The Complete Karma Trilogy (50 page)

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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