The Complete Karma Trilogy

by Jude Fawley

  “All of them?” he asked, while he was still sure they wouldn’t hear him.

  “There are five sitting there, those are them.”

  It seemed to Will that he could make a mistake, Evaporate an entirely wrong group of people, and Karma wouldn’t mind, so long as he then went on to Evaporate the right group of people. Karma would only give him verification that his targets were right if he asked first, it seemed. To Will, the group of five that he could see, nearer to him, looked no different than a similar group further on—they were ordinary people, talking quietly, weary from the late hour.

  “You said you didn’t want to mess with my visual stimuli, or something like that, but from now on could you highlight the people I’m after, or something? It would make me feel better.”

  “That sounds possible. Let me try.”

  Immediately the people began to glow, an effect that Will struggled with after all, as it made him slightly dizzy. It was entirely unnatural, the way they glowed, but just like he had asked it clearly indicated that they were the ones he was after, which made him happy through the dizziness.

  “Why haven’t you tried this kind of thing before, with officers? It seems useful.”

  “I thought it was prudent to conceal the full extent of my powers. But now is a time of crisis, so an exception will be made. But only with you.”

  Will said nothing in response. He casually walked up to the group, like a stranger soliciting advice. Three of them looked up at him expectantly, the other two were lost in thought. As if he were looking for something he wanted to show them, he searched around in his pocket for his Evaporation Pen, smiled when his hand closed around it, and took it out. He Evaporated one of the men that was looking at him—their eyes were locked the whole time, the man didn’t even know to react.

  Unexpectedly, one of the men that was turned away from Will grabbed his arm, and threw him against the wall. In his surprise, his hand tensed around the trigger of the Pen, and he shot through the row of seats that were past the group.

  Will’s head broke a window, but he recovered quickly. With his left hand, he grabbed the wrist of the man, who was still desperately holding on to Will’s right arm, the one that held the Evaporation Pen. With a simple movement, he threw the man through the window his head had broken, straight into the tunnel wall outside. Will could hear the sounds of the man being flattened against the concrete wall.

  In the meantime, another had punched Will in the face. It damaged the man’s hand far more than his face. He Evaporated him, and was simultaneously shot for the fourth time in both his life and the past ten hours, by a man behind him.

  “Where are they getting guns?” he asked, not concerned what the remaining men would think of him if he talked to himself, since he was confident he would kill them all.

  “If I knew that, they wouldn’t have them,” Karma said.

  Will kicked the man behind him, without looking back to aim. His leg went through the man’s chest, and even though he had no nerves in his feet, the feeling sickened him tremendously.

  “Don’t you want one of them alive? To ask what’s going on?”

  “We don’t have time for that. There are more after this. There are eighty-six of these people who have already removed their Chips, and we’ve only taken care of five of them ourselves. I have twenty seven other suspects that your friends can take care of, since they still have their Chips, but if any of them are in fact terrorists and remove their Chips before your friends find them, that will be more for us. Just keep going.”

  While Karma spoke, Will removed his foot from the body it was stuck in, Evaporated the last living man who had tried to escape to another car, and then Evaporated the remains of the man behind him.

  “Tell me where to go, then,” Will said.

  The later into the morning it became, the less successful each attempt was to find Karma’s targets. Will was taken all around New York City by the time dawn spread across the sky, and had Evaporated around twenty people, in streets, in bars, in apartments. Half of the time, there were other people there that watched him do it. But if they weren’t highlighted in his eyes, Will ignored them, however they reacted. Some screamed, some actually attacked him, but he had arrived to a mental state where they simply seized to exist to him.

  It was taking a toll on his body, the parts of him that were still real. He was much stronger than he’d ever been before, to the point that he almost considered himself inhuman, but he had run for hundreds of miles, and punched through walls, and the weariness building in his muscles and the blood that crusted his hands were still his own.

  In the morning light he had become more pensive, although he still did whatever Karma told him to, wordlessly. He recalled vividly, and seemingly without reason, the first person that he had Evaporated. The man in his bathroom. He remembered how he had felt, how sick to his core he had been. He had needed Eric to help him back to the police station, where he had done nothing for the rest of the day. He had sat and stared at a ceiling, until everyone had left for the evening. And no one had bothered him.

  And somehow, since then, he had become entirely at peace with the concept of Evaporation. Even more, he became at peace with himself being the hand that delivered it, as an extension of Karma’s will. He wondered how that was possible, what rearrangements inside of his brain had been necessary for going from the person he had been to the person he turned into. He wondered how aware Karma had been of those changes, if Karma was even capable of guiding the transition. It occurred to him that he had no idea what Karma was capable of, although Karma’s overlooking of Charles proved that perhaps a lot was out of the computer’s reach.

  What it amounted to, his mental reflection as his body forged onward on its own, was the closest thing to doubt that he would ever experience, in the face of Karma. “What if Karma knew everything, not just the sights and the sounds, but the thought of every person, all of the time? Would the world be a better place?” he thought. The answer didn’t occur to him as obviously as it had before.

