The Complete Karma Trilogy

by Jude Fawley

  He was writing a letter. For a long time, he just sat there with a pencil in his mouth, staring blankly at the empty white pages, but eventually he took the pencil from his mouth and wrote:

  Dear Sam,

  Years from now, you’re going to look at this letter and it’s going to make you laugh. It will be our last little private joke, me and you. If you ever get a refrigerator, I want you to hang this on it, ok? You’ll get a refrigerator, I know you will. You have such a kind heart, deep down. I still believe. And kind hearts deserve refrigerators.

  I’m sitting here at a café I’ll never be able to afford, writing this. There’s a window down into the Park, and I swear I can see you, but you’re so small from here. You’re smiling, I know. I don’t think I’m coming home again. That’s probably going to upset you for a while.

  I never stopped believing in the things you wanted me to believe in, I promise. I’m still in love with us, but mostly you. And I still think it’s our happiness and our happiness alone that is important in this universe, but mostly yours. It’s just that I’m going to bring us both down if you let me, and you will let me, so I’m going to spare you myself. I’m just not strong enough to do it face to face, so I’m using this paper. Forgive me for that, among other things.

  I know that me leaving puts you in a bad place. There are bills you won’t be able to pay, and you’ll have to live somewhere else. But believe me when I say that this world is made for people like you, it was made specifically so that you’ll always be able to get back up when you’ve fallen. But it doesn’t work that way for me, I won’t be getting back up.

  I’ll be leaving all my things behind. You should sell them. Sorry for the chore.

  You’ll probably want a reason, one that would actually convince you. I probably don’t have any of those. I will say that, for a while now, I’ve been finding myself thinking about what is right. In a really general sense. Like, is it right to hate absolutely everyone? Probably not, but why can’t it be, and who’s judging? I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in karma, I don’t believe in any of the things that you do, so I’m lacking a lot of motivation that you’ve always had an easy time finding, even if you’ve doubted the same things from time to time yourself.

  There’s nothing but ourselves, is what I’ve distilled it all down to, and even then, even when that’s all I’m considering, I’m still doing wrong. Which is discomforting. I’m going to do it right. I’ve thought a lot about what that means, and this is what I’ve decided. You won’t agree, but I know I’m right. When you read this years from now, hanging on your fridge, while you’re laughing, you’ll finally agree with me. You’ll have filled your life with other things and you’ll realize that they suit you much better. I hope you can thank me then, even when you hate me now.

  Be happy.

  None of it sounded right, but he put the pencil down anyway. He was done with the eraser, done with the lead. Rowing in Eden. He folded the letter up, put it into his pocket, and left.

  Ronin 9

  Fomenting Rebellion

  “IT KILLED THEM all,” Reiko told Toru. “Sometime between when Haru hit that button on Friday and when I came back today, Kuro killed all of the other rats. I watched the video of him doing it. They didn’t even fight him. That’s what I don’t understand. There was fifteen of them, and just one of him, and yet he managed to kill them all.” She was really depressed about it. Even though they were just test subjects of an experiment, she had come to like most of them.

  “Did they provoke him?” Toru asked. They were sitting in an office that he formerly shared with both Noboru and Haru, who were both gone, leaving the room strangely desolate. Reiko didn’t like the vacant atmosphere of the place, but it was much more private than the conference room, so she tolerated it. She didn’t like to see even the glazed shape of Mr. Laurel walking through the hall, through the conference room glass.

  “Not from what I can tell in the video. And it took him a while to start—Haru hit that button around two in the afternoon, and it was that evening when he went insane. This puts us back a lot, doesn’t it? Will there be another set of rats? Can I do those experiments again? I swear it wasn’t me that did anything wrong, there must have been something wrong with Kuro. I knew it from the beginning, but I didn’t know it was so severe.”

  “I’ll have to ask Mr. Laurel, unfortunately, but there’s no reason that he should say no,” Toru said. “What was wrong with this Kuro rat?”

  “He just never cooperated as well as the rest. That’s the only way I can describe it, really. I don’t think that he was naturally dumb, although he never learned any of his tricks. He was just a... leech. A mental leech. Until he turned into a cannibal.”

  “What do you think you could learn from doing it again?” Toru asked.

  “I want to know if it will happen again. If it’s something improbable or if it’s fated, for mentally conjoined rats. And I’d like to see a functional group of sixteen. They were getting smarter every time, it was incredible. I know you didn’t see much of what they were doing, and it’s not terribly amazing in contrast to what people can do, but for rats it’s unbelievable.”

  “I’m sorry if I’m not as amazed as you,” Toru said. “On a technical level, what we did as scientists was amazing. We made those chips, made them work, and, to hear you talk about it, they did everything they were supposed to do. But I had always expected more, I guess. I don’t even know what it was I thought would happen, but I know I was disappointed on your first day, when we flipped that switch and nothing visibly happened. I’ve spent years on this, for that.”

