The Complete Karma Trilogy (37 page)

The FSP vendor really bastardized the GNU toolchain. This chip is beautiful. Now it’s wicked fast. The brands are as dense as can be and it’s impossible to know who you’re really buying from and what they are actually selling you. With a die area like that, and this silicon’s terrible inductor modeling, we’ll be lucky if the wireless interface works from six centimeters away.
Toru?

What’s the hidden agenda? Is this product a flanker? A Cash Cow? A star? Can you eat it? Don’t want them blaming the layout guy when their offset is through the roof and the complicated cancellation scheme fails due to clock jitter. You just won’t eat them because a lifetime of making human friends has made you hypersensitive to our original carnal nature.

Hey it’s not a _real_ piece of firmware until it has a custom-ass linker script! I need to get on the conference call with the tsmc reps. They’re not going to be happy when we let them know we need both silicided and non-silicided poly connections. If that gets our conversion up, it will be worth it. Of course eCommerce is the game now and your friends are even part of the machine. How I love mixing hardware and software. See the thing is, everyone tries to write their hardware and software at different layers. If their DRC rules weren’t so ridiculous this circuit would be a breeze, but this double-patterning is kicking my butt. Dialed in.

Where’s everybody else? Is this coupon just to get me to buy a new line extension or will this product really make me better, faster, stronger? Poly-spacing violations everywhere. Passed LVS on the first try. Hopefully the ADC layout goes this smooth. And tsmc reps joined in. There isn’t even any thought into whether it was a good decision. Really boosts the margin in an age when we know what you want and how to tell you about it. Search for something once?
I’m really drowning in this.

The ads and products are you. Because at the end of the day, what is a program? And for you. It’s just information fed to hardware. We know you. Compiling layout netlist. We know what you want. Compiling schematic netlist. We now can give it to you wherever you go. Cross-referencing device instances. To you, your segment, your market. We can even write C programs. They compile into the optimal hardware-software implementation mix for a given power and size requirement, what could be better?

I’m going to hell for this. And I will confess. Anonymity is gone. Or maybe I’ll repent by rewriting it. Kill -9 “$childpid”.

She opened her eyes, and the employee from the coffee shop was standing in front of her, holding a broom. He looked like he was annoyed with something, and Reiko realized that maybe it was her. All of the noise was still there, the constant thoughts, a deep ocean of them—she was just finally on top of them, instead of underneath. She said, “You’re real, aren’t you.” She wasn’t sure that the words came out, since she never heard them.

He said, “I’d love to let you keep sleeping here, but the store is about to close and I would like to go home.” He gripped his broom tightly, and held it between him and her, like it was a symbol to legitimize making her leave.

When she opened her mouth to answer, she opened other mouths somewhere far away. When her eyes blinked looking up at the employee, it was someone else forcing her to blink, somewhere far away. Her heart was responding to someone else’s sinoatrial node, in someone else’s body. It confused her heart, an unnatural rhythm was banging away somewhere in her chest. She had to focus with everything she had to say words that were in her present tense. “I’ll get up. But it would help if you carried me.”

“I’m not carrying you,” he said, more annoyed than before.

“I’m not carrying me either,” she responded. “Toru, carry me. Haru, I know you’re in there. Saori. Someone make my legs move.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” Toru said, in her mind. She was sure that it was him. It was a very strange sensation—it was not his voice, and they weren’t really words that she sensed, but it couldn’t have been anyone else except Toru, and the nerve impulses couldn’t have been put together in any other way, except to say, “I don’t think I can do that.” It was like a hallucination of a thought, infused with his spirit.

“Five minutes. Give me five minutes, and I’ll find a way to leave,” she told the employee. At the same time, she was in seven other places, doing seven other things. They were places she didn’t recognize, although the longer she looked at them the more familiar they felt.

“Is there a reason I wasn’t given smaller steps?” she asked the cloud of consciousness that was around her. “I felt like I was drowning, very deep in some unknown pool in the corner of the world, and I was only barely able to reach the surface. It shouldn’t have happened like that.”

Hideo’s mind answered. “Haru was in control, and decided that small steps weren’t necessary. You can blame him.”

After listening to Hideo, Reiko got the impression that she had already known that answer, and that asking the question had been unnecessary. But it reminded her of her former consciousness—it was a foothold in a world that made much more sense to her, where she asked people questions and they answered her. The engineers knew, so she asked them.

Saori said, “The four of you, Toru, Haru, Noboru and Reiko, have a different Kaishin than us. A better one, one that is more connected. We don’t know what the functional difference will be, just that it is better. Ours cannot be improved, we are stuck with the original model.”

Reiko didn’t even know how to mentally respond. Instead, she thought, “What is the plan, from here on out? So far, this is not the rebellion that I hoped it would be. We’re connected, sure, but nothing else is established. How do we prevent what is happening to us?”

