The Water Thief (25 page)

If the contents
of my room were worth more than the entire seventh floor, this room was worth
more than the entire building.

Never in my
life, in my wildest dreams, had I thought that such power existed.

“Hello,
Charles.”

One of the small
screens obscured a thin hallway, from which came an executive. He was the man I
had met in Kate’s apartment. He wore a black suit with a golden tie, and was so
well groomed and preened that even Linus would have looked disheveled by
comparison. It was as if the man had been born an adult, in his suit, and he
wore it like armor, like he was bulletproof.

I could make out
his features much better than the last time I saw him. His skin was a burnt
bronze, his hair a dirty blond, and he had a very thin beard, like stubble, but
shaved in deliberate, sharp lines at his cheeks and neck.

He walked past
me to the writing desk, where he opened a hidden recess in the back and
withdrew a bottle of whiskey.

I wondered how
many other hidden compartments this place had, and what else they held.

“I understand
you drink whiskey?” he said.

He motioned to
the sofa and invited me to take a seat. Two glasses were already set out on the
small table. The executive poured some of the golden liquid into only one. He
re-corked the bottle before concealing it back in its original place.

“Do you know why
you are here?”

“You’re going to
torture me.”

He laughed.

“What a barbaric
mind you have, my friend. No, you will not be tortured. You are here because
you are broken. You are a complex machine, which for some reason doesn’t run
right. You can’t even perform rudimentary tasks properly. You are here to be
rehabilitated.”

“Rehabilitated?”
I mused. We both knew that my fate was already decided.

“Of course.
Nobody is mad at you or wants revenge; that would be immoral. If you can be
repaired, returned to some level of usefulness to the corporation, we’d like to
see that. You have a massive debt to pay off, and you could do a better job of
that if we fixed you rather than if we simply sold your organs off for scrap.
We’re not barbarians.”

He raised the
glass and held it. “This,” he said, “is called scotch. It used to be very
popular, but it came only from Scotland. They called this particular kind a
‘peat’; it came only from the southern swamps. They’ve been frozen solid for
centuries. Even if the world were restored back to its original climate, the
swamps will never come back. Another bottle of this will never be made by man,”
he said, taking a large gulp.

I looked at my
own glass, which he had failed to fill.

“Oh. Well, I
would like very much to offer you some, but your palate is nowhere near refined
enough to taste the difference between this and goat urine. It would be a
shameful waste—quite literally a crime—to share this with you. I have too much
respect for the company, without whose profits I could not have purchased this,
to do that. Respect, Charles.”

I laughed.

“What’s so
funny? Please, contrary to popular belief, I am always eager to hear a good
joke.”

“You act as if
you are so much better than me, but you’re not. You’re not, and we both know
it. Do you think I’m impressed by your scotch?”

“Oh my, you
misunderstand,” the executive said, his arms moving in broad strokes. “No, no,
no, I’m not trying to impress you, by no means. I make in a single day what you
make in a year. Since this conversation started I have already earned more than
you will ever have. I would be a pretty shallow man indeed if, in spite of all
that, I cared at all about your opinion,” he said, taking another sip.

“Say what you
will,” I answered. “You care. You’re a joke, showing off with your material
wealth, trying to intimidate me, show me how successful you are.”

“Dear, dear,
dear. You know, I’ve heard it said that executives have very big egos, that we
think the world revolves around us. Well, Charles, what would they say about
you, sitting there, thinking that I would be moved by your opinion of me?”

“You don’t even
need these things,” I said. “Look at you, all of your money, your oriental
rugs, your poker set, and your elaborate ornaments. You buy these things so you
can feel important.”

“Goodness gracious,”
the man said, gently putting his hand into his coat pocket. “Is that what you
think? My friend, I don’t spend money because I want to. Far from it. I do it
because it is my responsibility, because it is the moral thing to do.”

