The Water Thief (19 page)

I had lived
through two bombings, the death of my father, and the untold suffering I
watched in the executions every month. None of it prepared me for how empty I
felt at that moment.

“Everybody’s
doing it?” I asked.

“About a third of
our Karitzu at least. It’s harder to tell for some of the others, especially
those based in Europa. They’re running schemes like this everywhere; it was the
only way for them to compete, to survive—at least for another day.”

“You’re telling
me a third of these corporations are going to fail?”

“No. I’m telling
you that they already have. These corps exist only on paper; they don’t even
own their own colleagues anymore. They just don’t know it yet.”

I had to think
like Linus. He would be able to understand the enormity of it. It’s always been
theoretically possible for man to destroy himself. We always think it won’t
happen on our watch, that it will be some other generation that destroys the
world. That, in the end, is what makes us blind to the possibility, which is
the very thing that makes it possible.

But capitalism
is a game of brinksmanship, survival by being willing to risk just slightly
more than your competitor is. Of course the world would come to this, with both
sides driving themselves (and everybody else) off a cliff. Was there any other
way?

All that really
surprised me was that it hadn’t ever crossed my mind until then.

So what would be
the next logical step? What would Linus say would come next?

There would be a
tipping point, a point at which the phantom trades could no longer be kept
secret. Massive layoffs would follow within days; corporations would fail
overnight. Within a week we could see a third of all corps—at least in the
Americas, and possibly across the world—collapse. And this would not be any
third, but the largest third—those that had leveraged the most. Even to an
Epsilon the ramifications were clear—you’d see half of the remaining
corporations wiped out completely, corporations that had done nothing wrong,
that had not shared in the risk, would be sharing in the consequences.

“The PulpMill
Paper Company,” she said, “has never invested in anything other than exactly
what they need to run their business. Everything they do is above board. But
sixty percent of their business comes directly from Ackerman, and the rest of
it from within the Karitzu. When Ackerman fails, PulpMill will go under, too.
The cost of paper will soar. Any corporation with narrow margins—which is just
about all of them—won’t be able to buy any. So they’ll go under. In a two-week
period more than half the jobs on two continents are going to vanish. The price
of everything will skyrocket. Everyone will pull their money from the system—a
run on every bank in the world, simultaneously. Credit will freeze up; corporations
won’t be able to make their payrolls. Even if they could, caps would become
worthless, and food and water will be the only thing of value—but there won’t
even be close to enough of that to go around.”

“What do you
mean?”

“The Al-Arabina
Karitzu controls over eighty percent of the world’s oil. They’re heavily
invested in Ackerman. If Arabina fails, the flow of oil and gasoline stops
completely. How are you going to supply food to a city without trucks? We can’t
get water without pumps, which need oil. Without coal there’s no electricity.
And even if you had trucks, who’s going to pay the truck drivers? And with
what?”

“There must...
if this is really happening, there must be a way to stop it.”

She nodded. “I
understand how you feel. I’ve known this for a while, so sometimes I forget
what it’s like to hear it for the first time.

“You know, light
travels so fast that we think it’s instantaneous. But it’s not. It has an
actual speed. Over long distances, you can measure it. The light from the sun
takes eight minutes to get here. What we see in the sky isn’t the sun as it is,
but as it was eight minutes ago. If it exploded, or just vanished, we’d still
see it. Nobody would know, because we don’t have a measuring device faster than
the speed of light. We wouldn’t know for eight minutes.

“You and I, the
whole world, we’re living now in those eight minutes. Ackerman, your
colleagues, corps, the world as a whole—are all dead, they just don’t see it
yet. We are waiting on the day before the dinosaurs went extinct. We know for
certain that it’ll happen, but there’s nothing we can possibly do about it. The
age of corporations is over, my love.”

Kate pulled a
small tea infuser out of the cupboard. She crushed up some leaves, put them
into it, and dropped it into a clay mug. Then she put a dollop of condensed
milk into the tea.

It was a
precious commodity, the milk. But I had lost my appetite.

“Is this what
they would call a war?” I asked.

“War is the
inevitable conclusion of capitalism. We’ve been at war for centuries. This is
the end of war.

“Corporations
are run by people, nothing more or less. They’re not monsters, not superhuman
intellects, just people who are, for the most part, reasonably as clever as one
another. Some corporations will fail and others succeed. But everyone thinks
that they deserve to win. So when they think they’re going to lose, they feel
justified in moving the line of acceptable behavior further down the field.
They resort to more and more desperate actions to survive. Those desperate
actions become the norm, and the next corporation has to take even more drastic
measures just to compete.”

“But that’s so
selfish.”

“That’s
capitalism. Survival of the fittest. A good capitalist will tell you that in
general people are ethical and would never take advantage of the system. That’s
what the Communists thought, too. Zino hated this kind of behavior. She assumed
most people would never do it. She said that if your actions were honest, all
you needed was the rational perception of others. But that’s not true. They
need to be honest, too. Sure, on paper competition is survival of the fittest;
the smartest and most efficient corporation wins. But really the winner is the
one who can
appear
to be the best
while actually investing the least in customers or other expenses, the one who
can betray the most people with the fewest knowing about it—the one who can
best ignore human conscience without getting caught. Given unrestricted power,
the corporation will feel entitled, even obligated, to leverage it.
Unrestricted competition is a policy of scorched earth, period.

“The same was
true for governments, too. Power was supposed to be shared.”

My hand was
trembling as I brought the tea to my lips. “We have to warn people.”

“How? Most
people in the corporation don’t even know a crash is coming. They won’t until
it’s too late. Those who do are already making preparations to run, and the
last thing they want to do is tell anyone else. You talk, and Ackerman will
arrest you. Perception Management will call it a scare tactic to make money by
forcing a run on banks or selling short, and everyone—even Perception
itself—will believe it.”

