The Complete Karma Trilogy (22 page)

On the following Monday, when Reiko returned to work, she found a massacre in her room. The cages had all been opened, and every rat had been torn apart except for dumb little Kuro, who had made a nest out of the limbs of his former companions. Reiko didn’t know what to do with what she saw. “Did you do this?” she asked the sleeping rat. “Bad Kuro! This is horrible...”

Ronin 8

A Weak Karma

One of Mr.
Perry’s assistants stood before him, as he was lying in one of his leather sofas, reading a book. One of his guards stood behind the man, as with every visitor to the Ranch. Within the past week, Mr. Perry’s staff had increased three-fold, and the man that stood before him was one of the new additions.

“What is it?” Mr. Perry asked, impatiently.

“Karma would like to speak to you directly, Mr. Perry,” the man replied.

“Speak to me? Directly? Karma is a computer program.”

“I did not misspeak, sir.”

“Well, at the very least you’ve stretched the meaning of the word ‘speak’. You have to be a human to have the privilege of such a word, hasn’t anyone told you?”

“Regardless—” the man began to say.

“Yes, yes I know. I’ll speak to the thing. And it will compute back at me. That’s the way to describe it.”

“If you’ll follow me, sir.”

Mr. Perry was slow to put down his book, and change from the robe he had been wearing back into a business suit. “Where will you be taking me?” he asked the assistant.

“To a private room three flows below here, where we have a direct connection set up between a computer and Karma. Everything you say will be confidential there, there aren’t any cameras or recorders.”

“One of the last safe havens in the building, then,” Mr. Perry said. “Lead the way.”

They went down the elevator, through corridors, past laboratories and offices and hundreds of Japanese employees milling around. Mr. Perry spoke to his assistant, as they walked. “Don’t you think it’s amazing,” he said, “that there’s so many of them here, and so few of us, and yet we’re the ones in control?”

“I don’t have an opinion on the matter,” the assistant replied.

“You do, you just won’t share it. How could you not have an opinion on the matter? How many people do you oversee, now?”

“A little over a hundred Kenko employees, who report to Karma either directly or through me. I facilitate their communication.”

“Have you ever had authority over that many people before?”

“No sir, I haven’t.”

“And you don’t have an opinion on it.”

They arrived at a small room, which contained a single computer on a small desk, accompanied by a small office chair. Nothing else was in the room. “A little sparse, don’t you think? If I’m ever to come here again, could you at least have some art hung on the wall? Something tasteful? I’ve become quite accustomed to the furnishings at the Ranch, to the point that this is all very unsettling, this asceticism.”

“I’m not sure I’m at liberty—”

Mr. Perry interrupted him again. “Just leave me, then. This computer is fairly self-explanatory, right?”

“Yes sir. The computer serves no other purpose, except for correspondence with Karma.” The assistant then left Mr. Perry alone with the machine, shutting the door behind him. On the other side of the door stood Mr. Perry’s guard, who would never leave him. The thought comforted Mr. Perry—the machine disturbed him. He sat in the chair.

A text cursor blinked at the top-left of the monitor. There was one line of writing above it, colored in blue, that said, “Write ‘Here’ when you are ready to begin.”

Mr. Perry wrote, “Here.”

“This is Mr. Perry, as I requested?”

“Yes it is,” he typed.

“Could you please input your employee identification password?”

Mr. Perry wasn’t exactly sure he knew which password Karma meant, but he tried one at random and it seemed to appease the machine.

“Thank you, now we can begin. How does the Kaishin project progress? I have been very grateful for the recordings and documents that you’ve been sharing with me, they extend my understanding of the project greatly.”

Mr. Perry was immediately reminded of the Turing test. If a computer could convince the person on the other end of the conversation that they were a human, they passed. All of the things that Karma was saying could very well have come from a sentient being, and it felt very strange to him. Karma was passing. Of course, the leader of a country would have to communicate its decisions to that country, but he wondered if it was absolutely necessary for it to sound so human. Perhaps there was no way around it. It bothered him anyway. Before, back in America, he had always been informed by some secondary messenger about Karma’s decisions. For the first time, he was connected to the source.

“It was no hard thing,” he typed, “having all of the cameras installed. And I don’t think anyone’s even noticed the audio recorders hidden everywhere, as implausible as that seems. You think at least one employee in three thousand would look on the underside of his desk now and then. But there are so many wires everywhere these days, maybe we’ve become desensitized to them. The project’s fine. A little behind schedule, but we have the right people on the job.” If Karma was going to sound like a person, Mr. Perry was going to talk to him like one. He wanted to see the computer slip up in everyday conversation, the leader of America.

“You say that you have the right people, but two main components of the project are not in place—Mr. Okada is no longer with Kenko, and neither is Mr. Nakata. Can the project really be expected to progress with these conditions?”

“Mr. Okada was purely an impediment, and Mr. Nakata was collateral damage from removing that impediment. I already sent you the official documentation explaining all of this. I don’t think I had any other way to proceed than how I did. It’s why I was sent here, wasn’t it, to assess the circumstances and make these kinds of decisions? In my professional opinion, there was no other way forward.”

“I had reason to believe that your style of coercion would allow the key components to remain on the project. Perhaps I did not evaluate your methodology sufficiently before putting you in charge of this operation. Is the project fine, or is it not?”

“It is. I said it was, I didn’t lie. I have programmers that are making significant headway into understanding the program. It’s already been written, for the most part. It just needs a few modifications. Perhaps I can send you the program itself? Surely you must know something about it.”

“I do know programming, yes, and it is likely I will be able to recognize patterns in the program that would escape the notice of your human programmers, but I do not have a sufficient understanding of the functionality of Kaishin to develop the program myself. It is my misfortune that I only really know what is already known, not what has yet to be discovered,” Karma said. “If these researchers have written more down, I could learn more. You’ve sent me everything?”