He pulled a
cigar from his pocket, snipped the end, and put it in his mouth. “The economy
can only function so long as we consume. Money is made to be spent. Just
sitting there it’s worthless. When I buy things, I improve the lives of those
below me. Why, I redesign this office at least twice a year just to keep people
employed. And the people I employ, like good colleagues, spend the money that
they
earn. That money inexorably, albeit
regrettably, even makes its way to people like you. I have built entire
micro-economies with my spending, and kept many a colleague out of the gutter.
That is respect, Charles. That is love.”

“Yeah, you spend
the money on yourself, showing off or giving it to your friends and family.”

He lit the cigar
and puffed a few times to get a good burn going. I took the opportunity to look
at the swords, ancient blunderbusses, pistols, and other decorations on the
walls.

I wondered if
they were real. I could snatch one maybe, but I doubted I’d make it past the
elevator. Still, running him through with his own sword might have been its own
reward.

“I give money to
no one, Charles. Giving is for communists. I do, naturally, have a savings,
which I use to ensure my children get low-interest loans and stipends for their
educations, help them become high-contracts. But I do this because they come
from me, I raised them, and I know the corporation and its colleagues will
benefit from their success. I can trust them with money far more than I could
trust a stranger, more than I could trust you. My god, what would you do if you
ever earned any
real
money? Keep it?
That’s awfully selfish of you, don’t you think?”

“I’d use it to
help those who need it.”

“That’s what I
do,” he said.

“No, no, I’d
give it to them. I’d help them directly!”

“Precisely why
you can’t be trusted with money.” he said, stabbing the air with the smoldering
cigar. “The poor cannot handle money, that’s why they’re poor. Give a poor man
ten caps, and he won’t use that money to invest in the future, or to buy a ride
to a job interview, or to get a book and read it. No, he will buy a bottle of
potato vodka and be done with it. You’ve done him a terrible disservice. Now
he’s lost self-respect, and he’s learned that he doesn’t need to earn money,
that all he has to do is be poor and people will pay him. It’s a vicious cycle,
and every day he’ll act even more pitiable to earn even more charity.

“If, however,
you had taken that ten caps and purchased something, if others like you did the
same, then a factory would be built, and that man can be put to work. Oh, I
believe you, my friend. I believe you’d show charity. That’s why you can’t be
trusted.

“The truth is
that you’re selfish. You and your kind would drive our society to ruin out of a
conceited desire to convince others of your altruistic nature. You’re the one
trying to impress people. You talk about charity, taxes, a greater good, and
about a social compact, because deep down you’re terrified of your own
failures, because if you don’t convince people to take their eyes off of
competition they might just see you for the failure that you are, Charles. And
if they see that, and you haven’t convinced them of the importance of charity,
where will you be?”

“But you don’t
have to give the poor money. You can create social programs—”

“Ahhh,” he said,
taking a deep drag from the cigar. “The leviathan…”

“Government,
it’s better. You know it is.”

“Of course!
Absolutely! Do you think I don’t like the leviathan?” he said, throwing his
hands up. “It’s marvelous, my friend, simply marvelous. What I wouldn’t give
for a leviathan—take everything I own, please, take it if you can build one.

“But you can’t.
It’s an idea, an abstraction, a fairytale. Nobody has ever gotten one to work;
trying is no more productive than looking for the Easter Rabbit. The leviathan
requires compassion. Compassion does not exist, Charles. It’s an illusion. Even
your self-declared altruism, the money you would give to others, is motivated
purely out of a desire to end your own agony at watching them suffer, to
alleviate your own sense of guilt. I feel guilt too. I’ve simply learned to use
it productively. By our very nature we do what is in our own best interest—we
are incapable of doing otherwise. That is why the leviathans all failed—because
they allowed, even encouraged, belief in fantasy.”

“Compassion
exists. I have seen it.”

