The Water Thief

by Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  I was now, irrevocably, a citizen.

  Kate had said I should keep a low profile. But I couldn’t straddle the line any longer. I was Sarah Aisling, incapable of hiding my contempt for the system. I’d spent my life doing nothing, just letting the system do whatever it wanted so long as it didn’t trouble me any. I kept quiet and cloaked myself in the lie that silence wasn’t an endorsement.

  Linus saw competition everywhere he looked, as the very fabric of nature. But he saw it that way because he chose to see it that way, to live in that world.

  I’d love to have said that he’d die a lonely, miserable man because of the humanity he sacrificed. But it wouldn’t have been true. Linus would die a very wealthy man, an executive, maybe even CEO. He was already happy, fully enmeshed into the system. He derived pleasure from the system, fed off the lies he told and the people he outwitted. He would die happy because in the end he believed the most important lie, the one he told himself: that he was the greatest colleague in the world. There’s no bridge between you and a man who can invent an entire reality.

  “Are you okay?”

  I smiled and relaxed my shoulders. “Yeah, of course. You were right, too much coffee. I’m sorry, I should stop taking advantage of these prices.”

  “It’s tough, they’re at record lows. You know, you are an odd duck, Charles,” Linus said, sipping his coffee. “You need to play.”

  “I’m not going to play.” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to play.”

  “You’re just off the map today. What has gotten into you? Is it your contract grade? Everyone has fears and doubts. You’re just lazy, undisciplined. You need to learn to control…”

  Linus’ voice trailed off. He was still holding the coffee nearly to his lips, eyes fixed out the window, but the smile fell from his face.

  I turned to look, and then I heard a loud crack. The café became quiet. A man in a tan trench coat had just passed the newsstand. He staggered towards us, a look of surprise on his face. Blood began seeping through his coat, and a renewed determination overcame him.

  Another shot rang out. His shoulder lurched forward as he was struck, and he tumbled to the ground. Linus dropped his coffee and threw himself on top of me. As he did, the man outside exploded, wiping away the newsstand in a single stroke. A deafening wave of nails, ball bearings, and shattered glass washed over us.

  I was back at Allenhurst. The building lay on me. I couldn’t see or hear anything. So this is it. This is how my life ends. I wasn’t breathing. But if that were true, how could I smell the burnt flesh and sulfur? I couldn’t feel my leg; I couldn’t feel anything, except water trickling down through the rubble. That was how I knew I was alive—the cool wetness of ruptured water pipes. Drifting in and out of consciousness, the math was easy—the risk to workers wasn’t worth rescuing anybody. Just bring in the bulldozers the next day and begin clearing the rubble.

  I wasn’t at Allenhurst. I remembered, then, that I was in a café, in the middle of Capital City.

  I shouldn’t have come back. There’s nothing left for me at Ackerman. You were silly—silly to worry about anything. Reports to your bosses, meetings with Linus, the games with your colleagues, they’re all distractions. You should have married Kate, had children, watched them learn and grow, explored the ruins of NullSec and stolen water. You should have done things differently.

  I realized that I was being crushed, not by a building, but by the weight of the former rugby champion. And in a flash, the weight was gone.

  I sat up. The air was filled with dust, but the café was brighter than I had ever seen it. The posters were tattered, the blinds had been ripped from the windows, and the floor was littered with metal and glass. A loud, shrill siren going off somewhere in the distance. At first I thought it was an air raid warning, but it was just my own ears.

  I eyed what remained of a booth—splintered and shredded, with the stuffing blasted out of it. My hand was wet. I glanced down to see that it was resting in a growing pool of blood. As the ringing subsided I could make out moaning and screaming, though it was hard to tell where it was coming from. I thought I had better check myself for injury, and half-heartedly patted myself down, though I could have had a dozen broken bones and wouldn’t have noticed.

  I stood up and tried to brush the glass off. Blood had matted the smaller pieces to my clothes, making them tough to wipe off. The air looked dusty, cotton bits floating in it like dandelion seeds. Bodies were slumped on the tables and on the floor. Some people were dead, others were clutching their wounds.

  I looked around for someone to help me. I wasn’t sure what anyone could do, or even if I needed help. Maybe I could just walk out of there. I hadn’t tried walking yet. Then I became vaguely aware of my name being shouted. I tried to concentrate. Yes, it was my name. Someone was calling me.

  Linus was on his knees amidst the carnage, leaning over a badly injured woman. He tore his shirt into strips and began bandaging her wounds. He grabbed a steak knife and cut the pant leg off a dead colleague and fashioned a sling. He shouted my name again. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but gathered that he wanted me to come over. He pointed to her neck, where a severed artery was already rapidly soaking through the bandages. I tentatively grabbed her throat.

  “Press hard!” I heard.

  I pressed harder.

  “Hard, dammit!”

  “I’ll choke her,” I protested.

  “If you don’t choke her, she’ll bleed to death!”

  Pressing down hard, I felt her larynx under the flesh of her neck. She looked up at me, gurgling as she struggled to breathe. Her eyes were alive, pleading, as if she really believed that there was something more that I could do.

