The Water Thief

by Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  I tubed the report, shredded all my notes, and went to lunch.

  Chapter 3

  The subway smelled like putrid milk, urine and moldy bread. It was sticky with substances I preferred remain a mystery, and the incessant squealing of brakes and rumbling of trains made me cringe. The tracks groaned and creaked under the weight of the steel hulks, and the tunnels were so small, the margins through them so thin, I thought that at any minute the coach would strike the wall, seize, and come to a grinding halt, entombing me so far below ground that any rescue would be uneconomical.

  All this had very little to do with why I hated trains.

  I hated them because they made a very good target—all those people crowded together. It was a LowCon way to travel. The stations increased in security the closer we got to Atlas Square, but passengers weren’t fully screened until we got out. With every sudden jolt I’d wonder if my life was over, lost to a rival corp who considered a briefcase full of detonite a cheap and effective means of robbing Ackerman of some assets.

  Arriving at Atlas Station, we were herded through x-ray machines, body scanners, and past bomb-sniffing dogs. That was where some suicide bomber would detonate, there in the crowd. I hadn’t gotten my smoke in before coming, so I just closed my eyes and tried to relax, rubbing the referred pain out of my leg and wishing I had brought my pills as I was ushered through security.

  I did, somehow and through the grace of God, arrive at Atlas Square. It was HighSec. In fact, short of the Galt, it had the highest security in the territory. It was the seat of Ackerman power and influence, the pinnacle of luxury and commerce, and a testament to the success of capitalism. A large rotunda sat in the middle, made of a beautifully trimmed lawn with real grass. It was surrounded by a U-shaped plaza made of two levels of HighCon shops and restaurants. In the center stood a towering marble statue of the god Atlas, on one knee, shrugging the whole world from his shoulders. The whole place was designed to make you feel important, as if you stood with the kings of men, that your very presence was enough to give your life meaning. You couldn’t walk through the square without rolling your shoulders back, broadening your chest, and drawing your breath up from your shoes.

  The only things that were allowed to wear were the stone slab sidewalks. They sagged slightly in the middle under the repeated pounding of millions of footfalls for hundreds of years, like a trickle of water that can, with enough time, cut through the strongest rock. The stones were original, never repaired or replaced, as if to say “Ackerman has existed since the dawn of time, and will continue to exist forever.”

  Around the square, past the markets on the far side, was an old intersection, from back in the days when cars were allowed to drive through. In the center on a small island sat a newsstand. It was pricy, but filled with literature from Ackerman, our Karitzu, and even some competing corps. I used it in a pinch, or after lunch sometimes to show Linus that I wasn’t afraid to spend a little money. The proprietor was a nice man who always seemed to know just what kind of stuff would help me out the most.

  Past the newsstand, on the other side of the intersection, was the Café Americana. This nostalgic place honored capitalism in its infancy, back when it was regulated and looted by states and governments. It was long and slender, made up to look like a 1970’s diner. Overstuffed red leather stools crowded the front and booths ran down the length. On the walls were posters of famous capitalists like John Rockefeller and Pablo Escobar, painted in bright reds and blues, with stars and sunbeams behind them.

  It was one of the best coffee shops in the district, with a wide assortment of light fare. The prices were outrageous, even for a small sandwich, but that ensured a certain caliber of customer. I always bought lunch, and Linus’ menu choices seemed calculated to be just enough to cause me pain, but not enough to humiliate, a mark he hit with frightening accuracy. But it was good for me to have a mentor and to be seen rubbing shoulders with a colleague of his stature.

  Normally the place was quiet, exclusive—never more than half-full. But on that morning it was packed, and a long line had formed out the front. Thankfully, Linus was sitting on a stool in the front corner, quietly reading The Arbitrage Daily Journal. An empty seat waited beside him. Nobody asked him about it, and when someone bumped it or his table, he would simply look over his half-frame wire reading glasses and check that nothing had spilled.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  Linus looked over the rim of his glasses, dubiously, as if I had arrived exactly when he had expected.

  “Never apologize,” he commanded, quietly. He raised his arm grandly and thrust it out, exposing his watch in a deliberate stroke. Then he drew his eyes from me to the timepiece. He turned back to his magazine. “For anything.”

  Linus Cabal was built like a tank. He had played rugby at school, and leveraged his skills into a scholarship at François Quesnay, one of the most prestigious universities in the territory. For most athletes their intellectual careers ended there. But while he ranked third in the sport, he studied too, and graduated fifth in a class of eight hundred. The players called him a nerd who didn’t have the guts to dedicate himself to the sport. The academics called him a muscle-head who could have been valedictorian if he had gotten serious.

  But when the recruiters came, he told the firms that he hated the tedium of corporate life, and he told the leagues that he was terrified of getting an injury. The ensuing bidding war over his talents landed him a position in Ackerman’s Arbitrage division at the highest starting salary of any colleague on record, almost double what his valedictorian got.

  “Business is war,” Linus would say, “and all war is based on deception.”

