Lev didn’t want to crush the union, though he had old comrades who could descend on the budding city and lock it down in days. He just wanted to know what he could actually give them that wouldn’t be taking away from someone else - he had to reinvest, fast, if he wanted to give these refugees anything, if he wanted to build a city here. The workers could spend more money now than they used to, there was more to spend it on, and now we’re starting to see deflation. If only there was a way to tax them. “What if you gave them stock in the ESOP trust.” “They already sell them to outsiders, you know. If someone doesn’t have a family and wants to fund an outsider to live in TempTown 2. But supply is maxed out until we can reinvest and hire more workers. And what will the Cree think then? They want hard caps on growth. NASU just want chaos - I hear they turned a mine in the Northwest Territories into a commune! Ahh, I for one would not mind living on commune. Like Tolstoy. But I doubt would be as peaceful, here. Too many interests. Alas, I have no interest yet must be an interest. All I want to know is, what will be the flashpoint, and can it be arranged so I do not go out like Romanov?”

When the Canadian dollar collapsed, and Quebec was three months late shipping out their new libres, Lev made the move - drafted out for him in a three-page whitepaper - of introducing a local currency. It would be distributed in small lithium chips and pegged to the price of shares. Any amount could be invested in micro-share ownership under the ESOP trust. The trust’s pool of infrastructure money was now growing directly with the informal economy, which could now be measured directly as part of the formal economy of the site and even feed into Lev’s profits. “Quebec’s gonna want to tax them.” “Let them bring their services.” In the meantime she and Bol planned a formal census of the camps, identifying everyone with construction, environmental management, engineering, programming, hard maths, even teaching and training experience who could be paid directly in “levs” to work on projects under the trust. Caravans were backed up for a mile at the security checkpoint, and animals were flooding through the gaps too, white-tailed deer from the south picking low branches clean. (One of the elders had been trying to introduce his huskies to a local pack to breed wolfdogs. The ESOP used its funds to buy trackers.)

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