You might even get away with charging interest on all nine notes, and you'll be ok unless two noteholders return on the same day demanding to exchange their note for your apple.
In a village market which has one apple and nine "iou one apple notes", how many apples do they have in total?
An IOU for an apple is not a negative apple. A negative physical object logically cannot exist. You can owe someone an apple, but that doesn't mean there are negative 1 apples in the world because you cannot have less than zero apples. Furthermore, he said dollars (a specific physical object), not money (an abstract concept which can include negative values).