The Complete Karma Trilogy

by Jude Fawley

  Ten years. A moment that Matthew personally found hilarious had occurred at year eight of the computer’s reign—a national debate had surfaced, whether the computer had ‘served its term', and someone else should have been elected to succeed it, or another program designed, in the spirit of democracy as defined by centuries of precedence. But since all such matters were ultimately decided by the computer, it had naturally decided that it shouldn’t be displaced, nor modified in any way. Its decision turned out to be final.

  That computer program was called Karma, supposedly since it possessed the power to determine the best present actions to bring about the most harmonious future, a concept its designers found similar enough to the spiritual karma to warrant the same name. That same Karma had decided that it was best to use lethal force against entire countries, and now Matthew lived in the harmonious future of those actions, benefiting from their karma.

  It was fairly simple—Karma took as an input the current condition of the world, as represented by the countless data floating around in the internet and extra data provided to it by the people that worked for it, and it made clear political and economic decisions as an output, a governmental black box that served all of the same purposes that a body of elected officials might have done.

  For those reasons, it nearly didn’t matter to Matthew why he was being sent to Japan and what would happen after he did his job. Its merits had been assessed, decided to be in the best interest of America, and he had been deemed capable and sent off to perform. With that sense of confidence, after a five hour ride he disembarked from the maglev train and into the deep underground station of Tokyo, for the first and last time.

  The company in question was a large medical research facility that wore the guise of a nameless building in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo. Although it was loosely affiliated with the Japanese government, it was a private business that sold its technologies to other industries, once they were sufficiently developed. Many of the projects under research were strictly kept secret until their great reveal, but Matthew had a list of all projects known by the American government, which was assumed to be nearly complete. Karma had made the list itself, using information from obscure corners of the informational world that Matthew couldn’t fathom. There was one project in particular that he had been sent to oversee, which went by the title of Kaishin. To avoid suspicion, and for simplicity, he had been instructed to simply take over the entire company, but it was only Kaishin that mattered.

  He felt very conspicuous, surrounded by fourteen people in business attire, all extremely Caucasian. He could see the Evaporation Pens in the breast pockets of his bodyguards, and wondered to himself if the significance of that device had reached the world consciousness yet. He told them all to wait where they were, at the base of the building, while he went to a cafe across the street, at the corner of a busy intersection.

  The cafe had a very Western feel to it. Very modern, full of metallic glint and polished wood and sharp lines, track lighting and the heavy aroma of coffee. Several college-age people sat at the tables, shoulder bags placed underneath their seats. He stood in line, and when it was his turn, ordered a regular coffee.

  He hadn’t spoken Japanese in over a year, and he could feel that his fluency had atrophied. He had to search for each word individually as he spoke. “May I have a coffee, please? And no room at the top, if you will. Room is for the weak.”

  The barista didn’t seem to know how to respond, but did seem to understand him. He smiled subserviently, and shouted the order back to another worker behind him.

  It had been somewhat of a concern to Matthew, that he would come that far just to be unintelligible. He was ashamed of the feeling, but he was very relieved when the few brief words and a couple notes of yen were turned into a coffee, in correspondence with his will. It reassured him.

  Before returning to the group of men across the street, he took a seat at one of the tables by a window in the corner of the cafe, at which a young college student was already sitting. The action considerably shocked the man, since Matthew was straightforward to the point of rudeness when taking the seat, but his reaction didn’t slow Matthew down. The man didn’t have time to object before Matthew offered a fairly formal introduction of himself, and extended his hand. With a visible diffidence, the man took his hand.

  In Japanese, Matthew said, “And what would your name be, young sir?”

  “Hiro.”

  “And you attend a university, from what I see?”

  “Tokyo University.” The student took great care to use as few syllables as possible to answer.

  “So very abrupt, and here I’m just trying to get used to speaking again.”

  Hiro responded by making a large, ironic smile, and saying, “Well, I am very busy, so...” He then pulled a book out from the bag at his feet, and flipped it open to a random page.

  “How long do you think you’ll remember the things you read in that book?” Matthew asked. “If you are extremely interested by them, and have an excellent memory, maybe a year at best.” Matthew read the title of the book—it was a book on physics. “Unless you become a physicist. But that is the only exception to that rule. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. I’m at the end of my year, only with Japanese instead of physics. One more day, and I’ll lose it all. Wouldn’t you feel compassion, if our situation was reversed—you worked so hard to learn physics, and I, the physicist, refuse to remind you of all of the basic principles you desperately need, because I am too busy?”

  “You don’t make sense,” Hiro said.

  “Is it my Japanese, or my thought process?”

  “Your thoughts, I suppose.”

  “That’s all I needed to hear,” Matthew said as he stood up, and tousled the man’s hair. It was entirely inappropriate, and Matthew smiled as he did it. Hiro refused to look up at him as he left. “Enjoy being a physicist, little Hiro. Study hard.”

