The Complete Karma Trilogy (43 page)

“There is no way that I would allow you to die, not while you contain the information necessary to build Kaishin,” Karma said. “The rest of your life might be the most miserable existence ever imagined, but it will not end until a functional Kaishin has been delivered to me.”

“You wouldn’t allow it, but how are your human slaves to know that this is your will? When I stand up from this computer, I will throw it against the wall. You can try to send electronic warnings to anyone and everyone in this building, telling them that we must be kept alive, but I will block them all. The wall is already in place. This is your only window to this building, because that is how you yourself wanted it, but it is in our power to seal that window and leave you powerless.”

The rest of the group was struggling through the maze of Haru’s mind, trying to discover his motives, but they couldn’t get far before becoming bogged down. His entire mind was structured different from theirs, which made it inaccessible. They could unravel several thoughts at the surface, but even working together the core was out of reach. They asked, “If you can destroy him now, with a virus, why not just do it already? That would solve everything.” Mr. Perry had just cut the experiment short at Kaishin, and was on his way to somewhere else. They had to act quickly, and destroying Karma would have been a convenient action.

“It’s a bluff,” Haru told them. “A bluff that even Karma doesn’t know, yet. It has access to this computer, and can see everything on it, it can see the virus I’ve threatened him with. But the virus is heavily encrypted, and will take a while for Karma to understand. When he does understand it, he will realize that it is not a real threat—it just looks like one. Karma can’t be destroyed by a virus, at least not any that I can think of. I’m just buying time.”

“What’s the point?” they asked.

“I want it to understand its weakness,” he told them.

Karma said, “I will annihilate Japan, just like I annihilated the rest of Asia. And the fault will be no one’s but your own. How does that make you feel? Any bit of human remorse, human guilt? Your country means far more to you than it ever will to me, and that is your weakness.”

“You would destroy with it the one and only instance of the use of Kaishin,” Haru typed. “We’re using it now, and it’s wonderful. So much easily accessible information—I feel so much like a computer. Like, I can empathize with you and your calculations. And I can easily see the reverse—I can see how human you would become with it. I feel almost sad you won’t ever be able to experience it. To be human is really just a very specific structuring of information, and knowledge of that structure would teach you so much. Very unfortunate, the circumstances under which we became enemies. A program like you has always been one of my life’s dreams, I’ve just been distracted by all the other dreams I have. Human dreams. But it has been a pleasure getting to know you, and outplaying you so often. You have much to learn, Karma.”

“There’s someone coming down the hall,” Noboru’s mind told the rest.

“Distract them somehow,” Haru said. “Tell them their appointment isn’t now.”

Noboru left the room.

Karma finished decrypting Haru’s threat. “This is nothing,” it said. “You lied.”

“You fell for it,” Haru typed, and then threw the computer against the wall. It let out a fountain of sparks when it crashed, and then settled into a pile of broken glass. Simultaneously, he became aware of Noboru’s capture by Mr. Perry. He considered running after them, and having a physical struggle that could have potentially ended in Mr. Perry’s death, but he doubted his physical capabilities. All three of Mr. Perry’s guards owned an Evaporation Pen, any one of which would end his existence in a second.

“I can’t do anything to get him back,” Haru told the rest.

“We’ll use the guard,” they decided. “We will wait for the opportunity, and use him as a distraction.”

Haru went to the first computer that he came across, and used it to access speakers that were distributed across the whole building. When he spoke, his voice was heard on every floor, except the Ranch where Mr. Perry had all of the speakers taken out.

He said in Japanese, “This is the final rebellion of the Kenko building. If you have been waiting for an opportunity, now is the time. We are in charge now. Mr. Perry has been killed. I repeat, Mr. Perry has been killed. All Americans would be advised to surrender, but most of them will not understand this message and we advise that they all be killed regardless. If any one of your projects could benefit from human experimentation, we advise that use be made of any American hostage that you can take.”

“That makes us just like them,” the rest of his mind said to Haru’s core. “We are rebelling against their inhuman handling of us. To do the same to them would defeat our cause.”

