William John Wither

Scrabble (64)

Thurston was an exception to the rule.

Though his name was comprised almost exclusively of one-point letters, he received a 50-point bonus for it being over seven letters in length. As such, “THURSTON” was valued at a respectable 61. This made him an anomaly, and he knew it.

Five years prior, before the new rule was implemented, Thurston had been a used airbag tester at the Rhiadon Spare Parts Facility in Friedrichburg, Germany, where he tested, day after day, anywhere between 200 and 250 airbags. He had worked in this position for the past twenty-seven years, having chosen to join the workforce straight out of high school to financially support the caregiver required for his autistic brother, Alman. A few years later, his parents retired and, soon after, became enfeebled, and so an additional caregiver was required to meet the needs of all three palliative parties under one small, ramshackle roof.

Thurston didn’t think much about how hard he had it because he never had anything to begin with. He was a man of simple means (for he simply had to be) and found great pleasure in having a glass of fresh orange juice every Sunday morning at the local eatery. Though he couldn’t afford the food, he would sit there for a full hour, watching the rich white in the neighboring town come in and enjoy their buffet, slathering their plates with all types of body parts of repressed animals, then looking at Thurston as if he were a repressed animal himself.

The only news Thurston received was in The Local Tribune, which was delivered free of charge every Saturday, and it’s here that he had discovered both the eatery and the names of every elite family in the county. There were the Dobermans and the Earlmorrins, the Rushkoffs and the Fitzroys, and each family had a litany of offspring that acted as the incubator for perpetual wealth.

Don Rushkoff, in particular, owned the Rhiadon facility where Thurston worked, along with thirty-seven. Right-all repair shops across Southwest Germany and the three Bake n’ Beefs in Shurlich (which were purchased as gifts for each of his children). 

He earned 265x what Thurston earned and did 46x less work. He had gone to a heritage school where his parents owned a wing, and he had inherited the parts facility and repair shops as soon as his mother had gotten tired of running them. 

No amount of sheer lunacy or sad sacking could cause the Rushkoffs to lose all their money. Entire divisions of financial institutions had been dedicated to their wealth management, and even as Thurston had sat drinking his orange juice, Don, a table over, had already earned enough in dividends, capital gains, and stock shorts to buy 13,457 glasses of orange juice, with or without pulp.

Don had no idea that Thurston worked for one of his companies, because Don was not in the business of actually frequenting his businesses. He had managers that earned 64x less than him to do that, and those managers never came to this specific brunch spot because they thought it was overpriced and bunk.

So Don sat two tables away from Thurston and hadn’t the slightest idea who he was or that, in a matter of six months, he would be shoveling Thurston’s shit for a living.

**

The events leading to a future where Thurston was having his excrement turned into sloppy ferment by a man of abounding and ill-gotten wealth came about, like most things, through sheer arbitrary events imbued of alcohol.

It was a late March evening in Johannesburg and a social scientist by the name of Zanzibee Faulk was running a series of R-value analyses through an excel model she had just built. It was a late, brisk evening in March, and Zanzibee was in her lab at Wits University inextricably inebriated, so much so that she found herself arbitrarily scanning the lab for R-value determinants in an attempt to avoid going home. The reason for her hesitation was no great mystery, simply that her partner Glee had discovered something rather unpleasant that morning, and Zanzibee, though a social scientist trained in finding trends in large amounts of anthro-centric data, was largely inept in handling human matters on an individual scale. As such, after everyone had gone home for the day, she hopped down to the Pick n’ Pay and bought two six-packs of Witblits for one hundred rands before heading back to the lab for the long dark. 

So far, she had run regressions on belly button type to disposable income (low correlation), amount of blow dryers owned to dependency issues (low-to-moderate correlation), and how often you cry to how often you replace your light bulbs (surprisingly high) before setting her sights on a well-worn Scrabble board in the lab’s corner. The game had never been played, its quality a result of neglect, not use. It had sat rum-tum, how-you-do in the corner for ten long Christmases and crests of ardent spring, and only at this moment did Zanzibee feel the slightest twinge of regret for not acknowledging the game sooner.

