by Jude Fawley
“And I still prefer that plan, to tell you the truth. Objectively. I could have taken my time. And I wouldn’t have needed to depend on anyone else. I could have done it alone.”
“You can depend on me,” Lucretia said. Hardin could feel the wounded ego behind the simple statement.
“Yes, I can depend on you,” he replied. “But it isn’t just you and me, either.”
Hardin thought it would be best if he didn’t tell Lucretia his misgivings about the new plan, as it was. To hint at them was enough. What his new plan required was a deeper understanding about the social manipulation of people than he’d ever intended to develop in himself. Since it was perhaps his only remaining option, he would do it, but he found the difficulty staggering. And the probability of failing was too high.
It was already underway. At random, Hardin had chosen ten of the fifty engineers that been hired instead of him. Ten people that he had then replaced with members of New Karma. He didn’t dare make the fraction any larger, because the original fifty had already met with one of the Mars officials that would be travelling with them on the space shuttle—that person needed to see enough recognizable faces in the crowd, and not too many brand-new ones.
To the ten people that he had chosen to replace he sent a perfectly forged document, explaining that their deployment to Mars would be delayed until the next shuttle launch. For the amount of people that were on Earth, the traffic to Mars was surprisingly small—besides the food vessels, which were largely unmanned, the ships that went between Mars and Earth were nearly a month apart. So he informed those ten people that they would be taking the shuttle a month hence, since their job site wasn’t entirely ready.
And then, to make sure that the misinformation was never corrected, he had arranged that every bit of digital communication between them and the world go through New Karma, so that it could be monitored for content—if they wrote back to Space Engineering, New Karma would intercept the message and forge a reply, using a set of instructions Hardin had written out before he left. If they tried contacting other fellow engineers who had been hired to the same position, to ask if they knew anything about the delay—something Hardin knew to be in the realm of possibility—New Karma had corresponding instructions to deceive them. At least that was the method for all written communication. Any phone calls they would try to make in the remaining days before the real shuttle launch would never be answered. With hardly any effort at all, Hardin had isolated his chosen ten from the world.
When they landed on Mars, the ten members of New Karma would go their own way, and set up camp somewhere in the endless fields of corn and wheat. Hardin had already picked out the location, using recent satellite images of the surface of Mars.
It was a plan he couldn’t have done alone, as opposed to the one he had told Lucretia about. If he had performed the same isolating of just one engineer, and took their place, he would have had two options when he reached Mars—to run away, as he was doing with ten people, and to set up some sort of living habitat in the fields; or to stay with the engineers, and continue to pretend to be the person he had replaced. The problem with the latter option was that he would have been quickly found out, and for no simpler reason than that the person he replaced would have failed to meet their food growing quota on Earth, and would have asked for the government to supplement the rest. And the government would have told them no, because their supplement had been cancelled due to their living on Mars. And the situation would have developed from there, until Hardin was found to be using their same name on Mars, in a place he could easily be found.
The former option, to go into the wilderness of the fields alone, wouldn’t have worked well for him either. He would have been vulnerable while he was sleeping. He would have had to prepare his own meals, an activity that would have wasted hours of his day if he wanted to eat something other than raw corn for months. His focus would have had to switch almost entirely to survival, which was something he couldn’t afford. He needed as much time as he could get for implementing his plan. The people he brought were there to provide for him, while he did what he had to do. But they wouldn’t want to hear that.
When his group didn’t report to their jobs shortly after landing, their absence would be noticed. And about a week later, ten people would ask for food from the government, and be told that they were listed as currently being on a different planet. It was very likely that Darcy’s government would immediately set about trying to find Hardin’s group, and investigating how it was that they were able to get onto Mars. It was a plan that couldn’t be repeated twice—the government would change the system somehow, to prevent the possibility of more people getting to Mars the same way. Perhaps they would genetically identify every person, before allowing them on the shuttles. However they reacted, it didn’t matter much to him—he had enough people for his purposes that would soon be on their way to Mars, by methods that were already well underway. As long as he aimed well with the single shot he had, nothing could stop him.
The other members of New Karma were sitting close by. They all wore wigs, by Hardin’s command. They had argued and complained about it, since their shaved heads were a matter of principle to them, a symbol of their devotion to New Karma, but Hardin didn’t relent. The last thing he needed was for all ten of them to be conspicuously bald, in a crowd of fair-haired people, when they already didn’t belong there. He had let them choose the colors and the lengths, within reason, but it was like asking them to choose which form of torture they best preferred. Lucretia especially had a hard time managing her long, curly brown hair, which she was always pulling on and brushing from her face. The rest picked at their heads incessantly, scratching and adjusting as they sat in silence. It annoyed Hardin, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, short of rewiring their personalities. Which he strongly considered doing, after having to sit with them for over an hour, waiting.
Finally, they were let on to the space shuttle. But there was a moment, as he and Lucretia were walking amongst the gathering people, that required Hardin to focus all of his energy—one of the people in the group, from the remaining forty engineers, was Number 399 from the interviews, who Hardin had yelled at as he was forcibly removed from the building. As Hardin walked by, he saw a spark of recognition in 399’s eyes. And 399 didn’t just leave it at that—he walked up and spoke to Hardin.
