The Complete Karma Trilogy

by Jude Fawley

  “Promise,” she demanded.

  “Promise.”

  The next day, Toru was uncharacteristically late to work. He didn’t care much anymore—he took an extra-long breakfast at a small restaurant in the city, and walked through a park, before eventually meandering toward the subway that would take him to Nakai Station. The whole time, hardly a thought entered his head. He was just floating, following a breeze. But even a random breeze took him to work after a time. It was ten o'clock when he entered the Kenko building, and took the elevator up to the Kaishin floor.

  He had begun to wonder what he would do with his time at work, in what ways he could best prepare for the human experiments that would invariably happen the next day, when he ran into Reiko, who was leaving from Saori and Nami’s room.

  “What were you doing in there? You weren’t talking to them about it now, here at work, were you?” In a quieter voice he said, “Mr. Laurel is around here somewhere, isn’t he?”

  “He’s in his office,” Reiko said. “And don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.” She pointed back at the room she’d just left. “You should go in there. They’re waiting for you.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “You promised me,” she said.

  “You couldn’t have possibly...”

  “They’re being engineers about it, it’s kind of funny really. They’ve already inserted theirs. Hideo and Ichiro are next. Not turned on yet, but inserted. They’re going to do it first. And think about things, improve things, maybe. Before bringing us in. Safest that way.”

  “How could you possibly have convinced them?” he asked, in complete disbelief. “I was two hours late. Two hours. That’s a huge decision for them to make in just two hours.”

  Reiko looked both ways down the hallway. “And I thought you were nervous about talking about these things here at work? And we’re right here in the middle of the hallway, who knows who can hear us...”

  “Tell me.”

  “They’re more emotionally invested in this than you might think. All of them. And I may have mentioned Mr. Okada once or twice. Go. We shouldn’t be loitering like this.”

  She walked away, leaving him alone at the door into Saori and Nami’s room. He entered.

  Inside, the two women were inconspicuously discussing things with Hideo and Ichiro. Saori acknowledged him as he walked in. Hideo was holding one of the newest prototypes of the chip, showing it to the other three and saying things that Toru couldn’t make out. Toru jumped when he heard the door opening behind him, and turned around to find Mr. Laurel in the doorway.

  “A little late, Mr. Watanabe, aren’t you?” Mr. Laurel said, inspecting the young man, as if to find a reason for his lateness somewhere on his person.

  “I had certain affairs to attend to, Mr. Laurel, and am deeply apologetic.”

  “This is a warning. Punctuality is of utmost importance.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What brings all five of you in here?” Mr. Laurel asked. Toru froze completely, unprepared for the question.

  Saori answered from behind him. “Trying to ruin as few lives as possible. We will have to discuss the methodology of the procedure, if we’re going to get it right.”

  “Will you be requiring any surgical instruments? Or other materials?” Mr. Laurel asked. “It’s best we make all necessary arrangements today,” he added.

  “We agree entirely. But I don’t think we need anything now. I’ll let you know if that changes.”

  Mr. Laurel stood for a while silently at the door. He said, “It’s good to see you showing such professional enthusiasm for the job,” and smiled, before leaving the five of them in the room alone.

  After a few minutes, during which Toru had stood at a distance from the rest saying nothing, Saori said, “You’re doing this, right? Reiko said that you would, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

  “Did you ever get those pictures made, of the rat brains?” Toru asked, as an evasion.

  “Never had the time,” Saori said.

  “And that’s supposed to be comforting to me.”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I will tell you,” she continued, “that at least the surgery is bearable. I feel a little duller than I did before, like part of my brain was fried, but other than that I’m not so bad off.”

  “You really did it?” he asked, drawing closer.

  She lifted a braid of hair, to expose a small patch of skin that was stitched in the shape of a square, which had a small bump in the middle that might have been from Toru’s imagination. She said, “It’s going to be a little harder to hide for you boys.”

  “Can we tell Mr. Laurel that we’re practicing the incision? Or something stupid like that?”

  “It would be really hard to believe that we’d be practicing on ourselves. But maybe he’s that stupid. I really don’t know,” Saori answered. “But you can see the incision really isn’t that large. It might blend right in with Hideo’s hair, if I don’t shave it. It makes it harder, not to shave it, but it can be done. Your hair and Ichiro’s are a little too short, though.”

  Toru looked at Hideo and Ichiro, who both seemed completely calm. He felt like the only person that was having difficulty accepting what they were doing. “Reiko said you all are going first?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “The plan,” Toru thought to himself. He was supposed to be the immediate supervisor of the project, and somehow “the plan” had been made without his real consent, by someone who had only been at Kaishin for less than a month. “I want to be here when you turn it on,” he said. “I have Haru’s program, he sent it to me.”

  “We have it too,” Saori said. “He sent it to us this morning.”

  Toru was feeling completely undermined, but he tried to let it go. “Let me know when you’re ready. I don’t want to stand around in here. It feels suspicious.”

  “We’ll let you know,” Saori assured him.