  “It’s probably not comforting,” Reiko said, “but even the best science can’t be seen, sometimes. That’s how I feel. I don’t need the empiricism, the direct observations and measurable quantities. I can just believe. But if that’s really what you want, you can dissect all my dead rats’ brains, and compare them to the controls. To see if there’s any measurable physiological difference between them, shaped by Kaishin. The girls have the right machines for it, right down the hall. And I know Saori would do it for you. Don’t ask Nami. Would that make you feel better, if you got a scientific chart one week from now that said their cerebral cortices were thirty percent more massive? That’s the measure of success, right? Mass?”

  “Don’t mock me,” Toru said.

  “I’m honestly not. If you told me last week that you wanted their brains for analysis, I would have told you to go to hell. But now that they’re all dead, I don’t see what difference it makes. If Kuro can tear them all apart for his pleasure, then I don’t see why I’d stop you.”

  “I might take you up on that. Isn’t this Kuro still alive? I’d be interested in his brain. You wouldn’t make me wait until he died of natural causes, would you?”

  “No, I smashed him. If you can recover his brain, it’s all yours. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “That’s lovely. Will you do that for me? I know it’s a lot to ask, and I know you were probably joking, but it really would make me feel better if I had those comparisons. A really nice brain abnormality would make my day. Or if nothing changed at all, wouldn’t that be even better? We could practically call Kaishin natural, if nothing about the brain changed. You get all of those brains imaged for me, and I’ll talk to Mr. Laurel about getting you new rats. Then you can go back to doing your thing. Sound good?”

  “I can do that.”

  Later that afternoon, she lumped all of the dead bodies into a cardboard box, and brought them over to the brain workshop that the girls had next door to her own room. Nami and Saori were both there, but she intentionally only spoke to Saori.

  Slowly, and with a lot of effort, she had worked her way into Saori’s good graces, but Nami was beyond recovery. Nami was a genuinely disagreeable person, whereas Saori was overly serious, yet still human on a fundamental level.

  It was probably not Reiko’s natural charm that opened Saori up to her. If she had to guess, it was the fact that
they were all scared that made Saori more willing to reach out to a fellow scared person. They had been hearing a lot lately about people being fired, people disappearing, and the unnatural tendencies of Mr. Perry. The fear pervaded their interactions, even when they were joking. More and more, Reiko wondered to herself why she came back every day. But it wasn’t like her apartment on the other side of the city was in a different Japan, one that was not drowning in American influence, so she continued to wake up early every weekday to board the subway, like every other working individual had to do.

  Reiko set the box of gore on the ground. “Saori, I know this is asking a lot, but me and Toru were wondering if you could run these rats through your brain meat processor, and print out some pretty pictures for us. Maybe tell us what you notice is weird about them. I’ll bring over some normal rats for you to kill as well, if you need them. One of these guys went crazy and killed all of his friends, so you’ll be looking for homicidal maniac lumps or whatever.”

  “You say that like a joke,” Saori said, “but those lumps exist. In humans, at least. If your rat has one, then I’ll point it out for you. When do you want it done by?” On the other side of the room, Nami was ignoring Reiko’s existence. Maybe she was jealous that Reiko got to be Mr. Okada’s daughter, and not her. From what she understood, every one of them had loved the man, even the inhuman Nami.

  “Whenever is fine. Or at least I don’t care. It’s mostly for Toru. I’m more about the living rats.”

  Saori picked the box up off the ground, and put it on a nearby tabletop. Saori’s complete nonchalance about the contents of the box impressed Reiko. Most girls would have betrayed at least a slight distaste for such morbid things, but not Saori. Spending day after day cutting human brains apart probably desensitized people to that kind of thing, Reiko thought. She was disgusted, herself, and glad to be rid of all the dead bodies. She wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up the blood and entrails that remained in her room.

  “While I’m here,” Reiko said, “is there anything cool going on?”

  “I can show you this new gel we’re working on,” Saori suggested.

  “Yea, let’s do that.”

  “Okay, come over here.” They went to a table closer to Nami, but still the alien scientist did not acknowledge Reiko’s presence. On the table was what looked like a fancy coffee machine, with a little tray that contained a cross section of a brain on it. “Just watch,” Saori said.

  She hit some buttons, and the machine made a gentle humming noise. Slowly, it poured a small stream of a honey-like liquid onto just one corner of the brain. It stopped pouring automatically. The result of the operation was a puddle in the brain’s corner, which slowly seemed to be seeping into the rest of the brain before hardening.

  “So tell me what I’m looking at,” Reiko said.

  “It looks like honey,” Saori said, “but really it’s a bunch of microscopic wires. We got those little wires out of bacteria that were modified to make them, they aren’t natural. Anyway, the whole problem is that we need to distribute those wires across the entire brain, so we need a liquid that isn’t too viscous, or it will never make it through. It also can’t be too much volume, or we’d be putting unnatural pressure on the brain, so it has to be dense. It’s a nearly impossible compromise. We’ve been testing a lot of different liquid solutions. Anyway, this one does much better than the one we use on the rats. The stuff we used on the rats would never make it across a human sized brain.

  “Another solution would be to drill holes everywhere in the skull, and put the liquid in a bunch of different, evenly spaced little pools. But people wouldn’t like that, we’re trying to make this as non-invasive as possible. Keep watching.” Saori directed Reiko’s eyes back to the brain section.

