Run 00: Still Water

Six floors with no water, a stolen pump, and two buildings that both needed it.

The brief

A stack in Koreatown had no water above the third floor for eleven days, because somebody unbolted the booster pump off the riser and walked out with it. The mains only push water up three storeys; the pump is what fills the roof tank during the hour a day there's pressure to draw on. Without it, floors four to six are dry.

The building's owner of record is a management company that exists as a payment address and nothing else. It wanted the pump back — not out of concern, but because forty households had stopped paying rent, and that was costing more per week than hiring us.


Client	A management company. No name worth writing down and no person to meet
Broker	Fontaine, ten per cent as always
Offer	6,000¥ flat. No second offer, no twist in the payment, nobody buying anybody's silence
Deadline	None stated, which meant the rent strike was the deadline
Status	Closed. Paid in full, in a corner shop, in cash

We took it because we live around here.

Complications so far

The pump hadn't been stolen for money. It was bolted to a riser two buildings over, in a stack whose own pump had failed a month earlier. Sixty households up there with the same problem and nobody to call.
There was not enough water for both buildings, and there still isn't. That was the whole job. Everything else was plumbing.
And no, you can't just buy another pump. We checked, because it was the obvious way out of it. Nobody in this city manufactures one. Everything that works came in through the port years ago on somebody's manifest, and every unit in the basin that still runs is already bolted to a riser with people living above it — because in a city where forty households will go dry over one pump, anything sitting idle is sitting idle because it's broken.

What's actually available: bodies in the salvage yards off Alameda, plenty of them, all missing impellers and seals. Those are imports, the harbour pump crews hold what stock exists, and they trade them for favours rather than money. Or a working unit from the Risers, who are the only people holding any, at fourteen thousand installed. The job paid six.
The Risers offered to arbitrate, for a cut and the standing. Taking it would have settled the thing cleanly and left us in a relationship with a utility cartel.
A fire escape on the target stack is load-bearing in a way a fire escape should not be, and somebody's grandmother uses it daily.

Payout

6,000¥, less Fontaine's ten per cent, handed over at a Stuffer Shack halfway between the two stacks because it was open at that hour and she was buying.

Nothing else. No favour owed to us, no bonus for a clean job, and no interest from anybody in what we had actually done up there.

Aftermath

Settlement to be written up here.

What was on the table, for the record, because we argued about most of it before we did anything:

Take the pump back and bolt it where it belonged.
Connect the two buildings and let the one pump fill both tanks, alternating.
Leave it where it was and repair the failed pump instead — parts out of the harbour.
Hand it to the Risers and let them arbitrate for a cut.
Go back to the management company and get them to pay for a second pump.
Take a pump off somebody who wouldn't notice.
Give the money back.

What holds regardless of which one we picked: forty households on one block and sixty on another both know who came and what we chose. That's a permanent condition rather than a consequence, and it's the first entry in this log for a reason.