Chapter 12 – Collins Notices
1674 Words
Capital Heights was lightyears away from Riverside. There, rather than humid air and woodsmoke, the air reeked of polished mahogany, expensive cigar smoke, and ambition. Government buildings were monuments of glass and steel, their air-conditioned hallways thrumming with the quiet, hard energy of power brokers and deal-makers.
High above the city, in a corner office, Edward Collins surveyed his kingdom. The view was unblemished, a panorama of progress and prosperity that deliberately shunned the sprawling, less-sightly edges on which most of the city itself lived. Collins himself was a man cut for this environment. Collins was in his late fifties but had the healthy build of a much younger man, his hair silvery and set neatly, his suit pressed to accommodate the least softening around his waist. He seemed like a leader. He cultivated the image with the skill of a master gardener.
He was no minister, not on any ballot to which the public had a clue. His influence resided elsewhere, and it was more devious, more potent. He was a "consultant." A middleman. The man who knew how to grease the right palms, what regulations could be "streamlined," and which projects were worth a politician's blessing. His business was influential, and trade was very, very good.
He was reviewing a proposal for a new, state-funded water treatment plant—a project he’d shepherded through three ministries and stood to make a staggering commission on—when his assistant, a perpetually nervous young man named Ben, entered without his usual knock.
Collins didn’t look up. “This had better be a national emergency, Ben. I’m mid-fleecing.”
“Sir, it’s… it’s about the Riverside situation,” Ben stammered, holding a thin file.
Collins exhaled, putting down his gold pen. "Riverside? The backwater with the crazy professor? Did he drill another illicit borehole? Get Abiodun to find the institute steeper. Make an example of him."
"It's… worse than that, sir." Ben placed the file on the desk. "The initial reports were… vague. Our source in the regional ministry cabled this report."
Collins opened the file with an expression of extreme boredom. It contained a couple of grainy photos and a brief memo. The borehole well was the first, a very professional-looking bit of kit. The second photo was of a group of villagers standing in a circle around it. The third picture left him floored. It was Reuben Stone, standing with a tall nurse, overseeing a group of people stirring something in massive buckets. The fourth was the most fascinating: white, chemical haze surrounding a shantytown.
The memo was plain bureaucratic prose, but certain sentences were highlighted.
".subject has apparently enabled substantial enhancements in local health outcomes."
".unauthorized dispersal of medical commodities (bed nets, diagnostic tests)."
"appears to have mobilized the community into a de facto public health corps."
"Local opinion is strong in support, calling him 'Doctor Prophet'."
Collins's air of listlessness cleared, to be followed by a cold, creeping interest. He read the memo again, and then again. His trained mind, honed for decades to spot threats to money flows, began connecting dots at a nightmarish pace.
A water project he hadn't profited from. A shipment of medical supplies that bypassed his associated companies. A people being organized,made powerful, and therefore less dependent on government contracts—his contracts. A man being branded a"prophet."
The first three were pinpricks of money. The last was a political threat of the worst sort.
He slumped back in his leather chair, fingers laced together. "A 'prophet,'" he said quietly, a thin, dangerous smile twisting on his lips. "In the poor backwaters. How… biblical."
"Sir?" Ben said, confused.
"Can't you see it, Ben?" Collins's tone was soft, almost familial. "Pestilence. A plague of saviors. Miraculous interventions. He's not just building wells; he's building a story. And stories are far more hazardous than infrastructure."
He saw the endgame with crystal clarity. This "Professor Stone" starts with a village. Then a district. His fame travels. He is a people's activist legend, living proof of the futility of the state. Politicians, perpetually eager for a bandwagon of people, would beat a path to his doorstep, funneling money and publicity into his operations, cutting out the entrenched middlemen. Egos like Edward Collins.
This wasn't a pest. This was a nascent revolution. And it had to be strangled in infancy.
"Abiodun was an i***t," Collins declared, his tone losing its softness, turning razor-sharp and surgical. "He approached this like a bureaucrat. This has to be handled with a lighter touch. We don't want to make a martyr. We want to discredit the miracle."
He picked up his phone, scrolling through CEOs and ministers to locate a number marked simply "Harbor City - Eyes." He clicked it to the speaker.
The second ring was answered by a rough voice. "Yes, sir?"
"I have a job to be done," Collins said, his eye on Reuben's photo. "Riverside Village. There is a guy there. Reuben Stone. He has a health institute."
"I know the one. The well-digger. People are talking."