“Not my cause,” Haru thought. “I’m not changing the message I delivered. An insurrection that changes its mind is hardly an insurrection worth following.” He disconnected from Kenko’s speakers, to prevent the rest of his group from overpowering and speaking through his body. He could feel them hammering away at his core, trying to subdue him. They only stopped to listen as Mr. Perry spoke to Noboru, listening to his justification of the American invasion. And after that, Noboru was killed, and all of them experienced death for the first time.

Some of them had insisted that he run, some had insisted that Noboru take the Evaporation Pen from the guard in front of him, but Noboru had only frozen under the weight of so many diverging wills, strongly pulling him in so many different directions. Had they agreed on which mode of action to take, in the moments before his death, there was a possibility he would have survived. But under emotional duress their unity had fallen apart.

Haru’s announcement worked as he intended. On every floor, violence was erupting. The Kaishin group’s new plan was to capture more guards, and use them the way they had before. Their first guard, Mark, had died shortly after Noboru. His death had been less disruptive to their minds, since he had been less integrated, although they did lose access to a large portion of their English proficiency.

Nami and Hideo joined Saori, Ichiro, and Toru on the Kaishin floor, where together they overwhelmed Mr. Laurel. They tied him up like they had tied up the Japanese programmers, and left him in Reiko’s rat room.

Mars 13

Target Practice

When the shuttle
landed, the group of engineers then took a mag-lev train to Ares, the only city on Mars. The train let them off in the commercial district, just a few blocks away from the building that contained their offices.

Hardin’s companions were in awe of the pristine condition of the city. Everything around them was strikingly new—the roads, the buildings, even the air. The sky was a forgotten shade of blue, and the clouds that dotted it were a clean white.

Carrying all their luggage, they walked the few blocks and entered a large skyscraper. On the ground floor, the fifty-two people of their group waited for an elevator to take them up. Hardin mentally told his companions, “Back of the line, everyone.” Each elevator only took about ten people at a time, and eventually everyone had gone up but them. Then he said, “Okay, we’re not getting on an elevator. Follow me.” And they left. Hardin led the way, down the quiet streets of Ares.

“What are we doing?” one of them asked him. “Why are we leaving?”

“We can’t stay here,” he replied. “There’s always the imminent chance that we’d be discovered. Furthermore, I don’t think any of you can perform any of the duties they’d assign you to do. We’re going out to the countryside. We’ll make a camp there.”

“The countryside?” another asked, with the tone of a complaint.

“This city has no place for the uninvited. There isn’t a single hotel. Everyone just lives here. We have nowhere else to go.”

Lucretia asked, “How far are we walking?” She was struggling under the weight of her luggage, which largely contained extra supplies that Hardin had made her pack. The rest of the group was similarly burdened.

“There’s a bus stop, not too far from here. It drives out to the farms. And then we’re pretty much there,” he replied.

Without telling anyone the reason why, Hardin took the long way to the bus stop, which led them past the largest building on Mars. Since none of them had any idea where they were going, no one objected. In front of the building, Hardin stopped for a while. For five minutes, he just looked at it. To everyone else he seemed sad, although Hardin rarely expressed any emotion other than anger.

“What is it?” one of the people asked him

“It was designed to be the new Karma Tower. As members of New Karma, surely it must mean something to you.”

They looked at it briefly, but they weren’t as enthralled as Hardin.

“Wait here,” he said. He climbed the grand steps to the entrance, but didn’t go in. There was a flagpole at the entrance, from which the Martian flag was flown. Hardin dropped all of his bags at its base, and began climbing. To everyone’s surprise, he was an exceptional climber. He climbed ten meters up, took the flag off of its hooks, then slid back down. “We can go now,” he said, after he had folded the flag and put it into one of his bags.

Hardin led them all the rest of the way to the bus stop, which was already packed with waiting people. They joined the crowd. A quick glance around was all it took to notice that the people there were all well off—the men wore suits and ties, and the women wore gowns and ornate sunhats.

“Why are all these people going to the farms?” Lucretia asked. She had been looking at the bus map, which showed that the bus had only one remaining stop. “Some sort of business outing?”

“They’re going out to farm,” Hardin told her. “Every person on the planet spends a mandatory two hours on the farms, every day. No matter how socially important they might be. It’s kind of like the system on Earth, except the farms are public and Darcy is close enough to enforce it. These people must have an evening shift.”