  “It’s a different color than it used to be, isn’t it?” Reiko asked.

  “Yes, it is. Weird, right? If this is the stuff we would use, you’re looking at the future color of people’s brain on Kaishin. And look at this.” Saori picked up the discolored brain slice with one hand, and a nearby fresh slice with another. She flopped them around, a sight that nearly made Reiko vomit. But the modified slice was definitely more rigid than the other, Reiko noticed. “See how it’s all stiff? This stuff actually changes the tensile strength of the brain. It’s not really important, normally your brain isn’t being torn while you’re alive, but I still think it’s cool.”

  “Why is it hard?”

  “A bunch of wires.”

  “How do they connect? How do they know what to connect to?” Reiko had been at Kaishin for a month, but still had absolutely no idea how Kaishin worked, since Mr. Okada had only ever spoken about the technology in grand, broad strokes, and her talk with Haru had done nothing for her understanding.

  “They just connect themselves, when they cool down. That’s the one thing we still need to figure out, how to do this in a narrower temperature range. We’re feeding in the liquid at one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, which can’t be terribly healthy. It connects when it gets down around body temperature. And it doesn’t actually know what to connect to—it just connects to everything. Everyone who has Kaishin will have a completely different, completely random set of connections. But Haru’s program sorts those connections out, and finds out which ones are useful and which ones are meaningless. And I have no idea how he does that, I just know how to make a bunch of random connections.”

  “What’s left for you to do, then?” Reiko asked.

  “Like I said, lower the temperature range. Maybe find a better liquid solution. But other than that, we’re ready. We’ll just be looking at brains and a random assortment of liquids, until either we find something new or we just settle with what we have.”

  “Magical things you guys are doing,” Reiko said. “I’m going to leave before I get any smarter.”

  Mr. Perry visited Kaishin a few days later, along with three guards. He never announced when he was coming, so that the unpleasant surprise of his existence was never ruined. He wanted to speak to everyone in their group, which even after the firings and death was actually larger than when Reiko was first hired, because of Mr. Laurel and the large number of programmers that had replaced Haru. They crammed into the conference room, with the addition of a few chairs.

  “We’re moving on to human experiments,” Mr. Perry announced, without any prelude.

  “That’s not possible,” Reiko said.

  “It amazes me every time that you are still here, Ms. Okada. I hear that, under your supervision, all of the experimental rats died. That will make an excellent addition for your resume, when you finally start searching for a real job. We’re moving on to human experiments.”

  “You just acknowledged that the rats died,” Reiko insisted, “and you still plan on moving on to humans? That’s absurd.”

  “Two points, and then I don’t want to hear another word from you for the rest of this meeting. The only reason that you remain here is because Mr. Laurel deemed you vital to the preliminary experiments, but those are over now, aren’t they? And I make all of the final decisions.

  “My points. The first is that we’ve made excellent progress on the project, which I’ve been reading a lot about. The programmers have made a large breakthrough, and the engineers have a lot to show. Quite commendable, really—more than I expected to come out of this group. It is only logical that, after such improvements have been made, future success rates should be higher. My second point is that I have plenty of humans that are perfectly willing to be tested, so whether you feel ready or not, now is a good time to begin.”

  “Who are these people?” Toru asked.

  “Japanese citizens who have rebelled against the American government. Technically they’ve been condemned to death, but we gave them a choice, since we’re all about liberties where I’m from. They were allowed to choose between lethal injection or volunteering for projects such as your own, and told they’d be let off with a warning if they survived either. It’s a m
ercy, and highly efficient if you consider it.”

  “The ethics of this...” Toru began to say. He didn’t have a proper ending to the statement. He could think of no safe argument to be made. If he were to insist that it was wrong, he would be contradicting the phantom-like “American government” that haunted Japan, and he didn’t know what would happen to him. It was very likely that simply to disagree was being equated with rebelling. Or perhaps to be an inconvenient person was all it took to be condemned to a choice between death and torture. Reiko could see the fear and resignation in his eyes.

  “The ethics of this are perfectly in order,” Mr. Perry affirmed. “You should be well aware that, for all ground-breaking things designed for humans, eventually a human will have to try it, to see if it works. How do you think airplanes were perfected, or parachutes? Submarines. Someone had to jump off a cliff, and rely on their science. You’ve done the best you can to design Kaishin, haven’t you? What is there left to worry about, other than your own inadequacies surfacing when something wrong happens to these people? You better make sure now that you’ve got everything in perfect order—we’re testing in three days.”

  “Everything is obviously not in perfect order,” Reiko said. “Let’s call them our inadequacies, we’ll admit they are ours, because who cares? Either way, we’re not ready for the next step.”

  “I gave you your warning,” Mr. Perry said. “You’re out of this meeting. If you behave well in the coming days, perhaps you’ll be invited to the next one.”

  Reiko didn’t argue. She made a lot of noise as she pushed herself away from the table, stood up, and marched out of the room, leaving the shameful spectacle behind her.