The Complete Karma Trilogy (40 page)

Decay 15

Hunting Children

When the Helicar
landed by the City Park, Will went his separate way from the others. He wished them all the best of luck, and ran off immediately in the direction that Karma provided him. It was around two in the morning.

When he was out of sight of the others, he could finally talk to Karma again. He had to speak aloud to be heard by Karma, which was somewhat inconvenient when he wanted to look like a normal person. Since he was alone, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“The first person will be in a bar, the Town Pump. Unless he had another way out of a room that the bartender showed him into, then he will still be there. The bartender is complicit in the crime, he will be Evaporated too.”

It was two miles, but Will went entirely by foot, running. Ever since he had gotten used to his new legs, he would not have had them any other way. Besides the fact that he had to charge them once every other week, they never fatigued, and he made it to his destination in a matter of minutes. He stood at the door, waiting to go in.

“It’s last call, isn’t it? Will only the two of them be inside?”

“There’s a whole crowd of people in there still. The bartender did not announce last call. He will be to your right, almost immediately. Eight people to your left. After you Evaporate the bartender, go to the far, back-right corner, there will be a hallway and a room to the right again. If there is a man in there, you will Evaporate him.

“I almost think I could show you, but it is much easier to add aural stimuli to your brain than it is to add visual. I’m not sure how your brain would react, and I don’t think now is the best time to experiment. Maybe later.”

“Okay. Maybe later.” Will pushed the door open, looked to his right and left, saw all of the people for himself, and then walked to the bar.

The bartender was beginning to form words with his mouth, either to tell Will to leave or to offer him a drink, when Will Evaporated him. Some of the people standing behind him, most of whom had watched him walk in, began to scream or to run for the door. Will let them go, he went immediately for the hallway he could see in the corner, through the dim lighting of the bar.

“What are the chances he’s still in there?” Will asked.

“There isn’t a window,” Karma replied.

Will opened the door silently. A man was sleeping on a small cot, laid out in the middle of a room full of bar supplies—broken stools, kegs of beer, mop buckets. Will could hear him lightly snoring, over the commotion in the bar behind him. He Evaporated the man while he slept.

After he had done it, and while he was making his way back out of the newly empty bar, Will asked, “He really wasn’t broadcasting? You couldn’t see him there?”

“No. It was just probability. The exact same way that I would have to find a child, if it were necessary for me to do so. For all intents and purposes, we’re hunting down children, Will Spector. And there are quite a few more. I’m going to give you your next destination now.”

“I’m listening.”

The next person that Karma made him chase was nowhere to be found. It was in a restaurant that was already closed. Karma wanted one of the cooks to be Evaporated too, but he had already gone home for the night, and it would have to wait.

Will had broken through the back door, into complete darkness, and Karma had directed his steps, but it had been to no avail. The lights proved the place to be vacant. After going through the whole place, Will asked, “How long ago did you see him?”

“It was two hours ago. And I haven’t seen him anywhere since—this was the last place.”

“Where else should I try to look?”

“We move on. Next on the list. I can actually see five of them now, waiting for a subway, two kilometers away. Run south five blocks, then go west for two. You will find a subway station.”

Will knocked over a few people on the way, drunk people meandering home from the bars. Half of him wanted to stop to apologize, but the other half of him realized that he had no time to spare. He tried jumping, once he was safely outside, and almost made it an entire block before landing.

“The subway has already arrived, and they’re getting on it. Hurry.”

He had just caught sight of the entrance down into the subterranean world of the subway. He hurdled the stairs, through a group of people who had just debarked from the same subway that he was after, just in time to see the subway leaving.

“It’s gone,” he told Karma.

“Go after it.”

He was careful not to jump when he went from the platform to the tracks. In the controlled environment of the tunnel, which was nearly uniform as far as the eye could see, he was interested to see how fast he could actually run, if he put all of his energy into the effort. He was pleased to find that he could catch up with the subway in no time at all. He grabbed on to a railing on the back of the train, and pulled himself up.

Through a small window, he could see that no one was in the back car. Since there was no door, with his bare hand he punched through the metal wall, making perforations, until he was able to peel away a hole large enough for him to fit through. He then walked through the connecting cars, one by one, until he found the group of people.

“All of them?” he asked, while he was still sure they wouldn’t hear him.

“There are five sitting there, those are them.”

It seemed to Will that he could make a mistake, Evaporate an entirely wrong group of people, and Karma wouldn’t mind, so long as he then went on to Evaporate the right group of people. Karma would only give him verification that his targets were right if he asked first, it seemed. To Will, the group of five that he could see, nearer to him, looked no different than a similar group further on—they were ordinary people, talking quietly, weary from the late hour.

“You said you didn’t want to mess with my visual stimuli, or something like that, but from now on could you highlight the people I’m after, or something? It would make me feel better.”

“That sounds possible. Let me try.”

Immediately the people began to glow, an effect that Will struggled with after all, as it made him slightly dizzy. It was entirely unnatural, the way they glowed, but just like he had asked it clearly indicated that they were the ones he was after, which made him happy through the dizziness.

“Why haven’t you tried this kind of thing before, with officers? It seems useful.”

“I thought it was prudent to conceal the full extent of my powers. But now is a time of crisis, so an exception will be made. But only with you.”

