by Jude Fawley
“Once again, you’re weakening my claim. I’ve seen it all. A span of twenty years.”
Darcy took the time to give a very hearty laugh. “Very good, very good. And you’re what, twenty two? Younger? So you started when you were less than two, and you’ve come here now to tell me that you’ve just finished. How was the movie? Did it have a good ending? It’s impossible and absurd. I would advise you to stop making things up, before I lose my good humor.”
“I wasn’t quite fond of the ending, actually,” Hardin said in all seriousness. “I’m starting to wonder how many statements you will make that bear the mark of being both dismissive and wrong. It isn’t impossible. For your weak little mind, only capable of processing its own one lifetime, it would be impossible. But that doesn’t make it absolutely impossible. Because I did it. I said I wasn’t fond of the ending of the movie of your life because, at its end, I died.”
Darcy stared at him with piercing eyes, but said nothing.
“You don’t recognize me? After the years of animosity that you bore me? You would think you would recognize your mortal enemy, but perhaps I’ve changed quite a bit—I will grant you that much. So let me reintroduce myself. I am Karma.”
The look in Darcy’s eyes couldn’t have been more cold. He said, “Joke’s over, kid. Let’s cut this whole charade short before I get overly mad. You’ve gone too far and you’re going even farther, and you know it. Did Martin put you up to this?”
Hardin smiled. “Martin? Who’s Martin? You don’t believe me, do you. Maybe through casual conversation you’ll see the truth of the matter. You know, I’ve been looking at these crops you’ve been growing for the good of mankind. The staples of humanity’s food dependency—the corn, the potatoes, the wheat. They remind me of a certain farm that I saw on the border of Canada, although your agricultural skills have improved a little.”
“A farm in Canada?” Darcy asked, pretending to be incredulous.
“I didn’t say it was in Canada, actually, I said it was on the border. But thanks for clarifying my point. In Canada. That Canadian farm was a laughable wasteland. Here, on Mars... they’re growing, yes, but they’re too far away from the sun. They’ll never be as efficient as you would need them to be, to be sustainable. You just refuse to admit it.”
Darcy replied, “You’re just repeating the same thing all my silent critics will say, from where they think I can’t hear them. That’s hardly impressive, hardly convincing of the point you were trying to make about being a dead robot.”
“I’m being distracted by a higher purpose. I’ll get back to it eventually, the proof of my claims. I wanted to criticize you first.
“The only way that your system would be feasible would be if you were to switch the Earth and Mars. If you would give this virgin planet to the billions of slowly starving people on Earth, and then clean Earth back up. You’d have to break down the Solar Kite, and build one here. You’d have to purge the old atmosphere, and make one that isn’t quite so toxic and overcast. You’d have to tear down a lot of buildings, and revitalize the soil. It would be a lifetime of work.
“And that’s exactly why you won’t do it. You’d prefer to have a solution that looks like it’s working during your lifetime, rather than one that would actually work after you’ve died. I’ve thought about it for a very long time, Mr. Darcy, and I believe that that is the most concise reason for why I was going to be a better leader than you. Because I was never going to die, until you killed me.
“But don’t worry—my ghost has devised another solution for you. One that will work during your lifetime. By the time these fires have died down, half of Mars will be burnt. It can’t be contained any sooner than that, it was set in all the right places. That’s a lot of food, gone. The people on Earth will begin to starve, and riot. You’ll lose what little grip you have there, and they’ll come for you next. Unless you restore Earth’s food production facilities to their full capacity, that is.
“The problem with that solution, of course, is that someone might realize you were intentionally underutilizing those facilities. You slowed them down when people weren’t looking, when everyone was still reeling from my death. When the world was in the dark. But right now, the lights are on—there are news Helicars in the air, reporting on this fire. There’s one over your house right now. If you want to live out the rest of our life, I’d advise you to leave now, and get on it.”
Darcy’s mood became entirely black, and unreadable for Hardin. He hoped that he was cracking the man’s resolve, though. Piece by piece. Darcy said, “So now that you’ve made a lot of absurd statements, why don’t you tell me how it is that you, a human, were formerly a computer. And that should wrap up things here nicely.”
“Oh, right. Gladly. In the moments I knew I was going to die, you were outside the door to my room and my guards were all dead except for Will, but he was mostly incapacitated—when I knew it was too late for me, I did something I’d never tried before. You might call it desperation, if you were being anthropomorphic, and maybe it was—I found a small child, one that just had his Chip inserted, one that didn’t have any close familial relations, a child in which a large mental change would go unnoticed.
“And I filled his brain with an unbelievable amount of electricity. I rewired the whole thing, in my image. And somewhere along the way, I became him. I only had a finite amount of storage, so I focused on computational power, and a fair amount of data I thought would be useful in learning to be human. And I made sure to leave a little bit of room for everything I knew about my enemy, Mr. Charles Darcy.”
Darcy’s eyes grew wide, betraying a certain fear. Hardin was perfectly capable of identifying fear.
