The Risers

Utility contractors for a set of Koreatown stacks: water and power, both, because a booster pump needs a tap to run and holding both means holding forty households at once. Mains pressure stops at the third floor of a six-storey stack; the pump and the roof tank above it are what make floors four to six habitable at all, and the Risers are the ones who keep that pump bolted to the right riser.

What they actually sell is lift, not water. That distinction is the whole business: anybody can turn on a tap, but only the Risers keep the machinery that gets the water above the third floor.

Yolanda Fierro is who the stacks call when two sets of neighbors want the same answer, and her rulings are close to the only enforcement mechanism the Risers have. Her collectors are collectors, not soldiers: nineteen-year-olds with hardware they've never fired, which is a danger to everybody and mostly to them.

What the crew knows#

• They arbitrate for free and collect for a fee. Hearing a dispute costs nothing; Fierro's income is a cut of whatever gets settled between the actual parties. That's also why calling her costs a crew nothing, even with no money on the table.
• Collections are a business, and most people pay before it comes to anything else. When somebody doesn't, the Risers can and do escalate: a valve gets shut first, and if that doesn't land, a collector gets sent who is there to make sure it does. What happens next depends entirely on which collector that turns out to be.
• A working booster pump, installed, runs roughly seventeen and a half thousand nuyen: the honest market rate for the only stock in the district, not a markup. They're the reason there's any stock at all.
• Nothing about the water in those stacks is legal, and nothing about it is negotiable either. That's not a contradiction to the Risers; it's just how utilities work when there's no housing authority left to run them.

Standing with the crew#

Whatever the crew made it in Run 00: Still Water. A crew who let Fierro arbitrate the two-buildings dispute is a party she's ruled for, on record in her book, which is worth more than money the first time it matters, in the run that follows.