Will said nothing in response. He casually walked up to the group, like a stranger soliciting advice. Three of them looked up at him expectantly, the other two were lost in thought. As if he were looking for something he wanted to show them, he searched around in his pocket for his Evaporation Pen, smiled when his hand closed around it, and took it out. He Evaporated one of the men that was looking at him—their eyes were locked the whole time, the man didn’t even know to react.

Unexpectedly, one of the men that was turned away from Will grabbed his arm, and threw him against the wall. In his surprise, his hand tensed around the trigger of the Pen, and he shot through the row of seats that were past the group.

Will’s head broke a window, but he recovered quickly. With his left hand, he grabbed the wrist of the man, who was still desperately holding on to Will’s right arm, the one that held the Evaporation Pen. With a simple movement, he threw the man through the window his head had broken, straight into the tunnel wall outside. Will could hear the sounds of the man being flattened against the concrete wall.

In the meantime, another had punched Will in the face. It damaged the man’s hand far more than his face. He Evaporated him, and was simultaneously shot for the fourth time in both his life and the past ten hours, by a man behind him.

“Where are they getting guns?” he asked, not concerned what the remaining men would think of him if he talked to himself, since he was confident he would kill them all.

“If I knew that, they wouldn’t have them,” Karma said.

Will kicked the man behind him, without looking back to aim. His leg went through the man’s chest, and even though he had no nerves in his feet, the feeling sickened him tremendously.

“Don’t you want one of them alive? To ask what’s going on?”

“We don’t have time for that. There are more after this. There are eighty-six of these people who have already removed their Chips, and we’ve only taken care of five of them ourselves. I have twenty seven other suspects that your friends can take care of, since they still have their Chips, but if any of them are in fact terrorists and remove their Chips before your friends find them, that will be more for us. Just keep going.”

While Karma spoke, Will removed his foot from the body it was stuck in, Evaporated the last living man who had tried to escape to another car, and then Evaporated the remains of the man behind him.

“Tell me where to go, then,” Will said.

The later into the morning it became, the less successful each attempt was to find Karma’s targets. Will was taken all around New York City by the time dawn spread across the sky, and had Evaporated around twenty people, in streets, in bars, in apartments. Half of the time, there were other people there that watched him do it. But if they weren’t highlighted in his eyes, Will ignored them, however they reacted. Some screamed, some actually attacked him, but he had arrived to a mental state where they simply seized to exist to him.

It was taking a toll on his body, the parts of him that were still real. He was much stronger than he’d ever been before, to the point that he almost considered himself inhuman, but he had run for hundreds of miles, and punched through walls, and the weariness building in his muscles and the blood that crusted his hands were still his own.

In the morning light he had become more pensive, although he still did whatever Karma told him to, wordlessly. He recalled vividly, and seemingly without reason, the first person that he had Evaporated. The man in his bathroom. He remembered how he had felt, how sick to his core he had been. He had needed Eric to help him back to the police station, where he had done nothing for the rest of the day. He had sat and stared at a ceiling, until everyone had left for the evening. And no one had bothered him.

And somehow, since then, he had become entirely at peace with the concept of Evaporation. Even more, he became at peace with himself being the hand that delivered it, as an extension of Karma’s will. He wondered how that was possible, what rearrangements inside of his brain had been necessary for going from the person he had been to the person he turned into. He wondered how aware Karma had been of those changes, if Karma was even capable of guiding the transition. It occurred to him that he had no idea what Karma was capable of, although Karma’s overlooking of Charles proved that perhaps a lot was out of the computer’s reach.

What it amounted to, his mental reflection as his body forged onward on its own, was the closest thing to doubt that he would ever experience, in the face of Karma. “What if Karma knew everything, not just the sights and the sounds, but the thought of every person, all of the time? Would the world be a better place?” he thought. The answer didn’t occur to him as obviously as it had before.

As a child, he had dreamed of being the champion of Karma, and there he was, fulfilling that dream as completely as could be hoped. If he thwarted Charles Darcy’s plans, whatever they might be, he would be the champion of the century. But it wasn’t what he envisioned as a child. They didn’t tell children that people died for their sins—they didn’t even tell the adults. They just waited for the sins to be committed, and then sent people like Will in to pay them back.

Will didn’t even know who he meant by ‘they’—there was no definite body from which those actions stemmed, there was only Karma. But Karma was just a computer, after all, programmed by people who thought it would be prudent for it to make decisions the way it did. “Were they right?” he asked himself. He had been abstracting the ideal of Karma from its very real origins as a product of humanity, his whole life.

His conclusion was that the abstraction could be made—that the ideal of Karma was independent of its origins. That what was right was far easier for a nearly omniscient computer to decide, than for his own limited mind. So he surrendered his belief to that computer. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been chasing so many people down, to Evaporate them. He had no full comprehension of their sin—but he trusted that he didn’t need to know, that everything was as it should be.

“You’re quiet,” Karma said.

“I’m doing my job,” Will replied. It was ten in the morning, and he was having a hard time catching his breath. Without really being aware of it, he had Evaporated four more people.

“Do you require rest?” Karma asked.

“I might become useless to you here soon, if I don’t,” he said, knowing that it was true.

“Come back to Karma Tower, and sleep here. If I need you again, I will wake you.”

Will was relieved, but was worried that he was letting Karma down. “Are you sure that’s alright?”