Now, plum-stuffed with discount lightning, she methodically entered the letter values of every Scrabble piece into the algorithm. Then she extracted the names and individual net worths of every resident of the United States (taken from their most recent census) and ran the regression. She sat back in her worn twill chair and cracked another beer. There was guilt in that glass. It was bitter and cold like a Norwegian whip, and she stirringly pondered the conversation that would occur tomorrow after she reluctantly returned home. 

That was for another day though, and here was beer and R-values and the cool hand of a dark night, and just the thought made Zanzibee pop up in her chair, and this is when she made the discovery.

At first she thought it was an error, a slip of the finger, a forgotten sum in a grand vision of the equation, but when she looked close and found everything was one glorious string loading to a perfect number, Zanzibar knew the world would no longer be the same. A few days later, it wasn’t.

**

The new rules were as follows: all citizens of planet earth would be valued according to the cumulative Scrabble score of the letters of their first name. Only first names would be used, and only abbreviated forms could be grandfathered in if they had been used before the transition. As such, ‘Will’ (7) was not ‘William’ (62); ‘Max’ (12) did not become ‘Maximillian’ (72); nor did ‘Tom’ (5) become ‘Thomas’ (11). Any name consisting of seven or more letters would receive the equivalent in-game bonus of 50 points. 

Any future children would be named using the first two names of the parents in whatever order they chose. A second child was allowed, but the name given must be the reverse of the parents’ first names meaning, unless the parents were psychologically unsound, their first child would always be valued higher than the second. This had the effect of not only deterring additional children but made a strong correlation between the future of the second child and that of the planet at large.

Six years on, everyone was brimming with good love. “Everyone” referred not just to the people of the world, but all of its inhabitants, a symbiotic relationshipthat had successfully averted any form of extinction since the new rules were implemented. Zoo’s no longer existed because, although the rule did not apply to the names of for-profit enterprises, exploitation had gotten such a bad rap that no one wanted to see pandas dying in their cages anymore.

The president of the United States of America was now Abayomrunkoje Mefuja, whose name value of 81 afforded her the prime directive in the James Baldwin Memorial Residence (“the white house” had been stripped of its name due to the unsavory associations it had with the men who use to live there: their fat gait and flush, wrinkled faces like forgotten Christmas plums). The Baldwin had a staff of 225 (one for every tile on a Scrabble board) and was comprised of 157 people who identified as “female,” 46 people who identified as “genderqueer,” and only 23 “men,” none of whom were white.

Only one percent of the entire country now operated below the poverty line, and it was the very same people that had defined that line for billions of people for hundreds of years ie. white men. These men now served as the underbelly of society, though in a far more equal capacity than they had ever afforded those before them. All those named “Doug” mopped floors at the local empathy pool, and every “Bill” dug up the graves of old white people who were hogging space on prime land. 

Everywhere else it was the same. Every country used the same political system. All of the world’s assets had been redistributed according to name value, which only took a week and one day to set right given the digitized economy. This prompted UN Secretary Ahmojida Evak (71) to proclaim, “Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?” It was a resounding thought echoed the world over, and one that became summed up in a universal credo that could be found on anything from tea towels to the produce stickers placed on red gala apples: 

IT’S ABOUT TIME.

This statement in its entirety was a double entendre, implying both it was a conclusion that should have been reached earlier and one that came as a direct consequence of a violent history imposed on marginalized peoples. Sex, race, and gender were, as was and continues to be well-known, white patriarchal constructs just as founding father James Baldwin summarized, “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that Gary [8] Cooper killing off the Indians—when you were rooting for Gary Cooper—that the Indians were you!” He reiterated, “It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.”

So it was an existential lottery, tickets given out here or there with little to no reason, front row, back row, bleachers, nosebleeds, born one way or another, looking one way or another, until Zanzibee Faulk made her discovery. “How could there be a more corrupt, pointless, oppressive system than the one we already have?” She said in her address to the UN General Assembly three days after coming across her results, “And you think using the letter values from a game of Scrabble is lunacy?” No one could disagree, not even the people who benefited most from the current system. People like Don Rushkoff took a big old lean back in their aromatherapeutic chairs when the announcement was made public and watched the world regain sense around him.

