“There was a hotel fire. The building had revolving doors, and when the fire broke out, people panicked. Too many tried to get through at once and the door couldn’t turn. Six hundred people burned alive.
“Now back in the days of the republic, there were regulations that said when you had revolving doors you also had to have emergency doors that opened out. There were millions of little regulations like that, and the republic could shut down places that didn’t comply. Of course those rules made life harder on business, installing extra doors, inspections, higher heating bills. But this hotel went bankrupt, six hundred people died, who does that help? And nobody going into that building knew it was a death trap. You can’t inspect every building you walk into yourself.
“Sure, in the days of a horse and buggy, you didn’t need specialized knowledge to make sure that you were getting a good product. But in modern times how are you going to make sure there’s no cadmium in your paint, or that there isn’t lead in your water, or that the building you’re walking into is safe? Regulation isn’t pretty, but….”
“She’s that way because a hotel burned down?”
“No. She was in that fire. Her whole family was. She made it out. They didn’t.
“I think she misses her sister the most. Talks about her all the time. Anyway, that’s it. She’s a bit of a fanatic when it comes to the republic. And not that I don’t agree with her, but going to jail for the rest of your life doesn’t help the cause. Nobody on earth will ever know that she stood up to that judge.”
I know.
“What do you think they’ll do to her?”
“Whatever will make them the most money.”
“Why don’t we try to get her records? If we all chip in—”
“Oh, Charlie, you’re so sweet. But how are we going to do that? We start poking into those records, someone’s going to ask why. They’ll start investigating, and then we’ll be next. Besides, I’m not sure you have that kind of money.”
“If she’s gone for too long, what does that mean?” I asked.
“Reclamation,” said Kate, gravely. “Of course. But you need to do a lot more than steal a little water or tick-off a judge for something like that.”
“But she’s gone missing, right? You should have heard something by now?”
“Yeah. I mean we’re worried, sure. Why are you so bothered by this?”
I almost fell out of my chair with nausea. She put her arm around me, but I threw it off and held my head in my hands.
The man who had escalated Sarah’s report was long since dead. I didn’t know him anymore; I was ashamed that I ever had. It was another lifetime, a distant memory. But it dragged on me like an anchor tearing through my life. It wasn’t Charlie who had filed that report, it was Thatcher, a man I’m not sure I ever understood, and someone I didn’t like.
If I could have undone it, I would have. I’d go back to my old life, back to that dark cubicle, writing reports and listening to Corbett and Bernard bicker. I’d even go back to my marriage, if it meant that I had never written that report.
Certainly Kate and her friends—all of them—would’ve been better off.
I want to be reclamated. Leave me to rot at Ackerman.
She looked at me, worried. But she loved me only because she didn’t know what I had done.
“I turned her in,” I said finally.
“What? What do you mean you? You didn’t even know her.”
“No… Not for stealing the water. Her case. It came into Perception. It was a small matter, nobody cared. I thought if I wrote it up, told people she was a citizen, that I could make...” a fortune. That was the word I was looking for, a fortune.
“How did you know she was?”
“I didn’t! I thought I was making it up.”
I could see in her mind the tumblers falling into place. I hadn’t picked her agency by chance.
That blasted clipping. How could such a thin piece of tissue paper cause so much destruction to so many people? I’ve as good as reclamated Sarah myself.
I wanted to leave, but it was too dignified. I couldn’t deny her throwing me out.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Apologizing seemed so useless. But what else could I do?
You’re a failed colleague, and an even worse friend.
She fell to her knees and began to sob. I found myself hoping that her friends would show up—maybe Spag—and see what I had done. They’d make me suffer proper. But I couldn’t bear her crying. Overcome by cowardice, I ran out of the apartment. I didn’t even stop to close the door, just fled down the hallway, over the stoop, and out into the darkness.
Acid. Maybe the acid is bad tonight and I can let it eat me away.
The rain was clean. I cursed my luck. The one time I wanted rain strong enough to eat flesh, and I was denied by nature herself.
I ran down the street, into an alleyway, down another street, and around the nearest corner. I didn’t watch out for glass or nails in the road, pedestrians or the occasional car, I just ran. I caught a broken lamppost, and felt a gash open on my arm. It didn’t hurt enough, so I looked for another injury I could inflict on myself.
In my blindness I fell down a small gully into a drainage ditch. I knew immediately where I was—the abandoned school a few blocks from her apartment; the five hundred-year-old ditch. I wanted to get lost where I could never be found, and I had failed at that too.
Mud and refuse washed over me.
This will infect my cuts for sure.
I felt a shoe come off and wash away. I lay a minute before slowly climbing up the bank and back onto the main road. I was shivering, and I realized I’d freeze to death long before any infection spread.
Lightning struck, and I saw a person across the intersection from me. Nobody but lunatics and madmen had any business being out there in that weather.
Kate came up to me, and in one fell swoop drew her arm back and slapped me hard, very hard, across the face. I had no resolve left.