“Kate, do you
know how many people are going to die?”

“Most. It’ll be
mass famine.”

“This can’t be
true, it just can’t be.”

“I wish it
weren’t. As much as I hate Ackerman, nobody deserves this. But this is why I
hate them, because this is what they bring us. The victors of competition
haven’t ever shared their profits, but they’re happy to share their losses.”

“I’m saying it
can’t. You must be wrong.”

Kate shook her
head. “I wish we were. We’re not.”

Now that I had
come most to respect life, I was going to witness the loss of it on an
unparalleled scale.

But wait
.
She told me. Why would she tell me if nothing can be done? She wants me
to stay at Ackerman. That could only matter if….

“You built one!”
I cried. “An actual republic! You really are a citizen. You saw this coming
years ago, and you’ve been preparing. That’s what the secret meetings have been
about, that’s what you’ve been hiding from me.”

A look of joy
bloomed—as if a terrible burden was lifted. She could never tell me, never
violate that oath. But now that I knew….

“I wanted to
tell you so much. It’s never been so hard to keep a secret. But so much is at
stake, and there are a lot of us. The only thing that can get us killed is if
they find out before we’re ready. If they do, they’ll take the bunker.”

“Bunker?”

She turned to
me. “Yeah, an old bunker under one of the old apartment buildings up at
Glendale. We found it by accident; it’s not on any map, and there’s no
reference to it in the Galt or any of the ruins. It’s from the last, great
republic. It was designed for a nuclear war—it’s huge. We’ve been stocking it
for years—food, water; we have solar generators, hydroponics, waste reclamation
and management. We can live down there for decades.”

“We? How many
people?”

“About a
thousand. It’s a vault. Once the doors are sealed, not even Ackerman could get
inside—if they were still around.”

I loved Kate;
nothing was more important to me than she was. But I was overwhelmed with fear.
The pain from my panic attacks, which I hadn’t felt since I met her, came
flooding back. I was a man on a sinking ship who’s been told only one lifeboat
is left.

“If... if
somebody wanted to get in, how would he do it?”

“We all have
tickets—every family.”

“But you don’t
have family.”

“They gave me
two tickets, one for me and one for someone else.”

My throat
thickened again, and I couldn’t breathe. “Who are you taking?” I croaked.

She gave a
playful little laugh and rubbed her foot against my side. “You really don’t
know?”

“Well, we
haven’t been together that long. You have a lot of friends—”

“Of course I’m
taking you, Charlie. Don’t be silly.”

I grabbed her by
the waist and began spinning her through the air. She giggled and laughed. I
wanted to ask her thousands of questions. But between the blast at the café,
learning that the world was coming to an end, and this refuge of salvation, I
was exhausted.

That night we
lay in bed, but I couldn’t sleep, overcome with torrents of emotion: crushed at
the thought of so much suffering, guilty that part of me thought that they
deserved it, elated that I might survive, and unworthy of the honor. I was even
a little angry with Kate; she’d passed on a horrible burden, and a terrible
risk. The lives of the other thousand citizens, the fate of the Republic, were
not worth risking over a colleague like me.

“Jazelle agreed
to let me in?” I joked.

“She did,”
chuckled Kate, “but I don’t think she likes you. She thinks you could be
Retention. After the crash, it won’t much matter.”

I could have
been Retention. Jazelle had a point. And anyway, if I had learned about the
Republic, Ackerman could too. Heck, every colleague is Retention, by
definition.

Corporatism breeds paranoia.

I tried to quiet
my mind.

I would never
tell, of course. Ackerman could torture me until the end of time (or at least
until the crash) and I would never tell.

But I was also
racked with guilt over even having gotten the information out of her. How much
she must have sacrificed with her citizen friends by falling in love with a
colleague. I mourned the loss of the world, the walking dead who knew nothing
about their future. But as Kate said, we had to focus on what we could control,
not what we couldn’t. We would live, and that was something.

Maybe we all
have a little colleague in each of us.

“It’ll be so
wonderful to live in a republic, free of all corruption.”

Kate laughed.
“Oh, my darling, I wish that were true. Republics had corruption, too, people
trying to grab money and power. They don’t incentivize corruption as such, but
people will try to game any system. The difference is that in a republic, power
is distributed more evenly. The system isn’t one dollar one vote, but one man,
one vote. The rich will be more powerful than the poor, they always are, and
maybe it’s supposed to be that way. But the fate of each is tied more
proportionately to the other, and that helps keep the peace.

“But the only
real check against corruption is vigilance. The lack of it lead to the death of
republics: success bred complacency and arrogance, just like today. They
thought that the system was enough to protect them, that they didn’t need to be
involved. The point of a republic was to elect people to run government for you
so you could live your life. But citizens just let go of the rope. Nobody
voted, nobody got educated on the complexities of the governing. And the
corporations moved in and spent massive amounts of money on perception,
promoting the people that they wanted into office, and convincing the public
that the rich should get richer, so that they could employ the poor and drive
the economy. They convinced people that capitalism—this god of nature—would do
the oversight for them, that the free hand of the market would keep them safe.
But it wasn’t true, and on that front, the corporatists and I agree—life is
work.”

“I can’t believe
I never have to go back to Ackerman.”

“Oh Charlie, oh
no. You have to go back.”

“What?”

“Don’t you see?
If you don’t, they’ll come looking for you.”

“I, but—”

“Charlie, this
is not negotiable. I wasn’t even supposed to tell you—not for a few weeks, but
since you said you were going to quit working, I had to. Your coming here every
night is bad enough, but as long as they think you’re going to pay them back,
they don’t care. If you stop going in to work, they’ll come here, and in force.
They’ll arrest people, bring them in, start asking questions.”