The Water Thief

by Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  Much to my relief, the conversation drifted on to other subjects.

  I came home to a wife in the mood for a fight. Most of her things were loaded up. She granted me a few minutes of indignant silence. Then she began ranting that I was the cause of all her failures, that the only mistake she had ever made was to marry me, her life a cascade of ruin after that. The final proof of my ineptitude, she said, was that I had, after so many years, failed to see what an opportunity I’d had being married to her.

  I marveled at her wrath.

  Then she broke down crying, apologizing for overreacting, telling me she was sorry and saying that we needed to work out our problems.

  She’s behaving like a citizen, I thought, acting as if we share more than a marriage contract.

  It was partly my fault. I had told her I’d be a high-ranked Gamma some day, maybe even a Beta. I played the part I needed to land her, that of a real go-getter—regaled her with plans and schemes for advancement, building sub-corps or branch divisions, revolutionizing corporate markets. I had honestly thought that I’d wanted those things. But I didn’t, and that had proven itself out. And marrying her? That was pride. She was beautiful, argumentative, ambitious and unattainable. I enjoyed the prestige of being married to her far more than the actual practice of it.

  If there was a way to fix this marriage, I didn’t want any part of it.

  She grabbed all of her things, some of mine, and left. Moments later my ledger buzzed to let me know that she had cashed out. She was gone forever.

  * * *

  “That man over there,” said Linus, pointing to a poster of a large man in a suit and hat, “is Al Capone. Everyone knows he was a great capitalist. What most people don’t remember is how jealous the leviathan was of his success. He profited by selling alcohol and prostitution, services the people wanted. But the dammed leviathans said they knew better. They outlawed what he was doing, and when he had to use violence to defend himself, they called him a gangster and threw him in jail. If what he had been doing was wrong, he’d have had no customers, and he’d have been out of business—pure and simple. No matter how much money he made, all they did was vilify him. My god, the dark ages.”

  I nodded casually. The café was bustling, but I didn’t really notice.

  “To your new life,” he toasted. “Beatrice was dead weight. It’s marvelous you got rid of her—even got her to think it was her idea, let her take the hit on the divorce. Good man!”

  I sipped my coffee and smiled as graciously as I could.

  “You know, you seem different now. More self-confident,” the Beta observed.

  I laughed. No, I had no confidence. In fact, I had come more and more to realize that everything I had ever believed in was wrong. I regarded the system now, not a force of God or nature, but as just that—a system. I knew less than I ever had before.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” Linus asked, pleased with himself.

  I shook my head.

  “We need to play.”

  When I realized he meant poker, I had to hold back a chortle. Poker, this game that gave me nightmares, panic attacks and cold sweats.

  Oh my god it was just a game, a pastime. Just because Linus thought it was the ultimate expression of life didn’t make it so. Winning or losing at poker meant nothing more than winning or losing at poker. I was who I was, and would be just as much after the match as before it. How on earth had I ever let six little dice become one of the greatest sources of anxiety in my life?

  I put a single cap to my chest. I didn’t bother looking at the serial number—I wouldn’t have known the odds anyway. Linus let out a bemused chuckle.

  He bid, and I countered. He paused, not out of any genuine hesitation, but to remind me that he was still in command; to remind me that no matter how much I had changed, no matter how much courage I had, his victory was inevitable. He gave his second bet, and I called. We flipped the caps over and read them together.

  I lost.

  I gave him the cap. It was the easiest and fastest game I had ever played, and as close to having fun playing as I was ever going to get.

  He stirred his coffee, eying me suspiciously, yet grinning with pride.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  “No, not at all.”

  Despite his denial, Linus still kept a Mona Lisa smile. I wasn’t in a rush—I wasn’t the one who had a job worth hundreds of caps an hour waiting for me at work. So I waited him out.

  “You know,” he said, “it may not have occurred to you, colleague, but that was the most remarkable game we’ve ever played.”

  “Nah, I wasn’t even close to winning.”

  “Of course not. What’s remarkable is that in all the years we’ve played, this is the first time you ever called me.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said.

  “I assure you, it is. Until today I could’ve used fictions numbers that don’t even exist, and you wouldn’t call me. You only play defense, Charles. It’s why you’ve been a born loser, up until just now. Beatrice was far worse for you than I thought. This is the first time we’ve actually played. Well done.”

  This was extremely serious. I had thought that I could hide my new nature, that I had lived in the system long enough that I could continue to blend in. But I couldn’t.

  I had changed. Irreparably. And in a way far more pronounced than I had thought. And it would only grow more obvious.

  There were a host of other problems too. I couldn’t stomach managing perception anymore—not for Ackerman, not for anyone. I could stick to the basics, report innocuous mistakes like spelling errors or factual inconsistencies, but I wouldn’t be able to make a living on that for very long. And it was only a question of time before somebody suspected something. Heck, Retention could already be on me. Linus, Corbett, or even Bernard—they could all be undercover agents. Even if they weren’t, there wasn’t a single one of them who wouldn’t turn me in if they thought they could profit from it.

  There was a clock on me now. If I didn’t do something, the question wasn’t whether I’d get myself into trouble, but when.

