The Complete Karma Trilogy

by Jude Fawley

  “Where do I put it all?”

  “I’ll get you a bag. But you should totally put these shoes on right now. Throw those away.”

  Will was no longer handled individually. After a few days of waiting around and getting to know the officers, he was put into a class of twenty other trainees, and instructed in a room by a slightly overweight but still physically impressive, heavily balding, middle-aged man by the name of Lieutenant Caplan. They had already learned and been tested on the various laws they were to be enforcing, but the lesson that day seemed to be focusing on practical concerns that would be encountered while they were working.

  Lieutenant Caplan was saying, “Half of the calls that you are going to get involve someone taking too long in their bathroom. This is flagged automatically by Karma, and then you get sent to investigate because we can’t see what’s going on in there. You’ll show up, and there will by a dead guy sitting on the toilet, half of his skull sawed off by his own hands, blood everywhere. It isn’t pretty. Sometimes they’ll be alive still. They think they can take the Karma Chip out themselves, without anyone knowing, with the kind of tools you can buy at a local convenience store. It never works out. What you’re going to do, whether they are dead or alive still, is stand outside the bathroom, so Karma can see it, and you’re going to Evaporate them. Some of you will be tempted to call an ambulance if you find one that’s still moving, but I promise you that more often than not they’re beyond repair, and even if they’re not they’ve committed a felony crime, the punishment for which is death.

  “Other times you’ll just be doing an inspection to make sure all of their appliances are in accordance with the law. If you see anything suspicious looking, like someone attempting to modify or change their Privacy Room in any way, you are authorized to arrest them immediately. If they attack you, you are authorized to Evaporate them. But remember, Karma is always watching, so don’t go around Evaporating just everyone you see. The law must be broken first.

  “Another common thing you’ll be doing, especially this time of year, is reminding people that the Tax is on the way, if they aren’t quite ready for it. Most of these people you’ll usually find at the bars, which is kind of funny in a sad way. And then after the Tax, you’ll be escorting a lot of people to Rehabilitation, which can often be a messy business. We’ll explain more of those details later, when we visit one of the clinics.

  “Very rarely, you will be called to a scene where someone is acting violently, whether they are just disturbing the peace or actually killing other people. These are to be handled contextually. If you can make the arrest, that is preferable. But if that doesn’t seem possible without risking your own livelihood, you are authorized to Evaporate them. Always, in all cases, Evaporations should be done outside of a Privacy Room. If you ever Evaporate a person while you are inside a Privacy Room, you will immediately be under investigation and all your weapons deactivated. Pressing the button creates a high-frequency signal that is detectable to Karma even inside of a Room.

  “You may not Evaporate anyone in the Government, even if they are acting violently, or threatening your life. Your weapons will be deactivated immediately, if you do that. Instead, in such a case, you are required to use your stun gun and make an arrest. For every person that you arrest, you have the option of riding the subway system, or calling a Helicar to pick you up.

  “And now we’ll move on to the next topic,” he said.

  One month later, and Will was a certified officer. There was nothing ceremonious about it, no celebration, it was just that the next day he was allowed to go out into the city, carrying all of his new equipment. He was assigned to another officer, a man by the name of Eric Devlin. Eric had been an officer for only a few years, but was already well distinguished. Will was told that, for the most part, Eric would only be there to watch him perform, and that he was really on his own.

  On his Karma Card was a list of numbers that he was to visit in sequential order. There was no explanation that went along with any of them. When he tapped on the first one, a marker popped up on his Map, on the thirty second floor of some building three miles away. He and Eric took a quick subway ride, and then an elevator, and then Will was standing at the door of his first official business as a police officer.

  He had never been in such an unsightly building before. Nearly all of the lights that lined the hallway were flickering, and patches of the carpet were missing everywhere. He could have sworn he saw a rat, which had supposedly been extinct for ten years. He knocked politely on the door. At his side, Eric laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?” Will asked, a little too irritably.

  “Do you really think he’s going to answer?” was all he said in reply.

  Will hesitated momentarily, but then tried turning the handle. It was locked. He patiently opened his duffle bag, found his lock gun, and put it against the door knob. When he pulled the trigger, it made a high-pitched whirring sound and pushed the door open a few inches. Before he entered, he peered in through the slit of the door to see if he could make anything out. All he could see were dirty clothes and a large brown stain on the far wall.

  “Here, let me get that for you,” Eric said, and pushed the door open all the way. A horrendous smell suddenly reached Will from the breeze created by the door opening, and he staggered back a few feet to the opposite end of the hallway. “You’re going to have to have a stronger stomach than that,” Eric said, standing unaffected in the threshold. “And be quicker.”

  Will regained his composure, brought out his Evaporation Pen, and walked into the room. There was a small, overflowing kitchen to the left, and a short hallway to the right that had two doorways. One would be the bedroom, the other the bathroom. He was sure, from the smell, that he would find a rotting corpse behind at least one of those doors. First he opened the bedroom, and didn’t see anything besides a deeply sagging bed with formerly white sheets, unmade. The Privacy Room triangles could be seen in the corners, surrounded by peeling wallpaper. He closed the door again.

