The Complete Karma Trilogy (12 page)

“Is it possible for two people to be one person? It doesn’t seem possible to me, but I’m looking at this picture and it’s the only conclusion I can come to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m looking at the reflection of whoever it is that’s using Charles’ Karma Chip, and it’s not him. Now I’m asking, is that possible?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Why not?” Will argued.

“Karma would have noticed. And you can’t use the same Chip. They’re too complicated for any citizen to understand, much less build and manipulate.”

“What if Karma wasn’t looking, because it didn’t expect it either? I don’t think it’s impossible, is all I’m saying.”

“Well, you show me whatever it is you’re looking at when we’re at work today, and I’ll tell you what I think.”

“Okay.”

“Goodnight, rookie. Get some sleep. If you’re really up this late, looking into that kind of thing, you’re trying too hard.”

Ronin 4

Living in Terrors

Mr. Laurel was
with them when they finally moved on with the experiment, two days later than scheduled. Reiko was still somewhat distraught, but she showed up every day that she was supposed to, and carried on with her observations.

She was later to find out that Mr. Okada had no real family, and in his will specifically requested that he not have a funeral and that his substantial wealth be divided between a charity and Kaishin. She had been concerned that somehow the lie would be discovered, that her and Mr. Okada were in no way related. It wasn’t quite clear to her what the consequences would be, either. She wasn’t even sure why the lie had been told, anymore. But it never happened, no one ever brought it up with her.

Haru had brought a laptop with him, and the group of nine was crammed into her room for the first time. “It only takes this one button,” Haru had said, “and we will see how all of this progresses.”

While they were all watching, Haru hit the button. Reiko had arranged the cages somewhat like a stage, putting the four groups into four cages, so that everyone could see better. She was standing in front.

Like the first time, nothing seemed to change after the button had been pushed. The rats looked a little disoriented to Reiko, but there was nothing obvious about the transition.

“A very boring kind of science,” Noburu said.

“That you know nothing about,” Hideo said.

“You can’t be a salesman without knowing something about your product. I’m not an idiot,” Noboru replied.

“Could the two of you take it outside, or something?” Toru said, irritated. They were all irritated.

“Do they look fine to you?” Haru asked Reiko, although his eyes never left his laptop.

“They look well enough,” she said.

“What about now?”

“What do you mean? What changed?”

“I took another step. They’re in groups of eight now.”

“Are you serious!” Reiko yelled. She didn’t even know why she was mad.

“Haru!” Toru seemed upset as well. “No one gave you permission to do that. That wasn’t the plan.”

“Was any of this the plan?” Haru yelled back. “Does it even matter anymore? It’s just a button, and I pressed it. It’s just rats, and they’re fine. Is there a reason for us to follow a strict procedure, when everything’s falling apart? Is there a ‘falling apart procedure’ that I’m not aware of? The Americans kill Mr. Okada, and we’re supposed to just continue on like nothing happened?”

Before he burst, Reiko didn’t think that Haru was capable of the extreme emotion that he was expressing. He had looked so calm, but the transformation had happened instantly, and he was entirely red, spit flying from his mouth like an archetypal madman.

“No American killed Mr. Okada,” Mr. Laurel said, calmly but sternly. “I will remind you that he committed suicide, Mr. Wataya, and while it might have been due to his circumstances at work, we can hardly be held liable for—”

Haru grabbed the man by the lapels of his suit. He had dropped the laptop on the floor, where it made a dull crack as the screen discreetly shattered. It looked like Haru was going to say something, but instead he just laughed uncontrollably into the man’s face. Mr. Laurel was obviously unsettled, and couldn’t react. When Haru had laughed for long enough, he let go, and directly left the room. Toru followed him out into the hallway, but came back in a minute and said, “He’s gone. I don’t know where to.”

“Very unprofessional,” Mr. Laurel finally said.

“Well, you’ll have to forgive him that, won’t you?” Toru replied.

“I won’t, no. We’ll find a replacement for him, as soon as we can. We can’t afford to have someone so erratic on the team, even if he does show up again.”

