Later that night, legs shredded and arms dangling like rubber, I make my way home from the bus station after a long day of training. Tonight, I'm not thinking about that. I have other things to think about. I know that running the sneakernet is crazy, but I can't stop thinking about what Cyril said about making enough money to pay for school. The worst part about having to leave the magnet academy was that I lost access to all the proprietary grants and scholarships that would have paid my way through college. Without those awards, the best schools weren't even on the table anymore. My plan was to work three or four years after graduation to save up for it. But if I go with Cyril's offer, I could earn the same amount in one or two. Butâis it worth two years of risk to save two years of my life? To be honest, I'm not really sure. But I would be running. Running, even if it's running from danger, has to beat sitting on my ass for ten hours a day variable-checking the sloppy code of mediocre programmers. Just the thought of it makes me cringe. If ever there was a digital-age analogue to Bartleby the scrivener, that has to be it.
The stop sign at the end of the block glows octagonal red as a pair of headlights approaches from behind. Ordinarily, a slow approach at this time of night would have me bouncing on my toes, but this one comes with a familiar squeal that I know all too well. I let the beat-up pickup truck pull up alongside me.
“Hello, Jack,” smiles the old teacher through his Santa Claus beard. It's Mr. Chupick, my faculty advisor.
“Hey, Mr. Chupick.”
“Can I give you a ride?”
“If it isn't out of your way.”
Mr. Chupick shoots his thumb at the giant water tank mounted to the flatbed that still has some slosh to it. “Hop in,” he says, “I'm just running the rest of the water around town.”
Mr. Chupick lives on a small farm on the outskirts of town. He grows some produce and maintains some livestock, but mostly he draws water from his well and supplies it to those around town who can't afford the hookup to TerraAqua. If he sounds like a nice man, that's because he is, but make no mistake. Beneath his pleasant exterior he is also a tough man, and he can do almost anything. Whenever Mrs. Bach's car wouldn't start, he was always the one who got it going. When three pallets of sheetrock donated to the elementary school were left collecting dust because there was no money to hire a contractor to do the job, it was Mr. Chupick who went in on the weekends to put it up. That is something that has always impressed me about him, how good he is with his hands. I'm good with my hands when it comes to electronicsâwires, transistors, antennas, that sort of thing. Mr. Chupick is good with his hands when it comes to the stuff that really matters, the stuff that people can't live without. I know about things that can change the world; the stuff he knows could rebuild it from scratch.
I get in and yank the door closed behind me. “So where's the water going tonight?”
“The food trucks. They could use a topping off.”
I suppose it's irony that Mr. Chupick says this just as we pass three boarded-up storefronts that all used to be restaurants.
Like many towns across North America, Brentwood was once a decent suburb that tried to become an affluent suburb by selling its energy rights. And just like many other towns across North America, things went very bad very quickly. In Brentwood, it wasn't mercury in the dirt or dioxin in the air, it was a major hydrofracking mishap that caused a slurry of chemicals and natural gas to poison the town's water supply. Just like that. One day you had the cleanest spring water coming out of your tap, the next you could set a match to it and light the stream on fire. No joke, people could actually set their taps on fire. After that, many of the former residents left town, mostly because they could afford to leave. They took their settlement checks and moved into gated communities further upstate, and Brentwood became just another halfway suburb for people whose former residences were out in the squatter settlements. People who previously could only ever dream of living in a suburb like Brentwood. But now that the local water was toxic, who else could ever hope to live there?
“There's something I've always wondered about,” I ask Mr. Chupick, “how come your well wasn't ruined in the disaster?”
“A lot of people wonder about that. The spill happened above the water table. It affected the reservoir and all the surface water, but mine is a deeper well that taps into an isolated pool of groundwater.”
“So how much water do you have down there?”
“That's the sixty-four thousand dollar question. The Blackburn Corps of Engineers came into Brentwood and did a complete topographical survey a few months ago. That would tell me the answer, but I can't get them to release the results. If I could see those surveys, I would know exactly how much there is.”
“Why won't they show them to you?”
“Because even though they're contracted by the North American Alliance, they're still a private company. There used to be this thing called
freedom of information
, but that went out with the bathwater once the corporations took over.”
“So how come you never joined the water collective?”
“Oh, they've tried. Ever since the disaster, the water collective has been after me to join. Sure, I could let TerraAqua take over the management of my water rights. They would come onto my property, cement up my well, drive a pump into the ground and turn it into a relay in their water system. In return, I would receive a monthly revenue from the collective. But who would that benefit? Right now, I draw the water myself and distribute it as I see fit. I don't need TerraAqua to manage that.” Mr. Chupick steers the truck onto my street.
“Is that why you didn't leave like everyone else?”
“I didn't leave because this town is my home. After Mrs. Chupick passed away, I couldn't see moving anywhere else. It may not be much, but all of my memories are in that little farmhouse.” We pull up to my house. “If you want to have a real sense of community, you have to marry a town like you marry a person. It's for better or worse. Brentwood may have a sickness right now, but I vowed to stay in sickness and in health. Understand?”
“I do.” The Free City had a lot of things going for it, but a sense of community was never one of them. Even at the academy, being a year younger than all my classmates made it tough to have any real friends. Moving out to Brentwood was the first time in my life I had either, so I do understand where Mr. Chupick is coming from.
“Besides,” he says as he lifts the shifter into park, “where would I go?”
Where indeed. I thank him for the ride and throw the door closed behind me.
I hear Martin mumbling something in the living room. He does this sometimes when he's trying to figure something out. Whatever it is, he can tell me about it in the morning. I grab the rotted banister and start upstairs but then stop for a moment to listen to some of Martin's mumbling. I can't make out the words but they sound unusually spastic.
