The Water Thief

by Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  “And they do what you do. They blame the smart ones, those who can see the folly of man and survive despite of it. Nothing breeds hatred like success. That is Objectivism.”

  I’d noticed by now the absence of any clocks in the room, as if time itself did not exist within these four walls. The executive hadn’t asked me a single question about Kate or the Republic. I didn’t want to argue anymore, but I wouldn’t abandon my beliefs, or my beloved Kate—real or imagined.

  He’s trying to shake my confidence. He’s not asking me about her so I think he doesn’t need to know, so I’ll think she was Retention and then tell him everything.

  “The pigs are walking,” I mumbled.

  “Oh my god, Charles, have you just figured that out? My friend, the pigs have been walking throughout all recorded history. What you have failed to realize is that there are three kinds of animals on our farm. There are the pigs, who are smart enough to take what is theirs; the horses, beasts on all fours who do what they’re told; and at last the ducks, who point out that the pigs are walking but can’t figure out just why it is that they wake up to find themselves with a bullet in the brain. You were too stupid to be a pig or a horse. So you sit there and shout from the top of your lungs ‘the pigs are walking, the pigs are walking,’ and you think you’ve seen something special, that you’re special because you can see behind the curtain.

  “But the truth is that everybody can see behind the curtain. Everybody knows that the pigs are walking. They accept that fact because they believe someday they will walk too.

  “We’ve passed forty corporate budgets since I’ve been on the board. Do you know who pushes the hardest to lower the levies on HighCons? Epsilons, Zetas. Every poor man wants to cut levies on the wealthy because they all think that one day they will be that rich person, and if they help the HighCons, that karma will come around. Oh, they loathe executives, much like you do. But you always listened to your mentors. You didn’t often heed their advice, but you listened, and you always tried to curry their favor.

  “Yes, the pigs are walking. And everybody knows it. You’re the only one who, for whatever reason, doesn’t. You’re a blind buffoon. You might as well run down the street naked shouting that the sky is blue.

  “You accuse us of dogma?” he continued. “Of religious devotion to ideals in the face of overwhelming evidence? My god, your defects express themselves in so many ways, but this hypocrisy is truly astonishing. You are utterly incapable of reason, of self-reflection or critique, aren’t you? It’s a good thing, I suppose. We need defects like you to help remind people of how lucky they are.”

  The man had an answer for everything. He was wrong. I knew it, and would refuse to accept whatever he said, no matter what.

  But that’s the very deficit he’s talking about, my stubborn refusal to accept even the most obvious facts.

  It was a trick. This was what he did for a living, and he was far better at it than I was.

  One of us is insane. I wonder if I can tell which?

  “We are done for the day. I am sorry, but you are far more damaged than I anticipated. I’m afraid there is little I can do. The guards will take you back to your cell. Tomorrow morning they’ll bring you back, and I’ll tell you what’s been decided.”

  Chapter 21

  As large as my cell was, with all the rooms and delicacies available to me, I felt the walls closing in. The suite was a living part of the system. It had become one of the most effective tools they had against me. It gave me every luxury I could hope for, more than I had ever imagined, but it would never give me answers. I wasn’t sure of what was true anymore.

  I had defied the executive, argued all of my points, but it was like trying to argue against gravity. I defended the republic, but my bulwarks were dismissed out of hand.

  Maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake. Maybe I’ve been swimming upstream. Who am I to say that the system is wrong, and I’m right?

  I had once believed in the absolute truth of the corporate system and its universal reflection of nature. I never liked it, but I accepted the truth of it. Then I met Kate, I learned about government, and I accepted that reality just as surely.

  Maybe it was true, what they all said: reality doesn’t exist outside of perception. Heck, maybe there was no such thing as reality.

  I had been weak. I must have been. How else could I so easily slip from one belief to another? I understood this, but it still wouldn’t change my fate. I was going to die at the hands of Retention. If I was lucky I might see the sky once more—just as they brought me out onto the stadium, onto the scaffolding and under the rope.

  I had accepted that.

  But I needed to know the truth. These realities could not both be right. To know the truth wouldn’t save me, but I was long past caring about that.

  If the crash came, if the world ended, the truth would be pretty clear. And there would be hope—a chance that maybe this horrific system could in fact be destroyed, by the only thing that could destroy it—itself. If the Republic survived then there would be those who would know that we could push back against our own nature. But if the crash was going to happen, I wouldn’t live to see it. I was defeated, that wasn’t in doubt. But if Kate had been real—if there really was a Republic—I would have seen something extraordinary.

  I looked at my own reflection in the darkened television screen. Linus said that the person willing to risk the most won in poker. I no longer cared what happened to me. I could risk it all, and that would be my strength. I would make one last throw of the dice, and this time I would win.

  Chapter 22

  Once again the guards left me in the foyer. Again I entered the master room, and again the executive emerged from the hallway in the back.