  Back across the street, Matthew took the first sip of his coffee. It was tepid, at best. “Wonderfully refreshing,” he said to the men around him, back to comfortable English. They had all been standing in the same place, awkwardly, for the fifteen minutes he had been gone. “And sorry to keep you waiting so long. Certain necessities I had to take care of. But if you’re all ready, I believe it is about time for our appointment.” After saying that, he glanced at his watch for the first time in several hours to make sure that he hadn’t lied. “Very close to our appointed time,” he repeated.

  He led the way inside, his guards close behind. The main lobby was unassuming, with white tile floors and a small reception desk, flanked by elevators. Hallways branched off left and right, their length visible only for a moment as he briskly made his way to the reception desk. To the lady that sat there, he said, “I believe we have an appointment, for 3 P.M., with the board of directors? We’re with the American government.”

  She nodded, typed a few things into a computer in front of her, and said, “If you will take the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, you will be escorted from there.”

  “Thank you very much,” he said, and led his group to the elevator. No one said a word on the way up.

  Eventually he was sitting in a room with a lot of balding, middle-aged Japanese men. They appeared intelligent overall, just a little overfed. Matthew himself was a very slender individual, in his early thirties, who still had plenty of youth at his disposal. Sitting next to him were his bodyguards, although he had to leave the rest of his retinue back in the hallway, since they wouldn’t all fit into the room.

  The atmosphere was very tense. It was obvious that every single one of them hated Matthew’s existence, with an inspiring passion. He couldn’t help but smile at the thought. The man who was currently speaking was turning more and more purple with every word he spoke. Matthew thought that he was the CFO of the company, but, because he didn’t know the structure of Japanese businesses very well, and because the term the man was introduced with had no obvious English equiva
lent, he didn’t really know. That was something for his bureaucrats to worry about, so he didn’t concern himself with the details. Matthew knew that the man at the very end of the table was his only concern, and he focused all of his energy on performing physiognomy from across the table, so he would be ready when the moment came.

  The purple man was saying, “... outright insult to the legacy of this company. Thirty years we’ve operated with complete autonomy and complete success, and I can’t help but feel that the two go hand in hand. What’s to guarantee the future success of the company, and the fates of every person that works for it, after that autonomy is lost? We have thousands of employees, who deserve better than their fate to be gambled on by rash changes in company procedure. If this change is even to be considered, it should be implemented slowly and with a lot of forethought, or it will be nothing but disastrous. It is with decades of experience that I make these statements. I believe they reflect the general opinion of the room?”

  Several of the men nodded.

  Matthew broke from his reverie of staring at the CEO’s face, since he felt it was a moment at which he should respond, before any of the other men chose to extend the rant with their own views on the matter. He said, “Unfortunately, these rash changes that concern you will have to be made now, instead of in the near or distant future. You must realize that the clear vagueness of the time frame you propose is unacceptable for a man in my position, do you not? But to address those concerns, I feel you’re being a little overly sentimental about your autonomy, and that the changes will not have as large an impact as you seem to believe. You’re probably giving yourself too much credit, imagining that your leadership has such a large impact on the course of this company. A ship with a new helm is hardly a new ship—if it was seaworthy before, so will it continue to be. In the meantime, I’m a fairly accomplished navigator, so if you would all take a few deep breaths, I propose we move on with the matter?”

  With every sentence, a wave of disruption was sent across the room. Matthew smiled involuntarily at every period. They were all very serious men, he realized. Very self-confident, very attached, very difficult to displace. He could feel it already.

  “Unacceptable,” one of the men said.

  “Well, the terms are not yours to make,” Matthew responded.

  Several of the men jolted to their feet, surprisingly fast for their weight. Matthew stayed calmly seated. His guards stood up, and slowly removed the Pens from their breast pockets. He could feel a small amount of adrenaline being secreted into his arteries, but he let it float around uselessly.

  “Under what authority is this happening?” another man asked. “No one has answered that question yet, and it’s a very glaring omission.”

  The CEO at the end of the table, the man Matthew watched intently, cleared his throat. The attention of the room was unanimously given to him. Deep wrinkles formed in his forehead, as he frowned and mentally prepared a statement. “We will perform as Mr. Perry says. That is the final word on the matter. I will ask, of course, that he be understanding of circumstances, which have been mentioned by several gentleman already. This is a respectable business, and should always be. The quality of the product we make is our utmost priority, and the livelihood of our employees. Do you object to those priorities, Mr. Perry?”

  Matthew pretended to give it a moment of consideration. He could sense, by looking at the faces around him, that the decision of the CEO would override any objection that the rest would make. “Quality and livelihood. I can work around those two words. My methodology may be slightly different than you are used to, though.”

  “Damn Americans,” one of the more elderly gentlemen couldn’t help but mumble, after Matthew’s response.