What is it that has him so frazzled?
It's only two steps to the landing but it hurts every inch of my body. Toes, knees, the balls of my feet, they're all sore. I drag myself around the stairs and into the living room where Martin is pacing back and forth in a stylishly loose-fitting black suit with polished black shoes. His white shirt is unbuttoned at the neck. His unlinked cuffs dangle haphazardly from his jacket sleeves, and his hair is tied back cleanly. If James Bond were a nerd, he'd be Martin Baxter.
“Bollinger Bands,” he keeps saying. “Bollinger Bands.”
I have no idea what that means.
“It's just Bollinger Bands applied to a card distribution.”
“How was the game?” I ask.
“You expect abnormalities in the data set, of course. You expect those abnormalities, but over time those abnormalities should be normalized by the moving average. The standard deviations do allow for a margin of error.” He places his fingers on his lips and purses them. “I did everything right,” he says.
“Martin?” But he isn't listening.
“I did everything right. I kept the count. I calculated everything,
everything
on the fly. I kept a forty-card moving average and bound it high and low with one standard deviation. That tells you your entry and exit points, right?”
“If you say so.” I barely grasp what he's saying.
“I tracked it all. I knew exactly which way the table was trending. When it was trending up, I pressed up accordingly. When it started going the other way, I pressed back down. I split my tens exactly when I was supposed to, doubled when the numbers said to double, stayed when they said not to. Hit. Stick. Double. Split. I did everything right. Even on the insurance, which is normally a sucker bet, I knew precisely when the numbers favored hedging. I did everything right.” Martin turns to look at me. “I did everything right. The numbers were not wrong.” Now I can see the fear in his eyes. My stomach drops as Martin lifts his glasses off the bridge of his nose and pinches his sinuses. “Fifty thousand.”
“You owe the entire stake to the syndicate?”
“It was a zero-sum game,” says Martin. “All or nothing.”
He doesn't need to say it. We both know what that means. This is exactly how the syndicate operates. First they get their hooks into you, then they own you. In general, you don't ever want to owe the syndicate any amount of money, but I've seen people get in deeper over far less. Chimpo's uncle once took a galvanized pipe to the kneecap over just a few grand, but that was only because Chimpo's uncle had nothing else to offer, so when he couldn't pay, they put him on disability and collected that. But not Martin. Martin is far too valuable for that. He's someone they can exploit. Currency transfers, money laundering, wire fraudâall the things that would land Martin in prison if he got caught. “How long do we have?” I ask.
“I can make payments for thirty days. After that, I'll have to make other arrangements.”
Other arrangements
. That's always how they get you.
“My back is to the wall now, isn't it?” Martin mumbles. “There's no other choice now, is there?”
Martin looks to me as if for confirmation.
“No, there isn't,” I say. But that's only because I fully expect him to say that he's going to have to take the offer from Grumwell. I mean, that would be the reasonable assumption, wouldn't it?
“We're going to have to run.”
Run?
“Run where?”
“Into the squatter settlements. It's the one place the syndicate won't come after us.”
My jaw hangs open. Was he kidding? “It's the one place the syndicate won't come after us because even they won't mess with the settlement cartels.”
“Don't worry, we'll be fine.”
I immediately think of Dexter, who had to move into the squatter settlements when he was 5 after his family lost everything they had in the big asset crunch. The Drakes didn't have any choice at the time. We do.
“No. No way. We're not moving again.” It's not a response but an assertion. “This is our home, Martin. We're not leaving it. What about the offer from Grumwell?”
I can see Martin grind his teeth. “That's not an option. There is no way I would ever work for Grumwell!”
Even in a storm of fifty-foot waves, or in our case one giant fifty-thousand foot wave, Martin clings to his ideals like a life preserver. Ever since the takeover of Martin's old company, Grumwell has had a standing offer for Martin loaded with benefits, perks, and a substantial signing bonus. I know this because they never let a month go by without reminding him of it. They want him, and they are willing to pay anything to get him.
“Do you have any idea what they did to me?” he says.
“I know, Martin. They stole your company away from you.”
“No, Jack. If only it were that simple. Companies get swallowed all the time. That's business. Grumwell didn't just take Delphi away from me, they blackballed me among my own peers. Do you think it's just
bad luck
that no other firm will touch me?”
I know it isn't because Martin and I don't believe in luck.
“Grumwell made it known that any other firm who hired me would suffer the same fate as Delphi.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because that's the way Miles Tolan operates. When he wants something bad enough, he doesn't just take it by force. He orchestrates it so that the thing he wants comes to him. He removes all other options until Grumwell is the only one remaining, then he sits back and waits for his prize to come to him.” Martin drives his index finger into his head like he's tapping at his brain. “This is what they want, Jack! This is what they're after! But I will never let Miles Tolan have it. You have to take a stand for something in this world, and this is mine. I believe that knowledge is the shared intellectual property of all who seek itânot something to be owned by the few, or controlled by the one. My intellectual property is my own, for me to share with whomever I choose. It is not for sale to anyone. Especially not Miles Tolan.”
Now I'm the one who's grinding my teeth. “That's great, Martin. That's just wonderful. Every time you take a stand, I'm the one who ends up paying for it. I worked my ass off at the magnet academy so that I would be a shoe-in for every award. Then everything fell apart and you brought us out here. But did you hear me complain about it even once? No, I didn't. I just accepted the fact that I would have to work a few years and save up the money to pay for it myself. And that's fine, Martin. I'm willing to do that. But I am not willing to do this. I'm not leaving again.” If Martin has any kind of rebuttal, I don't give him the chance to make it. I'm already marching out the room.
“Thirty days, Jack.” He calls after me. “I can cover us for thirty days.”