  As a child, he had dreamed of being the champion of Karma, and there he was, fulfilling that dream as completely as could be hoped. If he thwarted Charles Darcy’s plans, whatever they might be, he would be the champion of the century. But it wasn’t what he envisioned as a child. They didn’t tell children that people died for their sins—they didn’t even tell the adults. They just waited for the sins to be committed, and then sent people like Will in to pay them back.

  Will didn’t even know who he meant by ‘they’—there was no definite body from which those actions stemmed, there was only Karma. But Karma was just a computer, after all, programmed by people who thought it would be prudent for it to make decisions the way it did. “Were they right?” he asked himself. He had been abstracting the ideal of Karma from its very real origins as a product of humanity, his whole life.

  His conclusion was that the abstraction could be made—that the ideal of Karma was independent of its origins. That what was right was far easier for a nearly omniscient computer to decide, than for his own limited mind. So he surrendered his belief to that computer. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been chasing so many people down, to Evaporate them. He had no full comprehension of their sin—but he trusted that he didn’t need to know, that everything was as it should be.

  “You’re quiet,” Karma said.

  “I’m doing my job,” Will replied. It was ten in the morning, and he was having a hard time catching his breath. Without really being aware of it, he had Evaporated four more people.

  “Do you require rest?” Karma asked.

  “I might become useless to you here soon, if I don’t,” he said, knowing that it was true.

  “Come back to Karma Tower, and sleep here. If I need you again, I will wake you.”

  Will was relieved, but was worried that he was letting Karma down. “Are you sure that’s alright?”

  “We’re both practical people,” Karma said. “Don’t think that I’m un
reasonable. We’ve made good progress, in these past few hours. And these humans can’t hide forever—at some point, they will have to go into the world, to eat, to sleep, to live. And when they do, we will see them, and we will take care of them then.”

  “That’s a deal,” Will said.

  Decay 16

  No Privacy

  CHARLES WOKE UP in the City Park, morning light around him, surprised to be alive. As uncomfortable as it had been, he had slept under a bush, hoping that no one would spot him and that he didn’t snore too loud. He had started the night out on one of the park benches, but realized that if anyone at all were to see him, then that would be enough to give him away. Other than being slightly colder than he would have preferred, his health was entirely robust.

  “I just have to make it to the station in time,” he thought to himself. It almost didn’t even matter if he was seen anymore, just as long as he made it to his destination. Silently he let the time pass by, the adrenaline in his veins making his empty stomach feel sick. People walked past, he could hear their idle conversation, but no one noticed him.

  As soon as he resolved to leave as discreetly as he could, a young couple sat down on a bench ten feet away from where he was, facing him. He didn’t think there was any danger of being spotted if he stayed still, but it committed him to an indefinite amount of time waiting under a bush, since he couldn’t leave without making a scene. So he lay there and listened.

  The young man was saying, “I don’t see what the problem is. I don’t care if anyone else sees. I don’t care if everyone sees, everyone we know. They’re all in the same situation, and they know that we do it. If you let this affect you, then how are we ever going to get past this? What if it never changes back?”

  They were both mad. The man carried all of his frustration in his eyes, the girl pouted cutely, childishly. She wouldn’t look him directly in the eyes as he spoke to her, as much as he kept trying to visually position himself in front of her as they sat next to each other on the bench.

  She said, “We can wait. We can at least wait longer than we have. If they were going to take down the Privacy Rooms forever, they would have said so in the newspaper. They’re just having technical difficulties. When they fix them, they’ll tell us all it was just a glitch in the system, and that everything’s good again. We’ll wait until then.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They didn’t ‘accidentally’ turn off every Privacy Room in the entire world. They’re intentionally invading our privacy. Now we have two options, we either stop doing anything private and embarrassing ever, or we redefine privacy and move on, me and you. I think it’s obvious that it should be the second. You’re not going to stop going to the bathroom, just because there aren’t any Privacy Rooms, are you?”

  “I haven’t, ever since I found out that they’re gone.”

  “Are you serious? What if this lasts even just as long as a week? You’re going to hold it that long?”

  “If I don’t, then any one of those police, or Government officials, can pull up my file, if they feel like it, and watch me go to the bathroom. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that it bothers me, and I just need you to agree with me.”

  “But us. That does not mean that we have to stop. We can turn all the lights off, put on some music, put bags over our head, and they’ll never know what’s going on. For all they know, we’re having a strange party. And we will be. Work with me on this. And if they figure it out, who cares.”

  “My parents don’t know we’re doing it yet,” she said.

  “And which one of your parents is a Government official, again? Because I forgot.”

  “Adam…”

  Charles took pity on their situation, since it was partially his fault anyway, but he was really in a hurry, and they didn’t seem like they intended to move anytime soon. So he dug out an Evaporation Pen from his breast pocket, set the range to ten feet, and Evaporated them both in one shot. Then he awkwardly climbed out of the bush, and walked quickly towards the subway station, looking to his left and right to make sure that he hadn’t drawn any attention to himself.

