by Jude Fawley
“Haru, what are you doing?” In the maze, the body of the guard was shot down, and the violent consciousness died.
“Do it,” Haru insisted. “A computer.”
Toru went to a nearby computer, while Haru disclosed a small portion of his brain that contained the things Toru would need to enter.
“How do you control your information this well?” they asked.
“Because I’m the programmer. I’ve also given you the instructions on how to turn the Kaishin off, and to destroy my program. Do not neglect to destroy my program.”
The static was becoming louder, and all of them could barely think. Toru rapidly entered keystrokes, trying to put distance between them and Karma. Before he could complete the change, a thunderous crack emitted from somewhere in their mind, destroying Saori instantly.
“It’s just raw, meaningless data that he’s throwing at us,” Haru said. “It’s brutal.”
And then Haru was gone. The static went with him, the raw data that Karma was trying to drown them in. Their minds became eerily silent, what was left of them.
“What did you do?” Reiko asked. “Where’s Haru?”
“I did what he told me to... I think he tricked me into leaving him behind.”
All three of the remaining members of Kaishin were standing in their usual offices, reeling from the intensity of the last few moments.
Eventually, Toru spoke, with his actual voice. He yelled across the office, to Reiko and Ichiro, “I’m going after Haru. I’m going up to that damn maze, and I’m going to kill Mr. Perry myself. Forget the plan. The plan isn’t working, and we’re going to fail if we don’t adapt.”
“I’m going with you,” Ichiro said.
Reiko yelled, “There’s hundreds of Americans up there still, with guns! You won’t stand a chance!”
They didn’t answer. They mentally shoved her away, and she was alone to her own thoughts for the first time in almost an entire day. Frustrated, she fed her rats, and held one of them. Down the hallway the elevator left, carrying Toru and Ichiro to their deaths.
“You can still leave,” Toru said, from somewhere in her mind. “Just walk away. Even Mr. Perry doesn’t know your real name. There’s a file, in a filing cabinet in Mr. Okada’s old office, that contains the only piece of paper that says who you really are. Destroy Kaishin, take that paper, and leave. Maybe you could still live a normal life, doing something else. You deserve that.”
“We’re in this together, aren’t we? I don’t run away.”
She was also talking to the rat she was holding. “You can be Kuro Jr.,” she said. “You can be a dumb, dumb rat, just like your father. Does that sound good?”
“There’s no reason for you to die here,” Toru responded. “Our plan failed. It’s as simple as that.”
She put the rat back in its cage, and patted Mr. Laurel on the head, before leaving the room. She got on the elevator, and pushed one of the buttons. The elevator didn’t make any stops before her destination, where she disembarked. The hallways were all completely empty, with only the occasional sign that it had just been the scene of violence.
“Where are you going?” Toru asked. At the same time, him and Ichiro met the first wave of American guards. Hundreds of other dead Japanese bodies littered the floors of the entrance to the maze, in ignominious piles. Toru was shot in the arm, and Ichiro took a blow to the side of his face, but they managed to overcome them, and take their firearms, before proceeding further into the maze. Reiko could feel the adrenaline that coursed through both of them, as they rounded every corner.
“It might still be here,” she said.
Toru shot an American directly in the temple, and took another bullet himself, in the rib. Ichiro was shot fatally. Toru pressed onward alone, although he could barely breathe from the blood that was filling up his lungs. The next guards that he came across were too much for him. His nose was broken, and he collapsed to the ground. They hauled his body off to a corner, were he slowly began the process of dying.
Reiko found what she was looking for. On the dead body of one of Mr. Perry’s personal guards, an Evaporation Pen had been left behind. In the excitement, Mr. Perry had forgotten that someone might come back for it, someone that knew what it could do. “It’s here,” she told Toru. “I have it.”
Toru couldn’t think of anything to say. His life wouldn’t last much longer, and the last thing he wanted to see was Reiko die trying to make a final attack, even with a weapon as powerful as the Evaporation Pen, but he didn’t want to argue with her either. He could sense her determination, on the other terminal of his machine. Only the two of them were left, connected. “Use it wisely,” he finally said.
