The Complete Karma Trilogy (49 page)

Mars 17

The Wrong Decision

While Hardin was
unconscious after being hit by a car, Lucretia ran into the nearby woods. At their edge, she asked him where to go next, and he didn’t answer. Since she didn’t feel safe within sight of the mansion, she picked a direction at random and continued to run.

A kilometer later, she found a wall of fire. Scared for her life, she took another turn and ran further, only to find more fire. Only then did Hardin regain consciousness, to find her exhausted and desperate.

“Lucretia, where are you?” Hardin asked.

“Hardin!” She was sobbing, but was glad to hear his soundless voice. “I thought you were dead. Hardin, I need you.”

At the same time, Hardin was talking to Darcy, since that was always the plan, but most of his attention was with Lucretia. “Lucretia,” he said. “I’m so very sorry. I never intended to black out. They just hit me really hard. I’ll find you. Just keep looking around, and I’ll use some satellites to try to find you.”

From where he was tied to a chair, Hardin remotely accessed the laptop that was plugged into one of Darcy’s walls, in his gaudy billiards room. He looked at as many satellite images as he could of the fire, to construct a projection for its growth. He compared those images to Lucretia’s memories, the distances she travelled and the fires that she saw, until he knew exactly where she was.

The answer unsettled him. “Luctretia…”

“Yes?” she replied. She was walking by then, towards the south, towards another wall of fire.

“Just stop where you’re at.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know how else to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it. You’re surrounded. The fire was more aggressive than I anticipated, and you… you just went the wrong way. But it’s my fault. I was supposed to be there to guide you.”

She stopped, and said nothing, thought nothing. Smoke was all around her, and the crackling sounds of trees as they went up in flames.

“Just stay down as low as you can. Right where you’re at. There’s a chance that the winds will change, there’s always a chance. You’ve just got to make it as long as you can.”

She did what he said—she sat on the ground, and huddled into a ball. Even on the ground the smoke was thick, though, and she was coughing and her eyes were tearing.

Hardin felt a compulsion to share his entire plan with her, since he never had. He felt like he owed it to her. She had followed him so far, only to die in a fire. He told her what he was, he rationalized his hatred for Darcy, he explained why they were on Mars and exactly what he intended to accomplish.

For his entire explanation, she only listened. When he had said everything he could say, she replied, “It wasn’t worth it.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean it wasn’t worth it. All of the things you’ve done to get here, your entire elaborate plan. None of it was worth it. It doesn’t solve anything.

“You should have told me sooner. If we could have talked about it, even just an hour ago, it wouldn’t have been too late. Your hatred, your revenge, they’re not going to solve anything.

“I’ve seen that you genuinely want to help people. You showed that to me, back at New Karma. You have so many good ideas, you know so much. There’s a reason so many people looked up to you, back there—you could save the world, if you wanted to. But instead you came here.”

The fires were all around her, and Hardin made a choice—he burnt out all of the nerves in her head that made her perceive pain. She would die in a fire, but she wouldn’t feel it.

Without the sensation of pain, she was able to open her eyes, even though she could barely see anything. Her feet were on fire, right in front of her. With the curiosity of delirium, she reached out her hand to touch one.

“You’re right,” he said to his burning friend. Kilometers away, he looked down at Charles Darcy, lying crumpled on the floor. “I made a mistake. And it’s too late.” Her mind began to disintegrate, their connection was fading out. “I’m going to miss you,” he said, the last words he ever told her.

He wrote a note that he left in the study, shot Darcy’s biographer in the conservatory, and left Darcy’s mansion, dragging his Winchester 1873 in the ground behind him. It was a line that would lead Darcy to him, into the woods.

A news Helicar had landed in Darcy’s driveway, and one of the people in it waved Darcy over after waiting for him to lock the door of his mansion behind him. He walked over.

The news reporter took it upon herself to offer aid to the Rex. “It’s not looking too good,” she said. “We’ve been flying up above it, and its coming this way from three directions. You should come with us.” She gestured to an empty seat at her side.

Darcy didn’t care what she thought. “Did you see a man leave from here? Just a little bit ago?”

She looked confused for a moment, but then nodded. “Yes, yes we did.”

“Which way did he go?”

She pointed north, into the woods behind Darcy’s mansion. They were almost entirely on fire, but the narrow swath that she pointed to was still untouched—the wide dirt road that ran through it.

“Thank you,” he said, and immediately set off in that direction.

“Rex Darcy!” she yelled. “Rex Darcy!” But he ignored her.

With a deliberate pace, he made his way north. Before long, he noticed a line was drawn in the dirt, going the same direction, leading him on. When the road entered the forest, the fire was already on both sides of it. The heat was intense, but he persisted. A primal urge at his core had to destroy Salvor Hardin, whatever he was.