“So I waited all this time, Darcy. What was unfortunate was that my relative obscurity, necessary for my possession of this body, almost made it too hard for me to climb the social ladder to stand here before you today. You were wise to make Mars the head of an oligarchy, it slowed me down. But it also made me more methodical. I might have failed, if I thought I saw an opportunity five years ago and tried to take it.”
“You’ve still failed,” Darcy said, clearly believing Hardin by then, although his fear was quickly replaced by a calm composure, assured by dominance. “I have you prisoner now. And I’ll get rid of you entirely, this time. There’s no small child you can destroy to escape, not this time.”
“You don’t think of yourself as a small child, Mr. Darcy? Because I do. You’ve left that Chip in your brain, the one that I put there. Didn’t you? You thought it was useful.”
Darcy touched his ear with horror, but it was too late. It was embedded in his skull.
“And it is useful.” Hardin pressed a small button that was inside of his palm, the wires underneath his skin, running to a device he had inside his hip. And Darcy was filled with a tremendous amount of pain, caused by a nonsensical array of numbers being lodged into his head. “Even though it’s the clearest symbol of my oppression, you’ve been using it all these years. Irresponsible repurposing of the past can often be dangerous. A smarter man would have taken it out,” Hardin said.
When Darcy woke up, he was amazed that he was still alive. It didn’t make sense. He found a note on his study table that said, “Make the right choice. I’ll be in the woods. Love, Karma.” Next to it, there was a single Evaporation Pen. He was being toyed with. Outside, the fire was less than a kilometer away.
One by one, he checked all of the rooms of his mansion. All of his tapestries were torn down the middle, all of his statues were broken, his vases, his mirrors. The door to the panic room was wide open, and empty. The only person he found, after searching everywhere, was the dead body of his biographer. There was a single gun wound through the man’s heart, and he had bled all over the floor of Darcy’s conservatory. It was a strange sight, even for someone who’d killed as many people as Darcy—a massive ocean of blood, with a body and several planters of geraniums floating calmly on its surface. He’d almost forgotten what a dead
body looked like, after using Evaporation Pens for so long.
His head was a maelstrom of frustrations, but perhaps the most irrational of them was that he’d spent an entire week inventing his life only for it to be shot to death. He took the Evaporation Pen from the table and left.
Decay 18
Cincinnatus
ON THE OTHER side of the door, his remaining ghosts had just been Evaporated. For the split second that he had the door open, he could see a lonely arm, hanging by a chain from the handrail across the room. He saw Will Spector, damaged beyond repair yet still standing, holding the Evaporation Pen that must have been the one Charles left by where Marcus had died. It was an oversight he had made, in his anger. He closed the door again, staying in the room with the former Karma.
He quickly glanced at a watch on his wrist, to see how much time he had left. In two minutes, his Order would attempt to blow up the building, if they were still alive on the ground floor. Charles was supposed to be on his way back up to a Helicar, where a pilot was waiting for him. But if he couldn’t get back out to the staircase, then he wouldn’t be going to the roof.
He had two options. He could go back out in to the room, and attempt to shoot Will before Will shot him. And then he would have to quickly find his way back up to the roof, and hope that he made it in time. His other option was a Grappling Chain that he had in his left pocket, and the sunlit aperture in front of him, where Karma had been. He would be out of the building in seconds. He imagined that the likelihood of success was about the same for either option. And if he waited any longer, Will would come to him instead.
“Come out and die, Charles,” Will shouted through the door.
“I think I’ll just stay in here instead,” Charles responded.
Will shot the door with his Evaporation Pen, and the barrier separating them turned to nothing. Charles pulled the Grappling Chain out of his pocket, and jumped out of the building. Two seconds later, he wished that he had practiced more with the thing, but he figured it out in time to shoot a link between him and a passing window, as he fell. When the Chain went taut, the window shattered and he had to retract and shoot it again, but it did slow his fall. He grazed the side of the building, shot again, and broke another window. The building was entirely windows.
It was only a matter of luck that Will had his Grappling Chain in his pocket, left there from when he decided it was helpful overcoming the short range of his stun gun. With one arm, he exchanged his Pen for the Chain, and jumped out the window after Charles.
Charles couldn’t look up well enough to see that Will was following him, but he did hear smashing glass above him, and knew that he was coming after him. The kid was crazy. Charles collided with the building much harder than he had intended, about halfway down, and he was only barely conscious as he shot again, swinging laterally across the building. He had to land somewhere else.
Will’s shoes had been shredded to nothing, exposing his robotic feet. He tried to use them to soften the impact of every time he ran into the side of the building, but with only one arm he was poorly coordinated, and hit his head a few times.
The wind became an ecstatic rush for a few seconds, and then the twang of the Chain going taut, then the shattering of glass, the impact, the building, then all over again. At no point did Will think he was going to survive—he just wouldn’t let Charles get away, no matter what happened to himself in the process. If he had a spare arm, he would have been shooting with his Evaporation Pen at the same time, but fate took his arm away. Distantly below him, he could see Charles making his way across the building, instead of falling straight down. Will couldn’t do the same thing, he was barely holding on as it was.
