The Water Thief (5 page)

“So what did you do?”

“I laughed at him, told him a
hundred thousand was a waste of time. I said if he was serious, I’d play for a
million.”

“You could afford that?”

“Doesn’t matter. The question was,
could he? He blew the whole thing off as a joke and walked away.”

“He brushed it off?”

“It is, more often than not, the
person willing to risk the most—even his own utter ruin—who wins.”

“So you got out of playing him?”

Linus sighed. “No, Charles. What
I’m saying is that I beat him before the game even started.”

He told that story often, and
whenever he thought I was missing a valuable corporate lesson, Linus insisted
we play. That’s all poker was: an exercise in lying.

I gave myself a half-hearted pat
down and told him I didn’t have any dice on me.

“We don’t need dice,” he said,
pulling out a bill from his pocket. “We can just use caps. Every bill has a
twelve-digit serial number on it. There are twice as many numbers and they
range from zero to nine so it’s a little harder than dice, but it’s the exact
same thing.”

I failed to see how twice as many
numbers was “the exact same thing.”

“Well, I haven’t studied the
probabilities.”

“The probabilities are irrelevant.
Play the person, not the numbers. Lie to me, use your bets as a weapon.”

“You’d have me at a terrible
disadvantage.”

“Then next time don’t get caught
without dice.”

I stood there, frantically trying
to come up with another excuse not to play. He pulled a cap from his pocket,
memorized the numbers in a single pass, and then held it to his chest.

“Three sevens,” he said.

I hated the game, which was no
doubt why he wanted to play.

“If you’d like, we can wager
today’s lunch.”

I had no excuses left. I pulled out
a cap and read the serial numbers. Most were different, only a few repeats and
no more than two of any number. It was a poor hand, which meant the blessing of
a quick game. His face was expressionless, but his eyes shone with the
certainty of an outcome I didn’t dispute.

I had two eights. Linus probably
had at least one, so I called out “Three eights” and prayed he’d call right
then and there.

“Four Twos,” he said. He’d
calculated his second bet long before I had even given my first.

I hated poker. I hated playing it,
hated people who liked it, hated the fact that everyone was playing it all the
time. It was like a joke that everybody got but me, one I had long given up
asking people to explain. Even Bernard, who lost more than I did, seemed to
enjoy it.

Maybe
I’ve been going about this all wrong. I know Linus. I can play the man and not
the dice. He’s proud—so proud that he might brush it off if I won, but he’d
never play me again. Even he gets a bad throw on occasion. Win this, and I’ll
never have to do this silly exercise again.

I began thinking about how to take
what I knew about Linus and leverage it into a victory. I had to do something
unexpected, that was the key. I could bet outrageously high, but that had the
downside of being unexpected for a reason—it was supremely stupid. No, I’d need
to bid the highest number I could get away with, something that would force him
to bid numbers higher than he could possibly have, and then I could call him.

But I didn’t have anything myself,
no real numbers to work with. But therein, I realized, lay the opportunity. I’d
bid outside the range of what I actually had, but inside the range of what was
likely—something I should have, but didn’t.

“Four sevens,” I said confidently.

“You’re a liar,” called Linus. He
placed his bill face down on the table and went back to reading his journal.

His cap had exactly three sevens on
it. If I had had even a single seven, I’d have won the match. And since I
always paid for the meals, there hadn’t been anything at stake. There was
nothing to lose, and somehow I’d lost anyway.

“Don’t worry about it,” Linus said,
dismissively waving his hand. “I’ll pay for the meal.”

“No, no, of course not,” I said.
“All my bets are good.”

I had stopped carrying poker dice
for this very reason. Now I’d have to stop carrying cash too.

“You know,” Linus said, folding his
paper and putting it on the table, “I saw your wife in the dailies again. It
was buried in the back, a minor thing, but she was there. Did you know?”

“No,” I lied.

“That’s three ranks she’s lost in
four weeks. That makes her... what? A Delta five? Maybe even four? Another
couple of weeks of this and they’ll downgrade her contract. You’ll be married
to an Epsilon, Charles, a
LowCon,
” he
said, emphasizing every syllable.