  I wondered, casually, if Linus could tell the difference between the truth and a lie anymore, or if, indeed, the distinction was even important to him.

  In the war that is business, I wondered, what new front has opened up to cause all this?

  “Why the crowd?” I asked.

  Linus scowled and began stirring his coffee, as if the answer was so obvious it irritated him.

  “Kabul Coffee is trying to set up their first shops in our territory. They snuck in under one of our free trade clauses with another Karitzu, so we have to let them in. They’re opening up three shops in the capital next month. The first will be in the square by the end of next week. So Takashi ramped up production and cut prices. He’s even tapped our bean reserves.”

  “He’s lowering the price to drive Kabul out?”

  Linus nodded. “They don’t have Ackerman’s deep pockets… We can run coffee at a loss for a decade without feeling a pinch.”

  “Isn’t that...” I said hesitantly. I had started the sentence, and now I realized I would need to finish it. “... a subsidy?”

  Linus pulled the spoon from his coffee and tossed it on the table.

  “Honestly, Charles, sometimes I don’t know why I meet with you. We’re not socialists. Subsidizing an industry is obscene. It’s illegal. Mr. Takashi would never do it. How on earth do you make your way through the world, even as a Delta, not understanding that? You’re in Perception, for Christ’s sake! If it looks like a subsidy to you, maybe you haven’t thought it all the way through! To even suggest...”

  He was right, of course. The suggestion itself was slander, probably actionable. Nobody in that café would have found a reward of five or ten caps worth the bother. Still, I shouldn’t have said it.

  Takashi was CEO, so he was perfect. This was not a point of pride, but a natural law. LowCons were a plague of biblical proportions on a corporation, tolerated only because their sheer numbers gave them considerable market power. A MidCon was simply someone who had learned either to screw up less, or to better demonstrate that his “mistakes” were actually the fault of those below him. Executives made nearly no mistakes, but rather spent the bulk of their time compensating for the ineptitude of their subordinates. The CEO, therefore, was perfect. If not, a superior colleague would have replaced him long ago.


  When Takashi did appear to make a mistake, it was the good colleague who could trace the mistake back to its actual source, usually a lower-ranked worker. Being a MidCon, the blame often landed suspiciously close to my own desk, and I spent about half my day demonstrating how the problem was actually the fault of someone below me.

  The real problem for Kabul was that, while Ackerman had started as a securities and futures brokerage firm, they soon began vertical expansion—making their own discount paper, coffee and snacks for their colleagues. Then they began selling on the open market, competing globally, and before long Ackerman had its own generic equivalents of nearly every product imaginable, from toilet paper to carburetors. When a higher quality or better value product came along, Ackerman just leveraged income from other products to wipe it out.

  “If Kabul coffee does a better job, shouldn’t they be allowed to compete on a level playing field?”

  “Level playing field? How is that not code for socialism? Who’s going to level the field? Who sets the rules, decides what makes it level? Who’s going to enforce it without regulating the rest of us into the ground? Governments? Those old relics destroyed productivity. No, no, the only Objective way to do it is on the fly, between corporations. Fair is what the market decides or allows for, taking into account all of the forces that come to bear. If Kabul wants to try to take us on in Coffee, they can go right ahead. They’ve been cleaning up in Europa, and that’s fine, but if they want to come here and start setting up shops, we’ll defend ourselves. And when they set up in other territories in the Karitzu, we’ll defend those too, because we’re the biggest and strongest and that’s our job, because pride is a commodity too. Nobody undermines our products in our own territory.”

  “If coffee is running at a loss—” I said.

  “It’s not a loss; it’s an investment in our colleagues, our brand name and reputation, and in the future stability of the coffee market. It’s long-term thinking. Only a Delta thinks it’s a subsidy.”

  It was boredom, that force which pushes the state of equilibrium towards a greater and greater tolerance for risk, especially with other people’s money.

  I shifted uncomfortably, trying to curry favor with a new topic. I thought about telling him about my Aisling report. He’d have liked it. But I didn’t say anything.

  “I looked into broadening my portfolio.”

  “Good, it’s about time you took my advice to heart. Who are you looking at?”

  “Studio One. They’re an entertainment and television production firm. They—”

  “I know who they are, stay away from it.”

  “Well, it’s a good company, I looked into it,” I said. “A lot of people are buying it.”

  “Exactly why you need to avoid it. It’s a solid company, sure. But the stock keeps going up even though they have the same shows as last year. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. People think it’s good so they buy it, driving up the price, which makes more people think it’s good. The price skyrockets until finally someone points out that the emperor has no clothes. The stock plummets, and everyone is wiped out. It’s a trend, that’s all, and by the time you notice a trend it’s too late to get in on it.”

  I didn’t tell him that I had already bought the stock.

  Linus looked at me wryly. “You need to play.” he said.