She took the elevator directly to the floor that the Ranch was on. When the doors opened, nothing was visible except brick and mortar. Like she had seen done only once before, she pressed a small button on the end of the pen-shaped object, and an intense beam of light began to rip through the bricks.
It seemed to be much more effective against people than walls, but still the bricks fell away in large chunks, leaving a gaping hole that opened up into a western-style house. The Pen quickly became very hot, and she dropped it to the ground.
Through the hole, she could see Mr. Perry on the other side of the room, smoking a cigar, staring right back at her. He said, in between puffs, “My God, you made it.”
Before she could do anything else, a hand reached through the hole she had created, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her through the rubble. She screamed and struggled, trying to grab on to the hands to relieve the pain in her head. Once her body was past the hole, she was lifted up, so that she was facing the last of Mr. Perry’s enormous personal guards.
“You made it far,” Mr. Perry said. “And that’s very admirable. But you are, after all, only a girl. Would you like me to demonstrate to you how I killed your father? It was in this very place, that I did it. There’s a room, in the back—”
“I’ve been there,” Reiko said, defiantly. “I’ve died there before. Not again.”
Mr. Perry laughed. “If only we’d gotten along better. But all of you are very stubborn. Your friend Noboru wouldn’t tell me anything I wanted to hear, your friend Haru much the same.”
She screamed, a loud, guttural scream. Toru was dying, but he heard her. He pushed her aside, and took control of her body. In a few deft movements, he broke the leg and then the neck of the guard that was holding her by the hair. Then Toru was gone, completely. She cried, but tried not to lose her composure. She grabbed a handgun that was on the ground, which was the nearest thing at hand, and pointed it at Mr. Perry.
Mr. Perry slowly stood up, and took his 1873 Winchester from the wall. He ran his hand up and down the long barrel, appraising it with the eyes of a connoisseur. He then brought it to his shoulder, and pointed the barrel directly at Reiko.
“It seems we’re at a stand-off,” he said. “Only, I doubt you know how to use that gun very well. Tell me, have you ever even shot a gun before? Do you know how it works?”
“Your guards knew how it worked,” Reiko said in English. “And I know a lot of the things that they knew.”
“Unbelievable,” he said, also in English. “You speak English? How long did it take you to learn it? Several hours?”
“It wasn’t that hard,” she said. “It’s a simple, profane language. And this isn’t a stand-off.”
“How is that?” he said. “You shoot, and I’ll shoot you right back. And I won’t miss.”
“I unloaded that gun myself, just this morning. I buried all of the bullets underneath the ash in your fireplace.”
Mr. Perry glanced over at his fireplace, which was behind him and to his left.
“You’ve been looking for them, haven’t you? It’s a shame to lie like that.” She shot him in the leg, and he dropped to the ground.
“You fucking girl,” he said, doubled over in pain. She picked up his rifle and clubbed him in the head with it, knocking him unconsc
iousness.
It was hard work, for someone of her small stature, but she dragged his limp body through the hole and into the elevator. She prayed to every god she could think of that the elevator would not stop between the Ranch and the Kaishin floor, but halfway down the elevator halted and the doors opened up. Three Japanese men entered, all holding make-shift weapons made out of office chairs. They all looked at her and her propped up, unconscious American body.
She didn’t know what to expect. It was entirely possible that they had become wild men, on no one’s side at all. They could have been roaming the halls, killing everyone they came across, destructive nihilists. They could have been loyal to the American cause, which she had heard stories of—Japanese employees that sold out their comrades to ingratiate themselves with the Americans, traitors that defected to what they thought would be the winning side. She held her breath.
“Need any help with that?” one of them asked.
“No, I’m fine,” she said.
When the door opened up on Kaishin, they silently watched as she dragged him away, and they even waved at her while the doors closed. She brought Mr. Perry to Nami and Saori’s old room, and struggled to get his head in position for the drill.
