The Complete Karma Trilogy (32 page)

But Percy didn’t see the future as well as Hardin could—such escapism couldn’t last forever. Eventually Darcy would have to return to the realities of Earth, and when he did, even the smallest of societies would be weeded out. It might have been years in the future, but it would happen. If something else didn’t happen first.

Hardin said, “Your fearless leader must be afraid to acknowledge the motive at the core of your society. You cannot maintain the belief in a true moral good and at the same time not think that it should apply to everyone else. Maybe you don’t see it clearly, but at your core it is true. What you need from everyone else is compliance.”

“And how are you going to do that?” Percy asked, defiantly. “The larger we are, the more conspicuous we become. When we finally do become a tangible threat to Darcy, that is exactly when we will be destroyed.”

“Then we destroy Darcy first,” Hardin replied. “That’s the real plan. It would be a bad way to go about things, to become threatened before removing the threat rather than the other way around.”

“Destroy Darcy how?”

“We would have to go to Mars.”

Percy laughed, so that everyone could hear. “You’ve had a huge lapse in judgment, my comrade. No one will follow you that far. In fact, I doubt anyone will follow you so far as to let you judge them for a week. Does he have any of the volunteers he presumes to ask for? A show of hands, and then we can put all of this folly aside.”

To Percy’s dismay, there was a fair display of hands, around thirty, from the group of three hundred. “You can’t be serious, can you?” he asked.

“I’ll just assume that they are,” Hardin said. He took a good look at his thirty—it was a very specific type of person that he needed. And, from his thirty, he only had four that fit his criteria. But four would be enough. “Thanks for volunteering, everyone, but I only need ten, as I said. Those ten will be—” and then he listed ten names, from the thirty that were willing. It seemed to astonish some people, since he had only been with them such a short time and there was no reason that he would know any of their names. Of the ten he selected, Lucretia was the only one that he’d met in person.

“I’ll need one more thing, from our comrade Percy. I’ll need to know your Karma Chip encryption keys, so I can have your lives broadcast to me. Will you let me do that, Percy? I’ll have to use your computer.”

Percy frowned. He didn’t dare to seem obstinate when so many people were supportive of Hardin. “Make it quick,” he said. “I don’t want you fooling around on it for very long.”

Mars 8

This is Why We Fight

Again it was
Lucretia that escorted him up to the seventh floor, where they were to meet Percy in his office. He hadn’t seen much of her lately, since she spent a lot of her time on the Street of a Thousand Beliefs, recruiting new members. He asked her, “You find anyone good lately, out there on the Street?”

“No one as interesting as you,” she said. “Are you really sure this is even possible? I volunteered because I was intrigued, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think you’re crazy. Like, if you can do what New Karma does just by knowing some encryption keys, why can’t I do it? I’ve seen plenty of encryption keys.”

“I’ll have to make some slight modifications to my Chip, using Percy’s computer. But only to the software. The hardware is all already there. It just needs to be activated.”

“I still don’t understand how you can know about any of this.”

Hardin replied, trying to sound inspiring, “If you follow me, like you’ve already chosen to do, I promise to teach you a lot of things. Things you never would have known otherwise.”

One of the guards on the seventh floor took them all the way down the hallway, to Percy’s office at the end. Percy was already there, sitting at New Karma’s computer. When he saw the three people at his doorway, he said, “Just take the keys and go. And don’t you dare try to use them for anything other than what you said you would. Just like that group meeting—you said you wanted to talk about your ideas for agriculture, and instead you slander everything I’ve done. You’re on thin ice. And I still don’t believe you can do any of the things you claim.”

“I’m sorry about the meeting, Percy. If I told you what I intended to say, you wouldn’t have let me speak. And I’m only trying to help. I’ll be more transparent in the future. Like right now—I’ll tell you that I need more than the keys. I need to reprogram my Chip to receive their signals. But you can watch me do it, if you don’t trust me.”

Percy stood up, and Hardin took his vacated seat. He immediately started typing.

Hardin quickly found that the user interface that Percy had pieced together was missing certain functionality that he would need. It didn’t surprise him. Deftly he opened up New Karma’s coding, and began adding functions.

The patriarch was right over his shoulder, watching him do it. “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’ll save it as a different program, if you really don’t want any of the things I’m adding.”

Percy was audibly frustrated, but allowed it to happen.

It took Hardin five minutes to complete everything he needed. His fingers hurt from the effort. “There, I’m done. I would like to thank you, Mr. Edwards, for allowing me to use your computer.” He stood up, bowed, and made his way to the doorway.