  He was referring, of course, to poker—that ubiquitous game synonymous with corporate living. On rare occasion you could find people who played it with cards—but at Ackerman we played the original Greek way, with dice. The stakes were decided up front. Then each player would throw six dice and keep what they rolled hidden from the others. The first player would bet on the minimum quantity of any given number on the table—for example two fives. Each subsequent player would have to raise the bet, either by raising the quantity of dice with that number, or the number itself (say two sixes, or three ones). This continued until someone called. Then everyone revealed their dice. If the total quantity of that number was equal to or lower than the bet, the better won; otherwise the caller did. Most everyone carried dice on them and played three or four games a day.

  If Linus felt any emotion for anything at all it was a love of poker. He denied it, but he had recorded every televised game—every match, every championship—for the last twenty years. He watched them, over and over again—studying faces, tells, and dice probabilities. He talked about how he’d spend thousands of caps in games he had no intention of winning, just to learn people’s tells and get them later when the stakes were higher.

  “My boss comes up to me…” Linus once recalled. He loved telling stories, old fables and personal vignettes. The grand and royal nature of storytelling attracted him to it, playing to his dramatic tendencies and delicate flourish. “He waited until I was in the middle of the trading floor giving my morning briefing. I had all of my subordinates around me, and he threw down. Challenged me to a game for a hundred thousand caps.”

  “So you beat him?” I had asked.

  “Couldn’t. If I beat him publicly, he’d destroy me for it.”

  “So you refused to play?”

  “Couldn’t. If I didn’t play, I’d be seen as a coward to my subs. They’d all start jumping ship to work for someone with balls—someone like him. Make no mistake, this wasn’t a game, it was extortion.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I laughed at him, told him a hundred thousand was a waste of time. I said if he was serious, I’d play for a million.”

  “You could afford that?”

  “Doesn’t matter. The question was, could he? He blew the whole thing off as a joke and walked away.”

  “He brushed it off?”

  “It is, more often than not, the person willing to risk the most—even his own utter ruin—who wins.”

  “So you got out of playing him?”

  Linus sighed. “No, Charles. What I’m saying is that I beat him before the game even started.”

  He told that story often, and whenever he thought I was missing a valuable corporate lesson, Linus insisted we play. That’s all poker was: an exercise in lying.

  I gave myself a half-hearted pat down and told him I didn’t have any dice on me.

  “We don’t need dice,” he said, pulling out a bill from his pocket. “We can just use caps. Every bill has a twelve-digit serial number on it. There are twice as many numbers and they range from zero to nine so it’s a little harder than dice, but it’s the exact same thing.”

  I failed to see how twice as many numbers was “the exact same thing.”

  “Well, I haven’t studied the probabilities.”

  “The probabilities are irrelevant. Play the person, not the numbers. Lie to me, use your bets as a weapon.”

  “You’d have me at a terrible disadvantage.”

  “Then next time don’t get caught without dice.”

  I stood there, frantically trying to come up with another excuse not to play. He pulled a cap from his pocket, memorized the numbers in a single pass, and then held it to his chest.

  “Three sevens,” he said.

  I hated the game, which was no doubt why he wanted to play.

  “If you’d like, we can wager today’s lunch.”

  I had no excuses left. I pulled out a cap and read the serial numbers. Most were different, only a few repeats and no more than two of any number. It was a poor hand, which meant the blessing of a quick game. His face was expressionless, but his eyes shone with the certainty of an outcome I didn’t dispute.

  I had two eights. Linus probably had at least one, so I called out “Three eights” and prayed he’d call right then and there.

  “Four Twos,” he said. He’d calculated his second bet long before I had even given my first.

  I hated poker. I hated playing it, hated people who liked it, hated the fact that everyone was playing it all the time. It was like a joke that everybody got but me, one I had long given up asking people to explain. Even Bernard, who lost more than
I did, seemed to enjoy it.

  Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong. I know Linus. I can play the man and not the dice. He’s proud—so proud that he might brush it off if I won, but he’d never play me again. Even he gets a bad throw on occasion. Win this, and I’ll never have to do this silly exercise again.

  I began thinking about how to take what I knew about Linus and leverage it into a victory. I had to do something unexpected, that was the key. I could bet outrageously high, but that had the downside of being unexpected for a reason—it was supremely stupid. No, I’d need to bid the highest number I could get away with, something that would force him to bid numbers higher than he could possibly have, and then I could call him.

  But I didn’t have anything myself, no real numbers to work with. But therein, I realized, lay the opportunity. I’d bid outside the range of what I actually had, but inside the range of what was likely—something I should have, but didn’t.

  “Four sevens,” I said confidently.

  “You’re a liar,” called Linus. He placed his bill face down on the table and went back to reading his journal.

  His cap had exactly three sevens on it. If I had had even a single seven, I’d have won the match. And since I always paid for the meals, there hadn’t been anything at stake. There was nothing to lose, and somehow I’d lost anyway.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Linus said, dismissively waving his hand. “I’ll pay for the meal.”

  “No, no, of course not,” I said. “All my bets are good.”

  I had stopped carrying poker dice for this very reason. Now I’d have to stop carrying cash too.

  “You know,” Linus said, folding his paper and putting it on the table, “I saw your wife in the dailies again. It was buried in the back, a minor thing, but she was there. Did you know?”