“Do you know how important the computer program he made is, to this project?”

“Yes, yes I do,” Mr. Laurel said.

“And do you know how long he’s been working on that program? And how obscure he made his code? He doesn’t program like anyone else, it’s all completely unintelligible to anyone but him. Whether you attempt to start from scratch, or to interpret his code, it will take you a very, very long time without him. You’re fine with that? You just don’t really know what’s going on around here, you come trampling in and expect everything to be fine when you’re through.”

“I feel like you must be exaggerating, in one respect or another, Mr. Watanabe. I’ll have Mr. Perry find me a couple of programmers, and we’ll see just how long it takes. Your position as a leader here is very tenuous, Mr. Watanabe. You’re only here because you know the entire scope of the project. I don’t want to, but I could do this without you. So please, be professional.”

Toru left the room as well, without responding to Mr. Laurel. When Reiko saw that it was slowly becoming just her and the engineers remaining, she ran out after him. She followed him to his office, where he was shoving things into a briefcase. “Where are you going?” she asked. “You can’t really be quitting, can you?”

“I don’t see what else I can do.”

“At the very least, come to lunch with me. As a favor. Across the street. And if I can’t persuade you to stay, that can be the end of it.”

Reiko and Toru sat together in the cafe, Reiko facing the street. Thousands of people went by, in cars, on bikes, by foot. Only a few of them turned and opened the doors to the cafe. She had a coffee and a small sandwich, and Toru had a bowl of ramen.

She had never really talked to the man sitting across from her, but, if she couldn’t persuade him to stay, she knew that Kaishin would become unbearable for her. They’d either replace him with a total stranger, or not replace him at all. Then it would just be her, Noboru, and the engineers. She had only eaten half of her sandwich before she dived into the conversation she intended to have.

“Please don’t quit,” she said, simply.

“Is that your entire argument for me to stay? There’s nothing left for me at Kaishin. And there’s nowhere else for me to go in Kenko.”

“What is Kenko?” she asked.

“Are you serious?”

She felt stupid, but she had to nod.

“It’s the company you’ve been working for, for the past two weeks. They own the building. And I’ve worked there for the past two years. When I started, Mr. Okada picked me out on my first day, to be in his group. So Kaishin is all I’ve really known. If I don’t work there, and for Mr. Okada, I might as well get another job entirely. I don’t even want to look at the building anymore.” Every time he said the name of his former employer, it brought visible pain to his face.

She responded, “You know how much the project meant to him, don’t you? I know I didn’t know him as well as you did, and now I never will, but I do know that he was very passionate about what we were doing. He would want to see it through to the very end, I know he would. Even if that meant we would have to put up with the stupid Americans.”

“He didn’t see it through to the end.”

“Toru, don’t say things like that.”

The young man quickly became emotional—he clutched his hands into fists as he spoke. “I’ve never respected a man, more than I did Mr. Okada. I’ve never looked up to someone so much, not even my own father. I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s true. And now he’s gone. I feel abandoned. I don’t know how it happened, or why it happened, and that just makes it worse. Totally abandoned. To the point where, if I don’t pick myself up and walk away, I’m just not going to make it. Having Haru around would have helped, but there’s no way that he’s coming back.

“Tell me—you were the last person to talk to Mr. Okada when he was alive, that I’m aware of. He left the office with you, that day. Did he say anything to you? Anything of note? I’ve been meaning to ask you that for a while now, but I keep losing track of my thoughts. I’m still very disoriented.”

Reiko thought for a moment. “He told me that Mr. Perry seemed very interested in him, and what he did. Perhaps in Kaishin. And that something was terribly wrong. And it turned out he was right. Suicide hardly makes sense, they had to have killed him. Of course I don’t know for sure, but as terrible as it is, it makes more sense.”

“And knowing that, you came back to Kaishin? When you’re not even an employee? That’s another thing I don’t understand at all, what it is you’re doing. You have no reason to stay. It was a temporary job that he offered you, that he was paying for out of his own pocket, as I understand it. Why do you care so much, to bring me here, to persuade me to stay?”

