The world we are building toward.

A hundred years from now, a girl in Lagos is twelve, and ambitious the way twelve is ambitious — completely. What she wants is what the ambitious have always wanted: to matter. What her century changed is how she will find out whether she does.

She has never been hungry, and neither has anyone she knows. Machines grow the food, raise the buildings, run the lines; a floor under every life has held for two generations, and standing on it is no more remarkable to her than standing on pavement. There is still money — plenty of it, and more in some hands than others. Her century kept the engine that made the abundance. What it changed was the culture riding on top.

No one assigned her a number. There is no ministry of worth, no dashboard with her name on it — her century remembers an early state experiment in scored citizens the way ours remembers lead in gasoline, and guards against it the same way. What she has instead is what people have always had, finally made visible: the regard of those who watch her work. When she repairs her first water sensor for the co-op, three people who know sensors will say so, and their saying so will be worth more to her than three thousand strangers' applause. It will fade unless she keeps going. It will forgive her when she stops for a year. It cannot be bought, and everyone she knows finds the idea of buying it as absurd as buying a friendship.

Money still does what money is good at. It prices the scarce things — the front seat, the old guitar, the trip — and some people have a great deal of it. What faded was not money but a habit: the habit of reading a person off their balance. "Net worth" survives in her century the way "well-bred" survives in ours — a real phrase, once said in earnest, now faintly comic when aimed at a human being. You can still get rich. It simply stopped being the same thing as being admired.

At dinner, "what do you do?" has slipped from the first question to small talk; with the floor in place, a job no longer stands in for a life. The question that carries the weight now — the one her century asks at tables the way ours asks "what do you do?" — is: "What are you tending?" A stretch of river. A set of patients. A failing archive. An old man four doors down. The answers are how people place each other, and the placing is done in stories, not in figures.

Her grandmother remembers the feeds — the years when standing was counted in views and the loudest lives ranked highest. The girl has seen them in a museum exhibit, next to the cigarette advertisements. Same cabinet. Same caption, more or less: things we measured because they were easy to measure, and paid for in what was hard to replace.

When her great-grandfather died, the family read what his neighbors had written across sixty years — the recognitions, kept in a drawer the way another century kept medals. Nothing in the drawer converts to anything. It is the most valuable thing the family owns. In her century, the dead and the living are finally honored with the same instrument, and nobody waits for the funeral to say what they saw.

She will still envy. She will still posture; there will be evenings she performs a kindness and knows it, and a community that — gently, the way her century does it — lets her know they know. People did not become better. The culture did. Ambition burns in her exactly as hot as it burned in the centuries of conquest and the centuries of money. It just builds different things now, because what earns regard finally points at what was always worth building.

And when she is old, and a child asks her what the old world was like, she will say what grandmothers have always said — harder than yours — and then she will reach for the one fact she has never quite believed, the way we never quite believe powdered wigs or child chimney sweeps:

"When I was your age, people thought how much money you had was the same thing as how much you mattered."