The Complete Karma Trilogy

by Jude Fawley

  “Does it make sense to you?” Will asked. “Why can’t they just say the truth? That he turned out to be a fake. What damage could it really do? I don’t see large rebellions happening, or people doubting the value of Karma, just because of that. We all know we need Karma. Well, most of us. The well-adjusted.”

  Eric said, “Karma forgive me for hazarding such a practical-minded guess, but here I go. It’s more than just the fact that they’d be losing such a strong role model. Everyone wants to think they can get rich. It’s the implications, it goes to show you that you can be evil to the core and still earn all of the money of being good. Maybe the general public wouldn’t consciously reach that conclusion, but I bet a part of them, subconsciously, would realize it.

  “A lot of people don’t separate the Good Work from the good intention. And that’s the perfect misunderstanding, that’s just the way we want it. Accidental sincerity in a majority of the world is more valuable than the truth, at least as far as I’m concerned. Because the first one gives us harmony, and the second one doubt, and I feel like it’s objectively the case that harmony is far more valuable, whatever its cause.”

  Will only considered it silently. A naïve part of him still thought that everyone, given the truth, would make the right decision, that the world was fundamentally good. But already he had found reasons to doubt that, being a police officer. Charles Darcy. He had spoken face to face with a reason to doubt.

  When they finally landed, they spread out across the mansion, their team of five. They all kept their shoes on. Will went straight to the bathroom, where he had failed to find anything before. Eric went to the bedroom. Marcus was in the kitchen, looking out into the backyard, and Steve and John were elsewhere, overturning furniture and tearing tapestries from the walls.

  Will wanted desperately to find what he had missed before. He tore the toilet from the floor, smashed it open with his bare hands, and threw the pieces of porcelain out the window. The glass shattered. He did the same with the cabinets, the towel rack, the porcelain tub. He broke everything into small pieces, and when he found nothing he threw it out the window. When the entire bathroom was stripped, he even tore out the drywall, but found nothing. “It’s just a bathroom,” he said to himself.

  A voice responded. “Go to the backyard.” It was Karma’s voice, somehow speaking to him from within his own head.

  Even though he knew, he asked, “Who is this?”

  “You know, Will Spector. It’s Karma. I’m tired of being in a tower, counting on others to do my work for me. Be my agent, be my body. And throw away your Karma Map, I will tell you everything you need to know. Help me with this.”

  As insane as it seemed to Will, he just accepted it. He asked, “What’s in the backyard?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s the problem. There are holes in my Map, gaps in my knowledge, and that’s a problem. We need to fill those holes, Will Spector.”

  Will placed his Karma Map on the ground, crushed it with his mechanical foot, and then vaulted through the broken window. He ran to the back of the house, without a moment of hesitation. “It’s hard to see,” Will said, peering around into the darkness. The moon wasn’t out that night. “Is this really helpful?”

  “Some detail is better than nothing, and I only need a little bit of detail. Go out past those trees.”

  Will continued forward at a sprint, into the thick brush.

  “Look around more,” Karma said.

  He moved his head back and forth constantly, not because he was actually looking for anything, but just so that Karma would have the images. Eventually he broke through to a clearing, in which there were tents and buildings.

  “They were living here,” Will said. “Hundreds of them.” He went through the tents, the temple, the control station, all the way to the farm, where animals were still wandering around listlessly in the dark. “A little, isolated community. I can’t believe it.” And to Karma, he said, “Was there anything else you wanted to see.”

  “I want to see you destroy it, every piece. Use your Evaporation Pen. Then go back to the mansion, and blow it up. Be quick, I need you to do something else after all of this. I don’t see anybody present, in the images you are sending. They are either gone, or hiding. Either way, this place should not exist.”

  Will took out his Pen, and Evaporated everything, starting at the farm. He Evaporated a cow, or at least what looked vaguely like a cow. He Evaporated the carefully tended rows of withered plants, the tents, the temple. The Evaporation Pen worked surprisingly well on inanimate objects—everything burst into the same billowing clouds of particles, no matter what it had been before. The walls of the temple were no different than the cows in the field. Until there was nothing left standing. It was exhilarating for him—for a long time, an unhealthy hatred towards Charles, and everything associated with him, had been building up inside of Will, and he was finally able to release a part of it. He could see the man’s works disintegrate, with his own eyes, with Karma behind them.

  He went back to the mansion when he had finished. The others were still destroying things with reckless abandon inside. “Find anything?” he asked to Steve and John, when he found them.

  Karma answered for them, inside of Will’s head. “They didn’t.”

  “Are you talking to them as well?” Will asked.

  “Only you. Don’t tell them.”

  Will found Marcus, and told him that it was time to blow the mansion up and move on.

  “But we haven’t found anything yet,” Eric objected.

  “Then there’s nothing to find.”

  “Fine. Give me some of the explosives, and I’ll put them around.”

