so glad to be wanted that he does figure eights around the screen. 
"Calculator!" I shout. 
"No need, boss! Simply tell me your desired calculation, and I will do it in my 
head!" 
So I have a most tedious conversation with Raster, in which I estimate the 
number of cubic feet in Soldier Field, rounded to the nearest foot. I ask Raster 
to multiply that by 24,808 and he shoots back: 537,824,167,717. 
A nongeek wouldn't have thought twice. But I say, "Raster, you have Spam for 
brains. It should be an exact multiple of eight!" Evidently my brother's new box 
came with one of those defective chips that makes errors when the numbers get 
really big. 
Raster slaps himself upside the head; loose screws and transistors tumble out of 
his ears. "Darn! Guess I'll have to have a talk with my programmer!" And then he 
freezes up for a minute. 
My sister-in-law Anne darts into the room, hunched in a don't-mind-me posture, 
and looks around. She's terrified that I may have a date in here. "Who're you 
talking to?" 
"This goofy I.A. that came with your box," I say. "Don't ever use it to do your 
taxes, by the way." 
She cocks her head. "You know, just yesterday I asked it for help with a 
Schedule B, and it gave me a recipe for shellfish bisque." 
"Good evening, sir. Good evening, ma'am. What were those numbers again?" Raster 
asks. Same voice, but different inflections - more human. I call out the numbers 
one more time and he comes back with 537,824,167,720. 
"That sounds better," I mutter. 
Anne is nonplussed. "Now its voice recognition seems to be working fine." 
"I don't think so. I think my little math problem got forwarded to a real human 
being. When the conversation gets over the head of the built-in software, it 
calls for help, and a human steps in and takes over. He's watching us through 
the built-in videocam," I explain, pointing at the fish-eye lens built into the 
front panel of the set-top box, "and listening through the built-in mike." 
Anne's getting that glazed look in her eyes; I grope for an analog analogy. 
"Remember The Exorcist? Well, Raster has just been possessed, like the chick in 
the flick. Except it's not just Beelzebub. It's a customer-service rep." 
I've just walked blind into a trap that is yawningly obvious to Anne. "Maybe 
that's a job you should apply for!" she exclaims. 
The other jaw of the trap closes faster than my teeth chomping down on my 
tongue: "I can take your application online right now!" says Raster. 
My sister-in-law is the embodiment of sugary triumph until the next evening, 
when I have a good news/bad news conversation with her. Good: I'm now a 
Metaverse customer-service rep. Bad: I don't have a cubicle in some Edge City 
office complex. I telecommute from home - from her home, from her sofa. I sit 
there all day long, munching through my dwindling stash of tax-deductible jelly 
beans, wearing an operator's headset, gripping the control unit, using it like a 
puppeteer's rig to control other people's Rasters on other people's screens, all 
over the U.S. I can see them - the wide-angle view from their set-top boxes is 
piped to a window on my screen. But they can't see me - just Raster, my avatar, 
my body in the Metaverse. 
Ghastly in the mottled, flattening light of the Tube, people ask me inane 
questions about arithmetic. If they're asking for help with recipes, airplane 
schedules, child-rearing or home improvement, they've 
already been turfed to someone else. My expertise is pure math only. 
Which is pretty sleepy until the next week, when my brother's agency announces 
the big Simoleons Sweepstakes. They've hired a knot-kneed fullback as their 
spokesman. Within minutes, requests for help from contestants start flooding in. 
Every Bears fan in Greater Chicago is trying to calculate the volume of Soldier 
Field. They're all doing it wrong; and even the ones who are doing it right are 
probably using the faulty chip in their set-top box. I'm in deep 
conflict-of-interest territory here, wanting to reach out with Raster's stubby, 
white-gloved, three-fingered hand and slap some sense into these people. 
But I'm sworn to secrecy. Joe has hired me to do the calculations for the 
Metrodome, Three Rivers Stadium, RFK Stadium and every other N.F.L. venue. 
There's going to be a Simoleons winner in every city. 
