“What the hell, Ashley? Why would you quit?”

Ashley Rice had left an honest-to-goodness piece of paper on my desk overnight. The typed print was a brief and concise letter of resignation. I'll admit I never really thought a lot of the hardworking and bland girl, but this kind of hurt.

Ashley Rice was the first person I’d hired after we’d moved away from the University. Sure, I could wish that she wore something other than a cardigan and denim skirt once in a while, but she was still a fixture in my life. To lose her... I found I didn't want her to go.

“I assumed you knew why I was severing our professional relationship, Mr. Holden.” Ashley just sat still, no gestures, no twitches. She never played poker, either. “You don't need even one full-time money person anymore, let alone my whole team. We appreciate what you do but having an office and desk and title when I don't actually do anything... it's hard. We're depressed. I'm depressed. I mean... I can't keep calling myself an accountant when I'm not.”

“Dude... Ashley... I'm sorry. You know I'd happily let you do something else,” I said. “You’ve always been more than welcome to write your own job description and title.” I was having a hard time processing it. Coming out of the blue like this I couldn’t help but be bothered – there just wasn’t any reason for her to quit. Plenty of people struggled to find a meaning when they didn't have to do anything, but Ashley had a job and a title and a position. Hell, you can find her name in history books and newspaper articles. And Ashley in particular, I never would have expected it from someone who never seemed to get emotional about anything.

“Don't be sorry, Mr. Holden. I'll still be available for consultation if you need it.” Miracle of miracles, a narrow smile graced Ashley’s thin lips before vanishing back into the still pond of her face. “And it’s not like I won't be keeping busy.”

“Busy, Ashley? Ten years, and I'm not sure if I've ever heard you talk about something other than spreadsheets and accounts receivable.”

I may have had a heart attack, Ashley actually showed me her teeth in a wide grin. “Oh, yes. You should come to the plaza by my suites some time. I've got the largest collection of typewriters in the Castle, I repair them, tear them down, I've even been working on designing a new model with all plasteel parts. That’s tricky, though. See, with plasteel the arms don't have any give to them.”

“Plasma Steel,” I corrected automatically. I was in a daze, really. I just couldn’t get past the fact that she was abandoning us.

She went on oblivious to me, “A good mechanical keyboard needs some flex to it, it keeps things moving when the typist is too fast and helps prevent jams. And of course, you need to accommodate the fact that the ribbon has give in it too...”

I cut her off, “I'll have to. Come by I mean. I assume you used one of those typewriters on this?” I fluttered her letter. “I was actually thinking about how long it had been since I had held a memo in hand. I can’t imagine anyone else but you giving me one.”

We made some small talk, and she let himself out. I did my best to hide it, but I was angry she left us. We had been having versions of this same discussion for years now. Inflation was beyond out of control – huge amounts of money was floating around, but there just wasn't anything worth buying with it. Food was free, durable goods were free if you were happy with an established design, manufactured goods were insanely cheap – several outfits of mass-produced clothing ran at about five dollars. A day of labor for most unskilled jobs (or jobs that only require on-the-job training) ran for a few dollars a day.

Even professional jobs that required a high degree of training just didn't cost much – it turns out that a lot of doctors just like being doctors. PhD types really are just big geeks. If anything, we were getting more professionals now that economic bars to entry were gone. Even if tuition and costs are totally covered, med school is a sacrifice, as is law school or really any grad school. If you don't have to worry about supporting your family, or feeding yourself, or big loans, then going to school is easy, and popular. Frankly, getting educated was probably our number one 'hobby.'

For us, we could meet our needs even if only a fraction of graduates wanted to use their degrees. Figure in that all the support infrastructure needed for a given job was pretty much always available, it got easy. Turns out that you get more (and better) teachers not by paying them better, but by making sure that they have all the supplies they could want, comfortable classrooms, and eventually smaller class sizes. When the only stress to teaching is children, then the people who love working with children prosper.

There were a few goods that still cost real money. For a while, imports ate up most people's cash. Pocky, fancy liquor, and various foreign brands continued to cost money. That lasted right up until automated production got good enough to mimic the foreign brands. Of course, some old-timers claimed that modern Pocky wasn't as good as the old stuff, but as soon as Glico started using the same production methods as the rest of the world, imitating it got easy. I probably couldn't tell you if the current snack was as good or worse than the old stuff.

When you get down to it, time was the only real commodity. Technically, the Arcology was expensive. Plasma Manufacturing had taken hundreds of thousands of man-hours to design, years to build, and was still expanding. Sure, the walls and fixtures themselves were practically free, and production capacity used on that was still capacity that could have been turned to build other products, but I don’t think we ever approached our max capacity. That’s why we used production allotments as perks for the designers and works that were still technically on the books that Ashley was refusing to be in charge of.

Nasa and other agencies were still building space missions, too. Re-usable rocketry was easy now – you could just smash your rocket into a field somewhere, dust it off, and launch it again now. The energy demands for satellites and shuttles were even easier, pretty much every satellite had a little Anghat generator built in to provide as much energy as you could need without any fuel demands. But even so, the rockets and capsules were still huge and ridiculously complicated. So... expensive. Each one took time and effort from designers to match it to the mission.

The only items that were still 'expensive' were those items that just could not be produced quickly. Liquor comes to mind – there just isn’t a good automation substitute to sitting around for decades in a barrel. The demand for artisanal goods was insane too, which was lucky because everyone had started handmaking all sorts of stuff. Entertainment was still pricey. Sure, computers could replace a lot of what actors did, but that required as many man-hours of animators and programmers as you saved by not having actors, so that didn’t change. But good movies, good books, good games, all that creative output still required almost as many hours as before, from people just as talented as before.

Freed up labor was producing a renaissance in muscle-powered techniques – woodworking, sculpting, and so on. Exotic hardwoods especially became scarce, So, now a mahogany desk was a major mark of prestige and power. There were problems with ecological conservation, and different places dealt with it in different ways. I'll admit I never really paid attention – no one in my Arcology ever really bothered with the really rare stuff. Personally, I was happy with Plasma Steel furnishings, with maybe some bamboo or pine to soften my surroundings. Most people around me seemed to feel the same.

Some regions banned particular goods entirely, some had sharp limits on anything they didn’t produce themselves, and some didn’t bother with any regulation at all. There were a couple of arcologies in the old deep south that would only allow imports equal to their exports. If you wanted a pound of hardwood from South America, you needed to export a pound of something out of the arcology. Other arcologies, notably the big one in New Hampshire, didn’t bother doing any regulation within their walls at all. They chose to leave it to the old state and federal governments.

My Arcology did create a system for allotting out wood and other limited goods that were separate from the production time credits we gave out. Some people traded those allotments – if you bought a wood desk, or had wood paneling installed by a carpenter, the artist would usually get paid in wood credits, or maybe old booze, or a rare food stock. For the most part though, no one used all of their allotments.

Typewriters though. Now I was curious. I knew we had musicians by the thousand, as well as actors, writers, chefs, painters. Athletes worked out and pushed their bodies further every day, coaches helping them over every sort of obstacle. And there were surely plenty of little things too – Albert spent his days on model scenery in his little coffee shop, Ashley had her typewriters, I wonder what other things were people spending their days on? What else was there that no one could have made a living at in the old days, but was still worth hours of effort?