  He left, and went to his empty office. He spent several hours doing absolutely nothing, staring at his blank computer screen, which he had never bothered to turn on. Reiko visited him several times while he sat there, but they never said much and she left as spontaneously as she came. He wondered what she could possibly be doing with all of her time, since her rats had died. How could she possibly not be suspicious, hanging around for no apparent reason at all? Maybe she was reading through all of her notes she had taken, or watching her videos, or maybe she was watching Hideo and Ichiro being cut open, only yards away from where Mr. Laurel was. And Mr. Laurel was probably going over everything with the programmers, making sure they had everything as set as they claimed to have it, oblivious to the silent rebellion they were inciting directly under his watch.

  At some point or another, Toru had called Noboru Wataya, under the pretense that the man had left something in their office that he should come pick up. “You should really come get it,” Toru said. “And maybe we could talk a little.”

  Noboru seemed very excited to be talking to Toru again, but reluctant about coming back to Kaishin. He said, “I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to come back. They fired me, after all.”

  “Nonsense. They can’t deny a man his personal property,” Toru said.

  “And what exactly was it that I left behind, again?” Noboru asked.

  “I can’t really describe it, but I know that it’s yours,” he said.

  Noboru agreed to come get it that evening, although he said he wouldn’t stay long. Toru said nothing else, and didn’t mention their intentions to try Kaishin. Immediately after he had hung up the phone, Reiko came to his office again. “Come watch,” she said. “It’s happening.”

  Hideo was operating the computer program himself, using a brief set of instructions that had been sent with it, since Haru wasn’t around to do it for them. They were all huddled in a group of chairs, in the same room that Toru had left them in hours earlier. Random cross sections of brains were littered all over the room lik
e always, a decoration that Toru found ominous.

  “If you get everything ready up to the ‘Enter’ button, I’ll hit it,” Toru said. Hideo looked up at him from where he was sitting, and nodded.

  “This is it,” Hideo said. “All ready.”

  Toru faced the four individuals, who all looked nervous now that the moment was actually there. “How are you paired?” he asked.

  “We’re together and they’re together,” Saori said, indicating that the women formed one group and the men the other. “We thought maybe cross-disciplinary combinations would have been helpful, but decided on this.”

  “And how long before you join those groups together?”

  “One step at a time,” Saori said.

  “You’re really all ready?” Toru asked, one last time.

  They all nodded, so he hit the button, the only one that he had to press.

  Reiko and Toru waited expectantly for what would happen. Hideo stood up and began to pace the room frantically, while Nami vomited violently on the floor. Saori looked disoriented, and Ichiro looked like a stone.

  “Somebody say something,” Reiko said.

  None of the four answered. They were all completely involved in their individual activities. “How do we know that it’s working right? That we shouldn’t turn it off?” Reiko asked Toru.

  “The only thing I know is that these numbers represent the amount of data being passed around, and as you can see they’re very large,” he said as he pointed to the computer screen. “Other than that, none of these charts really mean anything to me. Maybe if Haru was here he could tell you, but he’s not.”

  They returned their attention to the engineers. Hideo was calming down, and seemed to be the only one that was reasonably coherent. He said, to no one in particular, “That’s pretty painful, that hurts a lot.”

  “What hurts a lot?” Reiko asked.

  “Wasn’t talking to you,” he said.

  “Well then who are you talking to?”

  “My mother. His mother. Mother”

  “This really doesn’t sound good, Toru. What if they die? Do we run?”

  “No running,” Hideo said. “No running in the house.”

  “You’re right, Hideo, you’re completely right. No running in the house,” Reiko replied reassuringly.

  Saori joined the non sequitor conversation. “It’s not unsubstantiated, it’s just that the proof doesn’t belong to you. You’ll have to ask permission,” she said.

  “Maybe we should just turn it off,” Reiko said to Toru. “Let them go back to the way they were. Before it’s too late.”

  “I don’t think so,” Toru said. “If it fried their brains, their brains are already fried. Giving them two jolts instead of one won’t help their situation. We’ll just wait and see if they can pull through. The worst thing we can do is press too many buttons, in a panic.”

  “Toru is right,” Nami said. “Just leave it.” Even though Nami looked pathetic, in a fetal position over a pool of vomit, it was the first logical statement that one of them had made, which was a huge relief for Reiko.

  “Nami, how are you feeling?” she asked.

  “How does it look like I’m feeling?”

  “I’m very sorry,” Reiko said.

  “She made me sick,” Nami said, indicating Saori. “She got dizzy, and it made me sick. I don’t get dizzy ever, it wasn’t me that was dizzy, but she got dizzy and it made me sick.”

  “You can feel her dizziness?” Toru asked, with the tone of a doctor interrogating a patient.

  “It’s more than that,” Nami said. And then she was quiet for a while.

  After ten minutes of waiting, everyone seemed normal. Saori said to Reiko and Toru, “I think you’ve seen us through the worst. You should leave now, so we don’t draw any attention. We’ll clean up our mess on the floor, don’t worry. And we’ll let you know when we’re ready to continue.”

  Reiko and Toru were both very reluctant to leave, but the engineers insisted. Reiko said, while they were standing in the hallway, “It’s one o'clock and I haven’t even had lunch yet. Got caught up in all of the excitement. Will you come with me, again? I promise I won’t leave you this time.”