I didn’t know why I hadn’t done
anything about it. I was loath to talk about it, though.

“You’re compassionate. That’s the
problem, Charles.”

“I’m not!” I said.

“Generous, maybe?”

“What the hell!” I shouted. “Why,
just this morning I—”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

“You are compassionate,” he said.
“Get over it. I’ve seen it in you before. It’s why you can’t climb higher than
Delta. It gets really bad around the executions. Tell me, do they bother you at
all?”

“Bother me? Of course not!” I
snapped. “These people all stole from Ackerman; they’re all thieves and
looters, and Ackerman has every right to recoup their losses.”

“No, Charles. It’s not a right.
It’s an obligation. Ackerman is duty-bound to its shareholders and to every
colleague in the firm to raise profits as high as possible. These executions
provide ad revenue, reclamation income, ticket sales, and deterrence against
other violates. They’re a moral imperative.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, it’s not,” said Linus, taking
a sip. “You think we should treat Kabul with kid gloves? You don’t want to
confront your wife? You’re thinking like a child. Compassion isn’t natural, it
certainly isn’t economical, and it’s the antithesis of capitalism.”

“I know that!” I said.

“Do you? A child looks at your wife
and says ‘Oh, poor her. She’s having a hard time; I wish her life were easier.’
An adult says, ‘This is life, and I’m accountable for myself.’ A child
sacrifices himself for a friend; an adult realizes when the friend is hurting
him. She’s hurting you, Charles; this is self-defense, here. It’s is a business
arrangement. If she has half a brain in that skull of hers, she won’t take it
personally. But if she did, it wouldn’t be your fault.”

She probably wouldn’t take it
personally. Maybe that was part of why I hadn’t left her.

Lunch had turned out to be a
disaster, no two ways about it. Despite how much I paid for his mentorship, he
had never had that much respect for me, and I wondered why he continued to see
me.

“You know,” he said, “there was
once a farmer living in China....”

Oh boy… a fable.

“One day the farmer’s only horse
broke free and ran away,” he continued. “His family was on the brink of
starvation. The villagers tried to console him, but he would only say ‘it could
be a good thing, it could be a bad thing.’

“The next day his horse came back,
and brought with it ten more horses. Now he was the richest man in the village.
They tried to congratulate him, but he would only say, ‘It could be a good
thing, it could be a bad thing.’

“Weeks later the farmer’s son was
thrown from one of the new horses. His back was broken and he was paralyzed
from the waist down. Still, all the farmer would say was ‘it could be a good
thing, it could be a bad thing.’

“The next year their nation went to
war. All of the tribe’s young men were conscripted. They all died, except the
farmer’s son, who couldn’t go. And when the envious villagers told him how
lucky he was to still have a son, he said ‘it could be a good thing, or it
could be a bad thing.’”

Linus appeared to think the moral
was obvious, but I didn’t see it.

“You need to understand this,
Charles, because it’s very important. Every act, every single human act, has
infinite levels of regression—of both good and bad consequences. When somebody
says something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ they are simply presenting you with whatever
set of consequences they find matches the beliefs they
already
hold.

“But there is no such thing as good
or bad; they’re illusions, words, arbitrary slices of time engineered to elicit
a sympathetic response. Outside of that slice, they don’t exist. There is no
difference between the saint who gives food to starving children and the worker
who operates the gas chamber to kill them, except that one is making money and
the other is losing it. These are the Objective realities Zino argued for.”

“That’s not in the Bible.”

“It’s the only logical inference
from her work.”

“If that’s true,” I said, “why
bother being ‘good’ to the Corporation?”

It was a stupid thing to say. I
regretted it the moment I said it. But I felt a sense of relief, as if I had
loosed the elephant in the room.

Linus’ eyes bulged. “Because...” he
whispered, leaning in, “they’re the only thing keeping you alive. How long do
you think you’d last out there without your corporate contract? Rest assured, I
have never done an unselfish thing in my whole life. I am loyal because I need
powerful friends, and Ackerman is the best. You don’t think I get offers from
other corps? You don’t think I’m in high demand? I don’t ever even think about
it. I’m loyal to the corp because it’s good to me, because it’s in
my
best interest to be.”

