The Water Thief (3 page)

Frustrated, I began straightening
up the mess. I didn’t have the budget to buy more literature, so I’d have to
try to salvage something from the scraps he’d left.

As I was tossing the stray papers
into my safe, a page caught my eye. It was simple, delicate, an Ackerman court
record—printed on a piece of tissue paper so thin that it was
translucent—almost impossible to scan or copy.
Why would anyone bother with a court record
?
They’re expensive, and trials are for litigators, not Perception.

“Memo,” cried an Epsilon, blindly
thrusting a sheet into the cubicle. I took it, tossed it into the trash and
went back to the report.

The story covered the arrest and preliminary
hearing of an Epsilon, a terribly low-ranked woman named Sarah Aisling. She had
been living in LowSec, the last bastion of anything that resembled civilization
before the destitute wasteland outside, and home to a vast number of poor, low
and null-contract colleagues and employees from smaller corps. A Good Samaritan
had turned her in for stealing rainwater. She had been collecting it in
buckets, and then used a solar still to extract the evaporite. The result was
drinkable water.

It was a crime, sure, but she was
already in the system. The report had cost someone a hundred caps to get, but
you couldn’t make a dime on it.

She couldn’t afford an attorney, so
obviously she didn’t deserve one. Still, she seemed to argue the point.

Sarah Aisling
: Rainwater belongs to all of us. That
Ackerman Brothers has a slip of paper saying it is theirs does not—

Judge
: It’s not the paper, it’s the effort. They
spend a fortune protecting the environment from pollution and abuse so they can
sell a quality product. Every cup you take out of the air is a cup less they
can harvest, and a cup less you buy. You’re looting them, their stockholders,
colleagues, even their paying customers who have to make up the difference in
higher prices. You really need to hire a defense to explain—

Sarah Aisling
: I don’t have the time, money or
experience to find a good litigator, insure against a bad one, research that
insurance, protect against insurance fraud, or learn all the applicable
contracts myself.

Judge
: You have futures available; you can sell
against those to retain counsel.

Sarah Aisling
: Who wants to invest in the futures of
someone looking at jail time? My futures fell to pennies when I was charged.

Judge
: And whose fault is that? Your futures are
worthless because of your own actions. Don’t use some sob story to mooch a
litigator.

Sarah Aisling
: But you’re assuming I’m guilty.

Judge
: They found six solar stills in your home!

Sarah Aisling
: Of course, I was taking rainwater. But
that doesn’t mean I’m guilty.

Judge
: Doesn’t mean… It’s the definition of
guilty! Stop making—

Sarah Aisling
: I can’t defend against these charges
because I can’t afford a litigator. But I can’t afford a litigator because I’ve
been charged.

Judge
: You should have had insurance against
contract suits.

Sarah Aisling
: I did.

Judge
: So what’s the problem?

Sarah Aisling
: They canceled my insurance when I filed
the claim.

Judge
: So sue them!

Sarah Aisling
: I can’t, I don’t have a litigator.

Judge
: That’s very cute, Mrs. Aisling. But
again, it all comes back to you. Isn’t it possible that you should have saved a
bit more, been more careful with your money in case you needed it? Or—here’s a
novel idea—maybe you could have worked harder instead of plundering other
people’s work. If you’re resourceful enough, there’s always a way.

Sarah Aisling
: That’s a myth used by those with power to
justify tyranny against those without it.

Judge
: You could sell an organ if you had to.

Sarah Aisling
: Why should I have to sell my futures or
an organ to defend against charges that should never have been brought?

Judge
: Honestly, I’ve never seen someone
complain so much. You have a lot of excuses why this is everybody’s fault but
your own. That’s how you get through life, isn’t it? Excuse after excuse as to
why your life is a failure.

Sarah Aisling
: My life is not a failure.

Judge
: One deserves precisely and exactly the
defense one can afford, and you are a living testament to that. If you had
spent less time complaining and stealing, and more time improving your value to
the corporation, you would earn and deserve better representation.

I looked nervously around my
cubicle. It was scandalous, rebellious. I was grinning from ear to ear—it was like
watching a train wreck, seeing this woman square off with the judge. She
already knew the outcome: she’d be fined, spend some time doing hard labor,
maybe lose some rank. But she continued to argue. It was as if she wanted to be
punished, thirsting to have more suffering heaped on her.

I logged in and purchased time with
the full transcripts. As I read on I nearly fell out of my chair.

Sarah Aisling
: Your Honor, I request that you recuse
yourself.

Judge:
On what grounds?

Sarah Aisling
: You can’t be impartial. You work for the
people I am accused of stealing from.

Judge:
That’s what qualifies me. I understand the
consequences of these crimes on the victims.

Sarah Aisling
: I want a trial by jury.

Judge:
Juries are a colossal waste of time. For
every case you have to take twelve people off the street, explain the
applicable contracts and procedures and how to make a fair decision. You get
cases being decided by people with no court experience who just want to get out
of there as fast as possible. It’s the most inefficient system ever created!
You’re being tried by a certified and experienced judge, a judge of your peers.

I continued reading, heedless of
the meter. I had never seen anything like it. She was contemptuous, dangerous,
and didn’t care in the slightest that the judge held her future in his hands.
But he was so arrogant, so eager to exercise his power over her, that he missed
something.