  “I’m proud of you, Charles. You’re ready to be a Gamma now. It’s going to happen for you, I have no doubt. You’ve evolved; you’ve reached the next stage. Congratulations.”

  If there was anything I was sure of, it was that I was never going to be a Gamma.

  Chapter 8

  I had found Kate, but I still didn’t know what had become of Sarah Aisling. I’d need money, but that was very hard to come by in large quantities. The economy ran better if colleagues spent money instead of saving it, so savings accounts were prohibitively expensive. Only the wealthiest could afford them. I had an escrow account, but buying out Beatrice’s share of the apartment put that in the red.

  About all I could do was secure a large loan (at a high rate of interest). It didn’t matter; I had no intention of paying it back.

  I called a cab and went to the library. Though they didn’t advertise the fact, the truth was that the Galt Intercorporate Library was one of the most profitable corps in history. They offered two things no other library did. First, in addition to carrying practically every legitimate text ever written, they also had an extensive catalogue of pornographic, perverse, and subversive literature.

  Second, they didn’t monitor their clients or report their activity to any other corp… anywhere. That level of anonymity was worth almost any price, and the library knew it.

  At any given time there were about a half dozen corps trying to shut them down, get them to restrict usage, or to monitor their customers. Negotiations on these issues almost always ended in violence, so the Galt maintained a small but effective military force.

  Perimeter bollards and Jersey Barriers surrounded the entire building. Behind those was a twelve-foot chain fence, with razor wire and machine gun nests. The only gate had more security than the Atlas train station. It was UltraSec, if such a word existed. Scanners, chemical de
tectors, and bomb-sniffing dogs all stood between the outside world and the library. The building itself was a huge concrete structure with a three-foot-thick steel blast door.

  Despite all of this security, they prided themselves on expediency. From the line it took only ten minutes to get inside.

  I soon found myself standing in front of real books, ancient tomes from corporations and governments alike, computers with faster access to data than I had ever dreamed. The heretical works of John Stewart Mill, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes could all be found in their own, original words.

  An open terminal gave me access to Sarah Aisling’s records, more material than I could possibly go through. Her market value was pennies, and her status was listed as “detained.” The case had been escalated less than a day after my report, and they transferred her to the Citadel. I’d never be able to scrape together enough to learn her fate there.

  But Kate was Sarah’s friend, and might know what happened, maybe even know of a way to help. I looked up Katherine Wolfe in every personnel directory I could, but I couldn’t find her. She had been filling in, and since she didn’t work for Ackerman—or the rental agency for that matter—I had no idea where to even begin looking for her.

  That left me with the Arab woman.

  I found a list of the rental company’s employees. One by one I pulled their work licenses and found an Arab woman with dark skin and curly black hair named Jazelle. I hadn’t gotten a good look at her, but she looked like the right one. Her contact information was the same as the agency’s, so I just printed her license.

  I rushed home and, rummaging through my old boxes, managed to find my very first Ackerman ledger, an old Epsilon piece of junk. I was supposed to have turned it in when I got a Delta contract, but kept it for sentimental reasons. It was deactivated, and even if it weren’t, the firmware probably couldn’t even log into CentNet. But it might survive a cursory examination. I put on the dirtiest, dingiest clothes—moth-eaten and stale—that I could find.

  I had never been in LowSec before, but I knew the stories: rape, murder, and even cannibalism. It was all Epsilons and NullCons. The police couldn’t make any real money cleaning up crime, so stations were few and far between. Only a few broken-down fences and barbed wire, between LowSec and NullSec, kept out the barbarians in the wild.

  I took a cab to Capital City’s western gate. I hadn’t traveled that way in years. You could actually see the gradient, watch the city dissolve. Houses became duplexes, condos became apartments, lawns became patches of dirt, and windows became smashed shards with bars over them. By the time I reached the fourteen-foot wall encircling the city, homes were missing entire walls, rooms and roofs—all held together by rope, plastic bags, and rotting wooden beams.

  The city wall looked like hell. The beige paint had chipped off and there were scorch marks from detonated mines all along its length. Still the razor wire was mostly intact, and the wall did its job. Sniper towers, spider mines and Bouncing Betties were ready to cut down anybody stupid enough to try to go over the thing.

  “So many people,” said the driver, “trying to get in here. They want our jobs, our money. Forget earning a living, they want to break in and steal one.”

  The rate was a flat thirty caps to get into Capital City—enough to keep out the riff-raff. You could get out for free—they didn’t even check your credentials. Still I saw a line in both directions.

  “Who the hell is trying to get out?” I said, as we slowed and pulled in behind the car in front of us.

  “Day-workers, mostly. Low and NullCons. They don’t have a contract, so they’re slave labor. Karitzu protections don’t apply. Some of them get—what, maybe thirty-five caps a day.”

  “But it costs thirty just to get in here.”

  “Yep. They get five—take home.”

  It’s their own fault? They just need to work harder?

  “Slaves?”

