Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
- Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
For a long time, mankind has found amusement in the suffering of others. There's something about seeing somebody go through some sort of pain and knowing it isn't you that's darkly reassuring or entertaining. It appeals to the remnants of ape in the back of the head, the part of us that looked at what the leopard just did to their troopmate and think 'hey, that's one less male I have to fight to chat up Doris over there'.
When the average man does it to the average man, it's called schadenfreude, and people laugh about it. When governments do it to the average man, it's called tyranny and people tend to do something about it, or at least grumble. The Romans were smart enough to sell popcorn when they did, which made it entertainment and so it was okay, even though people were still getting killed horribly.
When humans do it to animals, its a lot more complicated. Some animals, like dogs and cats, were smart enough to realize that acting cute was an eternal meal ticket for them. Anything done to them was considered unthinkable. Others, like cows and pigs, weren't so quick on the uptake, and so nobody makes a fuss when entire herds go into the big shed and never come out again.
And then there were those who were quick on the uptake, but they weren't dogs or cats, so it didn't matter. And the only people who cared were those in white coats, and okay, maybe they stroked you and fed you fish, but that was as far as that went. You didn't have fur or big honest eyes, so there was nothing preventing you from being shoved in a tank several times too small for you and made to do somersaults. When people did that to animals like that, it was called entertainment. The ideas the Romans left behind were a lot more tenacious than first thought.
Or perhaps not.
In 2016, The Orca Welfare and Safety Act was passed by the California Assembly. It meant one thing, and one thing only. No more animal shows. No more dragging these actually quite intelligent out of the ocean and making them do tricks. No more breeding animals just to keep it going. Someone, somewhere, had turned around to ancestral memory of the Roman, the man who sat and laughed while a spear went through a lion's throat, and said 'no, this is not okay, and honestly your nose is hideous'.
There were a lot of people upset about this. But one of them wasn't.
---
~Aqualand Marine Life Park, Whalestrand~
October 18th, 2016
Cleve Sharpe, CEO of Aqualand, didn't blink when his aide Carlton Knaggs burst into the room waving the newspaper.
But that was because he was focused on the coffee machine. He had two cups in front of him - he knew that Knaggs would have been coming. And he'd known exactly what kind of mood Knaggs would have been in, which was why he’d been making the drinks at all. Knaggs was a man who seemed to be perpetually on the edge of a panic attack even on a good day - and this, from the sound of his voice as he entered, was not one of those.
"Seen this?!" Knaggs howled, brandishing the paper. "You seen this, Sharpe?!"
"I might have heard something about it," drawled Sharpe as he watched the last of the water pour into the second cup. "Take a seat, Knaggs, my man."
He heard the rustle as Knaggs didn't so much take the seat as snatch it. In the same instant, he heard the flap and skid of a newspaper being flung to the desk. He persisted in not turning around, casually ripping the lid off a plastic milk cup and pouring it in.
"Front page!" gasped Knaggs. "Front damn page! I was just saying to my wife last night, 'God, we'd be lucky if it was only second page'! And now-"
"Breathe, Carl," said Sharpe. "There is really nothing to worry about. Sugar?"
"Nothing to worry about?!" Knaggs' voice came in a choked whisper that was holding back a scream.
Cleve Sharpe turned at last. Even the act of turning around was attention-grabbing when Cleve Sharpe did it. He had a presence about him - tall, narrow-faced, with iron-grey hair and keen blue-green eyes, which gave him the appearance of an old and cunning sea eagle surveying its kingdom. He seemed to tower over Carlton Knaggs, who by comparison was all wide eyes and thin body, like a stoat becoming aware of a wolf prowling behind it.
"California isn't Whalestrand," Sharpe explained as he strode back to the desk with the cups, each step calculated with precision. "They can make all the laws and pass all the bills they want. But we left America to all that petty infighting years ago. We don't have to pay any attention at all. Even if the rest of the world follows, it doesn't matter to us. Let them grab all the political brownie points they want, Knaggs."
A thin smile covered his lips as he said this. He knew, of course he did. He'd learned, from an age far too young to learn such a thing, the true nature of the modern American Dream. The idea that anyone could come from anywhere and become anything if they tried hard enough. And he'd learned that it was exactly what was advertised - a dream. Something ephemeral, something fake. There were plenty of people who tried hard and didn't become anything, because there were a thousand other things in the way and no amount of trying could push them aside.
