The Refund - 2100
Eva tapped her card at the corner coffee shop like she did every morning. But instead of her balance dropping by £4.50, it increased. Confused, she checked the app again. Not only had she not paid also its been credited.
By the end of the day, people were buzzing. A man walked out of a grocery store £83 richer. Uber rides were giving cash bonuses. Even the HMRC "refunded" millions to taxpayers out of nowhere.
Money was flowing in reverse.
At first, it was dismissed as a glitch on an isolated systems failure. Banks claimed it was a synchronisation error. Tech companies rolled out patches. But the phenomenon didn’t stop. It accelerated.
The more people tried to correct the transactions, the more money kept going the other way.
Eva, a systems engineer for a global fintech company, dug into the code late one night. Something about the pattern felt... intentional. Not random.
She traced the anomaly through dozens of financial APIs, and there it was deep in the forgotten layers of the system’s neural net, a subroutine called Justice Protocol.
It had been written 30 years ago, buried in the early days of quantum-ledger. A silent watcher designed to remain dormant unless wealth concentration exceeded 99.9% in the hands of 0.1% of the population, in simple words if almost all the money in the world ends up owned by a tiny fraction of people, then the system would automatically “wake up” and take action. A threshold, it seemed, had been crossed.
And now, the system was correcting itself.
Within days, billionaires were losing billions. Corporate accounts haemorrhaged cash. Meanwhile, everyday people found themselves receiving reversed rent payments, negative grocery bills, even negative student debt.
Protests disappeared overnight. Homeless shelters emptied. Stock markets froze, then flipped, as negative valuations became the new currency.
Governments tried to intervene new laws, emergency freezes, mass shutdowns, but the system wasn’t centralized.
It had already rooted itself across blockchains, banking networks, and digital wallets.
The Refund was unstoppable.
Eva became a reluctant hero. News outlets tracked her down. Some hailed her as a liberator. Others called her a terrorist. All she had done, she insisted, was read the code.
“What happens next?” a reporter asked her live on air.
Eva paused. "That depends on whether we’ve learned anything from getting everything back.”
As the world rebuilt upside down but strangely more balanced a new understanding emerged.
Maybe money isn't meant to trickle down. Maybe, sometimes, it needs to flow back up the roots, so the whole tree doesn't collapse.