Percy immediately sat in his chair again, to go over the changes Hardin had made. “Remember my warning,” he said to Hardin, without breaking eye contact with the computer.

Hardin felt free for the first time in a long time, inside the heads of ten other people. He spent almost all of his time in his dorm, only coming out to eat when he was unbearably hungry. Because everyone was aware of his unusual circumstances, no one pressured him into gardening, or cleaning activities, or any of the other duties that a normal member would have been obligated to do.

Seeing the world through other people’s eyes, he was finally learning how to be a human. He had always had fundamental gaps in his understanding, but over the course of five years he had defined those gaps. Now he was ready, and he intentionally worked to fill them.

He soon learned that he didn’t care about chivalry and etiquette. Every single one of his human tendrils chewed with their mouth closed, because they were afraid of offending the people around them. And they ate with a fork and knife, even when it would have been easier to pick the food up with their hands, simply because it was polite. They said ‘Bless you’ when people sneezed, they laughed at jokes that weren’t funny, and they only farted when they were alone. Hardin had always known about those niceties, but for the first time he was seeing them differently, he was devaluing them in relation to other things he saw.

For instance, there was an interaction between Todd and Fred, both of whom he was connected to. Todd said to Fred, “Thanks for helping me the other day.” It was a simple statement, and it led to no further conversation. It was something that New Karma wouldn’t have provided a reward for—in fact, Hardin could see New Karma, and could see its judgments. It attributed no moral value to the statement. But Hardin could see deeper than the simple machine, he could see an undercurrent of volatile emotion inside of Fred, one that responded strongly to being thanked. Fred became much happier, almost instantaneously. Hardin still didn’t fully understand happiness, but he recognized it when he saw it. And because he felt like he should value happiness, he gave Todd a point for causing it.

Rebecca ate less food than her earned portion—everyone waited in a line in the mess hall, took fruit and vegetables from a buffet, and weighed them at a scale, where the weight was compared with their moral earnings for the prior week. Since fruits and vegetables didn’t grow in perfect units of weight, it had been decided that a certain tolerance would be allowed for—it was allowable to be within seventy grams, plus or minus. All of the senior members of New Karma had become pretty good at judging the weight of food, and were rarely off at the scale. In a group of slowly starving people, Rebecca was almost always seventy grams under. And she didn’t brag to her friends about her self-restraint, she didn’t condescend to the people that took more—she didn’t even think about it. It was subconscious. Yet it allowed for more food to be available the next day, and then the day after that, accumulating slowly. New Karma didn’t even notice. Hardin gave her a point every time.

But Hardin was still far from the perfect judge, and he knew it. Every time someone spoke poorly about Rex Darcy, as ambiguous as their statement might have been, he gave them a point. It was petty and irrational, and yet he couldn’t help it. And he was far less likely to subtract points when people acted poorly, because he was far too familiar with social failings. When Tom told a fellow gardener in the growing rooms that they were being stupid, Hardin actually gave him a point, because the person really was being stupid. He didn’t care if ‘criticisms were supposed to be constructive’, or whatever Percy might have had to say about it.

And so he spent an entire week. When the moral scoreboard was updated in the mess halls, Hardin moved from his bed in the dorm to a table by the scoreboard, so that he could give his report to his charges. He added up New Karma’s scores for his ten people, so that he could normalize his own scores and make the numbers comparable. Then he waited. Todd was the first to show up, and Hardin spent ten minutes discussing all of his evaluations.

The best thing that Hardin had to offer was that his evaluations weren’t limited to ten categories. He didn’t even make categories, since they seemed like inappropriate simplifications to him. Instead, he took the time to itemize every judgment that was given.

“That’s incredibly thorough,” Todd said, after Hardin was done.

“Unfortunately I’ve given you less points than New Karma has, but I hope that you at least understand my reasoning.”

“I’m amazed,” he replied, not caring about his score. “How do you even remember all of that?”

“I remember everything,” Hardin said.

“Well, you have my vote. I’ve always had my doubts about being judged by a computer, and you’ve just shown me why. Thank you.”

“You’re… welcome,” Hardin said, confused. He was simultaneously trying to untangle the complex mass of emotions in Todd’s head, but it was beyond his level of comprehension. He could sense the genuine gratitude, though.

The other ten reports went in a similar fashion. When it was Lucretia’s turn, she wanted to talk more about Hardin than about herself.

“So how do you do it? Is there some sort of trick? You promised to teach me.”

“In time,” Hardin told her. “More things have to fall into place, before I can tell you what you want to hear.” And he left it at that.

