Tod White- Titan's customs official

I looked at the new guy, after college I needed a job, a better one then Mcdonalds, since I already lived on Titan getting a position, making sure everything was OK was pretty easy to get. Everything had changed so much, sure the rent was still dirt cheap but that secret didn't stay a secret and now that you could go walk around outside, the World tree was evolving into an actual city of its' own. Not just a suburb of Seattle it even had it's own college these days.

"Ok, what's our biggest export from Mars?"

I had maps ou,t this guy needed to know this shit.

"Gold?"

I shrugged.

"There is some serious gold mining going on and gems too, but that isn't it."

I put a shaker down on the table.

"Salt."

"Table salt?"

I nodded my head.

"Ok you're making a planet, you can make all of the oceans drinkable, which makes farming a whole lot easier or you can have standard oceans, which one are you going to pick?"

"Fresh water."

I nodded.

"Yeah and why go out and create salt deposits for salt mines, it's just a lot more effort then you need. The problem is this, human beings kind of need salt to live, not a lot of it but some, and your new homeworld doesn't have enough salt, which is a problem."

"Freaking salt?"

"We live in an era or lived in an era were salt's dirt fucking cheap, for most of human history that wasn't necessairly the case. Salt's been used as currency, wars have been had over salt, it has a place in many cultures, salt is fucking important and only two planets in the solar system have saltwater oceans."

"Earth and Mars."

"And what planet do we own?"

"Mars."

"Yep, we don't have a monopoly of course, any nation on Earth with a coastline can export salt to their colonies, but the price of salt has gone up a little, by about 25%. Mars is pretty stable and things on Earth are not very stable so we export salt to all of the other worlds. It's not a lot of profit but since the price of metals suck, and agriculture is going to be dominated by the other planets, it's our nitch."

"Salt, fucking salt."

"You don't know how important something is until you have to go without it."

"And that's all we have."

"Well no, Mars... Mars is fucking weird, remember we have 3 Endbringer corpses powering it, not just one like most worlds, and it doesn't use that power in the same way."

"And?"

"Eh you have 10% less gravity so old people tend to like it, easier on the joints then Earth gravity, and there are a whole bunch of brute force things out there to make terraforming easier. So we can do tropical agriculture."

"..."

"Ugh, things like coffee, sugar, bananas, that sort of thing. Venus and Earth can do that too but what most people want are temperate zones. Which are good at growing rice, wheat and a lot of other stuff but not so good at other things."

"Why not?"

"Have tropical zones? It's a lot of effort and there are always trade offs, people want the most bang for their buck. Titan's more balanced then most planets but even they had to make trade offs. Not that Mars is a tropical zone we are just able to cheat, seriously you can grow anything there."

"And it still..."

"Sucks? Ever play DnD? Everyone else is playing warriors, a lot of power all up front. Mars is like playing a wizard, it's going to take more work but in the long run you're much better off. At least you could breath the air these days, and there is limited fishing."

"Nerd."

"This nerd is trying to show you the ropes and you need to know this shit, because this is your job now. Our job is to make sure that people don't try to smuggle drugs or other illegal things and cause an international issue. You need to know what actual salt looks like in all of it's forms because you're going to see it a lot. You need to know if someone's trying to smuggle cocaine or meth past you. This is your job now, take it seriously."

I looked at my phone and then studied a text.

"We're getting a ship, a problem one. Come on, follow me."

I walked with the new guy.

"A problem?"

"Yeah, you see the ship lied about its' manifest, um the paperwork that says what you have, that's a big giant no no. So continuing on, what do you know about our shipping rates?"

His eyes were blank and he shrugged.

"I don't know."

"How did you get in?"

"I passed a drug test, didn't have a record, and graduated high school."

Yeah... I didn't know that the standards were that low.

"Ok we have a class system from F, the lowest to S the highest. An F class ticket is just an individual either walking or taking a train from portal to portal, that's a quarter."

"25 cents."

"Right, then you have small boats like kaiacks or cannoes or motercycles, thats a class D, that's a buck."

"Ok."

"Then you have a class C, that's a small motorboat or a small car, we charge them 5 bucks. Class B are things like yachts and trucks, and by trucks I mean big rigs, not the trucks your average guy tools around in, that's a class C. We charge 10 bucks for those guys."

"That sounds like..."

"A rip off? They're getting a day pass through the entire network, you can make serious money that way if you're smart and you can get a deal if you go for a package, which I will go over later. Class A are larger ships, if it's between the size of a yacht and a super tanker it goes under class A, we charge them 25 bucks. Finally you get to class S, container ships, they're different, they get charged on weight so it varies. Leave their pricing to Thinkers and tinkertech."

"Ok, and um?"

"We process a lot of the lower stuff but 70% of our money comes from Class S shiping, this World tree alone makes 2 billion dollars a year, and that's only going to get larger as more people move to Titan and..."

He was here, a class A fishing ship.

"Stop the ship."

"My freedom of the seas is being-"

"Look this isn't our world ok? This is UK's world and if you want to fish here you need a license."

Lets see, he's from Spain, great.

"And dynamite fishing's banned here so you're going to have to leave it behind."

"YOU'RE STEALING FROM ME?"

"No, look your dynamite will go into safe keeping and then be returned to you."

"I shouldn't have to pay for a fishing license."

"This isn't Earth, look a commercial fishing license, and this covers an entire year of fishing, costs 50 pounds."

"My rights are being infringed upon."

"Look, I'm going to call the british consolate ok, at least hear them out."

"Fine."

I went to the call center and got in touch with my counterpart.

"Oliver, this is Todd."

"Got 'nother problem, mate?"

"Yeah got a fisherman that tried to pull a fast one on Oberon, we stopped him and now he's here. Here's his updated manifest."

I emailed the file.

"Hm, we don't allow dynamite fishing but we kind of need some bloody dynamite, tell you what tell him that we're willing to buy the bloody dynamite from him and take our fishing license out of that."

"What would he get?"

"Twice the going rate on Earth, it's more then he would get legally and he could fish for a bloody year, it's a fair deal."

"Ok..."

I went back to the phone.

"Ok, the british are willing to buy your dynamite from you, at twice Earth prices and give you a fishing license. You walk out of this with more money and can fish to your hearts content, everybody wins, you get to fish, the british get their dynamite and you're out of our hair."

"I refuse to have my property stolen from me!"

I massaged my temples.

"Then we're just going to send you to Europa, you're spanish so the spanish government on Europa might be willing to pull some strings for you. Bye."

I turned off the phone.

"Another lesson you can't fix stupid, it's a terminal disease and there isn't a cure for it."

"And the guy?"

"He's Europa's problem now."