While the drill did its work, she found a tool that looked sufficient for prying her Kaishin out of her head. The thought made her weak in the knees, but so did the thought of Karma finding her again, so she stood in front of a mirror and carefully extracted the pieces of the machine that she could reach. She knew that she didn’t have to remove the whole thing, just enough to make the device nonoperational. It was extremely painful, and her vision blurred into specks of light, but she managed to remove a large, important-looking chunk of metal, which she was confident would be sufficient. She also destroyed Haru’s version of the Kaishin program, using a computer and the instructions that he had given in his last moments.
She then completed Mr. Perry’s surgery, using what she remembered of Saori’s expertise. She even did him the courtesy of sewing up the flaps of skin over his new metal protrusion. Satisfied with her work, she dragged him to her old room, where she tied him up next to Mr. Laurel. Their former replacement boss still hadn’t moved much, though his eyes followed her movements. She said to him, “Don’t worry, Mr. Laurel, your friends probably haven’t forgotten about you. They’ll come find you eventually.”
She got a laptop from another room, which she used to bring her rats up to a group of eight, using Haru’s old program as modified by his three replacements. She took a moment to make sure that they all seemed healthy, and then slapped Mr. Perry in the face repeatedly until he regained consciousness, which took a while.
“Mr. Perry, welcome back,” she said in English. “I’ve brought you to Kaishin. You recognize it? This is my workroom, where I do human experiments. Yes, I know it’s strange that I have a workroom, since I’m not an employee here, but I’m Mr. Okada’s daughter, so I get special treatment. You do remember my father, don’t you? You were just speaking about him, just before you fell asleep.”
Mr. Perry moaned and said nothing.
“I’m going to give you a message. If you prove incapable of carrying it, then I’m sure Mr. Laurel here will cover for you. I’ve got a bunch of rats here, because I’m mostly a rat expert. And I feel very, very sorry for the poor things, but I’m going to mentally join them to you. And the rest of your pathetic life, however long that lasts, you’re going to have a bunch of rat thoughts, and they’re going to have a bunch of rat thoughts, and I’ll make observations. Okay? Of course, I have no idea what’s actually going to happen, but that’s why we do these kinds of experiments, right? I learned that, working here.
“If you’re really lucky, those programmers you brought in made a program that does absolutely nothing. But I doubt it. We were using a superior program, one that’s destroyed now, in case you were wondering. But I’ve got to hand it to these random programmers you found—their user interface is very self-explanatory, very pleasing to the eye. Haru wasn’t in to that, he loved unlabeled buttons, hidden buttons.”
Mr. Perry became coherent enough to glare at her, though he continued to say nothing.
“That’s the spirit,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you sleeping through this.” And then she hit a few buttons, joining the rats and Mr. Perry as one.
Mr. Perry instantly became very ill, vomiting everywhere. After that, he took to convulsions, and foaming at the mouth. He screamed as well, a high-pitched, piercing scream that his vocal cords should have been incapable of, but there was no doubting that they originated within him. The rats also had a hard time, screeching and biting and convulsing.
Reiko wrote some things in a notebook, carefully placed the notebook on a nearby table, then stood up. “It’s been a pleasure working for the both of you,” she said, and left the room.
In Mr. Okada’s old office, she found a file that contained the paper that he’d had in front of him, the day she first interviewed for the job. Written on it was her name, her high school, her college, the courses she had taken, the extracurricular activities she had done—her life. She had written it herself, her resume. At the very bottom, in Mr. Okada’s handwriting, it said, “Perfect for the job.” She laughed as she carried it to the elevator.
The doors closed on her last view of Kaishin, and then the elevator descended. She thought to herself, and no one else, “Perhaps I’ll go back to school. For something else entirely. Maybe I’ll be an engineer.” She knew that fragments of memories that had once belonged to several other people remained, fragments of understanding about electrical circuits, human anatomy, and being a scientist. “One of those,” she thought. And she was very sad.