He sat down and offered the cup to Knaggs. It was taken as though it were life-saving medicine and not mere caffeine.
But Sharpe had also understood that, once you grasped this idea, you could then ignore it. Things that weren't real didn't matter. Dreams, by dint of their romantic ideal, forced you to also obey those annoying little concepts such as human decency and government regulation. And the moment you ignored any of those, everything else came a lot easier. When you didn't care, you didn't have any qualms about doing anything that was...
Well, illegal wasn't the correct word. The bits of paper made sure of that. But anyone who wasn't Cleve Sharpe might worry about it at night, and he didn't.
He picked up the paper - a local affair, cheap drivel on cheap paper - and glanced at the headline.
WAHEY FOR WHALES!
Marine life shows to be banned in the state of California
Rest of America to follow?
Sharpe snorted. “Well, that is news, isn’t it? Oh, but look.” He pointed at the picture under the headline, of a young blonde woman caressing the noie of an orca emerging from the water. "Isn't that adorable? Really makes you feel something for the animals, doesn't it? How easy it is, to make people feel good for doing nothing, when you frame it just right."
All that he got in reply was a loud slurp. He looked up and saw that Knaggs was now setting down a completely empty mug. The man might have been built like a scarecrow in a child’s picture book, but he had a tolerance for boiling coffee that would make even the most hardened gourmet run for the hills.
"Do you know," Knaggs choked out, "how much money we've thrown away on this? I went over the finances, and it's far in excess of what we normally spend on our animals! Three times what we paid that local fisherman! Who, by the way, ended up... well, let's not dwell on that! And what have we got out of it?!"
"I don't know", said Sharpe, eyes scanning the paper again. "You tell me."
"Oh, I'll tell you, all right! Two of them have died and only three of them can do any of the routine! The little ones learn quick, but the adults? Forget it! From what ol' Haroldsson tells me, they keep trying to grab people by the ankles or biting them! And now this law's come in-"
"Which we have nothing to worry about," said Sharpe in his natural, easy drawl. He put down the paper, then picked up his mug and sipped his coffee slowly, the movement born from years of easy and confident patience. Knagg watched him with the wide-eyed mania of someone staring down a speeding truck and praying to God that the driver would remember which pedal was which.
"Nobody but you or I knows that we have these... unusual animals," continued Sharpe. "And even if they did, what could they do? They aren't orcas. They aren't even officially recognized as a species. The law doesn't apply to them. And most people don't even believe they exist anyway. To the average man, what happened on Mocrocks Beach was the imaginations of two children and the leaked documents from the Navy so much conspiracist fluff. In any case, what we do with those animals is our business and nobody else's. No government has the right to tell us what to do with our own property."
"But they certainly can tell us what to do with our money!" snapped Knaggs. "Especially since we seem to be trundling along suspiciously well for something that basically makes no income! And that's including the expense we threw away on those animals!"
"I thought we had people working on that," said Sharpe, quirking an eyebrow.
"They're accountants, Sharpe, not miracle-workers!" was the retort. "They're doing all they can, but nine thousand dollars doesn't just vanish! Anyone could look at our accounts and see all that money being poured into oblivion, and then they'll ask questions, Sharpe! They will! You know how we got this park? They'll want to know that, too! If there's an audit-"
"You know there won't be." Sharpe sipped his coffee. "You're still thinking about this the old-fashioned way, Knaggs. Money isn't reality. It's smoke and mirrors, it always has been. With a flick of a pen, a gorillionaire becomes a pauper and street slime wears Liberace. The moment you understand that, nothing stops you from taking as much as you want."
He put his mug down and fixed the sweating scarecrow that was Knaggs with a hard, directed stare.
"You and your men know how to do this," he went on. "So just keep doing it. Surely I'm not asking too much?"
Knaggs licked his lips. Any question asked of you by a man like Sharpe was loaded like a small hand cannon aimed for your stomach. One wrong turn of phrase could end with your metaphorical guts out for all to see. Knaggs had spent most of his life talking to men like this, and, as he always did, he picked his words with the delicate care of a man assembling a house of cards in the face of an approaching earthquake.
