The Complete Karma Trilogy (13 page)

Although they had decided as a group to always use discretion around Mr. Perry, Toru couldn’t help being critical. He said, “You sent people to his house? Are we supposed to tell you where he is, so you can find him and punish him for the small incident with Mr. Laurel? You understand he is our friend, correct? And that we would refrain from sharing such knowledge, if sharing it would jeopardize him?”

“You’ve got it all wrong, dear Toru,” Mr. Perry said. “I know we can seem harsh, but a person with as much skill as your friend Haru is given a lot more leeway. The savants are always socially inept, so it’s pointless to punish them when they’re exactly what you need.

“I’ve been told that his programming, while unorthodox, is exceptional. And unintelligible, unintelligible in the way that we are all sheep and he is the shepherd, and we are oblivious to his higher causes. No, I won’t punish him, not for just a small incident, as you so rightly call it. I want him back here, doing his job. You’ve seen how set back we are, trying to fill the void he left.”

“Well none of us have seen him since he disappeared,” Toru said, belligerently.

“If you do see him, convey the message please. That we have nothing but good will for him here, and will be more than accommodating to whatever requests he might have about the work environment.

“The second matter, the something I have to tell you. Noboru, we are letting you go. Not just you—this isn’t a reflection of your work. I’m not acquainted with your work, but I’ll just assume that you do an alright job. It’s just that Kenko, not just Kaishin, no longer has the need of a marketing branch. So there will be many more people besides you leaving, but I wanted to tell you first, and personally. Your secretary had to be let go as well, for similar reasons.

“Kenko will be moving in the direction of a non-profit organization. That’s a generalization, but it describes the situation well enough. There will be a lot of restructuring. I’ll have the details of your severance sent to you later today.”

Noboru was speechless. He was in his mid-thirties, and had been with Kenko for his entire adult life. Reiko had only recently learned the nature of what he did—Kaishin designed a product, and he made sure that a market existed for that product by making calls, organizing meetings, and setting up an extensive network of interested people. He spent a large portion of his day on the phone, and every now and then would take a train or a plane out of the city, to talk in person to some other company representatives. Because his job was so social, he had developed a very affable character, which is what attracted Hideo’s resentment for him. He always wore well-tailored suits, and was very polite at all times. And he was being fired.

“I’m sure there are good reasons,” Noboru said. He stood up, bowed, and left the room without saying another word.

Mr. Perry had also stood up, and was staring down at Reiko and Toru, who were both watching Noboru leave from where they sat at the conference table. Mr. Perry said, “I haven’t yet expressed my sympathies to you, Ms. Okada, about the passing of your father. My deepest sympathies go out to you.”

Reiko smiled painfully, and didn’t say a word. Eventually Mr. Perry left as well.

Ronin 5

The Fun Life of Mr. Perry

Instead of going
through the trouble of finding an apartment in the city, which he had heard could be an unpleasant experience, Mr. Perry fired everyone on the sixty-seventh floor of the Kenko building. He chose the sixty-seventh floor because, in his mind’s eye, he could see the perfect layout for a makeshift archetypal American home, the kind he’d never had.

The remodeling required was somewhat extravagant, but in just four days it was one of the most jarring experiences he’d ever created for himself, to have a large business elevator open up to the entryway of a very credible-looking ranch-style house. He turned a conference room into a master bedroom, he had the walls of a few offices knocked out to make a sprawling living room. He had a fireplace installed in the living room, even though he was told it would be unwise of him to light a fire in it. It didn’t dissuade him.

He specifically wanted a fireplace so that he could have a real mantle, which he adorned with many typical American knickknacks that had to be imported from across the world, topped off with a genuine elk’s head. He had a bear rug and deep leather couches.

The ‘men’ and ‘women’ signs were taken off of the bathrooms, and showers and marble floors installed. He had a kitchen, and had not one but two fully furnished guest rooms, which he had yet to think of a good use for.

With all his extravagance, he made sure that the expenses for remodeling were strictly less than what was gained from firing everyone on the floor, so that in the end he broke even and had nothing to worry about. The former people of the floor had been working on a new vaccine for malaria, which didn’t interest him enough to keep around. Their project was also not listed as a high priority on the list that Karma had made, and that sealed the deal for him.

If Mr. Perry and another employee had a disagreement, he would invite them over to his house. His house was, after all, only an elevator ride away. He would sit in one of his leather chairs facing the metallic sliding doors, the only residue of the corporate world left in the house, and wait for them to open, so that he could see their face as they took it all in. When he realized how much he enjoyed it, he had a camera set up with the same viewpoint, programmed to automatically take a picture every time the door opened, so that he could savor such moments in his old age.