  “I’m sorry, Charles,” he said. “I’m afraid we still don’t know what to do with you. You are beyond repair; I’m convinced of that. I let you down, and I am sorry. I was unable to fix you. Rest assured, I am among the best, and if I cannot do it... well, it cannot be done. If it’s any consolation, there will be some profit in your death. Even factoring in the cost of trying to fix you and the damage you’ve done to the corp, the entirety of your life should net some small profit to Ackerman. That should please you.”

  “Why not just kill me?”

  The executive looked disappointed. “Without profiting from it? My friend, how did you get this far before getting yourself in trouble?”

  “When will you know what will happen to me?”

  “I requested a public hanging. I think that would be the most profitable way to terminate you. You’re a perfect candidate. But it’s a tough negotiation; so many divisions have a say in the matter—Reclamation, Perception, Leisure, Entertainment, even Sales.”

  “Just end it. I’ll volunteer for the rope. I don’t want to be kept waiting.”

  “Goodness gracious, the delay is not out of any consideration for you. It’s simply that there’s a lot to deliberate. We have to be very careful how many people we hang publicly. Too many and the punishment becomes commonplace; we look callous and unforgiving, and people begin to wonder just why it is we have so many seditionists in the first place. But if we hang too few, then they might think we don’t care about crime. And the condemned must look right—sufficiently broken that people believe they are truly sorry, but not so much as to evoke sympathy. We have to consider the whole aesthetic of it.

  “Not to mention that we’ve hung a colleague from Perception two months in a row now. Three, and people may grouse that we’re targeting them unfairly.

  “And if Rendering had their way, there wouldn’t be hangings at all. When you fall, your body pumps adrenaline into your bloodstream—makes your fat all stringy and harder to render properly; it just won’t congeal right. They think that we should toss all of you straight into a vat of boiling water and lye. Oh, your death is a terribly complicated matter.”

  I nodded.

  “You were difficult to place, Charles. I considered the gladiato
r ring for quite some time. I admit to thinking that perhaps might help you. After killing a few people you’d learn to appreciate the value of competition and be rehabilitated, if you survived. But you are broken even beyond that measure of repair. You’d just as likely put up no measurable resistance and let yourself get run through. That kind of foolishness doesn’t make for rehabilitation, and certainly not for good television.

  “Of course, there is no way to know what Reclamation will ultimately decide. I make my recommendation, but they can be unpredictable.”

  “Thank you for letting me know.”

  The executive looked sternly at me. He shook his head.

  “I know a man. He loves to tell stories, little vignettes. I believe you know him, he’s an Alpha.”

  “Linus Cabal,” I said. “He’s a high-ranked Beta, though.”

  The man laughed. “Linus? My friend, he hasn’t been a Beta for quite some time. He’s an Alpha—and a high one at that.”

  “That can’t be. He’s a Beta.”

  “He told you that he was a Beta. That you couldn’t recognize him for what he was is not entirely surprising—he’s really quite good at what he does, and you really are quite dim.

  “In honor of Linus, I’ll tell you my own little story. There was a HighCon barbershop—on the other side of the city. My father took me there twice a month. I met a child there, maybe five or six years old. The executives would come by every week and toy with him. They’d tell him that they would give him either a single cap or two quarters. Each time he would take the two quarters, and they would laugh and joke at how stupid he was.

  “One day, and I must tell you this is probably the only time I’ve ever acted selflessly, I went up to him and said ‘Don’t you know that two quarters is half a cap?’ He laughed. ‘Of course I know.’ I asked him why he kept taking the lesser amount. He said, ‘Because the day I take the cap, they’ll stop giving me quarters.’ I made it my business to get to know that young man.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I’ve known Linus a long time, Charles, and on his best day he’s never gotten two quarters out of me.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “We’re playing poker right now, you and I. You’re pretending we’re not, dancing around it, being conciliatory, and thinking I won’t notice. But we’ve been playing since we met. You’re the one who didn’t realize it. So let’s end this game. Ask me your question.”

  “I have no questions,” I said.

  “Ask.”

  “Was it Linus who turned me in?”

  The executive sighed.

  “That was not your question, but since you asked, I will tell you what I can. The truth is that Linus had high hopes for you, but he’s been suspicious for quite some time.”

  “You call that efficiency? You send an Alpha to capture a Delta?”

  “You overestimate your importance. He was not sent, he goes of his own accord. He’s constantly looking for new talent, people the scouts miss. And where the scouts simply look for talent, he tries to foster it. Those who understand what he has to offer he often hires, takes them under his wing. The others he keeps an eye on, and if he sees anything suspicious, he turns them in for a nice profit.”

  “So he did turn me in.”

  “I didn’t say that, nor do you care.”

  I laughed at the man who presumed to tell me what it was that I wanted to know.

