The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 9

The man began to talk. He was John, a debt-recovery agent with one of the Chinese finance corporations.

Sameh stopped listening right then. Ellie could see it on Sameh’s face, out the corner of her eye. Sameh was bored as soon as she heard finance corporation, and started fidgeting and looking around.

Ellie listened anyway. She tried to stay out of debt-recovery work, and stick to chasing insurgents, but debt recovery was so widespread, so universal, that it was difficult to avoid completely.

She listened, and tried to work out what was going on. From what John was saying, his corporation owned a company which owned Ellie’s employer, and going through their records they had found her, found her team, and decided they were best for this. John looked at Sameh when he said that, looked at her and seemed a little smug. Ellie’s team, meaning he had expected Sameh to come too, Ellie supposed.

Sameh glanced up, and noticed John looking at her. She blinked, and then glared back. She was annoyed, was about to take a step towards him, and perhaps start everything again. Sameh was half an act, but sometimes such a good act that even Sameh forgot she was only pretending.

Ellie cleared her throat, and shook her head, and Sameh smiled and relaxed.

“If I work for you anyway,” Ellie said to John. “Why all this? Why not just tell me to do whatever you want done.”

“Need to know,” John said.

Ellie sighed. That particular phrase had come over from the old national governments and intelligence agencies and become the bane of people like her who were trying to actually get things done.

“Just let me explain,” John said. “It’ll all become clear.”

Ellie nodded, and John kept talking. He talked about demographics and skill sets and matches to niche task objectives. That part wasn’t useful, so Ellie stopped listening, the way she always did when people tried to give her instructions in corporate-speak. Eventually they would realize, and stop talking to themselves, and tell her what they actually wanted her to do in a way she would understand. Until then, she might as well stand there like Sameh was.

There wasn’t really any point bothering to listen. Ellie glanced at Sameh, and grinned, and Sameh grinned back. Sameh was okay. Sameh was waiting, too.

Since Sameh was okay, Ellie took the time to think.

The kid wasn’t hurt. That was the important thing to concentrate on now. Later on, she might want to kill this guy John, for putting her through what he had, but she’d wait and see and have a think about that before she did. John was just following his orders, and she understood that completely. It wasn’t really his fault that they had done things this way. And besides, the kid wasn’t hurt. That was actually what mattered.

Ellie thought, and while Ellie thought, John talked.

John talked, and Ellie half-listened.

                                                                        *

Once upon a time, at the end of the last century, the corporations that were now the largest lenders in the world had been small-scale plastics and electronic manufacturers. Those corporations had ended up making everything, absolutely everything in the world that anyone wanted to buy, and so had ended up owning all money, too. Obviously, in hindsight, Ellie supposed, but that had happened before anyone quite noticed, and apparently before the manufacturing corporations had thought it all through as well.

Their success caused a lot of problems, problems for them as well as everyone else. Suddenly the manufacturers had all the money, and were making things that now no-one could afford to buy. In order to keep manufacturing, and keep having customers, the manufacturers had to begin lending their money back to their customers, so people could keep buying their products. It was a lot more complicated than that, and had all sorts of shades of nuance about Chinese domestic politics and globalizing foreign trade and the place of denationalized financial institutions in an interconnected world. It was all very complicated, but actually it wasn’t. The Chinese manufacturing corporations which had all the money lent it to their customers, and somewhere along the way became Chinese finance corporations, and ended up owning the world. And by the time anyone thought to care, nobody had armies any more, or at least, not armies they could afford to pay without Chinese finance corporations’ loans, or equip without Chinese manufacturing corporations’ weapons, and they barely had governments either because governments didn’t actually do anything useful any more, so suddenly the world was as it was, and there wasn’t a great deal anyone could do to change it.

Everything had got a little tangled, but for most people it had actually been a good thing. Wars had stopped, mostly. Wars between real places, places with lawn sprinklers and fast-food chains and dishwashers in every kitchen. Those kind of places and got peaceful and secure, and had better credit, and got all the gadgets they needed.

Unless they made bad choices. Unless they took on more debt than they could handle.

The price of a comfortable life and peace and lots of gadgets was that sometimes whole countries went bankrupt. They went bankrupt, and were foreclosed on, and the debt-recovery corporations took over their business. Australia still had a government, as did Switzerland and the Baltic Union and Japan and what was left of the EU. And China, obviously. Those places had governments, but very few others. Mostly, incorporated trusts ran regions, and everyone was happy.

People were greedy, Ellie supposed. People always took more than they needed, or borrowed more than they could repay. They always did that, until eventually there hadn’t been very many governments left, not in any real sense, and that had made everything a lot simpler. And some governments had made terrible mistakes, too, which hadn’t helped. The Americans had made the worst of those. They had borrowed too much, and kept borrowing for too long, and then had agreed to allow debt-recovery on very unfavorable terms.

That was what debt-recovery work meant for Ellie, going to places where you were hated, where everyone was an insurgent, and taking away anything valuable you could find. It was a complicated, legalistic, highly political business. Much, much worse than just chasing hajjis around the mountains.