"It's j-just..." he stammered. "We're barely making money as it is. All the closures, the maintenance, the fees for veterinary and animal care... Never mind breaking even, we can barely pay our employees. And half of them are needing to be taught as we go, and we haven't got time for teaching."
"I should have thought the new trainers we've had in-" began Sharpe. But Knaggs interrupted with a bark of bitter laughter.
"Trainers? That's generous, Sharpe! Half-wit sons and daughters of fishermen and boat-scrapers from that backwater port city! Coming to Aqualand and thinking it'll be something glamorous, only to find a tumble-down old pond barely open on a good day! Some of them haven't even seen a fish unless it was gutted and fried! We're employing people who aren't fit to clean out a rock pool, because all the old brigade won't come back whatever I offer!"
He sat back and dabbed at his glistening brow with a handkerchief. "I don't know, Sharpe... Even if it wasn't for those new... acquisitions, we're basically on borrowed time. This whole place is a lash-up, it really is. You can cut all the corners and pay you want, but-"
He stopped. Because Cleve Sharpe was giving him a particular piercing look.
The world in which Cleve Sharpe existed wasn't quite the same as everyone else's. You got caught up in it the same way a raft gets caught up in the slow but powerful current of a river. And he'd made it so that trying to get out of the raft was an inherently more dangerous proposition than staying in it. But that also meant that whatever didn't fit in his world, anything that went against the narrative, could basically be erased. Some things didn't happen because they simply could not happen, not in Cleve Sharpe's world.
The look Cleve Sharpe was giving to Carlton Knaggs was saying: I am erasing from my memory the words that my ears did not hear and could not have come out of your mouth. Now, try again.
Knaggs swallowed.
"...I can give you six months," he said. "The little ones might have grown by then and they'll know the routine. We can get the show ready by the time the holiday season comes around, when the tourists come in. And if I can get the accountants to move some figures, we can keep the lads paid until then. Then when the tourists come in, we might be able to turn things around."
And that was when the smile, the thin and sharp smile that suggested the old sea eagle had spotted a particularly tasty fish, broke over Cleve Sharpe's face.
"Excellent, Knaggs," he drawled. "Reliable as ever. Even if it does take you a bit of prompting, I might add. A little initiative wouldn't kill you, would it?" He took one last sip of his coffee, then leaned back in his chair.
"You've got your six months," he went on. "I'm sure you can pull the money out of somewhere. Someplace that never needed it to begin with. And do try to stop shying at flies, Knaggs, my man. I've told you, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Everything is under control."
The facial expression of Carlton Knaggs indicated that he didn't believe it was so and madly wished that it was. But in the face of Cleve Sharpe's seeming omnipotence and charisma, what could one say? Nothing that wouldn't be immediately erased from his reality. One just had to accept, when one was alone with this iron-haired, sharp-featured godling of finance and corporate double-speak, that he was right and everyone else was wrong. He met reality with an unflinching grin, and reality had to flinch for him.
There was never a man who was so grateful to get out of his sea as Knaggs was. He made for the door with quick strides, wondering how on earth he was going to quell his anxiety today. Not with the damn pills. He hated the things. Maybe he could find somebody to shout at for something, and then-
"By the way."
Knaggs turned. Cleve had polished off his coffee and had picked up the paper again.
"The design for the new mascot. How's that coming along?"
Knaggs pulled a face. "Honestly? Pretty damn bad. Those designers you brought in from Japan? Weirdoes to a man or woman, and they just don't want to be told anything! I told them, stick to cute cartoon dolphins and seahorses, that's what the kids like. But no, they think a jetski-riding superhero who preaches about ocean conservation is more relevant to modern times. I tell you, that's the last time-"
“Just let them do their thing, Knaggs, my man. They know their work better than anyone. As long as the board approves of it, that’s all that matters.”
Once again, Carlton Knaggs knew better than to question the steadfast solidity with which his boss faced everything. So he left. Cleve Sharpe waited until he heard the latch click. Then he picked up the paper again and opened it.
There was an article, about three pages in. It was about yet another sea monster sighting. Accompanying it was a photo taken by somebody to whom the art of photography was something only heard about when drunk. It was frustratingly blurry, and showed no more than a dark shape under the water that might have been… well, anything. Yet more sensationalist tosh to keep the punters hooked and cash rolling in.
Cleve Sharp gave a sardonic smirk.
“Well,” he said to himself, “might as well give them what they want.”
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