All of the other minds responded at once, so that it was nearly impossible for Reiko to make out each individual thread of thought. She resolved the difficulty of focus by picking out Saori’s thread, and listening to it. Her choice was made based on the fact that the thread was the strongest and easiest to follow, as if it had been made better. It said, “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to kidnap a few key people. One of Mr. Perry’s guards, and one of his other underlings that does all of the managerial work. We’re going to implant them with a modified Kaishin that only transmits thoughts, and doesn’t receive. We’re pretty sure it will work. And this will give us a wider view of what we’re up against.”

“Sounds good,” Reiko thought. “I’m going to bed. I’m unbearably tired.”

“We all are,” Noboru thought.

The employee said, “I gave you five minutes.”

“Fine, fine,” she said, and managed to stand up.

That night she dreamed eight dreams, all at once. It was the most horrifying thing that had ever happened to her. Four of them were vivid, and the other four were like phantoms that haunted the other dreams, following close behind, disclosing small pieces of consciousness when she wasn’t expecting it. She was trekking through a sewer, in a living room with a family she’d never known, driving down the road, on a beach somewhere. Gentle waves rolled in, touching her toes, and the part of her that was in a deep, subterranean sewer shuddered with disgust. Even though she didn’t know the family, she was hugging each of them, and a sinister glint in the eye of one of the young woman told her that she was recognized as an imposter, and would be killed if she didn’t run away. But since she was driving, running away wasn’t an option. She couldn’t run in a car. She passed intersection after intersection, and was sure that she had missed her turn some kilometers before.

She screamed in all of her dreams. Simultaneously, she was someone else, and couldn’t control her movements. When she wanted to retreat from the sinister family, she continued to stand their dumbly, and she noticed how masculine her hands were. The color became black and white, and she tried to scream again, but couldn’t anymore. Her dominance came in waves, and it was gone for the moment—gently rolling waves. She saw nothing but a large, contorted face for a split second, then the other dreams returned.

She couldn’t even tell which dream was hers, and it bothered her. If there were eight, it seemed logical that one was her own, but she couldn’t assign identities to any of them. Perhaps hers was one of the invisible four, the phantoms, which she had only a vague impression of. She wondered what that would mean, if it meant that she was mentally weaker than the others, and was therefore suppressed. It occurred to her that maybe the divide, into the groups of two, was between the engineers and the rest of them, but that didn’t tell her who was in control. For eight hours she drifted around in a complete state of incertitude. Towards the end, the dreams had begun to thematically converge, as if their consciousness was merging on some fundamental level.

Before the completion of the merger, she was woken up by three alarms, which were set for the three of them that lived farthest away from Kenko. When one of them was awake all of them were awake, and so she laid there, wide-eyed, until her own alarm went off. Only then did she get up to get ready for the day, which promised to be extremely eventful.

Ronin 12

American Ambitions

The day of
reckoning had come for Mr. Perry. In just an hour, Kaishin would either work or it would destroy the minds of an entire group of people that had been an annoyance to him. If it did work, he could go back to America and forget about Japan, and how much he had come to hate it. He regretted all the time he had spent learning Japanese as a young man. It was time wasted, and it had forced him into a job that would have been better suited for some other unfortunate individual.

He never found his elusive programmer, but with any luck he had circumvented the problem by throwing a large quantity of lesser beings at it. The more time that went by, the more convinced he became that a string of problems that he’d been having recently could be traced back to the programmer somehow. Not only the prostitute expenses that he had been chastised about by Karma, but also a strange garnishment that had shown up on his last paycheck, which was for a massive twenty-thousand dollars. He had sent emails off to all of the necessary parties to have it dealt with, but had yet to hear back from anyone.

It went deeper than that. While sifting through the audio and video that was collected at Kenko, he noticed that a large portion of the audio was hopelessly garbled, like it had been passed through an inappropriate filter. Nearly all of the cameras, which were motorized and programmed to follow movement, had been recording ceilings instead of people. A string of emails had gone out to his American employees that falsely claimed to come from Mr. Perry himself, and were in fact sent from his address. They informed the employees that they were fired, effective immediately, and even included a valid maglev ticket back to America. Mr. Perry changed all of his passwords repeatedly, and managed to stop all of the “fired” employees before they left.

Mr. Perry knew that he was at war with one Haru Nakata, on some level or another, but it was the kind of war he didn’t know how to fight. The war he did know how to fight—the rebellions that were erupting across the building, whole floors at a time—he had solved by requesting more people under his employ, which had been easily granted. But no amount of extra guards would defend against a faceless hacker. He had a message delivered to Karma, alerting the program of his suspicion. If anything could take care of that problem, Mr. Perry felt that it was the heartless machine. It really wasn’t his concern anymore. If he was eventually fully compensated for his work, and if he was able to leave the country in the next few days, everything else was irrelevant to him.