  “The bathroom,” Will said. He had his eyes half-closed when he opened the door, expecting to not want to see whatever it was. And there was a lot of blood, all over the floor, and the wall, and in the sink. But the man that was propped up in the shower, the spring of all that blood, was still moving, and looked up at him when he entered. The bathroom was too small for Eric to fit in, he just stood outside and watched.

  “Oh good, you came,” the man said slowly, slurring his words. There were several empty bottles of alcohol scattered along the ground in the blood, Will saw. “Could you help me? I almost got it.” The man swallowed heavily, and a fresh stream of blood left his exposed skull. “It’s deep, real deep.”

  Will looked back at Eric. Eric made a silent gesture for him to turn back around. “Sir, what you’ve done is a felony,” Will said in an official tone. “I’m going to Evaporate you now.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” he said. “Do you think I don’t know that? I know that.”

  Will’s hand trembled heavily as he held up the small Pen, pointed at the man. He had to be within five feet, that’s what the range selector said. He had to hold his breath. Carbon monoxide, he would feel really tired and then he wouldn’t feel anything at all. “You knew the consequences,” he said quietly, weakly.

  “Back out of the bathroom,” Eric said, when he thought that Will might push the button from inside. “Your head has to be behind the doorway. Back up.”

  Will nearly tripped on his new legs, since he wasn’t used to walking backwards in them yet, and he didn’t turn around to do what Eric said, he just moved.

  “That’s good. Turn on the fan.”

  Will fumbled for the switch with his left hand, his right one still pointing the Pen at the man that was incoherently muttering something to his shower faucet. “Goodbye,” he said, and pressed the button.

  He shouldn’t have watched it happen, although he felt like he should, felt like it would be bett
er for him if he desensitized himself to it as soon as possible. But he shouldn’t have watched it happen. The Pen emitted a bright red beam that hit the man on the right side of his chest. Radiating from that point, he became a cloud, which engulfed his entire body in the space of a second. And Will could feel it, the wind that followed. He dropped his Pen and threw up violently.

  “That was really good,” Eric said. “You’ll do really great. Now pick your Pen back up.”

  Ronin 1

  Rats

  FROM WHERE SHE sat in the corner of a small waiting room, waiting to be interviewed, Reiko could hear the unmistakable sound of a bird crying. She was on the tenth floor of a building in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo, a place with no real nature to speak of for kilometers and kilometers around it, so the sound struck her as coming from some other reality entirely. Out of curiosity, she stood up and went to the only nearby window, to see if the bird could be seen, wherever it was.

  Outside, the natural light of day was waning, slowly being replaced by the lights of the countless cars traversing the roads below, and the lights of offices and other waiting rooms, where people were still working and waiting into the coming night. There wasn’t a bird in sight. The sound had stopped as well. Not wanting to lose it, she strained her ears to see if it could be found again, through the double-paned glass and over the sound of bustling that constantly emitted from the city’s surface. In that state of concentration, she was startled when a woman behind her announced, in a stately voice, “Mr. Okada will see you now, Mrs. Ishida.”

  “Yes, of course, thank you,” Reiko replied, quickly gathering her belongings from where she had left them beside her seat. Reiko followed as the woman led her down a long, narrow hallway, towards a room with an opaque glass wall, through which a light and a vague shape of a man could be seen. The woman, the secretary of the business, was unnaturally short and took small, jarring steps that nevertheless carried her forward effectively. She opened the door, made a short introduction to the man in the room, and stood aside to let Reiko pass by.

  In her life, Reiko had only been formally interviewed once, and so she was not very confident about the formalities, but she tried her best to bow and smile when appropriate, and she waited until a seat was offered to her. The table at which she sat was uncomfortably long for a conversation between two people, and on the other end of it sat a portly, partially balding man, who had to be in his fifties. He appeared to have aged gracefully though, and wore a well-tailored, black suit that made his girth seem more noble than anything else. He was Mr. Okada, owner of Kaishin Enterprise, personally conducting the interview for his business. It gave Reiko the impression that the business must have been small, for such an important-looking man to be wasting his time speaking with her.

  She really didn’t know much about Kaishin Enterprise, even though she had invested a large effort attempting to research it, which she took to mean that it was either very unimportant or very secretive. They had contacted her themselves, shortly after she had graduated from college, and since she hadn’t tried yet to find a job of her own accord, she decided to take the opportunity and see where it led.

  All of her reflections made her very nervous. She decided she was glad the table was as long as it was, because she knew that she was visibly trembling. She though that perhaps, from where he was sitting across the room, his middle-aged eyes wouldn’t notice. They seemed to be boring intently into her own eyes, as he sat in silence, making her feel more uncomfortable every second that went by. Finally his intentness dissolved, and the tension left the room. The fact that he could have such a profound effect on the environment around him seemed exceptional to her.

