The Complete Karma Trilogy (18 page)

They both stood up, and, when Darcy opened the door for them to leave the study, he passed the writer off to one of his attendants and went to play billiards for a while, since there wasn’t much work he could get done in the fields before it was evening anyway.

Billiards on Mars was almost entirely different than billiards on Earth, although Darcy had never really played in his former life. Even the simplest of Terran games didn’t translate well to the smaller planet—a billiards shot that would have been perfectly acceptable millions of kilometers away sent the cue ball flying through the air on Mars. The gravity was just that much more different. On Mars, billiards became a game of soft cajoling, delicate taps and simple combinations. Darcy found it relaxing.

Decay 8

In One Ear

Jackson, a longtime
member of Charles’ Order, sat at a bench in the City Park, waiting for a man to sit down next to him. Even though the sky was grey as always, it was agreed that the man would be wearing sunglasses, so that Jackson could identify him. He had almost given up waiting when the man appeared from around a copse of withered trees, following one of the main paths that honeycombed the Park. Without acknowledging Jackson in the slightest, he sat down next to him.

Jackson waited a minute or two before asking, “Damon? Is that your name?”

“Yes, yes it is,” the man answered, nervously.

“And you’re sure that you want to do this? You’ve weighed your options?”

“I can’t afford the Tax, I don’t have any other options. I’m joining. Now can you tell me what’s going on? I still don’t know what it is I’m doing, really. No one has told me.”

“It’s still too early for that,” Jackson said. “But if you’re sure that you’re committing, the answer to that question isn’t too far off. I’ll just need your help with a few things first.”

“With what?”

“Just say that you will help.”

“I will.”

“Okay. Stand up. You’re going to go straight to a medical supply store. You’re going to buy some gauze, painkillers, and some anesthetics. Like you cut your leg pretty bad or something, those kinds of things. Buy the good stuff for the anesthetic, you’ll be glad you did. You’re going to steal a scalpel. Now I know that’s illegal, and that you’d get caught eventually, but don’t worry about it. Do it. It’s very important that you do. And then you’re going to go to a hardware store, and buy a saw. Don’t ask why. And then you’re going to go straight to your apartment, and then to your bathroom. Leave the door to your apartment ajar, but don’t look back at it while you’re doing it. Bring all the stuff into the bathroom with you, don’t just leave it on your counter or the whole thing is going to be ruined, got it? And when you’re in your bathroom, don’t leave, no matter what happens. I will be there shortly, and then I’ll tell you the rest. Got it?”

The man simply nodded.

“Then go. And do it quickly. And nothing suspicious, besides what can’t be avoided.” When the man had hurried off, Jackson stood up himself and walked farther along the path, to another bench where two men were already sitting. “He’s on his way. Do you have the body already?”

One of the men responded, “It’s in a dumpster outside his place. He’s good, then?”

“I said he was on his way, didn’t I? Now let’s go.”

The three men had to walk all the way to the man’s apartment, since they couldn’t use the subway. It was about ten kilometers. When they had gotten there, they went behind the building, into a secluded alleyway with a large dumpster up against the building. They sat in the corner it formed with the wall. Jackson took a Karma Map out of the backpack he carried with him. He turned it on, and pressed a few buttons, until finally he was seeing the world from the eyes of the man he had just sent off, Damon. He was on a subway, the bag of supplies in his hand.

“He’s almost here. I’d say we have about five minutes.” He pressed a few more buttons, and was looking at a map of the apartment complex, specifically at the elevators and hallways. He watched for several minutes. “There are quite a few people going around. I’d say that your safest bet is the elevator you’ll find if you go right, and then all of the way to the back of the building. There doesn’t seem to be as many people back there. You do have the body here?”

One of the other men stood up, opened the lid to the dumpster, and looked down into it. “Yeah, he’s still here.”

“Get him out,” Jackson said. They jumped in, and heaved a large bag up and out of the dumpster, setting it carefully on the ground next to Jackson. Jackson opened the bag, and inspected the corpse carefully. “Good, very good.”

