I guess the war’d been bad for most people, but I was living fat. Before it kicked off, I was the khaki-panted chump in the third cubicle down on the left. Which office? Doesn’t matter. You’d never have noticed me anyway. Then the uprising uprose, the bombs started falling, and the trucks stopped coming. Those of us who were stuck here hadda get our consumer electronics from someplace, and I happened to be in a position to bring ‘em in. Life during wartime rolled along pretty sweet.

Until one day, on a routine delivery, I found the barrel of a gun jabbed hard into my cheekbone. Such a thing provides a crystal-clear perspective on one’s current predicament. What was I doing here?

“You trying to screw us, Gioia? You playing some kinda game?” This was Dewey, proprietor of a stall at the open-air Carondelet Bazaar, and usually one of my more companionable customers. Neither Dewey nor his gun seemed too pleased with the crates of IntelliTEC WPT1012 Digital Water Purity Testers I’d brought. “Seems to me these new gizmos look an awful lot like tracking devices, or maybe little explosives. What’s the story? You setting us up? You working for the Federals? Spill it, or I spill you.”

“Dewey, Dewey, it’s cool,” I stammered. “You’re working too hard, getting paranoid. You oughtta take a vacation.” Feeble humor would get me nowhere. The gun stayed. “Look, it’s just a device to test water. It measures the total dissolved solids, or TDS, in the water, to make sure it’s safe to drink. Makes sure there’s nothing nasty like asbestos, lead, mercury, whatever. Comes in handy in a place like this. You’ll sell every one of them, believe me.”

His eyes moved warily between me and the card, trying to check the sense of what I was saying. “Water tester, huh? You wouldn’t BS a fellow South Sider, now, would you?”

“Dewey, come on,” I laughed in what I hoped was a casually dismissive way. “It’s me, remember? Who got those hard drives through Federal lines when nobody else could? Who helped you get home from the East Side when you were so drunk you were practically falling off the bridge? For real, man. Clean water is safe water. Believe it.”

Five minutes later we were sitting around laughing, me counting Dewey’s payment, him testing a bottle from the water-seller’s stall (it failed), everybody swigging bootleg whiskey out of old Schlafly bottles just to stay on the safe side. Word was, a settlement was on the way. The war could end at any time, so I had to hustle these water testers and make my fortune while there was time. I could handle the stray dogs, the power outages, the local warlords, the occasional Federal mortar round. But I wasn’t going back to that cubicle.

Back to top