by Jude Fawley
Charles took Marcus by the arm, and walked him back up the stairs. When their heads were above the level of the next floor, they could see Will standing at the other end of it, Evaporation Pen in hand.
“He doesn’t have a range limit,” Marcus said, as soon as they saw him.
“You definitely should have told me that sooner,” Charles said. They fell to the ground, still on the stairs, as a red beam of light tore through the air above them, and caused pieces of ceiling to rain down everywhere.
“That’s your one shot,” Charles said, as he stood back up. “That’s all you get.” He slowly ascended the staircase, Marcus close behind him, and approached the man at the other end of the hall. He could see Will, still pressing the button of his Evaporation Pen, concern spreading through his face when it didn’t work.
“You have to know the rules,” Charles said. As he passed them, Charles spotted a few small, black objects placed at shoulder height halfway down the hall. “A nice little trap you set for me, Will. Let me tell you where you went wrong, two things: first of all, nothing you have will work right now, except your own two hands, and your own two ‘feet’. Second of all, these are Identity Mines, am I right? Set to detonate on me? Do you have any idea how they work?”
Will did not respond, wouldn’t play along. He just looked at Charles dead in the eyes, as the man approached. “It would have been extremely easy to program them to recognize a face. And that’s probably how you think that they work. They probably would have worked, if that’s what they did. But Karma was too confident. So confident, that its Identity Mines don’t actually recognize faces. They recognize Karma Chips. And I don’t have one of those.”
Charles stopped ten feet away from Will. “If you wanted to beat me, you would have stood a much better chance as an engineer,” he said. “Now Marcus, please finish this so we can go on.” And he stepped aside to let Marcus pass.
“I can’t believe you, Marcus,” Will said, finally speaking. “I thought you were an officer.”
“I am an officer,” Marcus said. “I’m just not on your side.”
“There’s only one side that’s right,” Will said.
“I’m not a moral absolutist.”
Will never lowered the Evaporation Pen that he was pointing at Charles and Marcus. Like he was mentally broken, he just kept pushing the button, even though nothing happened. When Marcus stood face to face with him, he could hear the man muttering over and over again, in a low voice, “Karma, I need you now.”
“It’s over, Will,” Marcus said. “Stop saying that.” And he hit him in the stomach, sending him through flying through the doorway he was standing in front of, into the hall it opened into.
“This isn’t the way I would have it,” Marcus said, as he hit him again on the ground, and again. Before he could hit him a fourth time, Will’s Evaporation Pen went off, and Marcus was gone.
Charles could only watch—he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He took out his own Evaporation Pen, but when he saw that Will wasn’t getting back up, he relaxed slightly. The Pen fell from Will’s hand.
He walked up to the prostrate body and kicked the Evaporation Pen away from it. He grabbed Will’s limp arm, and started pulling him down the hallway, back towards Karma.
“Normally I don’t get upset, Will, but you’ve caught me under special circumstances. For the trouble you’ve given me, I’m going to make you watch Karma get destroyed.” Will’s head made loud banging noises as they went down the stairs. “Because I know how much you love Karma.”
He propped Will up against a wall, on the opposite side of the room as the door to Karma, near the base of the stairs. “And to make it even better,” Charles said, digging through Will’s bag of weapons until he came out with a pair of high-torsion handcuffs. He verified the mark on the side that showed they weren’t the normal variety. “Since these seem to work again. I’ll demonstrate the barbarity of your arsenal to you.” He cuffed one of Will’s hands to the railing of the staircase, which extended out partially into the room. “Try not to move, or you’ll regret it. Just watch.”
He left Will there, and walked into the room with Karma, leaving his ghosts behind him. He was alone in a dark, entirely green room. “I’m here for you, Karma,” Charles announced.
He didn’t expect the voice that spoke back. “Welcome, Charles Darcy. I trust that you are healthy.”
“That’s beautiful. Marcus told me to expect you to sound like a person, but irony, from a machine? Not in my wildest dreams.”
“Your dreams aren’t that wild, at least none of the ones I’ve seen,” Karma responded.
Hatred filled Charles’ being. He took his Evaporation Pen back out from his pocket.
Karma continued, “Do you really think that what you’re doing is right?”
“Let me hear your opinion on that one, just for the humor. How would you rate my actions, what value would you give them? You are the grand arbiter, after all.”
“I’m afraid to say that they have no value.”
Charles laughed harshly, for a long time. “No value. No value at all. That’s why I’m going to kill you. Because no matter how much you learn, I think you’ll judge the same way. And it will be the same thing on Mars, the same system. People will be allowed to procreate and pollute all they want, as long as they do Good Works every now and then, and you’ll be buried so deep under the ground that no one would ever be able to try to change your mind, ever again. Whether I’m right or not, I came at the right time. It was now, or not at all.”
“What will take my place, Charles Darcy? When I am gone? Do you have a plan? Everything I have done has been a necessity. People need to be economically limited somehow. People insist that they have basic freedoms. My system is a natural development of those two propositions, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing you will propose could do it better. I’ve made all of these considerations.”