“I’ve just never seen anything so amazing as what we’re doing,” she said. “Maybe I’m naïve, but that doesn’t change the fact. I want to be a part of it. And even though I only knew him for a short time, Mr. Okada inspired me to carry this through to the end.”

“Well, you’re crazy then.”

“Tell me you’ll come back,” she said. “I know that it will be horrible back there, without you. We’ll endure it together. I know you don’t know me very well, because I’ve shut myself in that room with the rats for the past two weeks, but I’ll come out. I’ll be more present. If you’re there.”

“I meant what I said about Haru being important to the project. It will be very difficult to continue without him, no matter how many people they replace him with.”

“I know that he shouldn’t come back, with the way he behaved with Mr. Laurel, but perhaps he would agree to help us in an unofficial capacity. You know him well, don’t you? He’s put a lot of work into this too, by the sound of it. Surely he feels like I do, that it should be carried through no matter what.”

“Maybe part of him feels that way. But something you might not fully understand is that Haru is crazy. You did see his strange incident with Mr. Laurel back there. He’ll be harder to convince than me, and harder to find.”

“Are you saying I’ve convinced you?” Reiko asked, excited.

“I’ll go back. But only on the condition that we talk more often. If I have to sit around in that place in silence, just thinking to myself, I’ll go as crazy as Haru. Promise me that.”

“Promise.”

“And we’ll have to figure out exactly what it is Mr. Perry is after. And what happened to Mr. Okada. I will pay him back for what he did, no matter what. A large part of why I agreed so quickly is that I need the opportunity to do it.”

“Just don’t do anything too rash,” she said.

The next week was difficult for Reiko to make it through. She spent the mornings with her rats, who were adjusting to being eight-minded organisms, and in the afternoons she would participate in group meetings, where she found out what the rest of the group was doing.

The engineers were working on scaling the project to the size of the human brain. The engineer girls spent a lot of time dissecting real human brains, which they kept next door to the conference room. Where those brains came from, Reiko didn’t know, but they had a lot of them. Some were cut in hemispheres, others were sliced into unimaginably thin pieces and laid out in rows, using a machine that looked like it came from a butcher’s shop.

Hideo and Ichiro, the electrical engineers, were resizing the wires and connections, and were building a substantially larger chip than the one that was inserted into the rats. Reiko didn’t know many of the details, but from what she understood there was just a lot more connections to be made in the human brain, and the main problem in scaling up was trying to fit all of those extra connections into a reasonable amount of space.

She once asked Hideo, while trying to make inroads with the engineers, “If it turns out this isn’t safe for the rats, won’t you be wasting a lot of time, making it for humans?”

She realized too late that it was a bad question to ask. He said in response, “Not as much time as you’ve wasted, becoming a psychologist. What did they teach you in school, how to teach tricks to rats? I hear one of them can jump. I’m very impressed.”

“You’re also very rude,” she said, reacting. “I hope one of your little circuits doesn’t fry someone’s brain to a crisp, because you’ve made it wrong. They’d sue you for everything you’ve got, I imagine. And no one would trust you around them with electricity, ever again. Think of what a waste that would be, everything you learned. It would be like all you knew was psychology, in a world that didn’t care about the mind. That would be so very unfortunate.”

The new programmers were all struggling to make sense of Haru’s large, unwieldy program. They were old Kenko employees that were reassigned from wherever they had been before, but of course Reiko had never seen them. Apparently the program that ran the rat’s chips would need to be modified for the new hardware, but none of the programmers were sure where the changes needed to be made. Since she knew nothing on the subject, she avoided them as well.

She spent a considerable amount of time talking to Noboru, before he was fired. She was sitting next to him when he was told. The Americans had a bad habit of divulging private matters when everyone was around watching.

Mr. Perry delivered the news himself. Reiko, Noboru, and Toru were sitting in the conference room talking, and he walked in without asking permission, taking the seat at the head of the table.

“I’m glad you’re all here together. I have something to ask, something to tell. I have to ask if any of you know where Haru is. He hasn’t been answering our phone calls, and wasn’t at his house when I sent some people there.”