Mars 16
Earth and Mars, Switched
HARDIN HANDED HIS laptop to Todd, and said, “Plug this in somewhere, while you’re in there. The battery’s running low.”
Todd nodded, took the laptop, and ran off toward the mansion that was a few hundred meters away. Only Hardin and Lucretia remained.
There was no logical reason for Lucretia to be there. She had helped carry things to the mansion, along with the rest of their group, but then she had remained while everyone else ran off to safety. Hardin repeatedly told her that it was best for her to go, but she insisted on staying.
While he reloaded his rifle, Hardin said, “They’re going to come for me very shortly. But don’t worry, they plan on taking me alive. You, on the other hand, they would kill. So please, just run to the forest. I’ll meet you there, once I escape.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Lucretia replied. “You could have killed him just now, and it would have been over. If you really want him dead so badly, I don’t understand why you didn’t just do it while you had the chance.”
“We don’t have time for this,” he replied. “Run.” To emphasize his point, he gave her a small mental push. But before she left, she hugged him tightly. He hugged her back. And then she was gone, and it was just him standing in the middle of a road with a car coming straight at him.
He possibly could have killed everyone in the car, but he didn’t want to provoke them into defending themselves, so he wasted a few shots shooting at their engine block. Then the driver ran straight into him, and he lost consciousness.
When he woke again, he was sitting in Charles Darcy’s study, tied to a wooden chair. His rifle was gone, along with everything else he’d been carrying with him. Darcy was there—they were alone, just the two of them.
Hardin was dizzy and disoriented, but he had to put on a good show. He gathered himself, and said, “Cincinnatus, I’ve been waiting so long. It’s me, Spurius Maelius. While you’ve been tending to your garden, the Republic’s gone to pieces. Will you don your toga once more, and save it?”
Darcy was easygoing in his confidence. Hardly attempting to mask his condescension, he replied, “You’re insane, I can see. Talking nonsense. I guess I should have expected as much from a man that would dare to challenge me.”
“Nonsense? No, definitely not that. I’m just calling you what you’ve called yourself—don’t you remember? Cincinnatus. You’ve got that unhealthy preoccupation with the past. I like your style—why learn from your ancestors’ mistakes when you can do them so much better.”
“I prefer being called Rex Darcy, if it isn’t much trouble.”
“No trouble at all. Cincinnatus, Rex Charles Ford Darcy, it’s good to see you again either way.”
“Again? I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure, actually.”
“Oh, we’ve met once before. Face to face, as the expression goes. Although our interaction then was very short, I know you quite well. But most of my knowledge of you, the kind of knowledge that allows me to say that I really know you, comes from my acquaintance with your public life.”
“I’ve met a lot of people,” Darcy said dismissively, “and what you’ve seen in news reports, and on the television, that’s hardly enough to claim that you know a person. Although I shouldn’t be surprised that a person who acts as rashly as yourself would make claims equally as rash.”
“You’re quite mistaken, Mr. Darcy. Or at least you’ve misunderstood my use of ‘public life’. You think I’m using the archaic meaning, and that I’m only claiming to know that veneer of yours that’s more fabrication than truth. You must think I’m an idiot. No, if I meant that ‘public life’, I would have no cause for complaint. You’re a model citizen, a first among equals. What I meant was the more recent meaning of public—all the records taken by Karma of most everything you did for your adult life, except when you were hiding in Privacy Rooms. And, of course, there’s a sizeable gap where all those recordings were abruptly halted those five years ago. You do recall that, to a certain extent, those recordings were all public record? I meant to express my familiarity with those.”
“Very interesting, Mr. … Hardin, was it? A bold lie. All of those recordings were destroyed, along with Karma. And that’s public information in the common sense, not in your wonderfully specially defined sense. But I’ll humor you anyway. Let’s say you’ve watched upwards of one hundred hours of my life, since it would be beyond reason for you to have spent longer than that—you think you’ve learned a lot about me, from that?”