  “I apologize,” he said, in a commanding voice that took for granted it would be forgiven. “You have the exact likeness of someone that I knew as a young boy, and it took me a while to remember who it was you reminded me of. But that is neither here nor there—this is an interview, is it not?”

  Reiko didn’t think it was a question that needed answered, but he wore the face of an expected reply, and so she said, “That is my understanding.”

  “Very, very good. We need new people around here, we’re doing big things. Grand things. Probably things you’ve never dreamed of. And I’m not trying to insult your dreams, I’m sure they’re all very lovely, I’m just talking about strict probability. There are so many possibilities out there, so that you can’t very well just go dream about them all. Not if you have to be awake a majority of the time, anyway. We contacted you, is that correct? Do you have any idea what you are here for?”

  “Forgive me, sir,” Reiko started, “but I do not. I tried my best to learn about your business, but I was unsuccessful.” She felt like she was losing already.

  “Don’t be so gloomy,” he said, noticing her frown. “That is no fault of your own, not at all. Until all the patents go through, we aren’t letting anything through the cracks. We want to get a head start, we want to explore all of the possibilities ourselves, before we let anyone else have a chance. That’s just the nature of the business.”

  She attempted a smile, and he sifted through some papers that were on the table in front of him, the nature of which she couldn’t make out. He said, in apparent connection to one of the papers, “You have a master’s degree in psychology?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’ve worked extensively with rats?”

  “My master’s thesis did involve the effects of certain psychoactive drugs on rats, correct.”

  “Good results?”

  Reiko took a moment to interpret the vague question. “I saw a lot of sad things, I’m not going to lie. And since the quality of life of those rats was in fact a result of the research I was doing, it’s hard to unequivocally say yes. But I’ve been told by people that know far better than me that my findings will be very beneficial to the field of pharmacology, and I suppose that makes it worth it.” As an afterthought, she said, “So yes.”

  “I enjoy your humanity,” Mr. Okada said. “I can tell that you’ve been in a position to know this is true—that we can’t simply experiment with humans, even when humans are exactly what we are trying to improve. You’ve seen the consequences of that simple truth, and that’s what makes you qualified for what we’re doing. I don’t want to make promises that sound too good to be true, but I can very nearly guarantee you that the rats you would be working with here will not be another ‘sad thing’ to add to your list. Even though we haven’t yet tested on a live organism, we have a lot of confidence.

  “That being said, we are heavily modifying these rats, which is perhaps of questionable ethics. I don’t really know. I’ll admit, I’m too entranced by the end goal to reflect much on the means by which we’ll get there. I would need you to monitor them, similar to what you’ve done in pursuit of your thesis. I realize this all sounds very abstract, but if we’re successful, we’d be expanding the consciousness of these rats, giving them an experience no human has ever attained. I’m actually jealous that they’ll get there first. We would need your expertise on the success of this goal, and also the potential downsides, should they exist.”

  After pausing for a moment, he asked, “Do you think rats are roughly equivalent to people?” The way he said it, it sounded more conversational than intended as an interview question, but it caught her off guard.

  She said, “It depends on the context, I suppose. So many of the natural processes are the same. They eat, sleep, and communicate with each other. Some people, that’s all they do, so the similarities are entirely there. But they don’t watch television and their tail is a little better developed. What is it you’re doing with them, exactly?”

  He gave a hesitant smile. “It’s our unfortunate circumstance that I don’t feel I can answer that question, until you commit. Because of that omission of information, I’m going to be much more direct about other things that would normally be omitted, which I hope isn’t distasteful. We’d be running these experiments for three months
, for which we will pay you a lump sum of one and a half million yen. Should it turn out we need you further, we would discuss an extension at the end of that term, the details of which would have to wait for that moment.”

  “It’s not a permanent job, then?” Reiko felt a surge of ambivalence rise inside her. She was in a peculiar stage of her life, where half of her wanted stability and longevity, and the other half would run from any long-term commitment that was offered to her.

  “Like I said, it all depends. But I feel safer saying that it is not.” He interlaced his fingers, and lowered them to the table, waiting patiently for her to consider.

  “When would I start?”

  “I was hoping tomorrow, although I understand if the notice is too short. I’ve been busy with other things, and delayed this far longer than I should have.”

  Reiko was somewhat confused. “Aren’t you interviewing more people? Or have you already? Aren’t there more questions? There isn’t much time between now and tomorrow for more interviews.”

  “I’ve already decided for myself,” he said. “If you say yes, it is yours. The only thing is, I can’t give you much time to decide. I could give it another day, if I had to, but the timing of this is very important.”

  “I don’t need another day,” Reiko said. “I’ll do it, and tomorrow. Where should I be, here? And what time? Can you tell me more about it now?”

  Reiko arrived to Kaishin Enterprise at eight in the morning the next day. Mr. Okada greeted her there himself, in the lobby as she entered. He was first to speak. “Your commute is tolerable, I hope? I forgot to ask.”

  “I can handle three months of it, yes. Thanks for asking.”