  “You got it. Reconstruction will be here in two minutes. Let go and she dies!” Linus jumped up and moved on to another victim.

  The woman was older, maybe in her mid-fifties. She was dressed like a HighCon, but her skin was old and wrinkled—the signs of a Delta or even an Epsilon. Even as her eyes begged for life, she began clawing at me—trying to wrench me off her. I clasped my hands even more tightly around her throat.

  At Allenhurst I had been on the other side. Now, at the café, I wanted to save this woman. As I clasped my hands around her throat, I begged God to let her live. Let me save this one life—not because it meant anything to Ackerman, but because it meant so much to her.

  By the time the medics had arrived, she still had a pulse, but her eyes had closed. I sat on the floor of the café for a few minutes, bodies slumped at the tables as the reconstruction team tried to figure out how best to put the place back together.

  When I stood up I felt a stabbing pain in my left calf. A large shard of glass was sticking out of it. I ignored it, keeping my weight on the other leg as I limped out.

  Linus sat on the far side of the intersection, past the remains of the newsstand, facing the back of the rotunda. I sat beside him. After a few minutes of silence Linus, who hadn’t smoked in ten years, asked me for a cigarette.

  “I quit.”

  He nodded. “I suppose that’s good. Hell of a time to do it, though. You know you should get that leg looked at.”

  “Yeah, I can’t pull the glass out until I get to the clinic or else it’ll just bleed worse. I know a good place that’ll take care of it.”

  Linus reached for a pack of cigarettes that lay in the debris of the shattered newsstand. He put one in his mouth and lit it. “Don’t mess with some third-rate bull,” he puffed. “You can write it off if you let Recon do it. They’ll want to control the perception, so you should get a good deal.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I could smell the tobacco through the burnt gunpowder and detonite, and I suddenly needed a smoke too.

  “Kabul?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  It wasn’t right. It wasn’t wrong. Kabul hadn’t committed a crime or done anything immoral. It was si
mply a part of the negotiation, placing their thumb on the scale—forcing Ackerman to pay so much to drive Kabul out that it might just be easier to let them compete. A suicide bomber just cost less than doing nothing.

  “How’d they get him?”

  “Snipers,” said Linus. “There’s at least a dozen snipers covering the square around the clock. With so many HighCon assets here, it’s a tempting target… Our boys did their jobs, we’re all good.”

  In the background I could hear the perception team. Corbett had already arrived, and was haggling over how to best shape the incident and who should get credit for what. Already they had come down to two intriguing but mutually exclusive possibilities—they could laud Ackerman security forces for stopping the bomber before he reached his target, or argue that he could’ve been stopped sooner if MidCons stopped bellyaching about unfair security tariffs.

  “Maybe,” said Collin’s young voice, “we should have the reconstruction team rebuild the café exactly as it was, pretend like none of this happened.”

  “What? And ignore this opportunity! That’s criminal!” shouted Corbett, pulling out his ledger and writing up an impromptu report.

  I closed my eyes. Corbett was right, he’d own this noob before the year was out—if the kid didn’t end up in prison first.

  Linus was still smoking, but nobody dared hassle him about it. And despite the horror, I saw a ray of hope, from someone I had not expected.

  “You saved a lot of lives today,” I said.

  Linus shook his head. “No, Charles, I protected our assets. It’s the mitigation clause in every Ackerman contract. I had to.”

  “No, that wasn’t mitigation. You took charge, you led us. You saved lives. The world is a better place because of what you did.”

  Linus sighed and took another drag. He was exhausted, and resented having to spend the energy to try one last time to explain.

  “I don’t see how you can miss this, Charles. You don’t get it, even now. It’s my job to know first aid, to help assets in trouble, to protect Ackerman and mitigate damage to it whenever I can. I did my job, I did it well, and I expect to be paid commensurate with the quality of my work. And I will be.

  “We’re assets, you and I. But you have this sentimentality; you seem to think that life should offer more. Well, I don’t know about what should be. I just know that this is the way it is. We got caught in the crossfire of a rather tough negotiation today. That’s all. Don’t look for any more meaning than that. All that awaits idealists who can’t stomach a harsh reality is disappointment, misery, and death. You should want more than that for yourself.

  “I’m happy with the way things turned out. I’m happy because I believe in Nash. I will never get those responsible for this, I’ll never meet them. But my colleagues will, rest assured. This will cost Kabul everything. I trust my colleagues. I did my job today, and tomorrow an Ackerman sniper will do his. If we all keep doing our jobs, Kabul will be gone, it’s that simple.”

  He stood up, took a final deep draw and then tossed the cigarette aside. “This should clue you into the real world, Charles. This is what happens if you let your guard down, even for a second. Everyone, the entire world, is either with us or against us. They want to divide us, like the two prisoners. That is Nash.

  “You did well today. You took direction in less than ideal circumstances. I’m proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself. You honestly could make Gamma. It’s a shame you don’t really try. In any case, you saved her life—I think. And you’ll be paid well for it, I’ll see to that.”