He would beckon them in with a wave of his hand, and fix them a drink after he had them seated by the bear rug, facing the fireplace. After he had a drink in their hands, he would stoke a fire, with fragmented two-by-fours as tinder, topped with the latest newspaper. He would get a fire roaring, and hand them a cigar, lighting one for himself as well. He would do all of those things without a sound, until everything seemed settled and perfect. Invariably, his guest would be very unsettled, and only then would he finally speak.

He would say, “I bet you’ve never seen a house like this, not with where you’re from. That’s why I wanted to have you over, I think everyone should know how aesthetically pleasing it is. It was my father’s house, and my grandfather’s house before him. Those are their portraits over the fireplace there. Not the elk, that’s an elk, a trophy from my young days as a hunter. I’m sure you didn’t know this, Mr. Guest, but I was quite the accomplished hunter. It makes me wonder if I still am, reminiscing about it.

“Anyway, I know it’s difficult to bring up business in such a domestic environment, but I’m afraid it can’t be avoided. Perhaps when we’re done, I can show you the backyard. I have acres and acres, beautiful, wide-open land. You can’t really see it from the front, where you came in, but I assure you it’s impressive. I’ve taken to raising horses. They’re not really good for anything, but why not, right? You know what I mean. I’ve become distracted just thinking about it, my apologies. Business.

“Mr. Guest, I know we’ve had our disagreements, but I must insist you see things my way.” By that point in the conversation, black smoke billowed all across the ceiling. Technically his floor did not meet fire code standards, because he had all the smoke alarms taken out to avoid the unpleasant sound that would have ruined the moment for him.

He would point to a gun mounted on the wall, just under the level of the smoke. Their eyes would be wandering all over, but he would wait until they settled on what he was pointing at. “This isn’t a threat or anything, but that gun is loaded. It’s an 1873 Winchester, the ‘gun that won the West’. Incidentally, they make those guns here in Japan now, but that’s beside the point.

“Have you ever shot a gun, Mr. Guest? Do you know how to use one? That’s very unfortunate, they’re very fun. We’ve become off topic again. Have you decided, Mr. Guest, to see things my way?”

If they didn’t agree with him, he would call his guard over from the elevator, and the guard would take the guest by the arm as Mr. Perry took his gun from the wall. They would go to a small room in the corner of the house that had absolutely nothing in it, besides a window and a cage full of rats. All the walls were painted white, and the lighting was fluorescent, making it much brighter than the rest of the house. The guard would force the guest into the room, and Mr. Perry would follow with his gun.

“You might think,” he would say, “that a gun is pretty dangerous. And it is, it is.” He would load a round into the chamber, by operating the rifle’s lever. The guard would take two rats out of the cage, and set them on the ground. With the door closed, there was nowhere for them to escape to—he made sure that the seal of the door was extremely tight, when it was installed.

“You might also think that a gun would be too loud to shoot in a building.” When he said that, he would take a shot at one of the rats, and more often than not he would hit it, causing it to explode. If he was lucky, it would explode in the direction of his guest, covering them in rat guts. The sound of the shell exploding would resonate through the cramped, white room. “And you’d mostly be right, although there are much quieter guns than this. Rifles like this weren’t designed to be quiet, they were designed to keep their owners alive.

“This building has no shortage of rats in it, that’s what I’ve found. So I bring them in here for a demonstration, for your sake. Did you know, incidentally, that if that expression, ‘for your sake’, was written on paper in English, it would be indistinguishable from ‘for your sake’, or in other words ‘for your alcoholic rice water’? I bring these rats in here for your alcoholic rice water, Mr. Guest, even though I absolutely despise sake. That’s why I brought such a large supply of American whiskey with me. Distracted again.

“Mr. Guard, could you show him the Evaporation Pen? Mr. Guest, the rifle is a crude thing, from a crude time. It maims, and hopes that maiming is sufficient. It is our good fortune that science progresses, and the aim of most sciences is complete eradication. In a building like Kenko, most of you are trying to eradicate disease, not just maim it where you can. In warfare, eradication is much more tangible. You want the entire body gone. When those clever scientists dropped those very advanced bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they completely eradicated those cities.

“What we have here, in Mr. Guard’s hand, can be thought of as the nuclear bomb of firearms. It’s deceptively small. You Japanese have yet to realize the magnitude of its advent—my guard was able to walk straight through your maglev security station with it, because they didn’t know what it was. It looks just like a pen, doesn’t it? Mr. Guard, show our guest what it does.”

The guard would change the range of the Evaporation Pen with a dial to match the approximate distance of the remaining rat, and would fire the Pen at it. A harsh red beam of light would emit from the tip, and the rat would disappear in a cloud of smoke. When the smoke cleared, nothing remained but a scorch mark on the ground.

“Impressive, isn’t it? I have no idea how it works, just that it causes a very fast chain reaction that practically in an instant degrades every component of the body into smoke. Very good, very American science. If you ask me, I’d say it’s tenfold scarier than being shot by a gun. Even if you die from a gunshot, there’s the last comforting hope that something of your body will remain, a little piece of you reserving space for itself in the universe. But this Pen takes even that small comfort away.

