The Water Thief Read online

  The Water Thief

  Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2012 Nicholas Lamar Soutter

  E03-2013-03-26

  The Water Thief

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Excerpt from The Executive Letters

  Thanks

  For My Wife Holly, and for

  Emily and Alyssa

  “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

  -John Maynard Keynes

  "Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power. It is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands, using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way."

  -David Korten

  Chapter 1

  First there would be poker, then the executions. It’s perverse to dwell on the suffering of others, but on the first Monday of every month I couldn’t think about much else. On the days I bathed, I’d hold the soap in my hands and wonder if it was rendered from the fat of someone I had seen strung up, maybe even someone I knew. Did it come from their stomach fat? From someone’s dimpled thighs? I think probably the fat from all the people executed publicly was melted together with everyone else reclamated that day, or sold at mark-up for the novelty of it.

  I also wondered it bothered anybody else, this monthly spectacle. There was no way to tell, of course. Everybody watched together on television, whooped and hollered in delight with each drop, placed bets on whether the neck would break, or on how long it would take the writhing to stop. Just like I did.

  Beatrice took the car that morning, so as usual I was on my bike. It was a god-awful contraption—I had to work to keep the pedals from sliding off the crank arm, the handlebars were loose, the struts were rusted out, and it had no brakes to speak of. At any moment the clunker could send me careening into oncoming traffic. My right leg, which always hurt in bad weather, was now seizing up on me. Still, all I could think about were the hangings.

  Maybe that was why I had an anxiety disorder.

  I hadn’t brought my pills with me. If I had, I’d have been tempted to use them. Linus disapproved, and he could always tell. I decided on a cigarette instead, but I had to be quick about it. My permit was for outdoor smoking only, and the sky was getting darker, the wind had picked up, and the sulfur in the air was getting stronger. I put the executions out of my mind and pedaled to work as fast as I could.

  I was a private citizen, which is to say that I was the private property of the Ackerman Brothers Securities & Investments firm. They held most of my futures, which meant that even though I worked for them, they took back much of my income as dividends. That was why my smoking permit had cost so much. Some poor actuary had to sit down and calculate it all out—my future earnings potential and what effect my smoking might have on it, the sympathetic effects on colleagues, collateral damages to third parties and the environment, and so on. It took them nine months to calculate the base line and they had to re-figure it every quarter to account for changes in the market. It was a nightmare of accounting.

  Sometimes I think that’s the reason I took up smoking—my own little rebellion against the system. If everybody lit up, maybe we could choke the firm on its own paperwork.

  I rode up to work, one of the thousands of anonymous Ackerman administrative buildings that dotted the region. It was an old red brick-and-mortar monstrosity. The bricks were cracked and covered in dirt, rust, and sclerotic fungus. I wheeled past a large field in front with tall air-horn speakers posted at the corners. Morning calisthenics had already started, and the tinny voice of our CEO, Takahiro Takashi, boomed out over the yard.

  I locked up my bike, pulling my satchel from the back. The tan canvas bag was bursting with the loose-leaf papers, pamphlets, and clippings I had collected earlier that morning. With the bag slung over my shoulder, I slipped behind the building.

  I pulled out my tobacco and worked quickly, using the corner for cover. I leaned my shoulder into the wall, shielding the loose leaves as I rolled the cigarette tight and licked it closed.

  “Colleague?”

  A young man in dark blue police overalls appeared behind me, an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. I had seen him before, trolling the yard for infractions he could levy.

  “Do you have a license for that?” he asked.

  The guy was a noob, fresh and stupid on an order of magnitude I hadn’t seen in a good long time. Sure, a cop could go around catching criminals, but there was no real money in it. Good cops (the rich ones anyway) knew it was a lot easier to make their criminals. If my permit wasn’t in order, his commission would be a lot higher if he waited till I lit the thing to bust me. Heck, a really good cop would have found a way to get me to offer him one.

  Of course, making criminals wasn’t perfectly safe, either. Another cop could catch you doing it, or you could hassle the wrong guy at the wrong time and find yourself on the business end of a fine so big you’d be facing the rendering vats. The right amount of attitude with the cops went a long way towards convincing them that you were that guy, and this was that time.

  I pulled out my ledger, that small, ubiquitous electronic tablet which contained the sum of my total financial life—from the in-utero debts I had incurred suckling nutrients from my mother, to how much I paid in estimated air charges last year.

  “Your name Charles Thatcher?”

  I nodded.

  I was reasonably sure my permit was in order. Still, there were a million different ways they could get you if they wanted. There were an infinite number of contracts, clauses, exceptions, amendments and corrections which, in spite of the loud and oft repeated assurances from the best legal minds at Ackerman, I was reasonably sure nobody fully understood. That was the beauty of the system—everybody was so busy interpreting and litigating the little details of everyday life that nobody could organize for any other purpose. Rebellion, insurgency, revolution, all of these were impossible; civil unrest litigated out of existence.