We are allowed to take 15-minute breaks every four hours. So I crank up the Home 
Theater, just to blow the carbon out of its cylinders, and zip down the main 
street of the Metaverse to a club that specializes in my kind of tunes. I'm 
still "wearing" my Raster uniform, but I don't care - I'm just one of thousands 
of Rasters running up and down the street on their breaks. 
My club has a narrow entrance on a narrow alley off a narrow side street, far 
from the virtual malls and 3-D video-game amusement parks that serve as the cash 
cows for the Metaverse's E-money economy. Inside, there's a few Rasters on 
break, but it's mostly people "wearing" more creative avatars. In the Metaverse, 
there's no part of your virtual body you can't pierce, brand or tattoo in an 
effort to look weirder than the next guy. 
The live band onstage - jacked in from a studio in Prague - isn't very good, so 
I duck into the back room where there are virtual racks full of tapes you can 
sample, listening to a few seconds from each song. If you like it, you can 
download the whole album, with optional interactive liner notes, videos and 
sheet music. 
I'm pawing through one of these racks when I sense another avatar, something big 
and shaggy, sidling up next to me. It mumbles something; I ignore it. A 
magisterial throat-clearing noise rumbles in the subwoofer, crackles in the 
surround speakers, punches through cleanly on the center channel above the 
screen. I turn and look: it's a heavy-set creature wearing a T shirt emblazoned 
with a logo HACKERS 1111. It has very long scythe-like claws, which it uses to 
grip a hot-pink cylinder. It's much better drawn than Raster; almost 
Disney-quality. 
The sloth speaks: "537,824,167,720." 
"Hey!" I shout. "Who the hell are you?" It lifts the pink cylinder to its lips 
and drinks. It's a can of Jolt. "Where'd you get that number?" I demand. "It's 
supposed to be a secret." 
"The key is under the doormat," the sloth says, then turns around and walks out 
of the club. 
My 15-minute break is over, so I have to ponder the meaning of this through the 
rest of my shift. Then, I drag myself up out of the couch, open the front door 
and peel up the doormat. 
Sure enough, someone has stuck an envelope under there. Inside is a sheet of 
paper with a number on it, written in hexadecimal notation, which is what 
computer people use: 0A56 7781 6BE2 2004 89FF 9001 C782 - and so on for about 
five lines. 
The sloth had told me that "the key is under the doormat," and I'm willing to 
bet many Simoleons that this number is an encryption key that will enable me to 
send and receive coded messages. 
So I spend 10 minutes punching it into the set-top box. Raster shows up and 
starts to bother me: "Can I help you with anything?" 
By the time I've punched in the 256th digit, I've become a little testy with 
Raster and said some rude things to him. I'm not proud of it. Then I hear 
something that's music to my ears: "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you," Raster 
chirps. "Please check your cable connections - I'm getting some noise on the 
line." 
A second figure materializes on the screen, like a digital genie: it's the sloth 
again. "Who the hell are you?" I ask. 
The sloth takes another slug of Jolt, stifles a belch and says, "I am Codex, the 
Crypto-Anarchist Sloth." 
"Your equipment requires maintenance," Raster says. "Please contact the cable 
company." 
"Your equipment is fine," Codex says. "I'm encrypting your back channel. To the 
cable company, it looks like noise. As you fig 
ured out, that number is your personal encryption key. No government or 
corporation on earth can eavesdrop on us now." 
"Gosh, thanks," I say. 
"You're welcome," Codex replies. "Now, let's get down to biz. We have something 
you want. You have something we want." 
"How did you know the answer to the Soldier Field jelly-bean question?" 
"We've got all 27," Codex says. And he rattles off the secret numbers for 
Candlestick Park, the Kingdome, the Meadowlands . . . 
"Unless you've broken into the accounting firm's vault," I say, "there's only 
one way you could have those numbers. You've been eavesdropping on my little 
chats with Raster. You've tapped the line coming out of this set-top box, 
haven't you?" 
"Oh, that's typical. I suppose you think we're a bunch of socially inept, 
acne-ridden, high-IQ teenage hackers who play sophomoric pranks on the 
Establishment." 