Now, every person named “Don” worked down at the nearest water treatment facility ameliorating fat clogs found in the purification system. Every “Don” was given a large metal stick, a pair of yellow plastic gloves, and a stick of Vic’s (8) Vapo-rub to smudge under their nose so the air would smell like freshly-picked peppermint. Don himself wore a mask over his mouth too, not because it kept out most of the offending particles, but because he couldn’t help but smile like a rum-rushed billy goat.

Don would be the first to admit he liked his work. He damn well did.

**

Don Rushkoff wasn’t an anomaly.

They called it the Sisyphus Effect: All these white males who had worked as stockbrokers and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and the CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs (ei-ei-o) of Fortune 500 companies that bartered in oppression, now couldn’t think of a better job than the ones they’d been given. Gone were the feelings of stress and responsibility and guilt that came with egregious sums of money: how they should spend it, who would manage it, who would cheat them out of it, who would inherit it, and what they would do with the money when they did.

Ben (5) Reese of Corrigan, Columbia (the “British” removed with the downfall of the English Monarchy) worked on an organic potato farm in the smelly heat where he and all the other “Ben’s”, day after day, hand-picked spuds from the dry earth. “Do you know what I used to use these hands for before I had this job?” He told his friend Maritine (60) Samuel one evening over a plate of home-cooked noodles, “Counting money.” He paused to take a bite out of his dinner. “But where did the money come from?”

This was not an uncommon experience. The years of abstraction, of listless numbers on Bloomberg machines had created a system-wide dissociative fugue thick as heavy cream. Now these men were feeling the ground under their feet, the wind against their dry, flaking scalps. The sun shone on spots that hadn’t seen sun before, that needed special cream to keep from getting boo-boos before their skin, in tow, became dark and coarse like a New England thicket. Don poked at a wad with his large metal stick before wiping the sweat from his brow. “The hell did color have to do with anything?”

So the Don’s and Ben’s and Bill’s and Gary’s pushed their boulders, day after day, and realized the pleasure in performing a task that had a beginning and an end, that actually did something for people, and when they went home and made love to their partners, their rocks rolled back down the hill.

**

This good lovemaking sometimes led to new children, though naming them became a pragmatic affair. Sex and gender did not matter anymore, the binary ceasing to exist. The highest-value first name always won out. Jasmine (66) Lola was a human being with a stick between their legs. Alejandro (66) Umbra was a strapping young human being with a hole between his legs. Sticks and holes and both and none and all human beings. How do you like that?

**

Back in Friedrichsburg, Thurston (61) now managed the Rhiadon Spare Parts Facility and made 3x what he used to make. He gave fifty-three percent of that money away to various organizations within his community, and still had enough money left over to buy himself an orange juice every Sunday at the local brunch spot. His lifestyle had only slightly improved, not for lack of funds, but simply because he couldn’t fathom why he needed anything more in the first place. There were simple pleasures that existed in a single flower, and he always bought a fresh bouquet of them when he left the brunch spot and before returning home to his family. Global life expectancy had improved an average of fifteen years since the new rules had been implemented. All names valued above 15, too, were able to continue working in the field they had been in before the transition, or could practice any job they so felt capable of performing.

Many jobs vanished from existence, some that were deemed superfluous by former anthropologist David (10) Graeber, but most simply because the people who had once worked them, often in a physical capacity, their hands to the earth, wished to continue to do so, though in a much more equitable, inclusive, and supportive manner.

Suffice it to say, there was now enough orange juice for everyone. Would you like yours with or without pulp?

William John Wither is a writer and designer living in Vancouver, Canada. They are the lead designer of IMPACT: A Foresight Game, and have been published in The Puritan, Exile Quarterly, Tales to Terrify, antilang, and the CVC8 Anthology, among others. His work can be found at williamwither.com