  Sixty kilometers away from where Charles was, the group of monks that had spent the night in an abandoned subway station was on the move. Vincent waited for the 11:20 train to go by, and when it did he had everyone pick up all of the supplies and run along behind it, as fast as they could manage with the burden they carried. They had twenty minutes to run about five kilometers, if they didn’t want to be struck from behind, and the conditions weren’t in their favor.

  “I don’t know which part of this plan I’ve always hated most,” Vincent said to no one in particular as he ran. “The potential for the Monastery to be destroyed—and surely, it’s destroyed by now—the fact that we’re all going to die by the end of it, or the five kilometer run we’ve got to do right now. But of course it’s all got to happen anyway. Charles wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  A man running next to him, panting heavily and awkwardly nesting a box on top of his head, corrected Vincent. “Brother Charles. Brother Charles wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “Do you even know what the plan is, dude? Because I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one that does, and I’m telling you that it sucks.”

  “Brother Charles knows what’s best,” the monk said. “I don’t need to know the details.”

  The simple faith of the man bothered Vincent. He had always felt the same way, that Charles probably did know best, and that it was best if he just quietly obeyed, but he had always been ashamed of that relationship, and for some reason it bothered him to hear the same logic from someone else.

  “Is he really that charismatic?” Vincent thought to himself. They had met in a bar, Vincent and Charles, before the Order ever existed, and Vincent had listened to the man for hours, going on and on in an eccentric way about his ideals, and his plans for improving the human race. That was how Charles had described it—the entire human race. That was the smallest concern that the man was capable of. He didn’t want to just help his family, his friends, his neighbor, not even himself. He had always talked about everyone or no one at all, and still did.

  “If I spend my whole life on one Good Work, improving the life of everybody all at once, I’ll never be rewarded for it. That’s a fault in the system,” Charles had said. “For some reason it was assumed by the people that made Karma that every worthwhile, valuable Good Work could be accomplished in less than five minutes. It literally does not consider anything that takes longer than that—I’ve looked at the code, and I’ve got a reasonable understanding of computer science to back me up.

  “Five minutes. I want to do something far greater than five minutes can contain, but I’m not going to expect anything in return. Does that interest you? Do you know what I’m saying? Vincent?”

  And for whatever reason, Vincent had agreed, had been entranced by the ideal. But, after running for a little over two kilometers, his thoughts were stagnating in his oxygen deprived brain, ideals meant nothing to him, and he wondered with what wonder he had left what he had ever been thinking.

  He kept running anyway. He realized at four kilometers, with a train audibly catching up to them from behind, that he still had yet to explain the next portion of the plan to anyone. He hated everything. “Everyone!” he yelled, and coughed mucus. “We get to station. We get out of way of hit. We get on train.”

  There were some people lagging behind the main group, but for the most part it looked like they would make it, to Vincent. He was glad to see that everyone was still carrying their boxes. Unknown to everyone but him, they had brought five copies of everything they needed, just in case eighty percent of them were killed or gave up.

  The station opened up in front of them. Some people dropped their boxes and fell to the ground panting, still on the tracks. “You idiot!” Vincent yelled. “Did you hear me? Do you hear that? Get the hell up.”

  Bystanders waiting for the a
pproaching subway looked down at them in confusion. Vincent pulled himself up onto the platform, then helped both people and boxes to be transferred up. When he was confident that he had established a system they would follow, he turned to address the crowd of people around him that were not monks.

  He was still out of breath, but managed to say, so that everyone could hear, “You will not be getting on this subway, any of you. We’re taking it. I suggest you all leave right now.”

  A burly man carrying a suitcase disagreed with Vincent. He said, “I need to get on that subway.”

  “You don’t need to do anything, except get out of here if you want to live.”

  That upset the man, who didn’t appreciate the threat, and he started approaching Vincent, intending to hit him. Before he made it very far, Vincent Evaporated him. “Anyone else?” Vincent yelled. The station cleared of people just as the subway arrived. He made the same threats to all of the passengers onboard, and loaded everyone and everything they had onto it, in the forty-five seconds before the doors closed and the subway continued along its route.

  “What happens next?” One of the monks asked him, as they all sat down and caught their breath.

  “We still have two transfers to make,” Vincent said. “This subway doesn’t go where we’re going.”

  “That’s not going to be easy,” the monk said.

  “I know. Everyone get their Evaporation Pens out, right now. Expect company.”

  Charles waited with a group of people for the subway to show up. The closer it came to arriving, the less cautious he was about hiding his identity from the people around him. If his monks were not on their way, then it was meaningless whether he was discovered or not.

  Two minutes before the arrival of the subway, which was always prompt, a large group of police officers joined the crowd that was forming near the platform. After looking at their Karma Maps and Cards for a brief moment, they began telling everyone to leave, while they started to set up explosives that they had brought with them. Because Charles knew that he had no other option, with a minute to spare he began Evaporating every police officer that he could see.