  “Sex trade, mostly. You want to have sex with a twelve-year-old boy, it’s hard to do if he’s got a contract. Well, it’ll cost you a lot anyway. But null contracts, they’re starving to death out here. Fifty caps will buy you the right to do anything you want to anybody.”

  “How many people are out here?”

  “Eh…” he said, waving his hand.

  As we approached the gate, I saw a small car coming the other way. The guards stopped it, and the driver began arguing with the officers. One of them came around to the back, pulled out a revolver, and shot the trunk open. A man burst out and made a dash for the city line. The agent calmly raised his pistol and took aim. A shot rang out, then another and another. The man fell to the ground. Meanwhile three other agents had pulled the motorist out of the car and begun beating him.

  The driver looked at me through the rearview. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This happens all the time. At least a few times a week. It’s not dangerous, they’re careful not to hit anyone of value.”

  “Are they going to kill him?”

  “Nahh… They’ll come close, and then send him back as a warning. Won’t do any good.”

  We crossed through the checkpoint and into LowSec.

  The place looked a lot like I had imagined, like the pictures I had seen on television: decrepit stone, brick, and wooden buildings; dirt, filth and debris strewn everywhere. Nothing I had seen, though, did justice to the smell: mildew, rotting cabbage, fetid milk and raw sewage. Broken windows were covered with garbage bags, and water trickled from all sorts of places—broken downspouts, clogged gutters, and hydrants. There probably wasn’t a fire company within fifty miles; the buildings weren’t even worth a day’s pay.

  “Let me out a few blocks from the address.”

  “Sure… Don’t want the wife to know you’re coming down here, eh?”

  “Something like that.”

  I got out of the cab, and the driver sped off. Not until then, unshielded by the four corners of the car, did I really understand that I was in LowSec.

  I looked both ways down the street, but I didn’t see anybody. LowSec was supposed to have a huge population, but it was empty. Maybe, I thought, the place was so huge that some areas were deserted while others were social and economic hubs. Maybe the driver just dropped me off at an inauspicious spot.

  I hadn’t gone more than a few steps before I stepped in excrement, my first conclusive proof of life. I walked over to a rusted lamppost, leaned against it, and tried futily to wipe it off.

  Two blocks down I heard panting. Down a small alleyway was what looked like a wire fox terrier standing beside a dumpster. The dog’s coat had once been pretty, fluffy and white. But now it was muddied and patchy with mange. He was missing most of his teeth, and one infected eye was swollen shut. Despite all of this, he tilted his head and wagged his tail when he saw me.

  Then I noticed the boy hiding behind the dumpster. He was ratty and skinny, his clothes an earthen brown and his face muddy. The dog returned his attention to the lad, who was smiling and holding out a piece of flesh. He licked the child’s hand, and the boy knelt beside him. His tail started flying around, and he licked the boy’s face wildly as he nuzzled the creature close.

  Suddenly he slipped a noose over the dog’s head. As it struggled, a band of children came out from an open doorway and grabbed the animal. It was emaciated, but had enough meat on it to feed them for a night. The boy slung the mostly dead dog over his shoulder, and they darted into an abandoned building.

  I looked back down the long street. The sun would be setting soon. I wondered if I was close enough to a radio tower for my ledger to work, maybe call a cab. The agency was supposed to be only a few more blocks down, but I couldn’t see any offices or businesses around.

  I continued down the street, and noticed more children following me. They were hard to see—never really coming out from behind buildings and stoops, creeping back into the shadows whenever I turned to look. But they were there. Despite all my efforts to blend in, they had known from the moment I arrived that I didn�
��t belong. Maybe it was the cab, a LowCon company, but still from inside the City. Or maybe it was my shoe—why would anybody out there even bother wiping it? I worried that they were considering how plump I was, and how long I could feed them for.

  I’d been hearing noises for some time, but it wasn’t till then that I began paying attention to them. They had started with what sounded like whispering, or the rustling of trash in the wind. But these kids had, no doubt, told their friends, brothers, sisters and parents about the spoiled brat MidCon bumbling his way through their neighborhood. I noticed tapping too—banging coming from pipes and lampposts—a coded signal echoing for blocks. Without electricity or phones, still everyone within two miles knew I was there. As I approached each new block I could see the odd person or two glaring out at me.

  Where they had earlier taken some pains to hide themselves, now they didn’t seem as discreet. It worried me. I picked up the pace, but still couldn’t find the agency. It hadn’t even crossed my mind till then that the address could easily have been fake.

  I was about to dart into the nearest building when I caught a glimpse of the agency’s black and yellow rental sign under a crust of grime and benzene-soot.

  It was a converted Laundromat. Inside, baked into the walls, were the silhouettes of nearly two dozen washers and dryers. An emphysemic old man sat far in the back, playing solitaire, drinking a urine-colored liquid from an old olive oil bottle, and coughing up phlegm. The fan nailed to the ceiling had no blade-guards, and it oscillated with a horrific grinding noise.

  A man sat with his feet up on a long desk, which ran lengthwise down the room. He was bald, with hawk-like eyes and a thin nose. He saw me, but if he could tell that I didn’t belong, he didn’t show it. He casually got up and flicked his terminal on.