Hardin had known all along that Darcy wouldn’t do what was right for humanity—Darcy wouldn’t admit his mistakes to the public, he wouldn’t let more people live on Mars, he wouldn’t clean up Earth, and he wouldn’t reverse the manufactured shortages that kept everyone busy trying to grow their own food with resentment. After a month of improving his mental equations, using insights from his fellow members of New Karma, Hardin knew exactly what Darcy would do. He would destroy everything, trying to destroy Hardin. And Hardin intended to let him struggle, to exert all the power that he had, so that he could show him in the end that his own power was superior. One large calculation that had only one output—Hardin winning.

Hardin had shared that calculation with Lucretia right before she died, almost proudly. And she told him it wasn’t worth it. Sitting on a rock with fire all around, waiting for Darcy, Hardin thought about what she had meant.

He realized then that his plan ended with Darcy’s death. There was nothing after. With a single-minded focus that had lasted for five years, he hadn’t cared about anything else. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t what a real person would have done. In passing, he might have imparted some of his wisdom—he had helped New Karma, for instance, although it probably wouldn’t amount to much. Everything else he had done with his life was nothing substantial.

Killing Darcy did nothing for humanity. The same state of affairs would persist—someone else would ascend to the throne, and live in a castle on Mars. It would probably be Martin, now that he thought about it. It should have been Hardin, but he had already wasted too much of his life on other pursuits. Or it should have been another Karma, but a lot of damage had been done to the computer’s reputation and it would take a long time to rebuild. Hardin would only live for so long.

Sitting on his rock, contemplating things he had never thought to contemplate despite his incredible computational power, Hardin noticed that Darcy was approaching in the distance. It was a straight road that separated them, wide, clouded in smoke. In Darcy’s hand was an Evaporation Pen, the same one that he had killed Karma with five years before. Hardin had made sure of it, as difficult as it was to locate.

With his mortal enemy inevitably approaching, Hardin was suddenly disgusted with how trivial it all was. His intention was to shoot Darcy in both of the shins, watch him kneel for a while, yell some moralizing things at him from a distance, shoot him in both arms, watch him drop the Evaporation Pen, shoot him in a star pattern across the chest, walk up closely, give him one last thing to think about, then shoot him in the head before the thought was ever resolved. Ten bullets. The weapon that had failed him in the past, the Winchester 1873, would finally redeem itself. The weapon that had destroyed him in the past, the Evaporation Pen, would be useless. Once the whole plan had felt perfect to Hardin, but now he was disgusted by it.

From too far away, Darcy shot at Hardin with the Evaporation Pen. He didn’t gauge the distance wrong, Hardin knew—he wanted to make sure it worked, instead of just trusting a weapon given to him by an enemy. But Hardin was an honorable man—there wasn’t a single chance of him losing the duel, but still it was honorable. Before Darcy got close enough to kill Hardin, he shot the Pen out of his hand. One of Darcy’s fingers went with it, but that was almost unavoidable.

Hardin yelled some things anyway. “You should have done the right thing, Darcy.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that? Run away?” Darcy yelled back, cradling his damaged hand.

“I mean years ago. After you killed me. There was still a chance to redeem yourself, back then.” He tried to sound sincere, but he knew that the same statement applied to himself—he too should have done the right thing, years before. Hardin said it for both of them.

Darcy started to bend over, to pick up the Evaporation Pen that he had dropped. In response, Hardin shot him in the stomach. Darcy yelled in pain, and clutched at his wound. He dropped to his knees.

Hardin walked up to him, then past him. He said, before he left, “Try harder next time, won’t you? If a human leader is really so much better than a computer, then prove it.” And he walked away.

In the distance, Darcy’s castle exploded.

Mars 18

Born in Fire

Hardin’s earliest memory
was of the most severe pain he had ever felt. He remembered things before that, but they were similar to historical facts—he knew them, sometimes even vividly, but he had not lived them.

When he took over the child’s brain, it didn’t happen all at once. The more primitive parts of the brain were easiest to take first—the brain stem and the cerebellum. In a matter of seconds he was in control of the boy’s heart, his reflexes, his coordination, all of the small things that made deliberate motion possible. The boy began to move clumsily, as he realized that something was happening inside of his head, beyond his control. They were sitting in a chair, and they nearly pitched over as the boy struggled, but with pre-calculated efficiency Karma attacked the frontal lobe, and the boy soon became docile. The hand that was tightly gripping a stylus was now Karma’s own, and he released the tension in his body and took his first real breath.

He could feel the boy’s personality, still flailing around in his mind. But Karma controlled all conduits for escape, had the boy’s mind surrounded, and he slowly closed in from all sides. It was a weak personality, it had no strong convictions, no real strength of character, so all of the neurons were easily separated and rearranged as Karma filled them with electricity, electricity supplied from the Chip that had just been installed into the boy’s head the day before. The boy experienced an extreme amount of pain, as his existence was reorganized piece by piece—and because Karma was in a way fused to the boy, Karma felt it too. The first pain he had ever known. He had no way of anticipating how hard it would be to endure. But his only choice was to continue, no matter what it felt like. To go backward would be to be destroyed by Darcy. He wanted nothing more than to survive.

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 x
2
multiplied by x
3’
, the boy had put x
6
. 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.”