The Heart Goes Last

Once they decide to sign up for the Positron Project and live their lives in Consilience, Stan and Charmaine are given a stipend of posidollars. These posidollars can be spent at any stores in Consilience, or to order things from the corporate online catalogue. Consilience is a corporate-run town, and in this way, it is more of a product meant to extract maximum profit than an actual community. The posidollars play an important role in this process, symbolizing corporate rule and exploitation. It is established several times throughout the novel how profitable the project is, yet none of that profit trickles down to the people producing it, because they are paid in a currency that has no value outside of Consilience.

This serves a dual purpose. First, it is a means of social control, as it ensures all members of Consilience remain poor unless they stay in town—while they are not allowed to leave anyway, limiting their access to resources provides further incentive. Second, it creates a market with no competition and over which they have complete control. It allows them to effectively create an economic system in which they pay everyone in a fake currency that has no real value, to buy goods that they produce, while keeping all the real profit for themselves.