  I even had insurance against nuisance challenges to my permit, for just that reason. This guy probably went around hitting people with tiny violations that were cheaper to pay off than to fight in court. Idiots always dragged down the efficiency of a market.

  He held my ledger and thumb-swiped through the details of my permit, grimacing as he read. He tried to salvage a few caps off me by asking why I wasn’t in the yard for calisthenics, but we both knew it wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Medical waiver,” I said.

  It was a lie. My right leg had been crushed years ago, and while I still had the scars, it rarely gave me much trouble. But let’s face it, calisthenics sucked. I exaggerated a recent flare-up to a doctor who wasn’t being paid quite enough to do a thorough exam, and was willing to take a few extra caps to attest to things that weren’t strictly speaking true. Lo and behold, no jumping jacks for six months. And I have to say, though the exercises are mandatory, I’d never seen the C-Level executives (like the CEO, CBO, or CAO) doing them—except for special events. Our Chief Financial Officer was pushin
g three hundred and fifty pounds. But he was the CFO, so I assume he could afford a better waiver than I could.

  The rain started in earnest now. The cop glared at me before handing me my ledger and walking away. In the meantime my cigarette had dissolved into mush in my hand. Careful not to give him an excuse by littering, I shoved the goop into my overalls and went inside.

  Chapter 2

  The lights in the lobby were off, and I could see only by the dim glow of the overcast skylight. Simon sat behind the security desk and, as my eyes adjusted, it looked to me like he was reading a book.

  “Aren’t you going to turn on the lights?” I asked.

  “Still early,” he said, solemnly.

  I looked at my watch, but I couldn’t make out the time. I lifted my hand and, sure enough, I couldn’t even count the fingers just six inches from my face.

  Who is he kidding with that book? There’s no way he could be reading it.

  I waited to see if he’d turn a page. Nothing. I could hear my own clothes rustling as I walked to the bench at the far side, where I unzipped my overalls, climbed out and straightened myself up, letting my suit and tie breathe.

  “They have lockers, you know,” said a gloomy voice.

  I sighed, pulled out a single cap and placed it on the desk. “Yeah, but there’s a new insurance surcharge. I haven’t had time to file for it, and without it someone’s going to swipe my stuff.”

  Simon just kept reading. He didn’t even glance towards the cap. He might have been holding out for a five instead, but in that light I could have put a twenty under his nose and he wouldn’t have known it.

  Shouldn’t he have turned the page by now?

  “Looks like rain,” I announced as I packed my overalls.

  “It’s always raining.”

  “Not always,” I said, trying to be cheery. “Besides, rain is a good thing. It takes the sulfur out of the air. If we go too long without it, the next big storm eats through the roof of your car.”

  “Turns my hair green,” he said, twisting the fragile, sickly colored strands with his finger.

  “Well, you wouldn’t be the first. Get an umbrella,” I said. “Weathador makes a great one, cheap too.”

  “Sucks to an umbrella,” he replied. “It’ll last a few months then I’ll have to replace it. They can’t make me buy one.”

  It’s the executions, I thought excitedly. But I had known Simon almost a year, and if the executions bothered him, this was the first he’d ever shown it. Besides, anybody who was so obvious in his dislike of anything Ackerman did was going to get picked off quick.

  “Nobody’s making you buy one. I just thought—”

  “Of course they’re making me buy it,” he said, putting the book down. “That’s what they do.”

  “Who?”

  He didn’t answer. I wondered if it was too late to go out into the field and do my push-ups.

  The cap remained on the desk, unmolested. I had the distinct impression that he was watching me. I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure that somehow he could see mine. I nodded to him and headed for the stairs as quickly as I could.

  “They’re out,” Simon interjected, returning to his book.

  “The stairs are out?” I asked. “They’re stairs, how can they be ‘out’?”

  “Maintenance. They’re replacing the banister. You’ll have to take the elevator.”

  The elevator would take a load off my leg, but at five cents a floor, that would be thirty-five up and thirty-five down. Do that twice a day, plus lunch, that’s a cap forty for the day. Not a lot, but a couple hundred employees came in and out of the seventh floor alone, and the building had twelve floors. Yep, they’d rake in a little dough.

  Well, at least it’s not government.

  The seventh floor was where all the mid-grade Perception Management colleagues worked. We had no windows or offices, just four corners and rows upon rows of cubicles. The only fixed lights were tracks of tiny bulbs that ran along the floors, like on an airplane. They gave off just enough of a glow to make out the corridors winding through the constantly shifting maze of charcoal gray partitions.

  I offset the cost of my cubicle by sharing it with a colleague named Bernard Milton. Bernard was a short man, stocky—well, let’s be honest—fat really (bursting out of his suspenders fat). He had thin, sparse hair, which had prematurely developed mousy gray strands, and he was always eating chocolates, caramel candies or cookies, which left his face, hands and scalp with a permanent greasy sheen. Living in the shadows of the seventh floor, you could never be sure he wasn’t eavesdropping on you from behind some partition, or in a dark corner waiting to swipe something from your desk. An Alpha once called him (with both a little affection and a good deal of malice) “Gollum”—a wretched creature from an ancient fiction. The name stuck.