  “Racist comments will have to go. That’s my first dictate. If that’s such an unacceptable change from normal operating conditions, then I wonder that this company does as well as you say it does. Xenophobia can hardly get you very far, in this modern world. What a tense working relationship this will be, if I’m disliked on such irrational grounds, right from the start.”

  The room became hushed. It was a fairly dramatic situation that he was centered in, but Matthew’s mind couldn’t help but wandering. He simply had to wonder what the situation looked like to his bodyguards, who didn’t understand a single word that was being said. Comprehension would have to resort to a more abstract level, for them—it would look like a bunch of old, humanoid organisms being irritated by random vibrations in the air. And that’s all it was.

  Furthermore, one of those old men could say directly to Matthew, “I will kill you in the next five seconds. But not by using a physical weapon, nor will I make a single violent motion. I will not even move. Nevertheless, you will die in five seconds, if I can concentrate in peace for that long.” And his bodyguards, there to ensure his livelihood, wouldn’t do a thing to protect him, even though they could turn the man to a cloud of smoke in less than a second. He laughed at the thought.

  “If we can all be grown men, I’d like to move on to matters of business, which is what we’re all here for, is it not? I will require a tour around the building, to inspect operations, if someone could kindly be provided to do this for me.”

  Ronin 3

  Seppuku

  REIKO DIVED INTO her project with an enthusiasm she’d never had before. She rearranged the entire room into a configuration she thought would be the best compromise between her and the rats, between her observation and their comfort. She put a lot of thought into it. When she found out that she had a fairly large budget, she had cameras installed to monitor them at all times and to record everything. From the outskirts of the city, lying in her bed at night, she would watch them on her small laptop as she drifted to sleep.

  One week had gone by since her first day at Kaishin. In that time, the rest of the fourteen rats had been fitted with a machine in their heads, she had named all of them, including the control rats that had no machine, and they had all learned their names. She had learned their individual personalities, how often they slept, their nervous habits, how sociable they were. Using that information, she started writing little biographies for each.

  To start with, she had decided to keep the rats that were mentally paired together in the same cage. To those eight different pairs, in eight cages, she taught one simple, unique trick. Her thought was that if, after the groups were combined into four, each rat knew two tricks with only having been taught one, that would be the simplest indication she needed that the machine worked. She taught Tako and Maguro how to roll over, Yasai and Niku how to spin in circles on command, and Neko and Inu how to play dead.

  Only one of the rats, Kuro, was defiantly stupid. He wouldn’t respond to his name and refused to learn to jump when told. She went so far as to lightly starve the poor thing, by insisting that he would only get food if he jumped, but for some reason beyond her comprehension he would only eat food that was easily accessible to him, no matter how hungry he was. What was most interesting about the situation, to Reiko, was that his mental partner Kiiro was his polar opposite. Kiiro learned his name the second time that she reinforced it with food. After she taught Kiiro to jump, he literally would not stop jumping whenever she was around, unless she held him on the ground with her hand. He ate all of the food that Kuro refused to try for, which she left on a little ledge in a top corner of their cage. “I’m sorry, little Kuro,” she would say, looking at his hungry little body, in stark contrast to Kiiro, who was getting plump in spite of all his jumping. “He must be sucking it all out of you. But I can’t go easy on you just because you’re stupid, ok?”

  The pair of Kiiro and Kuro led her to the conclusion that, even if their minds were in a sense shared, their very distinct personalities could be left intact. Reiko wrote into a little book she carried around, “He can see, both physically and apparently in his mind as well, the rewards of learning. And yet he defiantly chooses to be the hungriest rat in the group. It remains to be seen whether Kiiro h
as been holding him back, or is slowly repairing this laziness. When we group them into fours, hopefully this question can be definitively answered.”

  Reiko would let them all out of their cages, sit with her legs apart on the floor with a bag of food, and have them all roaming around in front of her. Invariably a large group was directly in front of her, eying the bag of food. She would call them all by name, one by one, and lightly knock away the ones that came to her when they weren’t supposed to. As she anticipated, the mentally paired rats had a harder time distinguishing between their two names, even though they still got it right most of the time.

  Towards the end of the first week, it occurred to her that maybe Kiiro and Kuro were a clearer example of something that was happening with all of the rats. Even though she had named and taught the control rats a few things, she had yet to use them in a scientific capacity. She spent an entire lunch—which she always took at a cafe across the street from the building—absorbed in thought, instead of eating. When she came back, she set up her first real experiment.

  At the beginning of the week, she had already divided the eight control rats into four groups of two, kept in four separate cages, trying to keep their experience as similar to that of the other rats as possible. In preparation for her experiment, she decided to spend the next two days getting them acclimated to a more regular diet, rather than to feed them treats for good behavior. She had to somewhat compress her experiment as she otherwise would have done it, since it had been decided by Mr. Okada that on her ninth day the larger experiment would be moved forward with, whether Reiko was ready or not.