Sundar Patel saved the galactic economy from crisis by making invisible property visible. That property later became the largest asset in the galaxy. Patel’s specialty was making the numbers on both sides of a ledger match. If 100 came in on one side and 99 went out on the other, the missing 1 had to be given a name indicating where it was. The photon deficit was a number that could not be named. Power companies recorded the difference as a loss because it was too small to matter. But as the deficit rate increased, even companies supplying power normally began to go bankrupt on paper. Their power plants were still lit, but the companies had no money, and a chain of technically profitable companies was on the verge of failing for lack of cash. Patel was assigned to audit the first company to fail. He assumed that the company had manipulated its figures. For three months he examined every power plant and contract, but found no manipulation. The difference between the energy produced and the energy received by customers actually existed. He asked physicists whether the energy had disappeared. The physicists replied that they could not say it had. It might exist elsewhere, beyond what had been observed. Patel translated that answer into accounting language. If something existed but had not been found, it was not a confirmed loss but property that might still be recovered. Patel proposed an account called “unidentified recoverable energy.” The bankruptcy court complained that the name was too long. Patel replied that if writing the long name every time until the energy was recovered was inconvenient, they would have an incentive to find a method of recovery quickly. The court shortened the term to “energy receivables.”
Patel’s proposed accounting revision was highly conservative. Only 10 percent of the deficit would be recognized as an asset, while the rest would remain in reserve. Its period of application was also limited to the time before the cause was identified. Concerned about market shock, the government asked the press to refrain from reporting the proposal before its official announcement. One news organization published it first, arguing that the public’s right to know took precedence because of the seriousness of the matter. The panicked market stabilized immediately. Politicians hurried to revise the law, and the legislature passed the already prepared amendment within days. The bankruptcies of power companies stopped, and construction in frontier settlements resumed. Millions of people kept their jobs. Patel became known as the man who ended the financial crisis. He refused an award named after him. “I did not find the energy. I only moved the fact that we had not found it into another column.” The remark was taken as modesty.
Patel opposed using energy receivables as collateral for loans. He was more skilled with numbers than almost anyone, but when it came to debt he was unusually fearful. Born in Outer Star System 284, he believed that his family’s poverty was not simply bad luck but the result of debt accumulated over fourteen generations. His mathematical talent had allowed him to escape that poverty, but most of his family still remained there. Patel believed that although debt appeared to be secured by material things, what it actually mortgaged was future time. Debt meant drawing on time that had not yet arrived because what one had in the present was insufficient. At first, this appeared rational. Future production and income could make up for a present shortage. But Patel had seen too many cases in which the future, instead of paying off the debt of the present, merely inherited a larger debt. He did not call this “dissolving debt into time.” Whenever he spoke this way at home, his wife always gave roughly the same answer. “Why do you always end up talking about the destruction of the universe when you are talking about money?” Patel never managed to answer the question properly. He had introduced himself to his wife as an orphan.
Patel insisted that energy receivables were only a temporary asset used to balance the books until a method of recovery was found, but financial institutions obtained a court ruling that if something recognized as an asset could not be used as collateral, then it was not an asset. A market for energy receivables opened. Energy that had not yet been found acquired a future price. Each time recovery rights were sold, real money appeared on the books. Patel’s temporary energy-receivables account built new wormhole passages and cities. He tried to abolish his own accounting revision. Calculations showed that doing so would bankrupt corporations and governments at the same time. At first, he had created the system to save the economy. Later, he could not abolish it without killing the economy. At his retirement ceremony, Patel said that he still did not understand the temporary account he had created. If it was an asset, he said, it should someday return to its owner; if it never returned, then the ledger had entrusted its lie to the future. The audience applauded. After his speech, the price of energy receivables rose. News reports said that their creator had reaffirmed the possibility of recovery.