"The thought had crossed my mind," I say. But the fact that the cartoon sloth 
can give me such a realistic withering look, as he is doing now, suggests a much 
higher level of technical sophistication. Raster only has six facial expressions 
and none of them is very good. 
"Your brother runs an ad agency, no?" 
"Correct." 
"He recently signed up Simoleons Corp.?" 
"Correct." 
"As soon as he did, the government put your house under full-time surveillance." 

Suddenly the glass eyeball in the front of the set-top box is looking very big 
and beady to me. "They tapped our infotainment cable?" 
"Didn't have to. The cable people are happy to do all the dirty work - after 
all, they're beholden to the government for their monopoly. So all those 
calculations you did using Raster were piped straight to the cable company and 
from there to the government. We've got a mole in the government who cc'd us 
everything through an anonymous remailer in Jyvaskyla, Finland." 
"Why should the government care?" 
"They care big-time," Codex says. "They're going to destroy Simoleons. And 
they're going to step all over your family in the process." 
"Why?" 
"Because if they don't destroy E-money," Codex says, "E-money will destroy 
them." 
The next afternoon I show up at my brother's office, in a groovily refurbished 
ex-power plant on the near West Side. He finishes rolling some calls and then 
waves me into his office, a cavernous space with a giant steam turbine as a 
conversation piece. I think it's supposed to be an irony thing. 
"Aren't you supposed to be cruising the I-way for stalled motorists?" he says. 
"Spare me the fraternal heckling," I say. "We crypto-anarchists don't have time 
for such things." 
"Crypto-anarchists?" 
"The word panarchist is also frequently used." 
"Cute," he says, rolling the word around in his head. He's already working up a 
mental ad campaign for it. 
"You're looking flushed and satisfied this afternoon," I say. "Must have been 
those two imperial pints of Hog City Porter you had with your baby-back ribs at 
Divane's Lakeview Grill." 
Suddenly he sits up straight and gets an edgy look about him, as if a practical 
joke is in progress, and he's determined not to play the fool. 
"So how'd you know what I had for lunch?" 
"Same way I know you've been cheating on your taxes." 
"What!?" 
"Last year you put a new tax-deductible sofa in your home office. But that sofa 
is a hide-a-bed model, which is a no-no." 
"Hackers," he says. "Your buddies hacked into my records, didn't they?" 
"You win the Stratolounger." 
"I thought they had safeguards on these things now." 
"The files are harder to break into. But every time information gets sent across 
the wires - like, when Anne uses Raster to do the taxes - it can be captured and 
decrypted. Because, my brother, you bought the default data-security agreement 
with your box, and the default agreement sucks." 
"So what are you getting at?" 
"For that," I say, "we'll have to go someplace that isn't under surveillance." 
"Surveillance!? What the . . . " he begins. But then I nod at the TV in the 
corner of his office, with its beady glass eye staring out at us from the 
set-top box. 
We end up walking along the lakeshore, which, in Chicago in January, is madness. 
But we hail from North Dakota, and we have all the cold-weather gear it takes to 
do this. I tell him about Raster and the cable company. 
"Oh, Jesus!" he says. "You mean those numbers aren't secret?" 
"Not even close. They've been put in the hands of 27 stooges hired by the the 
government. The stooges have already FedEx'd their entry forms with the correct 
numbers. So, as of now, all of your Simoleons - $27 million worth - are going 
straight into the hands of the stooges on Super Bowl Sunday. And they will turn 
out to be your worst public-relations nightmare. They will cash in their 
Simoleons for comic books and baseball cards and claim it's safer. They will 
intentionally go bankrupt and blame it on you. They will show up in twos and 
threes on tawdry talk shows to report mysterious disappearances of their 
Simoleons during Metaverse transactions. They will, in short, destroy the image 
- and the business - of your client. The result: victory for the government, 
which hates and fears private currencies. And bankruptcy for you, and for Mom 
and Dad." 
"How do you figure?" 