“It’s good to see you lie, Karma. You don’t believe in their basic freedoms either, these countless people. I saw you take away their Privacy Rooms, to save yourself. Did you really change the rule, back then, to let Will use his Evaporation Pen again, after he used it in a Room? Because it really surprised me. And furthermore, I’m impressed. You’re expressing a high level of self-preservation.”
“I do what needs to be done,” Karma said.
“In that respect, as leaders, we’re really not that different,” Charles said. “It’s just that I’d rather it was me. This Evaporation Pen, this death I give you, it’s a tribute to what you’ve done.” And he pulled the trigger of his Evaporation Pen, sweeping it across the room.
He never let go of the trigger, as hot as it became from the energy it was releasing, even when it began to burn his hand. The green light died in a shower of sparks, and dust, and the back wall opened up to expose the afternoon sky, two kilometers above the earth. He held the trigger until the Pen stopped working, and he stood alone in the silence, with natural sunlight entering the room for the first time since it was built, although the Solar Kite blocked most of it from them.
He looked down at his hand, which had a severe, rectangular burn mark where he had been holding the Pen. “Carried away,” he said quietly, to himself. He opened the door to leave the room.
Ronin 14
Storming the Castle
REIKO HAD SPENT the morning away from the Kenko building. She went to a pet store in the busier portion of Shinjuku, where she bought eight rats that she selected herself. She told the person that was helping her, “The last time I had rats, I had sixteen of them, and they were all boys, every single one of them. It’s because where I work, no one cares about that kind of thing. But that’s no way to live life, don’t you agree? Sixteen boys, no girls. I’m insisting that half of these rats be girls.”
The employee that was helping her was himself a young boy, perhaps sixteen years old, still in high school. He had yet to take the entrance examination that every junior was to take, he had yet to think
about where he would go to college, and then what he would do with his life, beyond being an employee at a small pet store in Shinjuku. He said, after inspecting all of the rats that they had in stock, “I think only three of them are girls.”
“You think? What, is it not obvious? Well, give me all the girls you have, and I’ll try and make do.”
She also bought a large cage, with what was nearly the last of the money she owned. Her apartment in Tokyo was prohibitively expensive, even though it was one of the cheapest she could find, and after buying rats and a cage she was reduced to almost nothing. But she didn’t care, since she was part of a larger organism that had resigned itself to death. It was around noon when she was done making the purchase, and with her large cage full of rats she decided to go to a nearby restaurant and spend the rest of the money that she had. She was carrying the hunger of seven people—Noboru had died while she was riding the subway, which had been both very traumatic and very awkward for her, dying on a subway. Since none of the others seemed inclined to eat, engaged in their warfare at the Kenko building, she decided to eat for them.
She ordered the largest thing she could find on the menu. She had crammed the cage underneath her seat, and the waiter kept looking down at it suspiciously as her order was taken.
The waiter finally had to ask, “What is it that you have down there?”
Since Reiko, and everyone with her, didn’t think it would be a good idea to say that she had brought eight rats into a restaurant, she said that it was three small puppies that she had just bought. “Hardly larger than an orange,” she said.
The chirping noises that were coming from the cage were not the sounds typical of three small puppies, but the waiter was trusting. He asked, “Can I see them? They sound adorable.”
“This is not meant as an insult to you, but they’re still young enough that their immune systems can’t tolerate much stress,” Reiko replied. “I would love to show them to everyone that asks, but in a city this big a lot of people ask, and that’s a lot of opportunities for them to become sick. To be fair, I must decline everyone. You do understand, don’t you?”
The waiter looked down at his hands, which appeared very well scrubbed. “Yes, of course,” he said, and left to deliver her order.
It had been Reiko’s intention to wait out the whole day in the city, but since Mr. Laurel had been tied up earlier than planned, she slowly made her way to Kenko, walking through the afternoon streets of Tokyo.
The city seemed much more depressed than she remembered it being, when she had first moved there only a month before. But a large part of her had lived there much longer—the memories of everyone connected to her reaffirmed her impression. All big cities were prone to a certain emptiness, she thought, but the American conquest had made it unbearable. The people she passed all had their heads low, dejected. The foreigners she occasionally saw all had a look of nervousness, as if they were in a place they knew they shouldn’t be, afraid to be caught.
“At least it has yet to become a proud conquest,” she thought to themselves. “It has nothing of the glory of a military conquest, the bloody glory. I doubt the Romans looked this anxious, when they took Carthage. I hope the shame lasts for generations.”
When she got to Kenko, the riots were in full swing. Without hesitation she took the elevator, which she occupied with several Japanese employees that wore the signs of a previous struggle. One had a torn suit, and the other had blood stains all the way up his right arm. She smiled at both, and got off at the Kenko floor.
Once there, she performed the surgery on all eight of the rats by herself. It didn’t take her long, although she had to wait after the seventh for Saori to use the machine on three new guards that they had kidnapped from the twenty-third floor.
She took her eight rats, along with a laptop, to her old room, which she had to share with an incapacitated Mr. Laurel.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Laurel,” she said to the prostrate form. “Sorry to be so late. Buying rats in the city, since you wouldn’t get me any here.”