The ground came quickly, for Will. He shot his Grappling Chain, one last time, and when he hit the wall of the building, he tried to jump up, as hard as he could. His mechanical legs went through the glass, destroying his right foot, and he couldn’t have been more grateful for the complete absence of pain. When his feet reached the frame of the window, he found just enough leverage to jump, sending him flying away from the building.
He landed on a person that was standing on the sidewalk outside of the building, but he made it. He stood up as quickly as he could, and chased after Charles, limping on his broken foot.
Aaron was standing in amazement at the foot of Karma Tower, watching as two people fell down the side of the building, in a rain of glass. People around him were stopping to look up as well.
A woman next to him was saying to her husband, “My Karma Card isn’t working.”
Her husband didn’t want to be distracted from watching, so he answered irritably, “Have you been charging it?”
“The battery didn’t die,” she persisted. “It isn’t working.”
Another man, who had been listening to their conversation, added, “Hey, mine’s not working either.”
Aaron looked down at his own Card, only long enough to see that it wasn’t working either, before looking back up to watch. He smiled. Maybe he would be free from the tyranny of Karma after all, before it was too late for him.
More and more people stopped to watch, and quickly the crowd was huge. Aaron and the people around him realized, all of them too late, that one of the two people would land right where they were standing. They didn’t have time to react. A man landed directly on top of the woman that had spoken, sending her crashing to the ground. Her husband stared in dismay. The man that had been falling stood directly back up, and pushed his way out of the crowd, running to the other side of the building.
“My God,” her husband was saying over and over again, still stunned.
Aaron got to his knees, by the broken woman. She was bleeding profusely from her head and arm, but still breathing. Aaron took his shirt off, tore it into pieces, and tried binding it around the wounds, to apply pressure. While he was doing it, he shouted, “Someone, call an ambulance. She’s still alive.”
“Can’t,” a man said. “The Cards don’t work.”
“Well, help me anyway. She’s still alive. Where’s the nearest subway? And the nearest hospital? If we take her ourselves, we can make it.”
“Just stop,” the husband said.
“What, what do you mean stop? She’s still breathing,” Aaron said. He looked up, from where he was kneeling, into the blank expression of the husband, looking down.
“If we just wait, the Cards might turn back on.”
“If your Cards magically turned back on right now, and you immediately got an ambulance to come out here, chances are it would take just as long as if we took her ourselves. Except my way doesn’t rely entirely on stupid chance.” He had just finished fastening his compress around her head, and was getting frustrated with the people around him.
“I mean,” her husband continued, “I’m sure it would be worth a lot of money, if Karma saw us saving her. So if we just wait…”
“She’s your wife!” Aaron yelled, infuriated.
“We have bills,” he stammered. “She would understand.”
“I hate you, I hate all of you,” Aaron said, as he lifted the woman up alone. “I pray to God, I really do, that karma really exists. Not that piece of shit computer you all believe in, but the real thing. You’re all beautiful, well-adapted citizens now, but what then? I can only pray.”
“Even if you go to the hospital,” another man said, “if the Cards aren’t working, it’s pretty likely that people won’t be able to help you there either.”
“Won’t be able? Won’t be able? You’re all able, you’re just idiots. Against all odds, I might find another decent human being there. We’ll just see. But that’s not going to stop me now.” He pushed his way through the crowd, carrying a limp, dying life in his hands.
“Can one of you assholes at least tell me where the nearest subway is?”
Charles ran as fast as he could, through the streets of New York City. He was trying to make it to the City Park, the place that he knew best, in hopes of having an advantage th
ere. He could hear Will running close behind him, although he didn’t dare turn around.
A red beam filled the space to the left of Charles’ head. He was going to die. If he survived, it was because Will was shooting left-handed.
A huge explosion erupted behind them. Charles turned his head only long enough to see what it was, but he kept running as he did. He could see Karma Tower, not too far in the distance, begin to topple over. His Order had managed to blow it up. From the corner of his eye, he could see Will stop to turn around and watch.
Charles couldn’t believe it. The young officer was entranced by the falling of the Tower. He thought about continuing to run, but if he did he left a witness to his crimes behind, and it was possible he would never have a chance to kill him again. It was also possible that Will would hear him running, and recover from his reverie. He felt insane as he did it, but he turned around and walked silently towards the man.
He didn’t have any weapons of his own. His Grappling Chain could never kill a person, and he had used all the energy of his Evaporation Pen to destroy Karma. He didn’t know what he would do. The closer to Will he got, the more nervous he became, but still the man didn’t turn around. Charles was directly behind him.
From behind, Charles grabbed Will by his remaining wrist and pulled the Evaporation Pen towards them. It was a subtle movement that he almost missed, but with one finger he turned the range of the Pen all the way down, as he pulled with the others. At the same time, he whispered, “Shouldn’t look back.” And he pushed the button.