She was educated.

I would expect a LowCon to bemoan
the “injustice” of the system. But Aisling wasn’t angry, belligerent, or
insulting. Her arguments were eloquent, coherent, and rehearsed well above her
grade. She was talking about juries and property rights in ways nobody had
taken seriously for centuries.

Who
is this woman?

I plunged into her background,
buying records from every source I could think of. She was born into a HighCon
family that owned a software firm in Europa. She had been wealthier than I
could ever hope to be, destined for Alpha-grade executive work, and had already
contracted into a low Alpha by her early thirties.

But when she was thirty-five she
began causing trouble for her corporation. She gave to charity, for starters
(the Moral Hazard of which can’t be underestimated. “Teach a man to fish,”
Linus would say, “and he can eat for life; but give a man a fish, and he
doesn’t need to learn anything”). I couldn’t imagine the damage she wrought on
corporate efficiency. She gave lectures on how some individual rights actually
superseded corporate rights (this, despite the obvious and undeniable fact that
corporations represent the welfare of millions of people).

I checked, but I didn’t find any
record of her ever being admitted into an insane asylum.

The only thing I did find was a
story on a hotel fire. Hundreds died—in fact she was one of a handful of people
to make it out alive. She changed after that.

It was compassion. The fire must
have somehow infected her with it. By the time she downgraded to a low Delta
she was booted out. We took her on as an Epsilon in a small subsidiary that
rented out friends. By all accounts she was destitute, destroyed by her own ego
and a desire to muddy the waters. She lived in LowSec with other Epsilons,
Zetas and even people with no contract whatsoever (despicable NullCons).

I tried to track down her fortune.
Some of it had been given away, some poured into the small, socialist,
not-for-profit hospitals that exist in a few areas of Europa. All told I could
account for about ninety percent of her wealth. The remaining ten percent,
still a staggering amount of money, was unaccounted for. If she had spent it,
where were the receipts? If she had given it away, where were the transaction
records, who were the beneficiaries? No, she simply pulled it out of the bank
and walked away with it.

And yet here she was, living in LowSec,
refusing to get an advocate.

She still had the money. I knew it
in my bones. She could afford an advocate, or a hundred; heck, she could just
pay off the charges. She didn’t do it because she thought she shouldn’t have
to.

This wasn’t a colleague. This was a
citizen.

I could write up a report on this
that could pay off ten electric bills at almost any price! It might push me out
of high Delta into a low Gamma contract, maybe even get me onto the ninth
floor. I trembled, holding the paper in my hand. I shook so hard I thought I
might tear it.

All I had to do was craft it right.

And craft it right, I did. I
crafted a perception of her as a heretic, a purveyor of arcane and religious dogma—a
belief that human beings had value above what they could produce. She was a
pagan, a devil worshiper who abandoned morality, nature, and even common sense
for a belief in the debunked “social contract,” and in so doing undermined the
good of all people cradled in the benevolent, invisible hand of the free
market.

But that was just the beginning.
Oh, I turned her into a seditionist, someone who proselytized and encouraged
colleagues to abandon natural selection, competition, and evolution. She was, I
wrote, “a citizen, a communist, extremely dangerous and likely representative
of a much larger group of citizens who pose a serious threat to Ackerman.” If
Bernard could profit by taking a tiny issue and turning it into a catastrophe,
then by God I would elevate her to the leader of a revolutionary movement.

When I finished, I had, simply put,
the best report I had ever written. It was professional, concrete, not overly
emotional—simple and to the point.

I leaned back in my chair and put
the end of my glasses in my mouth. I chewed on them while I studied the thin
blue piece of paper that had yielded a report that could so change my life.

What
will this do to her?

The trouble she was in now was
nothing compared to what might happen if I filed.

But that was my whole problem. I
was always one bad utility bill away from bankruptcy. I had worked for
Perception Management for years, but never adopted the ruthlessness Ackerman
expected of me. It was the man who could most brutally stab a colleague in the
back who was the richest. I wasn’t there to protect her, to decide what was
right or wrong. I was there to provide an indictment. Submitting the report was
my job; defending herself from it was hers. If she failed, it wasn’t my fault.
Besides, my report would go through three hundred other offices for
investigation or follow-up. I reported things; accuracy was another department.
Heck, by this point I’d be liable if I
didn’t
speak up.

I had been falling behind for a
long time—not to people who worked harder, but those who did the job they were
supposed to do—churn out reports to throw into the maw of Ackerman’s
perception machine.

And I had tired of the burden of
ethics.

And, on some level, didn’t she
deserve it? She was so smug—the assumption that somehow
she
could lecture anyone on principles. Oh, how I’d love to be able
to do that. But I didn’t have rich parents who gave me the luxury of things to
give up so that I could feel superior.

Hope is the slow death of man, and
she spread it like a venereal disease: hope that there was something more to
life than what you can produce. She shouldn’t get to believe in that. Every
child born to this world knows for certain that he or she is special, that
they’ll grow up to be a CEO, to become rich and famous, to change the world for
the better. That is hope, and it’s never true, and so we live lives of
resentment and pain—inflicted on us by the gradual and repeated death of our
dreams.