  “Despite my best efforts, you simply will not learn. I can read you like a book. I can read every twitch, every eye movement, and every curl of your lip. When you choose to be silent, when you think you are keeping everything from me, that is when I am learning the most.”

  “So when I am silent, I’m speaking to you?”

  “Volumes.”

  “Then I won’t say anything.”

  “It is too late. I know you in your entirety. Your problem is a lack of discipline. You have failed to devoid yourself of emotion. When you win you’re happy, and when you lose you’re sad. It’s immature—you have the emotional control of… oh, probably a twelve-year-old. You have failed to understand that winning is temporary and only through the grace of God, and that losing it is just as temporary. There is never any need for happiness or sadness, to be arrogant or humble. A true Ackerman colleague has absolutely no emotion whatsoever. He is an employee, from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to bed—even in his dreams.

  “Your failure to understand this has fostered this hope of yours for a better life. You hope that there is more than our Darwinist selves, that we can act in some way other than for our own pure, unadulterated self-interest, that somehow we are not human beings. One can either accept our nature or not. But you cannot change it, and your efforts to do so have done nothing but bring you misery and failure your entire life.

  “Hope is a mental illness, a defect, very hard to cure. It is, by definition, the unwillingness to accept reality, the abandonment of rationality and reason for fantasy. You are psychotic, my friend, plain and simple

  “Hope has brought you to this end, Charles, to this room. It’s a common failure, though fortunately not often as severe as it is in your case. But hope is the flaw inherent to all low and MidCons. Everyone believes he is special, that he deserves what an executive has, that he can actually earn it. He believes that anyone can be an executive, that it’s an easy job.

  “We don’t beat that hope out of them, because that belief drives them to work harder. But hope leads to expectations, and whatever joy you get when expectations are met is fleeting, and soon replaced with even greater expectations, until the inevitable outcome is reached; you have unrealistic expectations that can never be met. I have found few things that destroy a man faster than unrealistic expectations. Hope, therefore, truly is the death of the human spirit.

  “To achieve something you must let go of your desire for it. You are too undisciplined to let go of your passions. That is why you are here, why you think you can win.”

  “Win what?”

  “The answer to your question. Ask me what you want to know.”

  I looked at the executive, whose stare back was cold and callous.

  “You cannot defeat me,” he said. “You can get nothing from me that I do not choose to give you. You are already broken. You were born broken. You were born to come into this room and do anything I want. You are incapable of anything else. You simply don’t comprehend it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  The man opened his jacket pocket, reached inside and pulled out a revolver.

  All at once I panicked. I had thought I was ready to die. Now that it was about to happen, I was terror struck.

  His mood changed. He looked mean, vicious, and violent. The pillar of self-control, the master of the universe, had vanished, replaced with murderous hatred.

  He slammed the pistol onto the table, threw open the poker set and slammed both cups down in front of me. He released his own cup, but held onto mine, the pistol resting between us.

  “If you want to play, let’s play.”

  I looked at the table.

  “If you win, I will pay your debt to Ackerman myself and see your life spared,” he said angrily. “They’ll throw you out, but you’ll live.”

  “If I lose?”

  He glanced at the pistol.

  “Five twos,” he said.

  The truth was that every game of poker that had ever mattered to me, the times I most believed that, with enough heart, desire, and will, I could grab a win, I was wrong. My hope failed me every time.

  He knew I was no good at poker. And he placed a staggering bet. Five twos? The odds were five to one against him, maybe more. Yet he knew those odds and bet anyway—hadn’t even looked at his own dice.

  The dice could have been loaded, or nothing but two’s on all sides. In that room he was a master of the universe, he could bend the very laws of probability to his will.

  He had the five twos. I knew it.
By luck or design, he had them. If I called or raised, I’d never leave the room alive.

  I slumped back into the couch, head held in my hands.

  He wasn’t smug, didn’t show any sign of pleasure at winning. He wouldn’t even give me that much credit. He deftly slid the revolver back into his coat and scooped up the dice.

  Not even an I-told-you-so.

  He returned the shooters to their respective places and closed the lid. He ran his hands over the box ceremoniously. If the man derived pleasure from anything, it was from this box, the principal tool of his work.

  “Why don’t you just ask me your question?” the man said. “Is it so hard? Is your cowardice really that great?”

  I was defeated, in every sense of the word. Calm washed over me. I had nothing to fear anymore. He would do what he wanted to me, when he wanted. Nothing I could do would have the slightest influence on my life from that point on.

  “Was Kate in on it?” I asked.

  He took a deep breath. “Congratulations. It cost you everything, Charles, but you finally reached the point where you could ask. Now, finally, at the end of things, you’ve become a man. Well done.”

  “Was she?”

  There was a buzz at the door.

  “I’m sorry, Charles. Our session ran longer than I thought it would. That would be Reclamation. You will be in their hands now. They will tell you your fate. Honestly, I do not know what it will be. But may you die well.”