“It was an
illusion. Have you read history?” he asked, taking another sip. He turned his
back and strolled casually toward the far wall, as if daring me to grab a
weapon and strike him. “Any history, it doesn’t matter…” he said. “Has there
ever been a time when man did not betray his fellow man? A time when man’s urge
to compete, to dominate, did not win out over this ‘compassion’ you believe
in.”

“It happens…”

“Only by
accident, only in errors of nature—predicted by Darwin himself, mutations which
fight against the natural order of things,” he said, taking a moment to check
the alignment of one of his paintings. “In short, Charles, only in you.”

“I am not
alone.”

He turned back
toward me. “We are all alone. We always have been, always will be. Convincing
people otherwise, getting them to fight and die for the leviathan, religion, or
a corporation, may have its advantage. But we are all alone. Wishing otherwise,
no matter how hard you try, will not make it so.”

He wants to break me. But he won’t. Not in a
hundred years.

“You are like a
child, closing your eyes, thinking if you believe in something enough,
sacrifice enough, devote yourself to it, then it must be true. You are like the
religious zealot who blows himself up in the name of something he will never
see or touch, convinced that the very act itself is enough to commit the
reality.

“Build a society
on the premise that man will not betray man and you will fail. Surely you can
see that. That is why the corporation is an absolute good; it does not expect
more of us than we can do. It is based on the knowledge that everyone will
betray everyone else. It thrives because it lives off greed and selfishness,
our most basic instincts, the ones without which we would not be the dominant
species on the planet. Align yourself with that state of nature, the state of
corruption—allow for it, embrace it—instead of wasting time trying to ferret it
out, and you’ll be a success.”

“But you can’t
build a society based on corruption.”

“And yet we
have.”

“But it’ll
fail.”

“You
underestimate the greed of man. The corporation is a boat far harder to sink
than most people believe. In the end, no matter how bad things get, everybody
wants it to survive. Everyone has a vested interest in it—from the CEO to the
night janitor—and they will do anything to keep it going. The corporation is
life, every one of us will defend it, no matter how corrupt it is, because it
is
us.”

“No, I’ve seen
the records. The whole system is going to collapse.”

Reaching the end
of his cigar, the executive went back to the writing desk and extinguished the
remains in a black marble ashtray. “You’ve seen the records, but you don’t have
the intelligence to decipher them. You say the system is going to collapse only
because it’s what someone told you. Someone told you that Hobbes’
Leviathan
was about democracy, good
works, and the social compact, and you believed that too. But they lied. Hobbes
believed in the brutal tyranny and absolute power of a single ruler.”

“That’s not
true.”

“Have you read
his work? I swear to you it’s true.”

“It’s about
government.”

“No, Charles.
Hobbes called government the leviathan—not because it was big and bloated like
the sea beast—but because the ruler of mankind should be like that biblical
beast, answerable only to God.”

“Corporatism
will end. I swear to you. If not now, then someday. Even if it takes a
millennia, your ‘great’ system will collapse.”

“Of course it
will,” he said sternly, turning toward me again. “I should hope it does. I
believe in competition, in evolution. So I know we have the best system ever
invented. But no system is static. If, in two thousand years, someone hasn’t
invented a better one, then man certainly doesn’t deserve his place at the top
of the ladder.”

“But that’s the
point,” I said. “When a corporation fails, when the system fails, the
executives will walk away with all their money, and they will say they did the
best they could, and that they deserve their compensation, and those who broke
their backs every day for the company will get nothing. It’s not fair!”

“It is the very
definition of fair. It’s the workers’ own fault that the they walk away with
nothing; they choose to. You can’t blame executives for being smarter than
them.”

“Nobody chooses
to fail.”

“Of course they
do. Not taking what is rightfully yours is a choice—the choice of inaction.
LowCons outnumber executives a hundred to one. They could raze the entire city
if they wanted, and take the money you say we owe them. But they never do. That
is why they are LowCons. That is how I know they deserve to be LowCons. They
choose it. And we walk away with the money because that’s what we choose.”