“All my personal guards have this Pen. I don’t carry one, because I find even these state-of-the-art things a little crude, but I will always be able to command their use in a second’s notice. Don’t disagree with me again, Mr. Guest, because I have no scruple about giving the word for someone to be Evaporated away. And your modern Japanese forensics won’t be able to make sense of where you went, since you’ll be nothing but vapor, and my American superiors stationed here in Japan won’t give a damn about you, since I’ve been authorized to do it. Am I clear?”

Even if they didn’t answer, which often happened, his conversation was over. He would have the guard take them back to the elevator, and he himself would go extinguish the fire, and do what he could about the smoke that filled his entire house by that point. After he made some calls to have his little white room cleaned up, he would sit back in his overstuffed chair and enjoy what was left of their drink he had made, which was usually untouched.

Other times he would have to leave the comforts of his home to patrol the Kenko building, and suppress any rebellions he found. In general it wasn’t difficult for him—he had a special sense for detecting the more dangerous elements of his employees, and he would either fire them outright, subtly threaten them, or invite them to his house, depending on the circumstance. His day became full of such threats, only leaving a small amount of time for him to think about the larger picture of the direction he was to take the company in.

What was most important, as directed by Karma, was that Kaishin finish their product at all costs. He had removed Mr. Okada from leadership there because although the man was extremely capable, which Mr. Perry knew from the moment he met him, he wasn’t absolutely necessary to the project, and would have proved more of a hindrance than an asset moving forward. If Mr. Okada discovered the American’s motives with Kaishin, he might have had the foresight to destroy all of their research, or some similar form of obstruction. At the same time, Mr. Perry didn’t want to seem too interested, and furthermore had other things to attend to, so was forced to install Mr. Laurel as their manager in his stead.

Late at night, in spite of himself, Mr. Perry would think about what uses Karma would have with something like Kaishin. Karma was, at heart, an information-analyzing program, and Kaishin transformed human impulses into information. Many uses suggested themselves for such a combination—the device could be used for perfect interrogations, as a substitute to more crude forms of torture; it could be used to form an elite, connected task force that would be monitored directly by Karma; perhaps to give the computer program a somewhat eerie understanding of the human consciousness, which seemed the least practical but the most profound of the possibilities. The ultimate reason didn’t concern Mr. Perry, but as a curiosity the thought sometimes crossed his mind.

In his spare time he would read all of the documented information about Kaishin, to understand its methods and its capabilities, and to be better informed about the project he was overseeing through the stewardship of Mr. Laurel. Besides the fact that the science was entirely incomprehensible to him, he was almost convinced he knew more about Kaishin than Karma, since he had Mr. Laurel bring him private files that described a lot of different aspects of Kaishin, the accumulation of years of unpublished research. He would sit in his leather chair, late at night, with perfect ambient lighting from floor lamps all over his house, and read what he could understand on his laptop. The thought occurred to him that he should share some of the documents with Karma, but for the moment he wanted to keep them to himself.

He was surprised by the loyalty of the employees to their company. He had expected it, but the magnitude was larger than he anticipated. Whenever they had objections to his policies, they would always bring the company’s viewpoint into discussion, as if they had access to such an abstract thing. He would always tell them, when they made their appeals to vague authority, “Do you think you even know what the company
is
anymore, after all of the changes I’ve brought? Kenko isn’t what it used to be, for better or for worse. I’ve made sure of that. So before you tell me again that this isn’t what Kenko stands for, try to think about what Kenko is now.”

In a way he felt sorry for those people—they were so confused. For a company that was in the technology sector, Kenko had a history of atypical stability. That history of stability lent credibility to the employee’s claims, claims that actions not in accordance with the ‘viewpoint’ of Kenko were probably not in its best interest, but what he had to explain to those people was that Kenko’s best interests were no longer what mattered to the people in charge, namely Mr. Perry. A harsh reality like that had to be difficult for them to accept.

A week after his arrival, there was a particular incident he had that involved one of the top executives of the company, who had attended the meeting on Mr. Perry’s first day. He had overheard the man saying indecent things about Mr. Perry’s character, which he naturally had to take offense to.

His method of overhearing was somewhat indirect. At night, when no one was in the building except the janitors, thousands of hidden audio recorders had been installed in every imaginable place, by Mr. Perry’s order. Mr. Perry then arranged that all of their recordings be forwarded to Karma for inspection, since they were far too numerous to be gone through by a human intermediary. He submitted the simple request to Karma that should his name and some profane word appear in the same sentence, it should be documented, along with the likely identity of the profaner. Every morning, he found a new edition of the list, which he scanned for names he recognized.