“There’s absolutely no way that they hired you, after your performance during the interviews,” 399 said. And he even turned back to one of his friends, and said, “Hey Douglas, this is the guy I was just talking about. You know, the one yelling at everyone.”
Hardin said, and quickly, before he lost too much conversational momentum, “If you could believe it, I was forgiven for my little outburst.” Hardin added, when he saw the incredulity in 399’s eyebrows, “Yes, even though I behaved so poorly. We really do have a gracious employer, you and I. They were able to overlook my glaring mistake, and to see my credentials objectively. I couldn’t have asked for more impartial treatment.”
399 became somewhat resigned, although he obviously still had some sort of inherent dislike for Hardin, no doubt due to what Hardin had said about his unemployment. “You’re not going to do it again, are you? Get all violent when things don’t go your way?”
“I wasn’t violent then. We just had a disagreement, and both of us, both me and the interviewer, decided to deliver our points loudly. I would have gladly walked out of my own volition, but they preferred to have guards do it for me. I suppose it was easier to do that than to tell me to leave. And that bit that I said to you, back there.” Hardin could tell by his expression that 399 hadn’t expected Hardin to bring it up himself. “I only said all of that because you were laughing. Laughing at another man’s misfortunes isn’t polite, wouldn’t you admit?”
399 had nothing to say to that. With a nod, he detached himself from where Hardin was standing with Lucretia. Through the course of their conversation, they became the last people to boa
rd the shuttle.
Confronting 399 hadn’t bothered Hardin. In fact, Hardin could have replaced 399, and made him one of the ten who would be isolated on Earth until Hardin’s subterfuge was discovered. But when Hardin had come across 399’s name, on the list of people going Mars, he saw an opportunity that he couldn’t pass by—at some point in the future, the concatenation of events permitting, Hardin would kill 399. Only then would he properly avenge himself of being laughed at.
Mars 11
The Void on the Other Side
TO FACILITATE THE increased amount of interplanetary travel, the Government built an evacuated Cylinder that stretched all the way from the surface of planet, past the Solar Kite, into space above. Besides the Solar Kite, it was the largest man-made construction ever built. It served for three functions—outgoing rockets didn’t have to worry about air resistance, or more importantly adverse weather, which had become more and more of a problem; there was no chance the rocket would miss one of the small openings in the Solar Kite, interrupt power for millions of people, and blow up in so many tiny pieces; and the shuttle boosters that were let go in stages would be guided straight back down to where they would be reused for the next shuttle.
Incoming rockets didn’t use the Cylinder—the opening would have been too hard to aim for, since it was still too close to Earth’s gravitational pull for easy maneuvering, and the atmosphere helped decelerate landing ships anyway. Instead, they took their chances with the Solar Kite, entering at the North Pole where there were larger gaps between the panels. The launch pad was located in Antarctica, for similar reasons.
Because the space shuttle was situated in a vacuum, the engineers had to cross a small, airtight bridge that led to the cabin of the shuttle. The shuttle itself was very narrow, which was necessary for it to fit into the Cylinder—it was a situation where the engineering considerations for the Cylinder, which required for it to be as small as possible in order not to collapse in on itself from pressure, dictated the design of all rockets that were made after its completion. So instead of a spacious room on the inside there was a long corridor, with only one seat on each of its sides. Since the engineers were taking seats in an orderly fashion, with the first people that entered going all the way to the front, and on down the line, Hardin ended up sitting at the very back, with Lucretia across the aisle and 399 directly in front of him.
The flight to Mars was fifteen hours, which was a long time to be sitting in chairs that were so thoroughly un-ergonomic, but it was a small price to pay to get so much closer to Darcy, Hardin thought. And it gave him time for something he was working on, which was the thorough mapping of the psyche of the nine people that were with him, as well as the ten that remained on Earth.
It was a delicate process. He could see everything that was going on in the present tense, for all nineteen, but the present didn’t tell enough about their emotional system, the causality that led from one emotional state to the next. Over time it would have been enough, perhaps over the course of years—given enough time, there was a high probability that each person would go through enough emotional states, in connection to diverse emotional stimuli, that Hardin could develop a decent map of each. But he didn’t have a few years.
Nor could he just dive through their minds—they would feel his violation of their thoughts, since he could only get to memories through electrical currents, and they would see where he was in their mind. Instead he had to slowly provoke old memories, memories that were contiguous enough to their conscious thoughts that they wouldn’t seem abnormal to the person’s mind he was directing. The past was a vast repository of emotional causality. With careful consideration, and with a few unavoidable guesses made correctly, he knew that he could get pretty deep into their psyche. But he hadn’t started yet, because he knew that an emotional time would be most appropriate—the mind was more prone to wandering, to reminiscing, when it was going through some sort of ordeal. An ordeal like the mind leaving the only planet it had ever known.
Because she was situated closer, and because Hardin wanted to also get an idea of their physical reaction to his mental probing, he chose to start with Lucretia. To focus, he blocked out the other eighteen people, so that he had more mental power devoted entirely to solving her.
