If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.
“Recent technological advances have led to speculation that smart contracts might largely, or entirely, displace the apparatus of contract law.” —“Contracts Ex Machina,” Duke Law Journal (2017)
“It’s 6:30 already, Katie,” the mousy man tells me. “How much longer to fix the contract?”
“It’ll be done when it’s done,” I say, without taking my eyes off the lines of LegalEase on the screen.
A shipment of drone parts from Busan to Boston should have been simple enough to arrange. One of the primary design goals behind LegalEase was to offer “a syntax that doesn’t frighten lawyers.” They’d write up a human-readable smart contract, which would then be compiled into byte code for execution on the Res Iudicata blockchain. But a lot of old-timers like Glenn never got the hang of the new language.
“There,” I say, pushing back from the keyboard. “All fixed.”
“Hmm,” Glenn says. “That didn’t actually take long, did it?”
I know where he’s going with this, so I ignore him. I drag the saved source file onto the simulator icon and watch the contract compile and come to life. After a few moments, a message appears onscreen: TEST SUITE PASSED.
“Now, Katie, I’ve been doing some thinking. What if, instead of paying you per contract—”
“Just a second.” My phone is buzzing. I glance down and see that Glenn’s Aureus address has just transferred the agreed-upon amount of aura to my burner address. Passing the test suite was the sole precondition in our contract.
I knew he’d try to stiff me. Too bad there’s no way to withhold payment or renegotiate terms with a smart contract. I pack up my things. “See you next time.”
San is sitting on the stoop, blocking my way. I don’t know anything about her except that she and her family live across the hall from me, six people in a one-bedroom.
“Enjoying the fresh air?” I ask, more out of politeness than interest.
“Sure,” she says, brushing her long black hair behind her ears and scooching aside to let me pass. “My baby niece won’t stop crying because of a weird smell coming through the wall.”
“Did you call Darren?”
San snorts. Darren may be the laziest landlord in history. I haven’t been here a month and I already know he’ll never fix my leaky kitchen sink.
“We talk about moving,” she says. Then she shrugs.
Everyone knows the deal: After rounds of trade wars and stimulus packages, inflation is rampant; rent control has reduced the housing supply; landlords have their pick of the “best” tenants, which means that people with no credit, like San and me, have no choice but to put up with slumlords like Darren.
“You could always go to housing court,” I say. “Implied warranty of habitability, you know?”
She gives me a funny look. “Courts and lawyers aren’t for people like us.”
I go inside and retrieve a six-pack. Back on the stoop, San tells me about her family—the claustrophobic boat hold; the trek across the desert; the basements where they hid from federal agents; the jobs that millionaires want done for below minimum wage; the tricks you learn when you grow up undocumented.
“It was easier when you could still pay for things with cash,” she says. “But at least there’s aura.”
I nod. With aura, I pay Darren on the first of the month and get the new code for my door lock. If I don’t pay, I’m immediately and automatically locked out. No credit check, no lease, no eviction proceedings, no appeal. Smart contracts and cryptocurrency: funny how both the rich and the poor have come to rely on them.
“So what’s your story?” San asks. “Why do you live here? I see you with that office tote bag.”
I tell her about the unenforceable promises in slick brochures from for-profit law schools. Three years and $200,000 of nondischargeable debt later, I received no offers from Big Law. My degree, it turns out, is worthless; it’s not trusted because it doesn’t have a name like Harvard or Stanford on it.
That’s why I decided to disappear from the world of credentials and respectability. I’m not authorized to practice law, but I can do the work that established lawyers like Glenn can’t for the crumbs they’re willing to throw me.
“Too bad you’re not a real lawyer,” San says. “Then maybe you could actually do something.”
I smile bitterly. Upstairs, her niece is still at it. Someone in another unit is shouting in Portuguese. The smell of spicy cooking wafts down—Southeast Asian, maybe? I wouldn’t know. None of us living in Darren’s smart-locked cubbies have even bumped phones, much less gotten to know one another’s troubles. The trustless can’t give out compassion on credit.
An idea begins to take shape. “Maybe we don’t need a lawyer,” I say. San raises an eyebrow.
Haltingly, I explain that I can write a smart contract for the door locks that will refuse to reset them unless a checklist is satisfied—clean water coming out of the faucets, functional heating, no strange odors, no leaks in the ceiling.
San ponders this. “But who gets to decide if the odor is strange? Don’t we need a judge?”
“I’d draft the contract to have the preconditions evaluated jointly by landlord and tenant,” I say. “If there’s a disagreement, we call on a Nonce Oracle.”
“A what?”
“Uberized jurors—uh, people who ride around all day on scooters and adjudicate preconditions in smart contracts. Big companies use them all the time to save on costs. We’d have to pool some aura to pay them. They’re just underemployed people not much better off than you and me.”
“OK,” she says, warming up to the idea. “But how do we get Darren to agree?”
If all of us, all the tenants in all of Darren’s buildings, banded together and insisted on my contract being installed, I tell her, Darren would have to cave. We’d end up with a tenants’ association built in code. We could even block the building entrances to stop him from bringing in replacements.
“Everyone is going to have to trust you,” San says.
We’re all people with something to hide, wary, suspicious, working at cross purposes. But even when code is law, even when you yearn for the ideal of a trustless web of incorruptible cryptography, sometimes you still have to rely on your fellow human beings, with crying babies and shitty credit and nothing better to share than cheap beer.
San’s niece has quieted down. She gets up and takes a final swig. “I’ve got to go.”
My heart falls. The vision of a revolution through code remains just that, a vision. But she holds out her phone.
“Want to bump? Next time the beer’s on me.”
Maybe, just maybe, it’s the first block in a new blockchain.
Ken Liu (@kyliu99) is the author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. A winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he is also a lawyer and programmer.
This article appears in the January issue. Subscribe now.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
- Introduction: What'll We Do?
- Real Girls by Laurie Penny
- Placebo by Charles Yu
- The Farm by Charlie Jane Anders
- The Third Petal by Nisi Shawl
- The Branch by Eugene Lim
- Maximum Outflow by Adam Rogers
- Compulsory by Martha Wells