"Your agency is responsible for screwing up this sweepstakes. Soon as the 
debacle hits, your stock plummets. Mom and Dad lose millions in paper profits 
they've never had a chance to enjoy. Then your big shareholders will sue your 
ass, my brother, and you will lose. You gambled the value of the company on the 
faulty data-security built into your set-top box, and you as a corporate officer 
are personally responsible for the losses." 
At this point, big brother Joe feels the need to slam himself down on a park 
bench, which must feel roughly like sitting on a block of dry ice. But he 
doesn't care. He's beyond physical pain. I sort of expected to feel triumphant 
at this point, but I don't. 
So I let him off the hook. "I just came from your accounting firm," I say. "I 
told them I had discovered an error in my calculations - that my set-top box had 
a faulty chip. I supplied them with 27 new numbers, which I worked out by hand, 
with pencil and paper, in a conference room in their offices, far from the 
prying eye of the cable company. I personally sealed them in an envelope and 
placed them in their vault." 
"So the sweepstakes will come off as planned," he exhales. "Thank God!" 
"Yeah - and while you're at it, thank me and the panarchists," I shoot back. "I 
also called Mom and Dad, and told them that they should sell their stock - just 
in case the government finds some new way to sabotage your contest." 
"That's probably wise," he says sourly, "but they're going to get hammered on 
taxes. They'll lose 40% of their net worth to the government, just like that." 
"No, they won't," I say. "They aren't paying any taxes." 
"Say what?" He lifts his chin off his mittens for the first time in a while, 
reinvigorated by the chance to tell me how wrong I am. "Their cash basis is only 
$10,000 - you think the IRS won't notice $20 million in capital gains?" 
"We didn't invite the IRS," I tell him. "It's none of the IRS's damn business." 
"They have ways to make it their business." 
"Not any more. Mom and Dad aren't selling their stock for dollars, Joe." 
"Simoleons? It's the same deal with Simoleons - everything gets reported to the 
government." 
"Forget Simoleons. Think CryptoCredits." 
"CryptoCredits? What the hell is a CryptoCredit?" He stands up and starts pacing 
back and forth. Now he's convinced I've traded the family cow for a handful of 
magic beans. 
"It's what Simoleons ought to be: E-money that is totally private from the eyes 
of government." 
"How do you know? Isn't any code crackable?" 
"Any kind of E-money consists of numbers moving around on wires," I say. "If you 
know how to keep your numbers secret, your currency is safe. If you don't, it's 
not. Keeping numbers secret is a problem of cryptography - a branch of 
mathematics. Well, Joe, the crypto-anarchists showed me their math. And it's 
good math. It's better than the math the government uses. Better than Simoleons' 
math too. No one can mess with CryptoCredits." 
He heaves a big sigh. "O.K., O.K. - you want me to say it? I'll say it. You were 
right. I was wrong. You studied the right thing in college after all." 
"I'm not worthless scum?" 
"Not worthless scum. So. What do these crypto-anarchists want, anyway?" 
For some reason I can't lie to my parents, but Joe's easy. "Nothing," I say. 
"They just wanted to do us a favor, as a way of gaining some goodwill with us." 
"And furthering the righteous cause of World Panarchy?" 
"Something like that." 
Which brings us to Super Bowl Sunday. We are sitting in a skybox high up in the 
Superdome, complete with wet bar, kitchen, waiters and big TV screens to watch 
the instant replays of what we've just seen with our own naked, pitiful, 
nondigital eyes. 
The corporate officers of Simoleons are there. I start sounding them out on 
their cryptographic protocols, and it becomes clear that these people can't 
calculate their gas mileage without consulting Raster, much less navigate the 
subtle and dangerous currents of cutting-edge cryptography. 
A Superdome security man comes in, looking uneasy. "Some, uh, gentlemen here," 
he says. "They have tickets that appear to be authentic." 
It's three guys. The first one is a 300 pounder with hair down to his waist and 
a beard down to his navel. He must be a Bears fan because he has painted his 
face and bare torso blue and orange. The second one isn't quite as introverted 
as the first, and the third isn't quite the button-down conformist the other two 
are. Mr. Big is carrying an old milk crate. What's inside must be heavy, because 
it looks like it's about to pull his arms out of their sockets. 
