The Yield Curve

The Banker’s hands trembled violently as the transport shuttle cut through the unrelenting dark. He told himself it was the deceleration meds, but down deep he knew it wasn’t. The hand tremors had started weeks ago, just after the last audit – the one where three clients had defaulted and subsequently vanished.

Now he was en route to Erabus-9, a ghost mining colony, its ledgers frozen mid-transaction. Headquarters called it a “collection mission.” He preferred “routine maintenance”. After all, money was life. Literally. Every citizen’s biofield was indexed, traded, and securitized. Debt was no longer metaphorical; it was measured in human years.

He docked to find the colony half-dark, lights flickering in lazy intervals like a dying pulse. The air was thick and metallic, smelling faintly of coins and biomatter. He moved through the corridors, past terminals that whispered as he passed.

“Welcome, client... Yield recognized... Input debt.”

He ignored it. Just feedback. Just static.

He located the Central Vault. Inside, their bodies hung in neat rows, hooked into the machines – miners, foremen, families – all still and pale, eyes bulging, skin pulsing with a faint bioluminescent glow. The ship’s hull hummed rhythmically, like shallow breathing. He approached one body. Its mouth twitched. A whisper leaked out, like a radio left on low volume.

“It…will… take you too.”

The Banker stumbled back, heart hammering. His tablet pinged – a notification from Central Exchange.

“Credit retrieval in process.”

Looking down, his name appeared on the screen. His veins pulsed with an intermittent glow. His shaking worsened. Each tremor was stronger, harder to contain. The tablet beeped again.

“Conversion efficiency: 34%.”

He tore futilely at his sleeve. His pale skin shimmered with embedded numerals, shifting like stock tickers. The vault walls throbbed. The entire structure was alive – breathing, calculating, feeding.

He screamed into the static. “Cancel transaction! Stop the yield!”

The voice of the Exchange was nasal, polite, automated.

“Debt exceeds Life. Conversion is optimal.”

His breath huffed in shallow bursts. The glowing had spread across his face, his chest, his trembling hands and became blinding. He realized too late that the colony’s terrestrial economy had found the perfect equilibrium: no waste, no mercy.

When the next collector arrived on colony four years later, the Banker remained – frozen upright in a column of amber light, maw gaping in perpetual protest, ticker symbols scrolling endlessly across his screen of flesh.

That quarter’s yield proved most excellent.