The Water Thief (2 page)

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 was 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.

The first and most obvious incident
was an article in the
Scientific Review
Daily
, which had said that they had found fillers, like sawdust and
powdered plastics, in a number of Ackerman-branded baby formulas. This might
seem like an obvious write-up, but it was a lead story, and by now there were
probably hundreds or even thousands of Ackerman colleagues reporting it. The
only people who would make a dime from it were the early reporters, people who
paid off the local newspapers to get the story before it was off the press. By
now it was worth fractions of a penny.

You couldn’t look for stories like
this, things that stood out. The art to finding a quality incident was in
looking for what was discreet. Run away from anything bold, underlined,
highlighted, glowing, or in those metallic inks that change color. Literature
was designed to be eye catching, to draw attention. The professional perception
manager was drawn to the things people ignored.

The first good incident I found was
an article on a youth soccer league that couldn’t practice because their last
ball ruptured on a hard kick. It looked like a sad story, until you realized
that they needlessly mentioned the brand of the ball (an Ackerman subsidiary).
This wasn’t an account of some poor soccer team; it was a takedown piece about
Ackerman dashing the hopes and dreams of a bunch of kids. I clipped the story
and wrote up a report. I suggested that we argue that they had over-inflated
the ball, hit them with a modest fine for slander, and warn them (for their own
sake) about making libel claims in the future without first having an expert
determine the actual cause of failure. Then we mention that Ackerman-branded
soccer balls actually have failure rates far below average (which they might)
and direct people to the nearest retailer. I took all of these suggestions, put
them into the pneumo tube and sent them off for review.

Next I found a wonderful story on
how one of Ackerman’s diet pills was causing dangerously low levels of calcium
in the blood. Some people were even getting rickets. I recommended a few ways
to discredit the findings. I also forwarded a copy of my report to Marketing.
That way, if there was any truth to the story, they could rebrand the pills as
a cure for calcium-induced arthritis.

While my approach was to find the
subtle stories, it wasn’t the only way to eke out a living on the seventh
floor. The Shotgun was a common strategy too: submit as many reports as you
can, as fast as possible, in the hopes that you hit something. The Poachers
were people who never paid for literature, but spent all their time trying to
gleam stories from “casual” chats with colleagues. Leoben, one of the managers,
was a quintessential Stabber—working just enough to look busy, all the while
making his principal income from ratting out colleagues for crimes, real or
imagined, against the firm.

Bernard, on the rare occasions he
actually worked, was a Nuker. He would find the most obscure article, a
ludicrous or innocuous account about nothing in particular, which drew nobody’s
interest. He’d spend hours researching and writing up long, fantastical yarns
on how, if the planets aligned just right and the rules of gravity shifted for
a moment, as a parallel universe opened up and suspended the laws of physics as
we know it, this article might just represent the worst thing
ever
to happen to Ackerman Brothers (if
not the universe as a whole). He’d highlight it, put little arrow stickers all
over it, tie it in a ribbon, stick it in the pneumo tube, and send his dire
predictions on their merry way.

A supervisor called Bernard’s work
genius.

Thane Corbett, on the other hand,
had his hands in many different pies. He wrote only a few reports a day. He
worked hard on them and did a professional, solid job (though they were never
quite the masterpieces he thought they were). The rest of the time he was
working on so many different things that it was impossible to remember just
which was his current get-rich-quick scheme. He’d invested in a traveling
carnival for a while, then in professional mentoring. He was taking a course in
sub-zero wilderness survival, presumably to lead expeditions into the wasteland
outside Capital City. His latest serious project was real estate, buying up Low
Security (LowSec) neighborhoods and squeezing them for every penny he could.

I finished a number of other
stories that morning. One was a particularly alarmist Op-Ed on how Perception
Management, as a practice, was leading to artificially inflated stock prices
that would result in a global economic collapse. Another defamatory story
claimed that Ackerman had assassinated an executive from a rival corp. Lastly,
there was an article that argued that our influence within the Karitzu had
grown too strong.

I packed my things, ready to head
out for my lunch with Linus Cabal. As I headed out through the curtains, I
caught an elbow straight to my face. I stumbled back and then toppled to the
ground. My literature flew into the air and scattered across the room—Bernard’s
own papers tossed into the mix.

“Oh my god,” Bernard said, “I… I… I
didn’t see you. Oh, I hope you’re not hurt?” He made a mad dash for the clutter
of papers. He scrambled over them, but his fingers were so thick that he
couldn’t slide his thumb under them, so he hastily stuffed crumpled fistfuls of
literature into the crook of his arm.

“Get out!”

“Just let me get my papers, a
million apologies!” he said.

“Those aren’t yours!”

“Oh, well they’re all pretty much
the same among colleagues, eh? We’re all on the same team. I’m sure I saw a few
land on your desk. Let me see... Say, have you seen Corbett? I was hoping to
get a ride home. Ever since I got mugged, well, I just don’t...” he stuttered.

“Get out!” I cried, shoving the oaf
out of our cubicle. He vanished in the darkness, a trail of crumpled papers
behind him. The damage was done; anything of any value was gone, and what was
left behind was mostly the junk he had brought in with him.

For a moment I considered what the
firm would charge me if I put a bullet between his eyes. It would have to cover
all his futures—probably not enough that they’d hang me for it, but they might
hock a few of my organs. Maybe I could find a way to convince Linus to cover
the tab. He certainly wouldn’t care if I killed anyone. But Linus didn’t do
favors—he collected debts, and a debt to him was never fully repaid.

No, it was fun to joke about, but
the math was against me.