He brought the sixteen prisoners of war to the Kaishin floor, since the Kaishin group insisted that they needed their own machinery to perform, machinery that couldn’t easily be transferred to a more convenient location. It didn’t matter that much to Mr. Perry, except that none of the rooms on the floor were especially large, and it would be crowded however they went about it.

Mr. Laurel greeted him in the small lobby. Mr. Laurel said, “The moment of truth, yes?”

“Yes, truth,” Mr. Perry responded. “The one and only truth. I hope I can commend you in advance for a job well done, Mr. Laurel. If this is successful, credit could hardly go to anyone else but yourself, for leading such an effective team.”

“You’re too kind,” Mr. Laurel objected.

“Nonsense.”

Toru stood behind Mr. Laurel, along with one of the electrical engineers, Hideo or Ichiro. Mr. Perry could never remember which was which. They had their heads bowed down politely, not making direct eye contact, in the Japanese fashion. “The formalities never die,” Mr. Perry thought to himself.

“This is the group,” Mr. Perry said to his welcoming committee, turning around to indicate the mass of people behind him. For every prisoner, there was a guard that escorted them. Also present were three personal guards for Mr. Perry’s sake, large men that wore earpieces and looked completely disinterested in their surroundings. “Or at least this is half of them. We’ll only do one half at a time. It would be hard to fit any more people in here.”

“It would be less difficult to fit more test subjects, if you had less guards,” Toru suggested.

Mr. Perry turned to the young man, whose head was still bowed, eyes still averted. “That’s a wonderful idea, Mr. Watanabe, but unfortunately impossible. These are highly dangerous men, if you hadn’t guessed by their circumstances and punishment.”

“Do you think sixteen highly dangerous men, mentally fused together, will be more or less dangerous than before?” Toru asked.

Mr. Perry had to stifle a surge of hatred that overcame him, directed at Toru. He had been dealing with similarly veiled provocations for longer than his psyche could handle, and eventually he would break and become destructive, even though he knew it was counter-productive. They were all much less safe than they thought they were, the Japanese, and he wanted them to know that. A wave of his hand, he could destroy them.

“I misspoke, and you caught me. I commend you on that, Mr. Watanabe. They
were
highly dangerous men, once upon a time. Past tense. Now they are highly neutered beings. About to become a singular, highly neutered being. Or at least that’s the hope, as long as you’ve done your job right.”

“Our job was to experiment,” Toru said. “To follow science, and see where it would take us. To make conjectures, test hypotheses, and find the results. At no point was success guaranteed. Our job was never to succeed in making Kaishin, it was to try. And we did try. Therefore, our job has already been done right, regardless of what happens today. So please, stop misspeaking, before catching you becomes tiring.”

“You’re much more impertinent than I remember you being, Mr. Watanabe,” Mr. Perry said.

Mr. Laurel look very concerned, as if Toru’s disobedience would reflect poorly on himself. He said, “Forgive him, Mr. Perry. They had a long day of extreme productivity yesterday, and tensions are very high for everyone today. This is the culmination of many years of work for him.”

“For us,” Toru said.

“What is this?” Mr. Perry asked. He was referring to the incision on the side of Toru’s head, which was mostly covered but discernible to an observant eye. Mr. Perry had stepped forward and brushed aside the hair that was covering it, to inspect it closer. He could see the little bump in the center that indicated the presence of Kaishin. “Why is this here?”

Mr. Laurel panicked more, to the point where his panic could no longer form words. Toru answered for himself, he said, “We were concerned about the viability of the procedure, since we had never practiced on humans before. So we took the liberty of trying the surgery on ourselves first, to guarantee its safety. Call it dedication.”

“It’s turned on, then?” Mr. Perry asked. He had a devious glint in his eye.

“We wouldn’t dare go that far. The surgery is terrifying enough, I assure you. Leave it to your test subjects to try the next step, but the first is manageable.”

Mr. Perry let go of Toru’s head, but wouldn’t stop staring at his averted eyes. He wanted to make eye contact, but it wasn’t possible. It didn’t stop him from staring, at where their eyes would have met.

“That’s stupidly brave of you. Perhaps you don’t understand the meaning of the words, ‘test subjects’. They are the ones that you drill into the heads of first—what difference does it make, if it’s them or you? It’s a person either way, isn’t it? And I decided that it would be them, as an answer to a practical matter. I don’t appreciate my answers being questioned. But since it’s done...” Mr. Perry stepped away. “Take us to the place.”

They were led to a small room, where a young woman was standing. She was one of the biomedical engineers, Nami or Saori, Mr. Perry could never remember which was which. She was alone in the room, with dozens of dissected human brains. An area was cleared out around a large machine that looked like a drill.

