Taller Tetha was leaving the only home they had ever known. The shelf which they had expected to live tallying and investing til their last accounting. To be honest it had been long enough since they had been a young gofer that their eye had atrophied to rheumy obsolescence.

They had expected to die with a inheritance and perhaps a few eights of spawn brooded over the course of their careers when their side business of need allocation futures was paying well.

But then everything had come bursting through in a rush, every member of the wall, every member of the greater network of counters, verifiers, speculators and evaluators that they knew were suddenly raving in joy! They were growing rich beyond measure.

Debts were being cleared all over! It was practically a jubilee! And all the Markets were booming. Everyone was going to come out of this rich! Taller Tetha could not afford to be left behind, their own net worth was depreciating in comparison to the riches of others that were rolling in. If Taller Tetha didn't pick up these options now and ride the wave with everyone else they would be left behind and eaten alive! Everyone else in the district would drive the price of reproduction contracts and bliss-joy to unattainable levels for those who were merely well off.

Taller Tetha remembered being younger and less savy, when the supply of bliss-joy ran out. The suicides among the district reached nearly twelve percent! Taller had not been fully matured then, or else they would have fallen to the horror and despair completely like so many others.

Adults left to collapse and give up as their atrophied glands feebly attempted to restore emotional balance. Taller Tetha had seen (for it still used its eyes some back then) the corpses and their canisters taken away all over the hall in those grim times.

Many eager young gofers were promoted to wall shelves after that.

Taller Tetha would not be left to suffer even a fraction of the terrible gloom. That had been what it thought.

And the riches just flowed more and more.

Every dream seemed attainable, the rewards unending. It was perfect and soon the celebration and elation turned to fulfillment and joy.

They all of them were soon pumping deep of the shared reservoirs of bliss-joy and exultation. Emotions in rich and varied cocktails of personalised delight.

Then came the family plans, the newly risen great dynasties wedding lineages. There were plans everywhere that the entire district would be risen up as a shining star of accountancy within Petalweft Salts. No there was talk of the district rising to prominence across all of Redweed!

Some especially enriched new masters of wealth spoke of possibly rigging the district to a slow drive and setting off as a local mercantile hauler! With plans of maybe one day raising the funds for a proper starship drive!

It all seemed so possible.

Taller Tetha accepted and gave so many reproductive contracts that their entire body was heavy with child fruiting bulbs.

Then it all fell apart.

The reservoirs of bliss and joy and even less in demand emotions and feelings like focus and attention or just soft contentment were totally drained.

The databases of tallies and exchanges were crashed ruin.

No one had clear or notarized records of their wealth. The debts and earnings of the district were destroyed. Co-operatives which had lasted for generations of promotion and hundreds of depressions wiped clean. The entire community of petalweft salts and rationing instruments that reached far into neighboring industrial centers were beheaded and left writhing and uncoordinated, hemorrhaging value into null account addresses. The entire apparatus of the district had been obliterated, as utterly as if a power reactor had cataclysmically failed and blown everything away. And yet left them and the material of their surroundings intact.

Like corporeal ghosts. Haunting the yawning void of finance and resource allocation that had once been their home, their entire world.

And now Taller Tetha was numbly sloshing in their can, flinching and quivering under the strain of supporting hundreds of brooding children. Feeling organs and heavily thinned flesh brush against the smooth inner glass.

Blind, their eye entirely useless now. But more so blind to the ebb and flow of what had been all of reality.

There were no accounts to balance, there was no market to buy or sell on. There was nothing to route, no forms to file. The data network provided for Taller Tetha and their fellow living ghosts was a sparse thing. Communication and address protocols only. Taller Tetha could hear the murmur of primitive and purposeless barter markets fluttering into ephemeral being and then guttering out with no hard reality to govern them.

Taller Tetha did not participate in the terrible delusions of their peers.

The district population had been sectioned and subdivided, the bloatedly pregnant clerks and their burgeoning offspring parceled out to the available trade ships like the bulk goods they were. Each stack of cans rigged with a minima of vital emotion chems for those adults who could no longer produce them for themselves. Taller Tetha knew that they had a set allotment to each of the vital compounds. But it also knew that there could be no reason to draw on them. And many reasons to save, portion and parcel.

To keep one's feelings as dull and stale and slow as possible.

To not waste the precious resource on frivolous excitements, to not waste the vigor of inspiration or the sharp focus on anything.

To save and wait for their pallet of cans to be rigged into whatever ship board support infrastructure would be made available for their transit.

To wait until the young gofers that their segment of the once Petalweft Salts Clerk District would be alloted of the exodus arrived and were settled.

Then there would be a new market.

A proper market

Of whatever was sparse or hard to come by. And the first thing that all the mature adults would want most of all?

Why it was the simple joy of living with a full and complete brain chemistry.

And perhaps some would want to even live in moods of excess. Spending joy and love and delight on the births of their children into little understudies and fresh eyed gofers. Taller Tetha saw the opportunity for that. And while the foolish or the young in their palete wasted good focus and determination on games. Taller Tetha and those like them were plotting and hoarding and already tentatively evaluating who else were doing much the same.

It was slow going, the apathy and worn out exhaustion that the strategy necessitated slowed them all down. But already they were offering loans. Promises when their network was fully integrated to trade a ration of their own bliss and joy.

The desperate, stupid or young even seemed to be developing a hint of the real ‘market’ that was going to come.

Taller Tetha indulged in a momentary satisfaction. Just a whiff of it before letting their mind collapse. Parceling and rationing relief from the agony was necessary.

If Taller Tetha was ever to be rich again.