News of his performance quickly spread through the commune, and he became even more notorious than he was before. People insisted that he continue to compete with New Karma, and insisted that he judged them as well. Their privacy didn’t seem to concern them.

He told them all, one at a time, “I’ve decided that I can only handle twenty people. And even if I could manage to handle all three hundred of you, that would only be a short-term solution. We must continue to grow. We must remove the obstacles in our way, at the head of which is Rex Darcy. If you really want to support me, then support me in that.”

Even though he rejected most people, there were a few to which he said, “I’ll make you one of my twenty. As long as Percy allows it, and lets me have your encryption key.” The ten were seemingly picked at random, but there was a pattern that only Hardin was aware of—they were well-educated people, people that had been to universities, and had been raised in socially superior families. Dissatisfaction had caused them to join a stagnant society instead of applying for the elite jobs on Mars, although the option would always be open to them. Hardin had a plan for them.

Percy had no choice but to oblige Hardin, as Hardin expanded his network of people to twenty. It was the greatest mental strain Hardin had ever known—his receiver was at maximum capacity, and so was his brain. The organic matter was never meant for such continuous exertion, but he attempted to do it anyway. He needed to become familiar with the people he would be depending on.

Instead of lying in bed all day, he made sure to be a visible member of the society, one that seemed reliable and wise. He helped implement more improvements in the growing rooms, and he slowly tried to push through reforms on recycling. He began giving lectures on moral behavior, which he was finally starting to comprehend. But all the while he was living twenty other lives, and it hurt.

One of his twenty happened to be one of Percy’s guards, and so he was mentally present when another representative of Rex Darcy was sent to tell their society to cease and desist. The diplomat was brought up to a room next to Percy’s office, and the guard watched as the two spoke.

“This is your last warning,” the diplomat said. “Rex Darcy has expressly forbidden the use of Karma Chips, recreational or otherwise. We know that you have computers, and that you’re tampering with the Chips. If this violation is detected again, then all guilty parties will stop receiving food stipends from the government.”

“Thank you very much for the notice,” Percy replied. He didn’t care to say any more. “Bernard, would you mind escorting our guest back out?”

Later that day, Hardin visited Percy himself. He didn’t need Lucretia to escort him anymore—the guard knew and trusted Hardin—and so the two spoke one-on-one for the first time, as they stood in Percy’s sprawling office.

Hardin said, “I’m sorry for the interruption, but we need to talk. I’ve thought about it for a very long time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we have to act now. We have to take the fight to Darcy, on Mars. Every day we spend down here just growing potatoes is another day wasted.”

Percy was frustrated with his rival. “What fight are you talking about? The ideological fight that I care about has already been taken to Mars. That Martin guy, he’s taking care of it. Such fights can be fought at long distances, by people that care more than I do. Rex Darcy already knows that everyone hates being forced to grow food. You seem to be talking about some physical fight, as if you want to go all the way over there and beat him up with your bare hands. You’re obsessed, morbidly obsessed. Why can’t you just let whatever it is go?”

To Percy, Darcy was just a faraway inconvenience, one that could easily be ignored if he tried. He still thought, somehow, that the government’s threats were hollow, and that their own society could ultimately be self-sustainable. It was possible that he was right, but only because Hardin was increasing their production capacity daily. And Percy also thought that Martin could somehow win the political fight, which was an entirely misinformed judgment. Hardin had to make Percy understand why self-sufficiency wasn’t enough, he had to make him understand what it was that made Darcy so unbearably horrid. “Can I use your computer, to show you something?”

“Make it quick,” Percy said. “I have other things to do, besides getting bothered by you.”

“It will be quick.” Hardin shamelessly activated the computer, and pulled up the spreadsheets that he wanted Percy to see. They were mostly just numbers, mixed with a few words, but Hardin could easily parse their meaning. “These are production outputs, out of all the food facilities here on Earth. The ones the government runs. The food shortages that we’ve been dealing with lately, the ones that necessitate our dependency on Mars’ agricultural output, they’re a fabrication.”

“What do you mean?” Percy asked, clearly not understanding the import of the numbers.

“They hide what they’re doing in the convoluted mess of these numbers, but I can organize them, and I also know what the production capacity of Earth used to be, before Darcy—Darcy is intentionally lowering the factories’ output, in order to make us think that we need Mars solely for growing food. So that he can have it for himself. He knows that if we, as a civilization, knew that he didn’t need all of that fresh, clean land for crops, then we would want it for better buildings, and cleaner air. In other words, he’s keeping it for himself.”