In a sense, he nearly became her. There was his own presence, which he couldn’t prevent, but it was small, looming in the background, making calculations of its own and occasionally issuing simple directives for her to follow. He became a ghost at Lucretia’s side, in her mind. For a while, he just watched. And participated.
She was scared—they were scared. Already they had left the confines of the Cylinder, and they were outside of Earth’s atmosphere. There were small portholes to the side of each seat, but even when she put her face all the way up to it they couldn’t get a glimpse of Earth behind them. Only the blackness of space, interrupted without being softened by the most starlight they had ever seen.
And it was terrifying. They were surrounded by a void, by nothing at all. They could vividly imagine what it was like on the other side—even air sometimes felt ominously vacuous, and there wasn’t even air anymore. It was the complete absence of existence, for an unbelievably large space. And they were on their way to Mars, a place they’d only heard about for so long, never actually thinking they would go there. So far away from the sun, and so hard to believe in.
When Hardin believed that he could faithfully mimic her inner voice, he asked, “Have I ever been this far from home?” And they went to the place. It was when she had left to join New Karma—she didn’t even move that far away.
She was from Bamberg, a small Bavarian town. It was almost absurdly filled with the past—in many respects, it was still a medieval town. There were cobblestone roads, old churches, and bronze sculptures that had turned green after so many centuries. It was one of the few towns that still employed an above-ground transportation system, in the form of antiquated buses. There were too many old, historical buildings for a more sophisticated system to be installed. They started on one of those buses, on their way out of the town.
The scenes skipped without warning. They walked down the cobblestone streets, the sun was setting over the crenellations of a nearby castle. They were in a field, and it was raining. They didn’t have an umbrella. They ran, out of breath, and when they took shelter under a copse of trees, they found a dead hawk, lying on the ground. They took a picture.
What they were experiencing was a boredom. They masked it with the veneer of an active lifestyle, but underneath it was stronger than ever, a vibrant lethargy. And, if they thought about it, it seemed like they could trace it back to the fall of Karma. Boredom was an unfamiliar concept to Hardin, so he made sure that she would expand on what it meant to her and how it manifested in her life. Lucretia seemed to hesitate to remember, but Hardin pushed ever so slightly and they followed the thought in time, they went to a place five years before.
It came as a shock, to hear that Karma had been destroyed. Karma had every appearance of something eternal—for as long as anyone had lived, Karma had made all the rules, all of the important decisions, had made everything. And its existence was so abstract—how could a being that was in a sense immaterial ever die? But it had, and all because of a faction of dissatisfied people that were put to death after a long investigation into their activities.
And what took Karma’s place was Darcy. A charming man, but one that was aging rapidly. And, instead of doing Good Works, everyone was supposed to grow plants. Because it was closer to nature, it was therapeutic, because of all of that.
What she quickly realized was that she hated plants. They grew so painfully slow, they were always dying or shriveling for no apparent reason that she could think of. She watered them when she was supposed to, she put the growing lamp exactly where she was told, but the plants always wasted away before they gave back anything in return for her efforts. It seemed obscene to her that a form of life could be so incapable of providing for its
elf. But then she remembered that the same thing applied to her.
It was a way of life that couldn’t replace the one she had lost with Karma—she had liked doing Good Works, she had liked the occasional smiles she would cause on people’s faces. Every day was an adventure, where she would walk through her ancient town, seeking a new situation that she could morally benefit with the opening of a door, or by sacrificing comfort. When she reflected on those days they seemed empty, but at least they weren’t a vacuum. Those days were full of an air that couldn’t be seen, but at least it could be lived in. She could breathe. In the vacuum of the following five years she could only hold her breath for so long, she could only tolerate life being meaningless for so long. Every day that it felt like she accomplished nothing, had done nothing, ate away at the small reserve of her soul.
So she ran away. Not so very far, just to Heidelberg. But the change was significant. There was still the necessity of growing plants, but grafted on top of that, like a much prettier face, was the makeshift construction of a New Karma.
Hardin was in familiar territory, standing back in the expansive mess hall of New Karma Building A. He had to push again—with Lucretia’s voice, he asked, “Why was it so hard to leave Bamberg if there was nothing for you there?” And his immediate response was a wave of raw sentiment, of late nights and early mornings, of conversations over the phone and dark bars where the music played loudly and everyone seemed so lovely. There were times, moments, thoughts, both before and after Karma’s death, but in a way they were removed from time, so that they were in a dimension of their own, in no way related to her boredom, or her unreflective complacency that came before—they were purely the love of a place. The place from which she came.
Abruptly they were dragged into the present, and there was nothing that Hardin could do to prevent it. She was looking out the window again, at the gaining starlight, and she was thinking about Hardin. Hardin found it disagreeable to be listening to thoughts about himself, especially after what she went on to refer to her thoughts as—she said she loved him. She was using it as some kind of coping mechanism, to momentarily forget about the looming Mars, but it was still an unfortunate circumstance for Hardin. And when she became momentarily aware that her thoughts were all available to Hardin, and she felt awkward about them herself, it became that much more unbearable for Hardin.
