The Water Bottle

The Water Bottle

The station was painfully close. I was racing through the desert, the sun slowly roasting and marinating me, soon id be a meal for the grim reaper. Sand tore away under the wheels of my bike as I rode hard east. Looking down into my lap, I eyed the package. I could abscond. It wouldn’t take me long to make it over the border, and with this package id be set for life.
“If only.” Letting out a sigh, I sped to the station.
Water was life. Water was money. Water was power. These were the truths of the world. They told legends of a time where there was so much water, people would bathe in it, they would let it wash through sewages, and every house would have its very own supply of water. Children were told of magical places known as “oceans.” Water as far as the eye could see, and in that magical place where mythical creatures, some as large as a hundred men or more. But these were just tales told to bring comfort to thirsty children, inventions of our own imagination, made in order to keep ourselves from going completely insane.
I stopped to rest as the shadows grew taller and the sun began to set. Gingerly, I opened the package to reveal contents, that were far more valuable than my own life, my own and that of at least a million other people would not equal the importance of the package.
White Water.
White water was water in its purest form. In his hands he held crisp, clean, bottled life. A few drops of White Water could distill and purify any water, no matter how dirty it was. The stainless steel bottle was cold, to the point where it burned my palms, almost aching to be taken away.
Tempting.
So very tempting to simply run away from here. And never look back.
He could run to the city, sell this to the highest bidder and amass a fortune of water tokens.
The world had changed from the legends of when men with slips of paper ruled.
Nobility was not decided by the clothes you wore, the company you held, and certainly not by accomplishments you’ve gained.
He who drank the most water was the highest of nobility.
The great cities had festivals of water, the streets were flooded and it sprang from every corner supplied by the fat cat aristocracy that ran the privatized water companies of the city.
Here, in the outlying regions we had no water. Those in the city did not value water as we did. For us water was life, it was the difference between living tomorrow and dying tonight. The government did little to help. It supplied us with what limited reserves of water it had in the federal water factories, but it was rationed, harshly. There was never truly enough water for us. Our mouths would run dry for weeks before a new government welfare package was shipped. At the end of every year, each family received a single water token for each member of the family. Water tokens came in 4 varieties, the ounce, pint, quart, and gallon. Each token could be cashed out for amount it represented.
Thus tokens also became a system of credit. A form of payment for other goods, a few fruits could be bought at the average expense of 3 to 4 ounces of water.
Water tokens were hard to come by in the Outlying regions; they were too busy being stuffed into the pockets of the Viri Aqua. The “men of water.”
The Viri Aqua lived within the Center regions, the cities, they were the nobility, the aristocracy and they were everything we could never be. Most of the Viri Aqua ran private water corporations and companies selling water and water bonds to the upper and middle class residents of the city.
We had an identity as well, we were the “Inaquosa,” or the waterless. The Viri Aqua chose to ignore us, we were their brothers in race and species, fellow humans, dying and suffering but we had empty pockets. We provided them with no capital gain and so we became invisible. They pretended like we did not exist and there wasn’t a single thing we could do to change that. Never to be acknowledged we became self-sufficient. Aided by the government we started pooling our resources to create our own water reserves and plants, we searched far and wide for sources to water and like the slow trickle of desert rain we learned to survive.
Many of the Outlying regions had adopted a religion.
I believe that, man finds god where, and when, he needs him most, man creates god to yearn for what he desires, in a hope that there may be a hope, that there may be some external power to aid him. A fallacy of the highest honor. And so, a god of water was created. The great almighty “Deus Aqua.” A whole clergy was created over night, the servants of this water god who had received the divine revelation that water must be sacrificed in order to be blessed. Many of the poor, impoverished families gave up their water falling into the deception that is “God.” The priests harvested water from the mindless and hopeless people of the faith and supposedly sacrificed it to their God. Only God knows where that water goes.
And then there were the Ictus, the tappers. Known as both Hero’s and villains. These were men who strived to change the situation they were in. They tapped into the water factories of the Viri Aqua and syphoned water from them; they would then distribute it to the needy. Golden hearts they all had. What most didn’t know was that sometimes the tapping process wouldn’t quite go as planned. They took the lives of innocents without hesitation, and when confronted about it, their only response was that it was for their survival. Saints that held knives often became nothing short of devils themselves, only time would tell.

The station was in sight