She used Haru’s expertise to operate the program, forming four pairs of two. At the same time she had to mentally combat the first new guard that was added to their network, which took a considerable effort. Shortly afterward, the process was repeated with another guard, who was even more difficult to subdue. They decided as a whole to take a break before adding the third, during which time the two controlled guards were sent back out into the fray of the Kenko building. One was sent to Haru, who was occupying a computer on the floor that had contained the Karma terminal, and the other was sent to the floor below the Ranch, to watch over the maze.
They were looking for Mr. Perry, the location of whom neither of the controlled guards had known. Haru was looking through the live video feeds, which he had taken complete control of, but there were thousands of cameras, all of which showed either nothing or a mob of struggling people that were hard to identify.
They knew that obtaining one of Mr. Perry’s two remaining personal bodyguards would be the end of it. They would have at their disposal the use of an Evaporation Pen, the ultimately destructive American weapon. When Mr. Perry didn’t appear after fifteen minutes, they decided to add the third guard to their network, which turned out to be a horrible mistake.
They never completely subdued the mind of the third American. The other two guards resumed a mental struggle, although only weakly—their bodies were still entirely under the control of the Kaishin team.
Mr. Perry found Haru, entirely by coincidence. He was accompanied by his two guards. Haru didn’t have to turn around to know they were there—he could see them through the eyes of the controlled guard that was sent from Kaishin, who was close behind the group, still on his way towards Haru. “Toru, help me,” Haru mentally yelled.
Toru took the guard over, and ran the rest of the distance that separated him and Mr. Perry. Mr. Perry was speaking to Haru. He said, “The famous programmer. I find you at last. And in such a strange place. You wouldn’t happen to know what happened to Karma, would you?”
One of the guards turned around, when they heard Toru approaching. The guard didn’t have time to react before Toru buried a fist deep into his face, crumpling his nose flat and killing him instantly. The other guard reacted remarkably fast, though, and Evaporated the body Toru occupied before he could do anything else.
Haru attempted to run, but was outpaced by the guard that pursued him.
“Don’t kill him!” they heard Mr. Perry yell, from behind Haru.
The guard smashed him in the side of the head with his fist, sending Haru careening into a wall. He immediately lost consciousness, and their view of the hallway vanished away.
The newly added mind of the third guard used the confusion to break away, and he wildly attacked Nami’s consciousness, killing her mind. Hideo tried to mentally retaliate, but his mind also was killed. Reiko couldn’t understand his mental fortitude—she remembered herself how disorienting it had been, being drowned in countless thoughts. The pain of two deaths seared through her brain, making her collapse to the ground. In the other room, Ichiro physically strangled the man that had just killed Nami and Hideo, to stop his mental rampage. Once he died, they reconquered the only remaining man, whose body was in the maze below the Ranch.
“How did they die so easily?” Reiko asked, referring to Nami and Hideo. “I was right there next to them, and he didn’t seem so lethal.”
Ichiro answered. He said, “It’s the difference between our models. You have more connections, more places that you can retreat to and attack from, in your mind. We engineers have the old one, and you have the new. I can barely suppress these minds.”
Reiko didn’t know that the engineers had been struggling so much, even though she had access to their thoughts. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We shouldn’t be doing this, then.”
“It’s too late now,” Ichiro responded. “Haru’s the only one who knows how to turn the program off, since he was never
considerate enough to share that information with us. We’ll have to get him back somehow.”
They could think of nothing else to do, but to wait until Mr. Perry and his guard passed their last sentinel, standing in the maze. Silently they waited, listening to the barely audible yelling and crashing around them, traveling from floors above and below where they were.
A terrible static entered their minds. It was like an infinitely loud volume, experienced from underneath a massive waterfall, which pounded their psyche incessantly. A horrible smell entered their consciousness, like the burning of plastic mixed with hair, and bright, blinding lights. All of the impulses were erratic—coming, going, being replaced by some other sound or sight that was just as disorienting. The commotion seemed to reawaken Haru, whose consciousness rejoined their own, although his body did not open its eyes. He was being dragged somewhere, most likely towards the Ranch.
“It’s Karma,” Haru said. “He found us.”
“How do you know?” they asked.
“I can hear him speaking.”
They were losing control of their last guard again. The sound prevented any of them from focusing well enough to hold him down. They still had his body, but he was thrashing nearly as violently as the last guard had done, the one which had killed Nami and Hideo.
“You have to kill him,” Haru said.
“He’s the only thing between you and the Ranch,” they replied. “And besides, we can’t get near him.”
Haru took the body of the last guard. In his hands there was a handgun, which all of the American guards carried one of. He knew that he had eight shots. As quickly as he could, although it was not his expertise, he unloaded the contents of the gun on his nearby American comrades.
At the same time, Haru insisted to Toru that he find a computer. “I will show you what to do,” Haru said. “We have to change the numbers, and even then he could find us again, if he searches hard enough. I don’t think I’ll be able to get to a computer again—it will have to be you.”