  I pretended not to hear it, or that I was above using it, but Bernard was a wretched colleague. He hardly ever worked. He just spent his time rummaging the building for anything of value. Spot him skulking away, and you could bet something was missing from your desk. He even took the cheap things, like paperclips, binders, and pushpins. A few years ago some colleagues took to setting up infrared taser traps in their cubicles. But soon the traps began disappearing. Before long all the suppliers were out of stock, except for Bernard, who was selling off a surplus.

  His one redeeming feature was that he was horrible at poker. He’s the only man I’ve ever met who was irrefutably worse than I was. Poker was so ubiquitous, such a symbol of affluence and influence, that it was nice not to be the worst player on the floor. His set was second hand—two torn cardboard leather shooters and six worn and mismatched dice. I mean he could play the game, shoot the dice, and keep them hidden. But he was easy as all hell to read. If he just had a bunch of random numbers, he’d be sweating bullets. If he threw a few pairs or triplets (especially high ones), he’d be wriggling with glee. If that poor guy ever rolled six sixes he’d probably die of a heart attack. That was the only reason he hadn’t found his morning coffee laced with strychnine; anybody truly upset with his antics could usually win enough off him to let it go.

  My desk had the usual stack of thirty or so memos that had collected overnight. Ackerman did everything on real paper—watermarked and numbered—to slow the rate of corporate espionage. The memos were all the usual bureaucratic nonsense: Action Item Change Requests now needed to be signed by hand, the tariff for failing to write legibly in the “pertaining” field of incident reports had been increased four cents, sixth-floor colleagues were no longer to use the seventh-floor vending machines unless their grade was Delta or better....

  I was happy to get a jump on the day, what with everyone else still out in the yard. I put on my glasses (my father’s old wire-framed ones), turned on the green-screen terminal, and began checking the stocks and futures markets so I could ration out my resources for the week. With paper and a pencil, I noted any troubling changes in the market. The cost of electricity had gone up. I eyed my small desk lamp, wondering if I could lower the wattage any more. Paper prices were steady, and so was the cost of air. The price of coffee had plummeted—good news that would save me some money when I had lunch with Linus.

  But when I saw the price of water I nearly choked. In the last hour it had gone up tenfold. Buying some more information, I learned that there had been an attack, this time at a water treatment facility in Brookhurst. A corporation from a competing Karitzu paid a mercenary firm to blow it up, and raw sewage was now spilling into the aquifer.

  My God! Did this happen before my shower? What about the toilet? Christ, I may have just blown six hundred caps on a single flush!

  Hell, for the next few hours I couldn’t even afford to wash my hands.

  My ledger beeped. I pulled it out and checked the screen. It was the MWS (Market Warning Service), an insurance firm who had sold me a warning package to notify me of wild shifts in the market.

  They wanted to tell me that the price of water wa
s going up.

  My face became flushed. I clenched my fists and resisted the urge to lash out. I cursed the bombers—terrorists and looters with no sense of decency. I cursed MWS, which seemed to notify me of these swings much later than their higher-paying customers. Then I laid into my insurer, the Market Instability Insurance Company, who, if I actually filed a claim, would drown me in a tidal wave of paperwork or just cancel my policy on a technical issue.

  But I wasn’t upset at any of these things. Not really.

  I was upset that no matter what I did, no matter how hard I researched it, I would never know the real reason that water prices had jumped.

  Sure, the story claimed that there had been a bombing. But it was just as likely an industrial accident managed to look like an attack. Or maybe the incident was staged to give Ackerman an excuse to raise prices. Heck, maybe a group of executives had gone long on water stocks and engineered the blast to corner the market. I could put a million caps into researching it, and I’d still never know for sure.

  Oh, I’d have been a rich man if in that moment I could have sold my hatred.

  But there was no time for ruminating. Soon every colleague I knew would be breathing down my neck. So I finished checking the markets and went to work.

  It began getting brighter on the seventh floor as colleagues started coming in; the reassuring sound of keyboards, typewriters, and idle chatter all waking up for the day. No one would be talking about the water; why should they—you could short sell the stock and make a killing until it became common knowledge. A lot of money was going to be changing hands.

  I closed the curtains to protect what little light I had—moochers were always trying to sneak some reading light when you weren’t looking. I picked up my satchel, pulled out the literature and fanned it across the desk. I was a Delta-grade colleague from Perception Management. Delta was my contract grade, and Perception Management was the division of Ackerman that dealt with unfavorable press, ratings, or reviews. In the mornings I would pick up whatever literature I could, then spend the day scouring it and writing reports, which I would send to the ninth floor for further review. I earned a commission on any report that made or saved the firm money.