Mr. Perry said, “Where is the rest of your team? There’s only four of you, that I’ve seen. Where are the other six?”

Saori said, “We anticipated that it would be crowded, so they’re elsewhere, to free up space. I assure you that I could carry out the procedure alone, if need be. Toru and Hideo are only here to provide assistance in the event of complications, although chances are they will just stand around the whole time. The whole thing is probably simpler than you’d imagine it to be. It’s just a little drilling, and some sewing.”

Mr. Perry quickly became an interrogator. “‘Elsewhere’ isn’t specific enough. Where are they? They’re on the clock, are they not? What work could they be doing that’s not on this floor? Why would they not want to see what their work has done, when the moment has finally arrived?”

“To be honest with you, their distaste for the circumstances outweighed their desire to see it happen, even if it is ‘the moment’. I couldn’t attest to their exact location, but they’re here somewhere.”

Mr. Perry was very frustrated. He sensed that something was going on, but didn’t know what it could have been. His options were to return the prisoners to their cells and delay the experiment to some other time, to find out definitively what was going on, or to persist with the experiment and investigate later. His concern was diminished by the fact that half of the people not present were his replacement programmers, who were subservient to him alone. Also missing was Ms. Okada, who could have hardly been much of a threat. His mind raced, trying to understand what they could possibly have been doing elsewhere. He decided to continue with the experiment.

“This is your first set of eight. We will switch them out with the other eight when you are done.”

The engineer went about her job without any hesitation. He stood and watched the first two holes be drilled into his enemy’s head, and then left before the third. His three guards followed him. They went down a floor, where the other group of eight was waiting for him to arrive. He took that group back up the elevator, and deposited them into the room that had previously contained all of the rats, though it was now empty. He told the group of guards, “They’ll be done shortly, at which point that group will move to the lobby, and you will move into the room they are currently in. As long as we rotate around, we should be able to manage fitting everyone in for the final stage.”

He went back to the procedure room, where the seventh person was being drilled into. When the eighth was done, he conducted the maneuvers to exchange the two groups. For each one of the second group’s surgeries, he watched carefully, as the machine made its cranial hole, and pulled a portion of the skull away. Then the engineer deftly filled the aperture with a red liquid, then a small chip was simply pushed into the opening, and finally the machine sealed the hole back up. The engineer even did the stitching at the end, all under four minutes. In the course of slightly over an hour, all sixteen were installed and ready.

Mr. Perry was increasingly more paranoid as that hour went by. A lot could be done in an hour, he knew, and he was still worried about the absence of the several Kaishin employees. If he had really trusted any of the nineteen guards that were on the floor with him, he would have left matters in their hands, but Mr. Perry was far from trusting and not a single one of them spoke Japanese. Then there was Mr. Laurel, who seemed like the loyal, obedient type, but had perhaps developed emotional attachments to his Japanese underlings, which would render him incapable of proper leadership.

If the hidden Kaishin members had a plan to free the prisoners and resort to warfare, the sides would be almost exactly even, which were odds he didn’t like. If he could have fit more guards comfortably on the floor, he would have. The last few weeks had proven to him how quick and seemingly from nowhere a rebellion could start, and although they hadn’t won any battles against him, their spirits were far from waning. Objectively, he wondered if his paranoia was excessive, but he knew that people in his position were the first to die in high-tension circumstances like the one they were all in. A friend of his had died in a similar situation, at a former Russian company, back before Russia was deemed beyond salvaging. He had been thinking of that friend often, for the past few days.

“They’re all ready,” Saori said, indicating the prisoners.

“May I do the honors?” Mr. Perry asked.

“It would only be proper,” Saori said. She directed him to the computer that controlled the communication between the Kaishin devices, and briefly showed him how to use it. She said, “This button turns them on, and then this one forms the first pairings. This one is the one that moves to the next pairing stage, but it will be two hours before it is necessary to take that step, as was decided previously.”

“Good, very good,” Mr. Perry said, as he sat in an office chair and took a hold of the mouse. He had made his decision, one that would get him out of the room quickly, which had become his primary concern. He wasn’t going to stay there for at least another six hours, without knowing where the other employees were. “I’ll give you one last chance,” he said to Saori. “Tell me where the others are.”

Saori smiled sweetly, and said, “There are any number of places—”

Mr. Perry rapidly clicked the mouse four times, and stood up. “I think we’re done here, then. Guards.”

“What did you do?” Saori said, losing her composure. “That was not the protocol.”

“There was no protocol,” Mr. Perry said. In front of him, the prisoners had all begun to scream, some grasping and clawing at their heads, others collapsing. The screams were inhuman, as if the rapid electrical fluxes in their brains had seared away their human essences, leaving nothing but an animal in pain.