He then looked quickly inside two backpacks that had been inside the bag with the body. “This one’s his,” he said, as he handed one of them over to one of the men. The other backpack he traded with his own. “Okay, our guy’s already in the elevator up to his place. Go ahead.”

The two men stood the dead body up, put the backpack on its shoulders, put a hat on it, and then put its arms around their shoulders. “Does it look good?” one of them asked.

“Beautiful, just beautiful. Take him up. I’ll be right behind.” With that they started walking around to the front of the building, body in tow. Jackson put the empty bag back into the dumpster, put the other backpack on, and then went himself.

At the main entrance, a man was opening the door for people going in. When he saw three men, two carrying the third between them, he was quick to open the door for them. “Doesn’t look good for that one,” he said, indicating the dead body.

“Drunk off his ass,” one of them said. “We’re helping him get back to his place.”

“Bless your hearts,” the man that was holding the door said. “Let me get this for you, it’s the least I could do.”

“Thank you very much.”

They took the body as quickly as they could to the elevator in the back, smiling and explaining their situation with a few words to everyone they passed. They were lucky to catch an empty elevator up to Damon’s floor, and no one got on as the elevator ascended. When they had finally arrived at the right floor, they saw Jackson on the far side of the hall of doors, gesturing them over. The door he was standing in front of was slightly ajar, which they pushed open. They went straight for the bathroom.

“Hello Damon,” he said, when he opened the bathroom door. “Good to see you here. Bring him in,” he said to the men that were standing out in the kitchen. “And you, Damon, stand in your shower. We need the space.”

The two men dragged the dead body into the bathroom, and set it on the toilet seat. Jackson took the backpack off of it, opened it up, and pulled out a compact machine. He then opened his own backpack, pulled out a similar machine, and joined the two together by securing a few latches.

“We don’t have much time,” Jackson said to Damon, who was standing with a confused look in his shower. “Where’s the anesthetic?”

“In that brown bag on the sink,” Damon said.

“Now, you’re not going to like the sound of this, Damon, but I’m going to have to remove your ear. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s going to hurt like hell, even with this anesthetic. And you won’t recover for a week or two. But I’ve done like fifty of these and I’ve never killed a dude, alright?” The man just nodded dumbly. Jackson mounted the machine on the wall above the shower with suction cups. The two other men had already begun to partially cut a portion of the dead man’s skull off, after which they turned him upside down and drained him on the floor.

“You’re making a mess,” Damon complained.

“Shut up and hold still,” Jackson said, a syringe in his hand.

Three hours later, while they were walking north, Jackson had the group of men stop for a second, while he showed an extremely drowsy Damon his Karma Map. “Watch this. Damon, hey Damon. Watch this.”

The man slowly opened his eyes, and looked at the screen Jackson was holding in front of him. “Hey,” he said slowly. “That’s my bathroom.” On the small, circular screen could be seen the dead body from before, slumped over and bloody, sitting on the toilet and head resting against the sink. The details of the face were obscured by blood.

A saw was lying on the ground, a scalpel in the sink, and an overturned bottle of pills was scattered everywhere. A hand was extended from the perspective of the screen, as if it was the hand of whoever was looking into the bathroom. In their hand was a small pen. Suddenly a bright light emitted from it, and the body was gone.

“What? What just happened?” Damon asked, confused.

“You’re Dead now, remember that. You’re one of the Dead.”

Sixteen kilometers away, standing in the air of an Evaporated man, Marcus looked around quickly to make sure that nothing suspicious had been left behind. There weren’t any backpacks, or suction cups, or anything else that would catch the eye of a supercomputer. He was satisfied.

For the first time in quite a while, Charles was visiting his Monastery. He told Vincent to gather everyone to the temple, since it was a Sunday and he wanted to give a sermon. Half of the people were already there, meditating. The other half were on the farm, and had to be brought in. When they had all finally crowded into the small, wooden edifice, he began without delay.