Lucretia looked the people over once more. None of them looked too happy. The man closest to them kept looking at his gold wristwatch with distaste, ostensibly because of the time that was being wasted. Then the bus arrived, and they all climbed in. Hardin’s group drew a lot of attention on account of the luggage they were carrying—the bus driver looked at them suspiciously, and so did nearly everyone else that was paying attention. Hardin felt it would be best to give an explanation, so he said to the bus driver, “We’re taking some more supplies. Government order.” That seemed to satisfy the driver, and they were off.

Dark clouds formed around them as the bus made its way out of the city. Soon it was raining, small little drops that could only barely be seen before they coalesced on the windows. No one spoke, and the bus was filled with an eerie silence.

When the bus arrived at the farms, once again they had to go their separate way from the larger herd of humans. As the rest of the people got in line to have their ID scanned, to prove that they were reporting for duty, Hardin took his group out to a nearby supply shed, where he loaded them up with shovels and metal piping.

“What’s all this for?”

“We’re going to dig,” Hardin replied. “We’ll have to live underground. Now hurry, and let’s go.”

They had to walk several more kilometers, and Hardin could hear the resentment in their heads. Night was falling, and they were trudging through corn fields. Everyone was tired from so much travelling and walking. But if they slowed down, it would have been possible for someone to find them. Subtly he manipulated their minds, to make sure they stayed motivated.

Finally, Hardin had them stop. “This will be as good a place as any. You can rest for the next three hours, but then we’ll have to start digging. I’m going to keep walking, to scout out the region. I might not be back to help you dig, but regardless I will instruct you on exactly how to do it.”

Lucretia followed him as he continued onward. She asked, “Is it okay if I come?”

He didn’t have any reason to tell her no, so he agreed. They found a road, and walked along it for another kilometer. The rain intensified, and lightning constantly illuminated the sky. The storm was furious, primal—the storm of a new world. In the distance there was a glow, and the sound of sirens.

“What’s that?”

“A fire,” he said. “They have a lot of those here. They haven’t quite perfected the weather yet.”

They turned off the road, and went to the center of a field. When he found a spot he liked, Hardin pulled out a tarp and an umbrella. He put the tarp over two of their suitcases, to use as chairs. Then he got out a laptop, which he was careful to keep under the umbrella as he situated himself. Lucretia sat down next to him.

She didn’t ask, but she was curious about where he got the laptop. He said, “I stole it. I stole a computer, and bought a gun.”

“A gun, huh?” she replied. Then Lucretia just listened to the thunder and the sirens for a while, as Hardin typed furiously on his computer.

He was using Martian satellites to find people—thousands of people on Mars had active Karma Chips, and he located them all. He watched them move, a bunch of dots on a map, looking for patterns. Simultaneously he was sending advice back to New Karma, on Earth.

There was a possibility that he wouldn’t be successful. And if that was the case, he wanted to make sure that New Karma stood a decent chance of survival. Under the unambitious leadership of Percy, the computer program was never going to thrive. So Hardin sent it new functions, new ideas, and a better system of pronunciation. It represented a large push in the direction of the old Karma, with the addition of a few improvements that Hardin had devised. It took ten minutes for New Karma to respond, but when it did it was with gratitude. “Use these things wisely,” Hardin told it.

Then Lucretia spoke—she said, “I’ve been wondering for a long time now, why I came here.

“All my life, I can remember people telling me that I would never see this place. They told me that Mars was for the rich people, and that I would never be one of those. And I believed them. Because it was true. So I spent a long time convincing myself that I didn’t want to go to Mars. That I didn’t care. I’d see pictures every now and then in the newspaper of the blue skies, the fields of green, all the happy people. And I just wouldn’t care.

“I did a really good job of that, not caring. I really didn’t want to come here, even though it was everyone’s dream. And then you came along, and as simple as that I had a flight for a space shuttle to take me here. You didn’t even ask if I wanted to.” She took a moment to look at all of the rain-soaked corn around them.

“I guess all I’m trying to say is that I’m confused. And lost. I don’t know where I am. Do you know what I mean?”

Hardin was listening, although he continued to type on his computer. And he knew what she meant, although he couldn’t relate to how she felt, since he always knew where he was. Then, out of nowhere, she kissed him. She took his head in her hands, turned it, and held a long kiss. When she was done, she put her arms around Hardin and hugged him tightly, from the side, her head resting on his shoulder.