I felt an overwhelming sense of
emptiness. Linus could easily be a Retention agent, which would explain his
interest in me. Even if he wasn’t, any number of agents might be lunching in
the café. I didn’t care. Sarah Aisling stood up to a judge. I couldn’t even
stand up against a game of poker.

“All living creatures care about
their own survival—at least all the moral ones.”

I gave my coffee a half-hearted
stir.

“Leave her…” He said in a
commanding whisper.

“I’ve thought about it,” I said, in
a last-ditch effort to placate my colleague. “But the cost is way too high, and
I’m sure she’ll turn herself around. She’s very—”

He slammed his hand down on the
table in disgust. “You see, Charles, that’s Delta level thinking right there.
You won’t be promoted if you don’t start to think long-term. It’ll cost you 20k
to get a divorce, but if you turn around and marry a rising star—a high Delta
or low Gamma, you can get that money back in three or four years. You’re
Gamma-level material, maybe even Beta-grade,” he said. “Well, at the very least
you could get Gamma. You just don’t have the motivation, and honestly I have no
idea why not. You probably think too much. But this ‘oh, she’s a real go getter;
this is just a phase; oh, she’ll turn it around’ wishful thinking is absolute
garbage. It’s beneath you; I have no idea why you entertain it.”

A reliable divorce was closer to
one hundred twenty-five thousand caps. I couldn’t imagine that he himself could
get one for much less. But we were playing poker now, as we always did. And, as
always, he could see all the dice on the table.

I stood in the
undulating subway car, thinking about Sarah Aisling. She was an aberration, a genetic
defect. She could have gotten her life back but instead squared off with the
judge. What must have happened to her? What secrets did she think she knew that
caused her to choose self-expression over self-preservation? She probably
didn’t like the executions anymore than I did, but
she
wouldn’t hesitate to say so. And besides the vigor of her
conviction was the quality of her arguments. She had spent a lot of time
thinking against the corporate structure. Aisling wasn’t the first socialist I
had ever seen or heard of, not the first lunatic or atheist either. But that
anybody so educated could be so liberal—it confounded me.

When I returned
to work I found nearly everybody out on the field. The building was cordoned
off by officers and tactical teams, and colleagues were all bouncing off each
other in a frenzy of chatter. Along a side street stood ambulances and police
cruisers. A reconstruction team, carrying body bags, was just coming out of the
building.

“Charles!”

Thane Corbett
ran up to me, eager for a gratuity for being the first to fill me in. He was a
sculpted, athletic black man, with a serious face and a very thin goatee. He
was without a doubt one of the smartest people on the seventh floor. He exuded
success. This, of course, ruined his career. Nobody likes success. Successful
people remind you of your own failings, they highlight (to both you and your
boss) what you’re doing wrong and how easy it is to do the job right. They
increase competition and expectations, both of which make your life harder. No,
Corbett was chained to the seventh floor, and for all his vaunted intelligence,
he’d never figure out why.

“Thank God
you’re back. Have you heard?”

I shook my head
and handed him five caps.

“One of the
guards snapped,” he said. “He went on a killing spree, up on the second floor.”

A pain shot
through my chest and my throat felt thick. I already knew who did it.

“It was
hilarious! You know, there was actually an executive doing an inspection
there,” he laughed. “Can you imagine that, if some executive was wiped out by a
simple random act of violence? Classic!”

“So what
happened?” I asked as casually as I could.

“Nothing, he
shot some people, but security closed in and he killed himself. Obviously they
won’t let us do the perception on this one, but there’s a pool going. It’s ten
caps to get in. That new guy, Collin, thinks that they’ll be so thrilled the
executive survived that security will get a commendation. Can you believe it?
I’m going to love taking his money from him. Honestly, I’m going to find a way
to destroy that naive little noob before the year is out. I’m gonna own him.”