  Will retrieved the bag he had been carrying, from where he left it at the entrance. He gave a few small bundles to each of the others, and they placed them around the house before leaving.

  They all got into the Helicar, and when they were a safe distance away, Will pressed a button on a remote that detonated them all. A large, spectral fire consumed everything, lighting up the world below them. When the light faded, there was nothing left. Will was satisfied.

  The voice in his head spoke again. “I have the list, of potential suspects. People that have most likely worked for Charles Darcy at some point in their lives. I’m sending it to you now. I’m watching some of these people remove their Karma Chips from their head, as we speak, so I know for a certainty that they are more than suspects, they are criminals. I’m also sending more officers to Evaporate them, but I need you there too.

  “The ones that already have their Chip out will be our responsibility, you and I. They will not be on my Map directly, but I can still see them as they pass by others. I will track them as best as I can, and you will find them and kill them. Tell your group you have something else to attend to, when we land.”

  As Karma was speaking, the Karma Card of everyone around rang, and they looked at what it had to say. It was all things that Will already knew, but he acted surprised.

  “A huge list of people to Evaporate,” Eric said. “All over the city.” They all got out their Karma Maps, to look at where they would be going to find them. Eric asked Will, when he saw him just sitting there watching, “Aren’t you going to look at your Map?”

  Will thought about his Map, crushed on the floor of Charles’ bathroom and then incinerated in the bomb blast. “I have other things to attend to,” he said, even using Karma’s phrasing. “We’ll be going our separate ways, when we land.”

  “What does Karma have you doing?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Well, damn. That’s unfortunate,” Eric said. “I hope we can still celebrate together, as a team, when this is all through. Don’t go dying on us.”

  Decay 14

  An Angry Cloud

  TWENTY MEN IN uniforms, carrying large bags, approached the main gate to a Rehabilitation clinic on the southern side of New York City. One of the guards was yelling down at them from a tower, telling them to back a
way, when he was shot several times. Another guard, who had been standing right behind him, pulled out his Evaporation Pen and walked to where he could see the approaching group, but before he could do anything he was shot down as well.

  The twenty men quickly planted bombs at the base of the two towers adjoining the gate, then one on the gate itself, and backed up to detonate them. In the meantime a small group of guards had arrived on the tower from a staircase behind it, but they arrived only in time to participate in the explosion. The towers were engulfed in an incendiary cloud, the guards dying instantaneously. One of the towers collapsed down into itself, the other fell back into the main building, knocking a hole into the upper portion of the wall. The two pieces of the metal gate were thrown to either side, where they rested on the ground.

  “Move in,” their leader said. “Straight ahead.”

  They shot more guards that came through the front door of the building, and propped the door open. They had to blow up another door to make it from the front to the holding cells, but hadn’t taken a single casualty until they tried to walk through the smoke of the former door into the room beyond, when two of their men were Evaporated in a single instant, by bright red light cutting through the clouds of smoke.

  “Fall back,” the leader said. “Throw the grenades.”

  “But that’s where the prisoners are,” one of the uniformed men objected.

  “I said throw the grenades.”

  Three were thrown in, and a multitude of screams could be heard as they went off. The men poured into the main hall in the wake of the explosions, shooting guards that were lying prostrate on the ground, their bodies riddled with shrapnel. Several of the prison cells that had the misfortune of being close to the front door contained casualties of their own, orange bodies scattered across the floor.

  “Find me some keys.”

  Several of his men started searching the bodies of the dead guards, until one of them produced a set of keys.

  “Open the cells up, open all of them.”

  More guards were coming from the opposite end of the hall. They were still out of the range for their Evaporation Pens, but the guards tried to use them anyway, the red beam fading into nothing thirty feet before the group of attackers.

  “You, open the cells. The rest of you, take them out.”

  The sixteen men that weren’t trying to frantically open prison cells spread out across the width of the hall, and opened fire on the opposite end of the hallway. A single beam caught the left shoulder of one of them, and he screamed as his body quickly became a cloud. Eventually the beams stopped, and all that could be heard at the other end of the hall were the screams of prisoners.

  The leader split the group into two halves, to guard either end of the hallway as they finished releasing prisoners. When all of the cells had been unlocked, he said to everyone in a booming voice, “Feel free to stay here, if you’re enjoying yourself. But everyone that is inclined to join us will be given a gun, and we’ll be going to another Rehabilitation clinic just a few kilometers away, to free them too.”

  There were mutterings all up and down the hall. One prisoner said aloud, “They’ll just kill us, there’s no point.”

  “We’ve got a plan,” the leader responded, but directed it to everyone. “The more people we have, the more likely we are to succeed. But we have to leave right now.”

  He didn’t even wait for a response, he gestured for his men to rejoin him from down the hall, and they went back out the way they came. Already Helicars were hovering in the air, and police officers were repelling down with their Grappling Chains. He instructed his men to fire up at them as they ran. Behind them, a crowd of prisoners spilled out the building, frantic and orange.

