The Part I Didn't Write
This post is part of my Medium blog.
There's something I left out of The Condition Set, and I've been turning it over all week. Economic deterioration. The part where being from a place starts to cost you money.
Let me back up, because that's only half true. I did put a debt crisis in the books. It's the crack the whole trilogy sits on: the United States over-invested in AI, borrowed against systems that were supposed to remake the economy, and the debt turned into a currency crisis. The world lost confidence in the dollar. In Contingent, the second book, that's already history. It gets one paragraph in chapter four.
Here's the sentence I keep rereading: "American executives who once treated Canada as a career demotion became grateful for a job, boring Canadian procurement, and institutions that still knew how to buy medicine."
In Redundant, the American executives are cocky. All of them, all the time. They know what they're doing, the systems they bought are going to keep making them rich, and Canada is where your career goes to stall. Two years later in book time, the same people are hoping a Canadian company will have them. They didn't get worse at their jobs. The country under them got worse at holding value.
When I wrote that, it was fiction with a plausible engine. I didn't think I was describing something already underway.
That detail took me two books to earn, so sit with it a second. Nobody in the story has a dramatic ruin. They just notice the offers stopped coming, then that the offers still coming were Canadian, then that they were saying yes to terms they would have laughed at in the first book. That's how I think it actually arrives. You don't get a collapse you can put a date on. You get a slow repricing of where you're from.
Now look at the actual news. There's a live argument about the US debt trajectory and what happens if the dollar stops being the default currency for world trade, and it isn't fringe anymore. It's in central-bank speeches. I'm not an economist, and this isn't a forecast. It's what the argument sounds like from the cheap seats. Reserve-currency status quietly subsidizes everything else: the borrowing, the deficits, the assumption that a crisis anywhere else is a buying opportunity here. If that subsidy fades, you don't get a market dip. You get a decade of being poorer than the last one, while everything that depends on the borrowing gets strained one institution at a time.
The personal version keeps catching me, because that's where I had to put it in the books. At some point being American turns into an economic liability. Your currency buys less abroad. Contracts you're party to get written in someone else's money. The promises your retirement math leans on get repriced by people who don't have to care about your election. That's the part I left out of the books, and it's the part that already has a foothold.
It's an interesting week to be thinking about this. The midterms are Tuesday. Everyone's talking about the uptick in the conflict with Iran, and there are conspiracy theories everywhere about some large event people claim is coming. I don't believe those, and I want to say that plainly. What I can tell you is true: the country I live in has never felt more tense or more unstable. I say that without relish. I like the place I live. I'm not cheering for the wobble. I'd rather be wrong about all of it.
Contingent is set a few years out. When I was writing it, that distance felt polite, like enough room that nobody would read it as a prediction, just a world where the consequences had compounded. I put the debt crisis a couple of years from now. That was supposed to be generous.
I wrote a trilogy that projects some economic discomfort, because I think the systems we've built are more fragile than the people running them admit. I didn't write it as a schedule.
So let's hope I'm wrong about the two-to-three-year timeline. Let's hope this week goes well, the tense people stay wrong about the large event, and the dollar stays boring.
We'll know more on Wednesday.