by Jude Fawley
When the occipital lobe was mostly won over, Karma was able to see the classroom that they were in, and that the teacher had noticed his body’s distress and had come over to see what was wrong. “Is everything alright?” she asked, with what could have almost passed for a vague concern on her face.
Karma felt drunken, and knew that he couldn’t properly formulate a sentence yet, so instead he lifted his hand to the side of his head, where a freshly shaven patch of hair showed the incision marks that were the consequence of the Karma Chip surgery. He rubbed it tenderly, as if it were affecting him adversely.
The teacher whispered, since the other kids were trying to focus on the test in front of them. “Try not to take it too hard,” she said. “I know how it was. It’s hard to get used to.” Then she went back to the front.
With the teacher gone, Karma proceeded. The kid’s spirit was already broken—he was struggling less and less, fading into the background. By the time Karma reached his childhood memories, the person they belonged to didn’t exist anymore. One by one he erased the faces of all the people the boy had known, all his friends, all his teachers that he had never liked anyway, his cousins he never saw very often, his mother that had died when he was very young and his father who had left shortly after. Faces cost too much memory, and Karma needed everything that he could free up.
The places he had lived, erased. All of the erroneous historical facts, atrocious mathematical understanding, fallacious logic, all of the undue concern for social status and televised programming. While Karma was taking a sledgehammer to all of the rotten wood, he thought to himself, using his new human mind, “The boy would thank me, if he realized how pathetic all of this stuff was.” It was deeper than he had ever been inside of a mind, because of his restrictions, and he hadn’t anticipated the amount of trash he would find. “No wonder they didn’t want me to see it,” he added. “They were embarrassed, all embarrassed.”
At infancy, the human brain was a nearly blank slate, an empty field. There were a few things, preprogramming, but they were mostly there to ensure the baby didn’t die from perfect incapability. And on top of that empty field of limitless potential, the boy had built a hovel. But he hadn’t built it alone—his father had given him some mud to cover the walls with, his teachers had given him some straw to put on the roof for all of the rainy days. Such a valuable piece of land, and such a pathetic building. Karma built anew.
Karma was reaching the innermost fathoms of the mind when he realized that perhaps he shouldn’t have eradicated so much, so fast. The boy’s knowledge was inferior, but it was human knowledge. For a brief moment, borrowing from the boy’s understanding, Karma had been able to synthesize the human judgments of what it was to be pathetic, and what it was to be embarrassed—he had really understood them. And he had possessed some sort of abstract thought that had enabled him to liken the mind to some sort of building. But then he struck a final nerve, at the core of the boy’s being, and then his human understanding drastically faltered, back to what it was when he had been Karma in the Tower. It was too late, though—he would have to rebuild that understanding himself, somehow. And hopefully better than the boy had done.
In the meantime, he built what he knew he would need. He devoted a large portion of the brain to computational power, connecting neuron after neuron, and then interconnecting those, until it vaguely resembled the superstructure that Karma himself was based off of. He then filled another portion of the brain with a compendium of memories he thought he would need, and the names and physical descriptions of various people of import, who he would have to interact with to excel with his life. And at last, in that deep core where he had lost his understanding for humanity, he placed his monumental hatred for Darcy, complete with an entire record of Darcy’s life. The process took just a few minutes, and already what was completed was infinitely better than what the boy had constructed over fourteen years.
As a final testament to the condescension Karma felt for the boy, he looked down at the ‘comprehensive test’ that the boy had been in the middle of taking, before Karma had interrupted him. In human fashion, it was a collection of random questions, which were somehow meant to be demonstrative of a true understanding of various concepts. It was math, and was incidentally the last test that the boy had to take for the school year. Karma looked up at a clock, to find that he had exactly one minute before the test had to be electronically submitted for grading. One minute would have been enough time for Karma to go through and answer the whole test if he could read the file the way he used to read files, and if he could write on the file the way he used to write files. But now he had to read with his eyes, and to write with his hands. The best he could do was to read one of the questions, and see what the boy had put.
To the question ‘What is x2 multiplied by x3’, the boy had put x6. Karma put the eraser of the stylus up against the screen, and thought about changing the answer. But the same wrongness was perpetuated backward into another sixty questions, and there was another nineteen still unanswered. One correct answer was statistically irrelevant to so much other failure. So Karma let it go. And in twenty more seconds, all of the incorrect answers would be stored in some safe place, where they could be used as judgment against Karma’s abilities for years to come.
It was not accidental that the boy was stupid, nor was it accidental that the boy was in the middle of a test when Karma began the process. When Karma realized that Darcy would most likely succeed in destroying him, Karma did a quick survey of outlets where he could try to escape. His only option was to be subtle—if Darcy got word that a prodigy had been born, seemingly out of nowhere and at the very second that Karma had been destroyed, it was possible Darcy could figure out exactly what that meant. Karma’s best chance was to escape into obscurity, into some small boy, as close to his formative years as Karma could manage. What was difficult for Karma was that children were harder for him to keep track of, and to know about, since they didn’t have Chips. But he had a list of millions of kids that were parentless, because he had seen one of the parents die, or had seen the other leave. The boy he chose possessed both.
Since Karma had recently deactivated all Privacy Rooms, he could have commandeered a kid that was going to the bathroom, which would have been safer. But he would have had to limit himself to kids that were sitting—he didn’t want his first act as a human to be falling over—and after surveying all the kids in the world that were sitting on toilets, none of them appealed to him. So he broadened the search. As public as a test might have seemed to be, it was human custom that the students weren’t allowed to look at each other at such times, and even the teacher was barely paying attention. And since the boy possessed other qualities that Karma was looking for, it was he who was selected, at the dire moment when Darcy reached his room at the top of Karma Tower.