Good. Again. Harder.
I prayed she had a knife, something she could stick into my belly, twist and pull up—let me die in a garbage pile in LowSec. It was still a better death than most people out there got, starving to death, though not nearly as bad as I deserved. She wouldn’t do it. I don’t know how I knew that—she certainly could kill me if she wanted—she had the nerve, had the skill. But she wouldn’t. So I eagerly awaited the next slap.
It didn’t come.
“Why?” she shouted.
What the hell? That’s what she wants to know? How could she not know? She knew what it was to be a colleague.
The truth? People always tell you that hard work leads to success. But it’s hardly ever true. Prestige, power, and influence are the only real currencies. People use those to buy the favors they need to make money. The people who make the most money come from money, have the most to leverage and can sit back and let their money do the work. You want to know who’s going to make the most money? Just look at who was born into it. The single best indicator of where you end up in life is where you start, no matter what the capitalists tell you.
I did it because I wanted into that club.
Sarah had been nothing more than a name on a piece of paper. I hadn’t seen her curly blond hair, her bouncy demeanor or fanatical dedication to a cause she was willing to die for. She had no parents, children, friends or even colleagues—she wasn’t somebody’s child. She was just a name.
“Why?”
“I… I thought that if I could—”
“Why did you tell me?”
I stammered. From the moment I met her, I knew that I’d have to face this sooner or later. How could she not know that?
I want to be punished. That’s why.
“I… you had to know.”
“You didn’t have to. You could have just gone on pretending… pretending that you didn’t know her. Why didn’t you?” she said angrily.
Because I want to know what it feels like to have the
only person you love in this world hate you. Then I might feel better.
I shook my head. It would have been the only sensible thing to do—pretend like it never happened. We were happy together. It’s not as if anybody would ever have found out, and telling her wouldn’t bring Sarah back. If I had possessed even an ounce of self-preservation I’d have buried the secret, even from myself.
“Let me go,” I begged.
I had stopped wiping my eyes. The rain had matted my hair to my face, and I couldn’t see her any more,
But I heard a soft voice. It simply said “no.”
“Just let me go. Go home, I won’t come back, I promise,” I pleaded.
“No.”
“End it all right here. I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t have anything left.”
“No,” she said.
She came up to me, threw an arm around me, and led me back home.
We sat there quietly. I was disinfecting my wounds, and she was toweling off.
“I could buy her out,” I said, “at the very least pay her fine.”
“You don’t have that kind of money. None of us do. Besides, you’re already leveraged to the hilt.”
“I’ll find a way to raise it.”
“How? I mean, if anyone could just raise that kind of money, they’d already be doing it.”
“Maybe if we pool our funds, we can buy her out?”
Kate shook her head. “At what cost? There’s always someone we need to bail out, someone in trouble—there’s more trouble out here than we can afford. People are starving to death.”
“Maybe just enough to buy her records then. I can get you some money,” I said desperately. “Then at least we’ll know where she is.”
“Knowing where she is might make us feel better, but it won’t help her at all. And if I buy the records, they’ll want to know where I got the money. That’ll draw attention we’d rather not have.”
“I’ll ask for her records then, as a follow-up to my report!”
“How many times have you ever followed up on a report in your career? Five or six? You have to have some kind of reason to follow up—they’re going to ask.”
“I’ll say it’s because I am so concerned for the company, because she’s so dangerous.”
“You’re going to help her by reminding Ackerman how dangerous she is?”
“My god,” I said, “how can you be so blasé about this?”
“Oh, my poor Charlie,” she said. “I’m not. But what do you think life is like out here? People vanish all the time. Ackerman can come for anyone for any reason, and sometimes people come back, sometimes they don’t. All we can do is keep our heads down, hope they don’t decide we’re all worth more rendered into machining lubricant.”
“I have to do something.”
“I don’t know about you, but I want to live. And we’re not going to live if we can’t overcome our mistakes, move forward, and worry about keeping the people we have alive. I’ve got some experience with this, and I can tell you that you can spend years blaming yourself; it’s cathartic, it’s easy, and it’s a great excuse to not go about the business of living your life. Wallowing in self-pity is as futile as working for that huge payoff at Ackerman. But you’re not the only one suffering; neither is Sarah. People out here, citizens, are struggling to stay alive. If you can’t forgive yourself, where will you be?”
“What would she think, you bedding the man who had her killed?”
“We don’t know she’s dead. We don’t know that it was your report that escalated her case. We don’t know who reported her in the first place or why. Heck, we don’t know for sure why she was arrested—stealing water might have just been an excuse.
“We need to focus on what we have, and not what we don’t. But if she knew the man you are today, what you’re risking by coming here, I think she’d forgive you. I hope she would.
“And I haven’t given up on the idea that maybe someday you’ll be able to ask her for forgiveness yourself,” she said.
“I want to do something. I want to bring down Ackerman, the whole system—corruption and greed—I want to end it.”