  “They shot Peril, they shot him. Evaporated. He’s dead.”

  “You’re going to have to calm down, Brother Charles. You knew the risks, and so did he. You shouldn’t have called here. This conversation is being recorded.” Vincent was sitting at the control station, back at the Monastery, watching over all of the monks that were out in the city. Charles was on the other end of the line, panting.

  “This is an emergency. Doesn’t it sound like an emergency? They’re onto me, or they wouldn’t have shot at me. They came in with a bunch of Helicars and shot at us with those Pens.”

  “I know, I saw it all.”

  “What do you mean you saw it? We were in the Park.”

  “I’m telling you I saw it. I was watching through Peril, and the feed never cut when he walked into the Park. The Privacy Room there isn’t working.”

  “You take every single one of our monks, and get those Chips out of their heads, right this instant.”

  “That’s insane. We wouldn’t be able to keep track of any of them, and we still have until tomorrow. And there’s no way they won’t notice a hundred people disappearing simultaneously. Chances are they were just after you, they saw you walk into the Park, they turned the Room off, and now they think you’re dead. So we’re in the clear. That is, until they listen to this conversation and realize that they have to kill you again.”

  “I’m not taking any chances. If they can turn off one Privacy Room, they can turn them all off. They saw me with a group of people, so they’ll be looking for more of us. We both know how good they are at finding people that are on the Map. Do it.” Charles was concerned that if any of his monks were found, they would be interrogated, and say too much.

  “If the Privacy Rooms really are down, they’ll see us taking them out.”

  “I said do it. And get everyone and everything out of the Monastery, and on its way for tomorrow. We can’t mess up the timing.”

  “Alright. But if this goes to hell, I just want you to remember that I think you’re overreacting.”

  Charles handed back the phone to the woman he had taken it from, thanked her politely, and ran.

  Vincent sounded the alarm from the temple. All of the people that had been training with weapons, and all of the people that had been working on the farm, gathered in front of the door to the control station, where he addressed them. There were a little over a hundred present, all told.

  “I hate to say it,” Vincent started, “but I think it’s become time to say goodbye to our Monastery. Brother Charles is under the impression that the police are on their way here now.”

  Everyone began to panic, and a few began to run away.

  “Whoa, hold it. I’ve got more things to say here, I promise I’ll keep it short, okay? We need to get all of our equipment from over there, and get it to the old subway station. Checkpoint gamma. And each of you will be given one of the weapons you’ve been training with for a while now, just in case we get spotted. That’s all I’ve got, so let’s get going. Stay focused.”

  They moved in a mass to where a lot of boxes were being stored behind the temple, which was also where they had been keeping all of the reverse-engineered Evaporation Pens and Grappling Chains. Vincent helped to pass them all out, before having everyone take some of the boxes and follow him along a desolate road towards an abandoned subway station.

  One of the monks was walking alongside Damon, who had only been at the farm for about an hour before the alarm had been rung and everyone was called to the temple. The monk could see the fresh cut along the outside of the man’s ear, and the bewilderment in his face. He said to Damon, “You just have bad timing, man. It’s not always like this. It’s usually pretty relaxing, really. You just have bad timing. How long ago did they take out your Chip?”

  “I haven’t really woken up yet,” Damon said, and looked around the large box he was carrying, down at the Evaporation Pen and Grappling Chain that were hanging at his sides.

  “Yeah, bad timing man. Well good luck.” He immediately hurried off ahead, because he felt that even though he was just trying to be polite, the conversation had become awkward and he didn’t want to hang around. Damon just kept plodding forward, one foot after the other. He was going back the direction he had come from
only an hour before, when he had arrived, the only difference being the box in his hands and the weapons he didn’t understand.

  “Aren’t those Helicars?” one of the monks said, pointing off into the distance. The group was going through a neighborhood of rundown houses, walking down the middle of the road.

  “Damn, they are,” Vincent said. “Everyone, get behind one of those houses. We can’t let them see us.” Quickly they scattered, and Vincent watched from around a corner as the Helicars made their way towards the mansion. “Okay, let’s keep going.”

  Eventually they reached the old subway station. It had been deemed obsolete when the newer subway system had been installed ten years before, but it still connected to one of the lines, two kilometers down its tracks. They broke the chains that were around the door, and entered the empty building. Down the stairs was a dark, graffiti-filled platform. All of the benches were broken, and the electronic fixtures had all fallen down.

  Vincent was talking to everyone again. “We’re going to go about two kilometers down these tracks, and we’re going to stay there for the night. We’re going to take shifts, guarding both sides. They’re probably not going to find us here, but if they do we’re going to have to put up a fight. Now let’s go, let’s get all these boxes off the platform and onto the tracks.”

  While the monks were doing that, Vincent walked back to the door of the station, and looked in the direction of the mansion. He could have sworn he could see a glow in the distance, as if they had set the place on fire. He sighed, and shut the door.