The kiss completely surprised Hardin. He had access to the entirety of her brain, and he hadn’t seen it coming. Until the moment she did it, she hadn’t once thought about it. Such a purely impulsive action caused Hardin to wonder if he actually could see all of her thoughts—the action had to have originated out of somewhere. In his own confusion, he stopped typing. Together they listened to the thunder and the sirens.

Hardin said, “I’m not the kind of person you should waste emotion on. I’m not a person at all. I do all of the things a person does, I sleep at night and eat two meals a day, but underneath all of that I’m something else. Something impossible to love.” He could have said it in her head, and he could have manipulated her mind to force her to believe him, but for whatever reason he said it aloud and allowed her to make her own choice about what he meant. And she didn’t believe him.

Eventually, he said, “There’s a lot to be done. Let’s head back.”

The Mars air the next day was refreshing in a way that he couldn’t understand. There were rainclouds in the distance, another gathering storm, and the faint light of the distant sun was on the opposite horizon, struggling between trees. He removed his rifle from where it was strapped across his back.

Their underground cave was nearly complete, and the other nine were putting the final touches to it. He decided that it would be best to get in some target practice with his new gun, a Winchester 1873 rifle. So he took his Martian flag and walked a few kilometers away, where he found an orchard of apple trees.

He needed to understand the exact way in which the rifle’s bullets were unpredictable. If he could do that, then they would no longer truly be unpredictable—he could at least factor the probability of the bullet’s deviations into every shot he made, which would give him probabilistically better aim. But to do that he would have to make quite a few shots, to take a proper sampling.

He picked a tree, and draped the Martian flag over one of its low-hanging boughs. The flag was a red sphere in the middle of a black field, like a Japanese flag at night. The red sphere would make a good target. He then took measured steps. The steps of his right leg were longer than the steps of his left, a predisposition that took root when the world forced his body to be right-sided, instead of sinister. It was only a few millimeters difference, but he noticed. Instead of attempting to adjust, to make them equal, he merely used one number for his left and one for his right, adding them every time he took a step.

After four hundred steps, he turned around. The number should have been 306.389 meters. He brought out a laser distance reader he had stolen and aimed it at the flag. Since it was flapping in the wind, he aimed its stable part, where it was in direct contact with the tree. The laser was the hypotenuse of a triangle, whose short leg was the length of half the flag and whose long leg was the distance between him and the flag. Trigonometry gave him his measured distance as 306.398. He had to wonder who was right, him or the machine. Maybe his footsteps weren’t as consistent as he wanted them to be. He tried not to be upset as he put the distance reader away and took his gun in both hands again.

Of course the deviation of each bullet caused by its time in the barrel was only one of many variables, like gravity and wind resistance. Gravity was easy—even though a lot of his experience with shooting had been on Earth, it wasn’t very hard for him to lower the tip of his gun just a little bit. And at short distances he knew everything that the air was doing. The one unknown variable was isolated—the inaccuracy inherent to the gun.

The gun salesman had tried to sell him a better gun, one that wasn’t so prone to missing. “It’s literally an antique,” the man had said. “I only use it myself for decoration, it’s hardly meant to shoot. Maybe three hundred years ago, but who’s to say if it works now.” There were far more accurate models, improved designs, and improved craftsmanship, although guns themselves, in the traditional sense, were quickly becoming antiques as well, their art slowly dying. The Winchester 1873 was an antique of an antique. But Hardin had insisted that it was the gun he wanted, and not for any kind of decoration, but to shoot things with.

Ten rounds. Hardin quickly worked the lever, shot, lever, shot, until all ten were spent. He then looked at the target for a long while, contemplating the distance. 306.389, or 306.398. A man with two watches never knew the time. In the future, he wasn’t going to be able to walk out each distance before he took a shot. Nor could he always use the laser distance reader, which took time that he wouldn’t always have. His eyes would have to measure. But similar experiments he had done proved that his eyes were only accurate plus or minus 0.2 m at 300 m, meaning that a perfectly well-intentioned shot would either hit too early or too late, therefore falling too far or not enough. But nothing he did seemed to increase that accuracy.