  It was with that that Linus, torn clothes and covered in blood, walked away. I looked up into the sky, one of the few clear blue skies I had seen all year. War had come to Ackerman.

  Chapter 14

  Kate tended my wounds as I sat in a chair in the middle of her living room.

  “Seems like I’m always cleaning you up.”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t really listening.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I just can’t believe Linus. The people he saved, they meant nothing to him. They were just assets.”

  “He’s lean, sculpted by years of corporate work. He doesn’t have emotions anymore. No fear, no sadness. He doesn’t hesitate, he doesn’t regret his decisions, he just acts. That’s why he loves poker so much, why he’s so good at it.”

  “I hate poker.”

  “Of course you do, you hate lying. You wear your heart on your sleeve. Poker is all about deception. People think ‘cuz there’s dice, it’s random. But it’s not. The odds are always the same. And everyone knows that you bet high on a good hand, and low on a bad one, so everyone tries to deceive you by doing the opposite. But we all know that everybody knows, and so on. So in the end it’s the best liar who wins, the person who can most convince you of the weakness of his roll.”

  “He said that Nash supports corporations…”

  “That’s what all corporate agents say,” she laughed. “He wasn’t against them, but he said that, for the best success, trust had to be balanced equally with competition. Do you trust any of your colleagues?”

  The stitches on my calf were neat, the bandages tight. Out in the wilds of LowCon were no hospitals to speak of, and experience was the best first aid. They had their own education.

  “I’ve had enough. I can’t go back. I’m done, Katherine. I can’t work for Ackerman anymore.”

  “I know, hon. I know it’s hard. Just keep working there a little longer.”

  “Longer? What on earth do I need to go back there for? My life is a joke, it’s fake, and it doesn’t mean anything! I’m never going back.”

  “I know, I know. But they own your futures. They’ll come after you.”

  “Let them. They’ll never find me here. If I cash everything out, move out here, I can drop my ledger into a river and....”

  “Charlie, you can’t,” she cried.

  “Oh, no. I didn’t mean… I didn’t mean to presume I was going to come here. I can get my own place.”

  “It’s fine if you move in here with me. That’s not what I meant. You can’t quit Ackerman. Not yet.”

  “But you can show me. I can steal water, grow food, you can teach me to survive.”

  “You just can’t,” she pleaded. “You have to keep working.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She clasped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and she began to cry.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said.

  The woman who had never been frightened by anything looked at me as if I were already dead, as though my death was a certainty no one could avoid.

  “What have you done?” I said.

  “It’s not me, Charlie.”

  “Your friends. Oh my god, are they going to turn me in? I should have….”

  “No, it’s not them, Charlie, please!”

  “Why can’t I leave Ackerman?”

  She still refused to answer.

  “I have to leave. It doesn’t matter where I go, but I can’t stay there. You have to understand that.”

  She shook her head. “It’s over, Charlie.”

  “What? You’re leaving me because I’m going to quit work?”

  “No. Ackerman is over. They’re through. Everybody is. Corporations, the world, it’s coming to an end. It’s going to crash. It’s all over.”

  I laughed.

  She had gotten me worked up over nothing. We had spent so much time in her world that I sometimes forgot how little she knew about mine.

  “There are crashes all the time,” I said, reassuringly. “It’s a part of business.”

  She fell to the couch and held her head in her hands.

  “No, you don’t understand. Everything, the entire system. Every corporation, every colleague—everything is going to go bankrupt.”

  “Not everything. Ackerman certainly won’t,” I chuckled. “They’re too big; they’re insulated from problems like that. It’s called diversificatio
n. You may know governments, but I know corporations, and I hate to tell you, but nothing is ever going to end Ackerman.”

  She choked and shook her head. She couldn’t look me in the eye.

  “They’re the cause of the problem. And it’s not going to happen. It’s already happened. Ackerman is dead, they just don’t know it yet.”

  “Whoa, I was there this morning. They’re fine. I don’t know what you think you know, or what someone told you....”

  “Nobody told me anything.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not possible.”

  “I’m sure that’s what governments thought—‘It’s a crash, like any other.’ But crashes get worse each time. The people willing to risk or sacrifice the most will probably win, and so the line of acceptable behavior moves closer and closer to mutually assured destruction. Everyone keeps wagering more and more until everything is leveraged, and then the system dies.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She breathed deeply and began. “Ten years ago we had a really cold year, and ice began encroaching into habitable land. Land prices shot up.”

  “Yeah, but it was an off year. The next year was warmer and the ice receded.”

  “Yes, but land prices never came back down. That initial increase sparked massive speculation on the market. So many people were buying land that they artificially inflated the price, fueling more speculation. I mean, land is real, right? Not like paper money. So they thought it was a sure thing. Land prices got so high that everybody wanted in on the boom, making the boom even larger. The reality of how much land was actually available didn’t make a difference. People wanted it because everybody else wanted it.

  “Ackerman saw a huge opportunity there. They got in early, and they got in big. They figured out that if they put everything they had into land—that simply by investing in land—they could cause the price to go up even more. It was like printing money. Buying more land made the land they had more valuable.