We sold Mars for ten dollars a ticket.
That was the genius of it.
Not rockets. Not fusion engines. Not the gold-plated spaceship squatting on the launchpad like a billionaire’s bathroom fixture. The genius was the lottery.
TEN DOLLARS TO BUILD TOMORROW.
That was the slogan. It appeared on buses, churches, porn sites, government buildings and the sides of delivery drones. Teachers sold tickets in school corridors. Cops sold them at traffic stops. Children shook collection cans outside supermarkets while the supermarkets rounded up every purchase and claimed the tax deduction.
Everybody bought one.
Left-wing people bought tickets because Mars would be sustainable. Right-wing people bought tickets because Mars would be free. Libertarians bought them because there would be no government. Socialists bought them because the mission belonged to humanity. Christians bought them because the red planet was clearly mentioned in Revelation if you read it correctly. Tech people bought them because they thought dying in space was innovation.
Nobody understood what the prize was.
That was deliberate.
The advertisements showed crystal towers rising from crimson valleys. Artificial rivers crossed green deserts. White children and brown children held hands under a transparent dome while a robot planted wheat behind them. There were lions everywhere.
The New Lion, they called Mars.
Nobody knew what that meant either, but it tested well.
Mars was the New Eden, the New Babel, the New Frontier and the New Jerusalem. It was a capitalist utopia where ambition would no longer be restricted by gravity, morality or the federal tax code. On Mars, the advertisements promised, humanity would finally become whatever it deserved to be.
The ultra-rich heard something different.
They heard that Mars had no extradition treaties.
They heard there were no journalists.
No unions.
No age-of-consent laws.
No inheritance taxes.
No environmental regulations.
No angry former employees.
No neighbours.
No democracy unless they wanted one for decorative purposes.
Anything was possible there.
Yes. Anything.
We made sure they understood that part.
The applications arrived immediately.
The first billionaire bought an entire residential deck. Another reserved a valley and renamed it after his mother, although his mother was still alive and begging him not to go. Oil princes commissioned indoor rainforests. Crypto barons demanded private currencies. Media owners ordered harems, cloned pets and arenas where disputes between employees could be settled by combat.
One former president asked whether Mars had term limits.
We told him no.
He wired the money before lunch.
The ship was called the Providence, because rich people like names suggesting God has personally approved their accounting practices. It was three kilometres long, plated in something that looked like gold and powered by a drive nobody outside the project was allowed to inspect.
The passenger list was beautiful.
Bankers. Oligarchs. Weapons executives. Private-equity surgeons. Data miners. Hedge-fund prophets. Influencers who sold nutritional sand. The men who owned the water. The women who owned the men who owned the water. Every bastard who had ever described poverty as a failure of imagination.
They brought chefs, servants, bodyguards, art collections, embryos, vintage wine, racehorses and enough cocaine to terraform a small moon.
They did not bring plumbers.
We suggested plumbers.
They laughed.
They said robots would do it.
That was when I knew we were going to win.
I was twenty when I joined the campaign. I called myself an anarchist because I had read half a book and hated my landlord. Three months later I was a democratic socialist. Then a civic nationalist. Then a free-market populist, briefly, after a woman with excellent cheekbones explained monetary sovereignty to me in a nightclub toilet.
By launch day I believed in everything.
Borders and no borders.
Workers’ councils and small business.
Public ownership and private guns.
Universal healthcare and mandatory exercise.
Peace through strength.
Strength through peace.
America without empire.
America as the only empire morally qualified to abolish empires.
People said I was inconsistent.
I said consistency was how dead people defended their mistakes.
The launch happened on a Tuesday.
It should have been a national holiday, but productivity analysts said that would hurt quarterly growth, so we abolished quarterly growth instead.
Three million people gathered around the spaceport. Another billion watched online. The billionaires waved from a balcony halfway up the ship, dressed in white and gold like a convention of sexually confused angels.
They looked happy.
Why wouldn’t they?
They had beaten death, taxation and the human species.
The President gave a speech about courage. The opposition leader gave the same speech with different pauses. A famous child sang the national anthem while autonomous cameras circled overhead.
Then the engines ignited.
The ground shook.
The Providence rose slowly, obscenely, carrying half the world’s concentrated wealth into the blue.
People began cheering.
Not polite cheering. Not patriotic cheering.
Animal cheering.
The sound of a civilisation vomiting out a bone.
The ship climbed through the clouds. The gold hull became a bright needle, then a spark, then nothing.
We waited.
There was a delay of eight minutes while mission control confirmed the trajectory.
The public did not know there were two trajectories.
The official flight plan curved toward Mars.
The real one curved outward.
Past Mars.
Past Jupiter.
Past the orbit of Neptune.