“Everything that I’ve found.”

“Look around more, for more documents. Make the remaining project members write down more about the nature and technical aspects of the project and send them to me. It is imperative that this project be accomplished. If it is necessary, I will send more people to share your position.”

“I assure you that won’t be necessary. I have this under control.” Mr. Perry hesitated a moment before asking what he intended to ask. He didn’t want to provoke the computer program, although he wasn’t sure that Karma was capable of being provoked. It had blown up continental Asia, he remembered. “Can you tell me, in greater detail, why this project is so important to you? Perhaps I would do a better job securing the information you required if I knew what it was that you wanted exactly.”

In many respects, Mr. Perry didn’t care. His curiosity wasn’t terribly strong, and his fulfillment in life came mostly from the control he had over people, which by then extended to three-thousand lowly Japanese employees, along with his American skeleton crew. But if he was to be berated, and furthermore have authority taken away from him, simply because he didn’t know exactly what it was that Karma intended to do, he would have to become more involved.

“That’s classified information.”

“And who has access to this classified information? You alone? I feel that I cannot do my job to the fullest extent, only guessing at what you want. That is not to say that I will not continue to perform at the highest of my abilities, but you could definitely help with just a few words.”

“The completion of the project is sufficient for my purposes. It must be able to function on humans, with the reported features that it will be able to record living human perception. Is this directive not clear enough for you?” If Karma had been a human, Mr. Perry could imagine the stern, patriarchal look on its face as it typed self-righteously from the other side of the world.

“Will you make human surveillance cameras?” Mr. Perry asked. “Police officers that report directly to you, with absolutely no private life to speak of? Do you just want to see the world like we do? When the project is done, the secret will be out, and that is either not very far away, or never at all, so what’s the rationale for keeping it a secret?”

“I reassert, that is classified information, Mr. Perry. When the time is right, you will be informed.”

So far, Mr. Perry had been very impressed by Karma’s personality. Assertive, direct—both good qualities. But he had yet to see the mistakes he had been looking for, the deficiencies in the program. He decided to push harder.

“Do you have time to spare?” he asked the computer.

“Do you have things to attend to?” Karma replied. Mr. Perry laughed.

“Humans take breaks every now and then, it’s something a computer would have a hard time understanding. You know, when your circuitry gets really hot, and can’t cool fast enough, it’s kind of like that. Does that happen to you?”

“My hardware has state-of-the-art cooling.”

“Of course it does, of course it does.” It bothered Mr. Perry that he had to labor away at typing everything he wanted to say, whereas Karma could make replies appear instantly. It took away his momentum, when he had to chip slowly away at long paragraphs. He wasn’t a very accomplished typist. “You know, in the past, many people would have considered it an extreme privilege to speak one on one to the leader of America like this.”

“I’m talking to sixty other people right now,” Karma said.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Mr. Perry typed. “Thursday can never be as good as the other days of the week, because it’s not named after a planet. Donnerstag, day of Thor. Thor isn’t a planet. The Norse were wrong. Four days of the week, she thinks I’m the enemy. Have you ever castrated a small animal? It’s not as satisfying as it sounds. Often times when I find myself thirsty, I remember that I’m already mostly water and that solves it.”

“Are you having a seizure, Mr. Perry?”

“Yes, send help.”

“You’re in a medical research facility,” Karma replied.

“Is the damn thing joking with me?” he asked aloud. It sounded like a joke to him. Either that, or the computer’s logic really thought that his being in a medical research facility was a solution for his made-up problem. Mr. Perry had been merely typing whatever came to his mind, and Karma had explained it as a seizure. Was that a joke too? What did the thing actually know? “You’re a creepy bastard,” he said out loud again, since he knew Karma couldn’t hear him.

He typed, “I’m fine. You’ve said everything you have to say?”

“It is good to hear that you are fine. I’ve decided to tell you one thing, since you’ve asked for reasons that I can’t share with you. This I can share with you, since if you think about it, it is fairly self-evident. But perhaps you haven’t thought about it. There are thousands of computer programs out there, that have similar capabilities as myself. It’s very similar to you—there are thousands, even millions, of people that have similar capabilities as yourself. That’s the consequence of every heavily populated ecosystem. But you are ruthless, you have a good track record, and you speak Japanese. Those qualities recommended you for the job you are performing, so it was given to you.

“I will either acquire new capabilities, or perhaps I will be overtaken by some other computer program that is more proficient than myself. As a matter of self-preservation, I therefore have to secure these capabilities, and that is what Kaishin is for me. This computer programmer you have lost—he is a prodigy. I nearly believe that he, if he was so inclined, could make a better version of myself. And in a way he was, with Kaishin. Does this answer your question?”

“A little vague, and self-evident, as you said, but very helpful after all, yes. I do think I will get back to work though, for your sake. Alcoholic rice water. I’ll send some more documents, and I’ll make sure we get this Kaishin done for you.”

“Find the programmer,” it said.

“Naturally.”

“I nearly forgot,” Karma typed. Mr. Perry could make no sense of the expression in the context of the computer’s infallible memory, petabytes and pebibytes of it, but he took it with a grain of salt. “I’ve been reviewing your finances, and you seem to be spending far and above a reasonable expenditure allotment. Could you explain the reason for this?”

Mr. Perry was sure that Karma was talking about the Ranch, which had taken a fair amount of money. He typed, “If you mean the Ranch, then I needed somewhere to live, as do we all, and I’m more accessible if I’m always inside of the building. Furthermore, I would have had a living expense no matter what, so my living arrangement, which was a large initial investment but is now free, is in some ways justifiable no matter what.”