“In the very near future, our Order will be called upon to prove its worth. Some of you will lose your life, and I am sorry. The cost is high, but remember what we’re here for. In five short years, the colonization of Mars will begin. We have much less time than that. Right now, Mars is at its most beautiful. Its waters and skies are blue, its trees are green, there are actually wild animals on it, engineered from DNA fragments of extinct species that used to walk this Earth.

“In the next couple months, they will start building obscene buildings. A Solar Kite to blot out the sky, large skyscrapers to replace the trees, one by one. They will tell you that this Solar Kite is more transparent than the last, but I tell you from the perspective of science that it can’t be entirely transparent, or it wouldn’t do the job that it is there for, which is to absorb sun, and therefore to block the sun, and make energy from it. They will tell you the buildings will be more beautiful this time, designed by the best architects in the field, but they will always be oblong, metal things that require more energy than they create, or in other words are entirely unnatural. They will tell you the animals will be at home there, but I’m telling you now that they’ll die again like they died before, if a large change isn’t made moving forward.

“I brought you all here, to the Monastery, to try to prove one thing to you. That if you put a lot of your own energy into it, your life is sustainable. You don’t need the factories to produce a living for you, you can plant seeds and raise animals and do it yourself. I feel like it’s a lesson often forgotten. Everyone feels that it’s best that everything remotely unpleasant is done for them, leaving them to do whatever they want, which for whatever historical reason has evolved into Good Works. In my opinion, this evolution was a misstep. We evolved wrong. I want to turn back the biological clock, and give us another chance. There is no reason that a Good Work has to be defined as directly helping your fellow brother. You can help your fellow brother just as well by doing your Good Works to the Earth itself, by removing the Solar Kites and the factories and using your own energy, by being your own factory.

“These views would be considered heretical by Karma, or at the very least they would never be rewarded. Which is the same as being heretical, because in this society you have to constantly be ‘rewarded’ just to survive. Nor is the oversight of Karma natural. Somehow a machine, a supercomputer, was placed above us as the ultimate authority. It constantly invades our privacy—these ‘Privacy Rooms’ are not a consolation for the damage that is done the rest of the time. Everywhere you go, you are being watched, almost all the way to your very thoughts. This is why we declared Karma as our enemy, this machine, and declared the true karma as our savior in its place, the harmony and oneness with the Earth and the universe around it. So I took the Chip out of your head, at least half of the time. Moving forward, moving onto Mars, I promise to take it out of your head all the time, if I am able. But I’m going to need your help.

“As I said, it’s the next few months that are extremely important. We need to make the change before they start building a new, stronger Karma on Mars. Because that’s exactly what they’ll do. When they built this Karma, they didn’t realize how central it would be to the world. So even though it is protected very well, up on the ninety-third floor of the Karma Tower, it isn’t invincible. On Mars, they will plan it better. They will put it underground, they will put it everywhere, into the earth itself, where it will never be possible to eradicate it entirely. It will be invincible. For the good of mankind, we will prevent that eventuality by destroying Karma now.

“I hope this doesn’t come as a complete surprise to anyone. Out of necessity, I haven’t shared many of the details with you, until this point. If anyone else knew what we were doing, we would have all been dead long ago. So I kept it a secret, as hard as that is to do these days. We, as an Order, have been building an ideology for the past two years, but we’ve also been building a lot of weapons. In the other half of this building, on the other side of the wall behind me, we have our own monitoring system, as you know. We also have our own Evaporation Pens, our own Grappling Chains, and our own explosives, that we made ourselves. It is not a coincidence that I made the two separate functions part of the same building, the temple and the armory. I believe that they are two facets of the same object.

“Over the next few days, instead of meditating, you will be trained on how to use these weapons. Of course, half of you will still be maintaining the farm, or our system will collapse. We’ll take turns, like we always have.

“Now I want a show of hands. How many of you are opposed to this plan? And feel free to be honest and express your true feelings on the matter. That is, after all, what we are here for, to protect human dignity and the right to dissent. If you do object, I won’t let you go back into the city, and give us away, but I will let you stay here permanently, which shouldn’t be objectionable, because it’s what some of you have been doing for years now. Please, let me see the hands of those that don’t want to proceed with us.”