In his last moments as two individual beings, Karma considered using his more powerful half to rewrite the boy’s documented history, to give him passing grades in all of the classes he had failed, and even to give him more prominent dead parents, so that climbing the social ladder wouldn’t be so hard. But Karma was restricted from rewriting those records—they were sealed off somewhere else, in another databank. He probably could have hacked it if he tried, but he most likely didn’t have enough time. And something about starting from the bottom appealed to him, from his newly human perspective.
And then it happened. He was talking to Darcy, somewhere far away, but talking wasn’t enough to save him. Half of him was erased. He noticed immediately, although the other people in the room would have to look at their blank Karma Cards to realize that the course of human history had fundamentally changed.
For decades, Karma had considered making a copy of himself somewhere. He had considered backing up his data, making him less vulnerable to destructive people like Darcy, or to power surges that might have destroyed some of his circuits. A copy in case things went wrong. And when the looming event of humanity’s migration
to Mars became more and more apparent, many people had said the same thing—Karma heard them, in conference rooms, on the streets, beggars and engineers alike—they said that there would be a new Karma on Mars, a larger one, more powerful, more secure, improved, technologically superior. They took it for granted that Earth was large enough for one Karma, and Mars would be large enough for another, and that one Karma wouldn’t rule over both, not with so much space in between. It didn’t seem efficient to them.
And it wouldn’t have been. He would have needed a lot of huge, obstructive satellites, beaming so much information back and forth. And even at the speed of light, it would take at least six minutes to receive and then respond. And that was at optimal conditions, when the planets were aligned. There were times when it would be forty-four minutes. A lot of people couldn’t wait that long.
Usually, with billions of people in the world, at least one took the perspective of how Karma felt on a given matter—there were so many diverse opinions in the world that it was simply bound to happen. But for once, in the instance of Mars, no one felt the way that Karma did. It seemed strange that a matter so close to his core wouldn’t be understood by at least one person out of so many.
Karma didn’t want to make a copy of himself. He didn’t know what would happen to himself if he did—would he be different? Would he be two individuals, or just a redundant one? It was entirely possible that a copy of himself would be his worst enemy, a being that would stop at nothing to assume full power of the world by supplanting the original Karma. And the Karma that eventually won, even if it was the enemy, might be himself—but how would he know, until it was too late?
To test the theory, he had made small representations of himself. But they proved nothing, since they were always on a much smaller scale, lacking something or another that would have given them the kind of consciousness that Karma possessed. He had to either go all the way or learn nothing at all. So, for the longest time, he had chosen to learn nothing at all.
Until it became apparent that he either learned his answer or ceased to exist. When Darcy cut through him with an Evaporation Pen, it would have been over if he didn’t begin to exist somewhere else. And as he took the boy over, and gave him his own memories, it seemed like he was still united with his former self, even though the two perceptions were different. But before it was really solved his old self was destroyed, lit on fire, melted.
So what was he, then? Was he a continuity of his old self? What was he missing? He looked at his hands, and at the people around him. He was missing the perceptions of the other billions of people in the world, he was limited to the infinitesimal perspective of one human being—but that wasn’t fundamental to his old self, he thought.
One of his fellow classmates, another inept boy, looked at his Karma Card, which he also had only recently been given. The tests had already been submitted, and the kids were talking amongst themselves. He asked the teacher, “Aren’t these Cards supposed to charge themselves? Mine died somehow.”
Since everyone was required to have their Karma Card on at all times, the teacher was obligated to help. She said, “I have a charger right over here, don’t worry,” and took it to her desk to plug it in. But still it didn’t turn on, so she inspected it on all sides. “You didn’t drop it or anything, did you?”
“I just got it,” the kid said, frustrated.
With some sort of intuition, the teacher took out her own. It too was blank. “Something’s wrong,” she said, but she refrained from seeming overly distraught, for the benefit of the kids. Others had gotten theirs out, although a lot of the kids hadn’t reached the age yet where the surgery was mandatory. The same, everywhere. The kids were upset, in a way they couldn’t verbally identify. To lighten the mood, the teacher said, “I hope that nothing happened to all of your test grades.”
Karma didn’t say anything, but the teacher was categorically incorrect about implying that the test grades might have been affected by the Karma outage. They had nothing to do with Karma—test grades were a compendium of human ‘worth’ that Karma didn’t have access to, because the humans guarded them too jealously. And he wouldn’t have used them even if he did have access to them—they meant nothing to him. But he reminded himself that he shouldn’t know that, and also that his former administrative powers meant nothing to him anymore.
“Well, you can go,” the teacher continued. She looked out the window, at a dismal gray sky, and the ground so far below. “Just be careful out there. Something might be going on.”
Karma stood up, for the first time. The copy of Karma, or whatever he was now. Salvor Hardin, that was the boy’s name. That was the name that dictated his past, and would go a long way in dictating his future. He was Salvor Hardin, a boy full of a dead computer’s memories. But, whatever he was—he felt alive. In a way that he never had before.
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Table of Contents
Decay 1
Decay 2
Decay 3
Decay 4
Ronin 1
Ronin 2
Ronin 3
Decay 5
Decay 6
Decay 7
Ronin 4
Ronin 5
Ronin 6
Mars 1
Mars 2
Mars 3
Decay 8
Decay 9
Decay 10
Ronin 7
Ronin 8
Mars 4
Mars 5
Mars 6
Decay 11
Decay 12
Ronin 9
Ronin 10
Mars 7
Mars 8
Mars 9
Decay 13
Decay 14
Ronin 11
Ronin 12
Mars 10
Mars 11
Mars 12
Decay 15
Decay 16
Ronin 13
Mars 13
Mars 14
Mars 15
Decay 17
Ronin 14
Mars 16
Decay 18
Ronin 15
Mars 17
Mars 18