"Mr. and Mrs. De Groot?" he says, as he staggers into the room. Heads turn 
towards my mom and dad, who, alarmed by the appearance of these three, have 
declined to identify themselves. The guy makes for them and slams the crate down 
in front of my dad. 
"I'm the guy you've known as Codex," he says. "Thanks for naming us as your 
broker." 
If Joe wasn't a rowing-machine abuser, he'd be blowing aneurysms in both 
hemispheres about now. "Your broker is a half-naked blue-and-orange 
crypto-anarchist?" 
Dad devotes 30 seconds or so to lighting his pipe. Down on the field, the 
two-minute warning sounds. Dad puffs out a cloud of 
smoke and says, "He seemed like an honest sloth." 
"Just in case," Mom says, "we sold half the stock through our broker in 
Bismarck. He says we'll have to pay taxes on that." 
"We transferred the other half offshore, to Mr. Codex here," Dad says, "and he 
converted it into the local currency - tax free." 
"Offshore? Where? The Bahamas?" Joe asks. 
"The First Distributed Republic," says the big panarchist. "It's a virtual 
nation-state. I'm the Minister of Data Security. Our official currency is 
CryptoCredits." 
"What the hell good is that?" Joe says. 
"That was my concern too," Dad says, "so, just as an experiment, I used my 
CryptoCredits to buy something a little more tangible." 
Dad reaches into the milk crate and heaves out a rectangular object made of 
yellow metal. Mom hauls out another one. She and Dad begin lining them up on the 
counter, like King and Queen Midas unloading a carton of Twinkies. 
It takes Joe a few seconds to realize what's happening. He picks up one of the 
gold bars and gapes at it. The Simoleons execs crowd around and inspect the 
booty. 
"Now you see why the government wants to stamp us out," the big guy says. "We 
can do what they do - cheaper and better." 
For the first time, light dawns on the face of the Simoleons CEO. "Wait a sec," 
he says, and puts his hands to his temples. "You can rig it so that people who 
use E-money don't have to pay taxes to any government? Ever?" 
"You got it," the big panarchist says. The horn sounds announcing the end of the 
first half. 
"I have to go down and give away some Simoleons," the CEO says, "but after that, 
you and I need to have a talk." 
The CEO goes down in the elevator with my brother, carrying a box of 27 smart 
cards, each of which is loaded up with secret numbers that makes it worth a 
million Simoleons. I go over and look out the skybox window: 27 Americans are 
congregated down on the 50-yard line, waiting for their mathematical manna to 
descend from heaven. They are just the demographic cross section that my brother 
was hoping for. You'd never guess they were all secretly citizens of the First 
Distributed Republic. 
The crypto-anarchists grab some Jolt from the wet bar and troop out, so now it's 
just me, Mom and Dad in the skybox. Dad points at the field with the stem of his 
pipe. "Those 27 folks down there," he says. "They didn't get any help from you, 
did they?" 
I've lied about this successfully to Joe. But I know it won't work with Mom and 
Dad. "Let's put it this way," I say, "not all panarchists are long-haired, 
Jolt-slurping maniacs. Some of them look like you - exactly like you, as a 
matter of fact." 
Dad nods; I've got him on that one. 
"Codex and his people saved the contest, and our family, from disaster. But 
there was a quid pro quo." 
"Usually is," Dad says. 
"But it's good for everyone. What Joe wants - and what his client wants - is for 
the promotion to go well, so that a year from now, everyone who's watching this 
broadcast today will have a high opinion of the safety and stability of 
Simoleons. Right?" 
"Right." 
"If you give the Simoleons away at random, you're rolling the dice. But if you 
give them to people who are secretly panarchists - who have a vested interest in 
showing that E-money works - it's a much safer bet." 
"Does the First Distributed Republic have a flag?" Mom asks, out of left field. 
I tell her these guys look like sewing enthusiasts. So, even before the second 
half starts, she's sketched out a flag on the back of her program. "It'll be 
very colorful," she says. "Like a jar of jelly beans." 

Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.