The Providence had enough fuel to accelerate for eighteen months. It did not have enough fuel to slow down.
That was the whole plan.
We did not kill them.
That distinction mattered to some people.
We gave them the finest ship ever built. Orchards, theatres, swimming pools, hospitals, spas and five hundred years of entertainment. We gave them every luxury their money could buy.
We simply neglected to provide a destination.
The message revealing this was scheduled to play once Earth was too far away for rescue.
I helped write it.
It said:
Congratulations. You have achieved complete independence from society.
That evening we held the mother of all parties.
Times Square became a communal kitchen. Wall Street became a dance floor. People climbed onto trading terminals and poured supermarket champagne into the keyboards. Someone projected the passenger manifest onto the stock exchange while ten thousand people shouted each name and voted on whether to forgive them.
Most were not forgiven.
The banks closed at midnight.
By one, the dollar had crashed.
By two, every debt database in the country had been copied, printed and set on fire.
By three, the fires had spread to the tax offices, property registries and the headquarters of six major insurance companies.
People called it chaos.
They were right.
It was magnificent.
We burnt the economy because the economy had spent generations burning us. Mortgages vanished. Credit scores became meaningless. Rent contracts were shredded in the streets. Supermarket workers opened the warehouses. Nurses occupied private hospitals. Mechanics took over the autonomous vehicle fleets and turned them into free buses.
Congress met in emergency session and rescinded the laws.
All of them.
That was not supposed to happen.
The proposal had begun as a joke. A constitutional reset. A twenty-four-hour legal silence during which the country would decide what rules it actually wanted.
But the old lawmakers had lost their donors, their lobbyists and most of their private helicopters. They were frightened. We were loud.
So at 4:17 in the morning, the statute books expired.
For six hours, America had no federal law.
People did not become monsters.
That disappointed several television commentators.
There was looting, yes. Mostly food, medicine and televisions. A luxury handbag store was stripped bare, though the bags were later used to carry insulin between neighbourhood clinics.
Three men tried to form private kingdoms.
Two were laughed out of town.
The third lasted until breakfast.
The police disappeared in some cities and joined the crowds in others. Soldiers guarded water plants and refused orders to disperse civilians. Judges set up folding tables outside courthouses and began asking people what justice should look like.
We called those days the Confluence.
Everything met there.
Left and right.
Faith and atheism.
Workers and owners who still did some work.
The rural counties sent grain. The cities sent doctors, software and pornography. Churches became dormitories. Shopping centres became assemblies. Former prisons became housing, archives and, in one case, a very successful indoor mushroom farm.
We wrote a constitution in public.
It was ugly.
Everyone shouted.
Gun owners demanded liberty. Mothers demanded safety. Workers demanded ownership. Farmers demanded independence. Indigenous nations demanded that America stop pretending it had invented the ground.
We argued for nineteen days.
We nearly broke apart six times.
On the twentieth day, we agreed that nobody should be rich enough to buy another person’s future.
Everything else followed from that.
The new constitution was only seven pages long. Half of it concerned water, housing, voting and the right to leave any job, marriage, church, algorithm or nation that claimed to own you.
There was still money.
There were still businesses.
There were still flags, borders, churches, guns, unions, families, markets and people selling terrible coffee at criminal prices.
Freedom did not make us pure.
It made us responsible.
Years later, the Providence sent its final transmission.
The billionaires had split into factions.
The property faction controlled the orchards. The security faction controlled the air. The crypto faction had created seventeen currencies and starved because none could be exchanged for potatoes.
Their leader appeared on-screen wearing a military uniform stitched from hotel curtains.
He demanded rescue.
He appealed to human rights.
He said no person should be abandoned simply because society disliked them.
For once, the bastard was correct.
We debated for three days.
Then we transmitted the new constitution to the ship.
We told them we would begin designing a rescue mission when they ratified it, disarmed their private security forces, freed their workers, pooled their resources and accepted one equal vote per person.
The answer came months later.
A single sentence.
WE WOULD RATHER DIE FREE.
We sent back:
That is your right.
Sometimes I think about them passing through the dark, still drinking old wine and arguing over who owns the stars outside the windows.
Sometimes I feel guilty.
Then my rent reminder does not arrive.
My medical bill does not arrive.
My student loan statement does not arrive.
Instead, the local assembly sends me a notice asking whether I can work two hours at the community kitchen on Saturday.
I complain about it.
That is freedom too.
We did not build Eden.
We were twenty years old. We could barely build a table without arguing over whether screws represented industrial hierarchy.
But we cleared some ground.
We took the men who believed they owned the future and gave them exactly what they wanted:
A world with no government.
No taxes.
No workers’ rights.
No limits.
No one to tell them no.
Just themselves, forever, travelling deeper into the perfect freedom of empty space.