"I want you to listen," Collins commanded. "I want you to find people who are not talking. The ones who are envious. The ones who were overlooked for a job. The ones who think the 'Doctor Prophet' is a fake. Everyone has critics. Find them. Nurture them."
"Okay. And what do you want these… critics… to say?"
Collins hesitated. "The angle is not that he's incompetent. The angle is that he's dangerous. That his methods are untested. That his 'miracles' are cover for something else. Possibly he's experimenting with unapproved drugs on the villagers. Maybe the well water is making people sick in some other way. Maybe he's an agent working for a foreign country, destabilizing the region. Let them make up their minds. Just start the rumor.".
"Whispers don't come cheap, sir," the voice answered bluntly.
"All worth something does, I suppose," Collins replied brusquely. "Bill me through proper channels. I want this in two weeks."
He ended the call and looked at Ben, who was pale. "Sir, is that? absolutely necessary? He's only a village schoolmaster."
"That's what they said about the carpenter from Nazareth, Ben," Collins shot back, his smile restored, colder than ever before. "We are in the business of dominating realities. This man is creating his own reality. I won't let that stand."
His authority was the first stone cast into a shadow war. The Harbor City resident, a fixer known as Kofi, worked well. Within weeks, a new sort of whisper circulated in Riverside, crawling under the doorways of the newly built tippy-taps and the proudly hung bed nets.
It started at the grimy bar on the village's perimeter, where disillusioned men gathered to drown their despair in liquor.
"My city cousin tells me that those nets are coated with a chemical that renders women sterile," a man complained loudly enough for others to do so. "The government would never do this. That is why the 'professor' had to import them illegally."
Another, driven by cheap liquor, interjected, "He decides who gets the aid. Did your family get a net? My family didn't. He prefers the ones who are most appreciative of him. It is not healthy. It is about loyalty."
The rumors were common because they played off underlying fears and worries. Why did some families get nets before others? Is there an ulterior motive the professor had for being so interested in their children's health?
Reuben had noticed the change himself, not from the System, but from Anna. She came into the clinic one morning, looking grim.
"Old man Goro was here," she grumbled, shutting the supply cabinet with more force than necessary. "Inquiring about the new nets being 'government approved.' Claimed he'd heard they were 'dangerous.'"
Reuben scowled. "That's absurd. They're generic WHO-spec LLINs.".
"I know that. You know that. But he doesn't." She stood in front of him. "And Mrs. Eze, Nneka's mother? She visited me and questioned me, very softly, if the water in the well had been tested for. for something that would render her daughter barren someday."
Reuben's belly grew cold and knotted. This wasn't ignorance. This was on purpose. The phrasing was too specific, too evil.
That evening, while returning to his institute, he had spotted a group of men sitting in the corner with a young, well-dressed man he did not know. The man was lighting a cigarette and talking in low, confident tones to his audience. He spotted Reuben, nodded a fraction too knowingly, and turned back to his listeners, his smile fading into an expression of intense worry.
The System, which was sensitive to political and social danger, finally made its pronouncement. A new warning surfaced, not in the health column, but in a muted, foreboding amber.
POLITICAL/SOCIAL THREAT INDICATOR: CAMPAIGN OF DISINFORMATION SUGGESTED. SOURCE: DOMESTIC ENEMY AGENT EDWARD COLLINS -> DOMESTIC ASSETS TASKED. TYPE: WHISPER CAMPAIGN, SEEDS SUSPICIONS ABOUT HOST'S MODUS OPERANDI AND MOTIVE. CURRENT EFFECT: LOW (5% COMMUNITY TRUST EROSION). PROJECTED EFFECT: WILL SABOTAGE LATER ATTEMPTS AT COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION IF UNCHALLENGED. OBJECTIVE: IDENTIFY AND DEACTIVATE DISINFORMATION SOURCES.
Reuben stood in the middle of the parched road, the words burning before his eyes. It was one thing to question whether it would be. It was another to have the cold, hard facts. Collins's name was on it. The war was no longer something out there in possibility. It had been declared.
He had been fighting sickness, believing that his enemies were senseless germs and systematic apathy. He was wrong. His deadliest enemy was a man in a sharply cut suit in a skyscraper many miles away who had just decided that the well-being of a village was a price he could afford to pay in defense of his bottom line.
The faith he had struggled so fanatically to create was no tool; it was now the very terrain of conflict. And the first, covert attacks had already begun. Edward Collins had seen him. And Reuben knew, with deadly accuracy, that this was only the beginning.
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