The Currency of Love

The Currency of Love is novella set in a post-apocalyptic future following the Great Stagnation, a collapse of the old world's abstract digital and paper currencies. The surviving populace splinters into Twenty Races, each based on a new, defining currency, ranging from the material, such as the Ammo Race (bullets) and the Cigarette Race (tobacco sticks), to the intangible, like the Sex Race (intimacy) and the Love Race (vows and kindness).
This division quickly sparks the Currency Wars, a conflict led by Thorne of the Ammo Race and his "Tangible" alliance, who seek to assert the dominance of material wealth over abstract values, declaring the conflict a fight for the human soul. The narrative centers on Vibha Jha, a woman of the Love Race, who rises to lead a federation of Intangible, Service, and Technology Races against Thorne's brutal regime.
Her strategy is to demonstrate the power of human connection, exemplified by her successful infiltration of the Siege of the Seed Fields, where she uses a small art token and a bond of kindness to achieve a breach that a bullet could not. The Intangibles' resistance also features the Knowledge Race's Digital Purge against the Bitcoin Race's cold digital wealth, and the use of Music and Art to boost morale and disrupt the Tangibles during battle.
Following the purge, Vibha helps engineers create a hybrid system that fuses digital security with human values-pegging transactions to a Love Race vow or a Labor Race hour-to establish a foundation of proven trust for a new economy, moving the world toward a Grand Convergence and A New Dawn.