It was a natural extension of things that were already working. Markets, the most advanced technology known to humans, knew how to price things. Buyers and sellers romped across the exchanges, offering and agreeing. Belief and reality mixed together into a cocktail that everyone drank. So it was only a matter of time. Electricity had been bought and sold for a long time. And water was on its way to becoming an important asset, part of every responsible wealth manager’s portfolio. Genetic code was a well-established and easily-defended intellectual property. So having a child could be very expensive, because pretty much everyone had at least a little bit of proprietary sequence, and that beautiful asset didn’t depreciate over generations (even if there were mutations). Farmers were paying for access to the sun, even if they owned the land; the satellite solar utilities had finally gotten large enough that they controlled what sun came to the surface and what sun stayed out in space, only coming down as electricity (electricity still didn’t stimulate photosynthesis).
So as I said, it was only a matter of time. When the at-birth-implanted blood monitors could establish global position precisely enough and oxygenation levels could be firmly identified, it was just a matter of making the market and restricting access. At first it was only possible indoors. But when the air became unbreathable outdoors, as-a-service gas masks became required, and the oxygenation monitors weren’t even needed to charge for that most immediately necessary of resources.
The videos of anti-market activists refusing to pay were disturbing, but it wasn’t that expensive to get 80% cleaned air, even if scientists could pinpoint just how long until the cancer got going. So mostly we were willing buyers; and there were many willing sellers. And perhaps we should have been suspicious when the same companies who burned trash to keep it out of the water supply were also the ones selling us air as a service. And perhaps we should have wondered why those companies also seemed to own the near-orbit solar utilities, and had sold their land-based solar farms just a few years before the sun mostly stopped filtering through the permanent fog. And perhaps it should have disturbed us that agriculture had mostly moved to the solar utility stations, where the sun was bright and unfiltered. But the genetic code for accepting the way things are was much cheaper than the sequences for discontent.
Roman Ryan 