  “Let’s do that,” he said. He looked back at the closed door, before they left.

  Reiko and Toru individually checked in on them at random intervals, throughout the rest of the day. They even made up excuses to talk to Mr. Laurel, to see if he suspected anything, which was especially hard for Reiko to do.

  She asked Mr. Laurel, “When will I be getting my new rats, if you don’t mind me asking? Toru said he’d ask you, but I don’t think he ever got around to it with all that’s been going on lately.”

  “They’ll be here tomorrow,” he said, which was when the human experiments were scheduled.

  “That’s not in the least bit funny,” she answered sternly. He said it like a joke, but the current of horrendous truth underneath it was far too strong.

  “It’s a joke,” he said. “But if we’re testing humans, what good will rats be?”

  “If there’s any common decency in the world, the human experiment will be canceled. And if we wait until then, to get me my rats I want, we’ll be a day behind where we would be if you just listened to me now.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Ms. Okada,” Mr. Laurel said. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m fairly busy.”

  Late in the afternoon, Reiko asked Toru, “What are they doing in there? You go in, and they tell you to leave. Like it’s a secret from us, even. And if they wait any longer, it will be too late—we can’t form a good, proper rebellion tomorrow morning, when it’s too late to do anything at all. We don’t have time for this.”

  Toru said, “I trust that they know what they’re doing. Whatever they’re doing in there, they’re working hard on it. You should trust them too.”

  “I’m finding that hard, right now. They need to know that we have to get this rolling.”

  “We’re on a team, all of us. You said so yourself, in the elevator, didn’t you? Trust,” Toru said.

  Reiko walked off to her empty room, and waited there alone.

  It was true that the engineers were working hard. The sounds of their labor filled the entire office space—the deep, rattling sound of the brain grater, the rapid opening and shutting of doors as Hideo and Ichiro went back and forth between rooms, shuttling tools. The lights would dim for a second as a machine was turned on, and a large amount of power was diverted to its complex inner workings. Reiko had to wonder what it was that they could possibly be making, and why it had to be made.

  Once, Mr. Laurel went and looked in on them. Toru couldn’t have been more nervous that they were on the verge of being discovered, but Mr. Laurel was too enraptured by their productivity to notice the workers themselves, and the fresh incisions that were on the side of each of their heads. He said, “You all seem to work very well at the bitter end of a deadline, don’t you? If I had known, I might have suggested this happen a very long time ago.”

  Saori only acknowledged his comment by smiling, before continuing her work.

  Nami was the one who retrieved Reiko from her room, just before five. She said, “We’re ready for you, Reiko. Come along?”

  “Saori?” Reiko asked.

  “She’s here.”

  While following her down the hallway, Reiko noticed that Nami’s walk had changed. It wasn’t faster or slower, it wasn’t more relaxed or more assertive. It was just different. Nami said, “You just missed Haru. He snuck in for a moment, to get the operation done.”

  “Wouldn’t someone have seen him?” she asked. She involuntarily looked behind her, where she expected to find Mr. Laurel, or even Mr. Perry, listening in on them.

  “Not at all.” They left it at that.

  Reiko was much more scared than she thought she would be, when the moment came. The tool that they used to get through the skull looked like a large drill press, with a wide tip. They would put her head under i
t, and it would lower down and cleave a hole right to her brain. Then it would pull a flap of her skull up. She would be conscious the whole time, with only a local anesthetic to comfort her. She felt like giving up, and running away. “I really don’t work here,” she said over and over to herself. “I don’t have to be here.”

  But she found herself under that machine anyway, and the sound it made when the metal made contact with her skull was one that she would never forget. It was like a wave that reverberated across her entire head and down her spine, jarring everything, over and over again. And after that, they used a little pump to insert fluid into her brain, and then a small piece of metal that connected it all. Then they put her back under the drill, which somehow replaced the part of her skull that was removed. She was barely conscious the whole time, from her sheer will of not wanting to be there mentally.

  When they told her they were done, she almost didn’t believe it.

  Nami said to her, “We’ve put it in, but we’re not going to turn it on until later tonight, exactly at eight o'clock. Go to a public place, so that someone will call an ambulance if something goes horribly wrong. There shouldn’t be a problem, though. We’ve made a lot of improvements. They’re going to make us leave the building here soon, so we don’t think it would be wise to turn it on now.”

  “Can I look in a mirror?” Reiko asked.

  Saori led her to a mirror, where she could see the square infraction of her skin if she turned her head sideways. It made her feel sick, but it was done.

  Toru walked in, while she was looking into the mirror. “How fast can you do it?” he asked the engineers.

  “We’ve got it down to five minutes,” Ichiro said.

  “I’m going to send Noboru in, and I’m going to go stall Mr. Laurel for time.” Without waiting for a response he went back into the hallway, and was replaced by Noboru Wataya. Even though his presence was a surprise for everyone, they took it in stride and put him directly under the drill. He seemed just as nervous as Reiko had been, which gave Reiko a small, masochistic pleasure.