“I know.”
“There must be something we can do, some way to bring it down. I mean, if we don’t do something, they’ll keep picking all of you—all of us—off. This is no way to live, waiting for them to come grab us.”
“I’d rather be me than them any day of the week. Every day I thank God for putting me on this side of the wall and not the other.”
“I want to do something,” I said. “I want to start being part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
She nodded. “I understand. Do you trust me, Charlie?”
I looked at her. “Of course.”
“Good. Then go to sleep.”
Chapter 13
I was sitting at the café, quietly stirring my coffee, lost in thought while Linus rambled on about lagging indicators of unemployment in the current economic climate.
He noticed, and asked if I had been listening.
“No. I’m sorry, you were talking about... What?”
“Is it Beatrice?”
“Oh no, god no,” I chortled.
“Then what? There are plenty of other people who are willing to pay for my time if you’re not interested.”
Of course Kate’s friends don’t trust me. I haven’t done anything. I haven’t risked anything for these beliefs—stood by them, fought for them. So long as I say and do nothing, citizenship is just a belief.
“I was just… Well I’m tired, that’s all.”
“You gave me that excuse last week,” he said.
“Well, I’ve been busy….”
“Do you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? It’s about a boy whose job it was to guard the village’s sheep. One night he got bored, so he cried wolf, and laughed as all the villages came running. The next night he did it again, and again on the third night. On the fourth night, however, a real wolf came. He cried for help, but the villagers thought it was a trick, so none of them came, and the wolf ate him. Do you know what the moral is?”
I shook my head.
“Never tell the same lie twice. Lies have to be fresh, constantly changing. You cheat on your spouse, come up with a new excuse every time you’re home late. Don’t, and you get eaten.
“I don’t mind you lying to me, Charles, I expect it. But for God’s sake, change it up a bit. You’re certainly finding something interesting, and it’s not me.”
“I’ve been thinking about… Have you ever heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma?” I asked.
“Of course, Nash’s theory. I’m not a complete dolt. Is that what’s bothering you?”
Whatever answer I had expected, this wasn’t it.
“God, you’re white as a sheet. Is everything okay?”
“I... well, I guess I wanted to know what you think of it.”
“Oh, genius, of course, every word of it. It’s basic economic theory; we’d be living in caves without it.”
“The Prisoner’s Dilemma?”
“Yes, Charles! What’s wrong?”
“I guess... well, I guess I don’t understand it. Could you please explain the theory to me?”
“Of course. Nash was a philosopher who discovered that people who work together do better than those who don’t. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two thieves are caught and threatened with jail time. If they work together against the police, they each get less time than if they don’t.”
I gulped down the last of my coffee and ordered another one.
“Charles, did you get hit in the head? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“And you’re okay with that?” I said. “What Nash said?”
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“But I thought Nash was a mathematician, not a philosopher? Are we talking about the same guy?”
“Of course we are. Those are just labels. Call him what you like. He was a mathematician. But Darwin was a biol
ogist, and he is the father of the social fabric of society. These people changed how we look at the world. I think it’s wonderful that you’re learning Nash, but look at you, you look like you’re about to jump out of your seat.”
“But how do you reconcile cooperation with modern society?”
“What do you mean? It’s the foundation of modern corporatism; that’s what we do, we work together.”
I became lightheaded, my heart began to flutter, and my chest tightened. The next coffee arrived, and I downed it even faster than the first.
“Jesus, you’ll give yourself palpitations. That has a lot of caffeine. Listen to me, I want you to slow down!”
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and looked around the room for relief.
“What’s wrong with you? You’re acting very strange. You’re quite bothered by this. Is it the idea of cooperation that troubles you? Look at you; you can barely sit in your chair!”
“Nash wasn’t… He didn’t talk about… he was talking about common interests!”
“Oh, of course he wasn’t. There’s no such thing as common interests, Nash knew that.”
I fell back into my chair. I could see him now, as I had seen Beatrice on the night she left. I could see Linus with the clarity he himself possessed.
I had thought that if I tried hard enough, since Linus was a bright guy, I could win him over with the strength of my convictions. But we weren’t even speaking the same language. We knew the sounds, the grammar and vocabulary, but the words all had different meanings.
Linus already knew all the arguments; he had processed them all. But instead of expanding his own understanding or worldview, he simply integrated each new fact into his previously held beliefs, supported by the impenetrably circular argument that competition was superior because it had beaten cooperation in a competitive match. Those were the rose-colored spectacles through which he saw the world, the system of weights and measures he used to judge life and call it fair.
Kate never denied the need for competition. But it wasn’t the entirety of all life. It was a system among many—each of which had to be applied in a constantly evolving and changing mix by people engaged in the system. That was the key—even the best of republics degenerate when trusted to the leaders alone. That complacency had killed the republic, a refusal to invest in the work of both finding and then staying on top of that mix. That same blind faith would kill the corporations just the same.
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