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settlement among the moons of Saturn. After the parade of mediocrity that had marked the closing decades of the twentieth century, it seemed that leader figures with the charisma to inspire followings had conceded the stage to rock stars and sports idols. Then, one day, a disenchanted California trial attorney with the unremarkable name of Thomas Mondel gave up a promising career to denounce the world’s economic system with the contention that humans were made—created, evolved, or “just there”; whatever one chose to believe—for better things. There was something wrong with a society that spent millions trying to make computers and robots imitate humans while at the same time raising humans to behave like robots. California had seen more than a smattering of fads and cults before, of course. But this was different in several ways that mattered. Mondel was not another beard with sandals and beads, reaching out to lost sheep and adolescents of all ages desperate to find escape from the hopeless corners of life that they had painted themselves into. He was professional, articulate, wise to the ways of the world, and he knew how to get attention. His appeal was to the slowly atrophying cost accountant stuck in traffic twice a day, two-hundred-fifty days every year, with the IRS waiting to mop up whatever of his year’s income survived Christmas; to the marketing wage slave sitting out a four-hour layover at O’Hare, looking forward to a microwaved TV meal in a solitary apartment and wondering what happened to the glamorous, high-powered executive that she’d created out of movie images in the years she was at college; to the frustrated who had worked to be scientists or teachers or ministers or healers, but found themselves turned into full-time form-fillers and fundraisers instead. In short, to all those people to whom it didn’t make sense to have to labor year-in, year-out in dismally unfulfilling ways in order to be allowed a modest share of the produce in a world whose biggest preoccupation seemed to be with moving overproduced merchandise that nobody really needed. And it was amazing how many people like that there turned out to be.
    It was hardly the first time that somebody had denounced money value as the sole measure of worth of all things. In the past, Mondel claimed, some such indicator to keep track of who owed what to whom had always been necessitated by scarcity. But knowledge and the limitless capacity that it equated to in today’s world made that no longer true. In terms of ability, humanity’s material problems were solved. What hadn’t been solved was finding the right incentive to induce people to realize that ability. Trying to mesh twenty-first-century technology with nineteenth-century notions of economics produced the constant clashing of gears that the world had been hearing. When the wants of those with the means to pay determined the demand that was supplied, and not what the rest of the people needed, eventually the ones with the needs would resort to force to satisfy them, which was why war, unrest, and rebellion refused to go away.
    “Mondelism” caught the mood of the times and spread, attracting followers from all stations in life committed to creating a mutual support network based on principles of obligation and trust, service and duty, instead of buying and selling. But it also attracted a lot of free riders too, as the skeptics had said it would, giving rise to hostility within and ridicule without, and in general the movement wasn’t a success. But neither was Mondel a quitter. The problems didn’t reflect on the soundness of the idea, he insisted, but resulted from its having to be sown in fields already choked by weeds. The followers continued to believe, and sustained by a core of tireless disciples and some quite influential backers, tottered on through intermittent triumphs and crises for several years. And then Tom Mondel met a geneticist-entrepreneur by the name of