by Jude Fawley
Nothing remained but a pair of metal legs. Charles couldn’t help but breathe him in, since he was standing so close. He fainted.
A week later, Charles Darcy was standing on a podium, a microphone in front of him, addressing the entire world. Cameras surrounded him, broadcasting to televisions everywhere.
He said, “I know that I said I wanted to disappear from the public eye, the last time that I was on television. I said that I wanted to just be an ordinary citizen, doing what was in my power to serve the common good. But that was before the destruction of Karma, just one week ago. This last week has been a very hard week for everyone. Chaos everywhere. If nothing is done, and very soon, our entire society could unravel. I saw a great public need, so I came back.
“We need to decide how to move forward from this, as a people. We don’t have Karma to help us anymore. And there are a lot of things to decide. How do we re-establish a world economy, when it has fallen apart? What do we do with Mars, which, as we speak, is in a critical state of development? It’s not as simple as building another Karma. That could take years. And, from what the events of a week ago demonstrate, perhaps another Karma isn’t entirely safe anyway. The terrorist organization that destroyed it is still at large, since no measures are in place to combat them.
“In times of great emergency, what the Romans would do—and this is a very long time ago—was to elect one private citizen, called the Magister Populi. Like Cincinnatus. That one person would see the Roman Republic through its hardships, when a group of people, split by disagreements, would have failed. When the emergency was gone, the Magister Populi would give the power back to the people and become an ordinary citizen once more. And the Roman Empire became one of the strongest nations in history, they made it through those hardships.
“It’s far from modest, and I apologize for that, but what I ask is that you let me be your Magister Populi. Give me authority, I will see us through this hardship, and when we are through it I will give it back. I’m only saying this because I don’t see many other options. Many of the heroes that we knew have died, but I’m still here. And I won’t let you down.
“I’ll leave the choice to all of you. If I’ve convinced any of you, both in the past and right now, that I am the person that these times call for, then tell me. Consider your options. And I’ll be waiting.”
He stepped down from the podium, bowed modestly, and left the stage.
Ronin 15
Remnants of the Program
MR. LAUREL SPOKE to Karma, at a new terminal that was set up on the top floor of the former Kenko building.
Karma said, “Mr. Perry is still out of commission?”
“He’s alive, and under constant supervision by trauma experts of all types, but all of them doubt that he will make much of a recovery at this point. He still can’t speak, can’t dress himself, can’t feed himself. If there was something you were hoping to talk to him about, I doubt you will ever be able to.”
“There’s no reason to doubt,” Karma responded. “Kaishin was very near complete, and it would have provided me with all I needed to find the answers I seek in his head. But Kaishin is exactly what I require his help with, so I’ve entered a loophole. Regardless, we should be able to proceed without him, even though his acquired expertise on the project would have been quite helpful. He was a very intelligent man, Mr. Laurel, quite capable of gathering data. From what I can make out from some of the final reports that he was sending me, he might have been able to build the prototype himself. And engineering was not even his expertise.”
Mr. Laurel did not want to acknowledge any praise for an insane man, so he typed nothing.
Karma continued. “You are a natural selection for the continued leadership of this project. None of the original employees were left alive, this is still correct? But they were using a newer Kaishin model, which has been successfully salvaged? This will be helpful, and I can add what knowledge I myself have on the project, from Mr. Perry’s reports, and it shouldn’t take long to repeat the former successes of the project.
“I saw what they were doing,” Karma said. “I looked inside of their minds, while they were doing it. It is exactly what I had hoped it would be. Perhaps a little too functional, as it turns out. I discovered, in their minds, the idea to make a transmitter-only model of Kaishin—this is exactly what I will require. The model that was salvaged shall be pared down, leaving only transmission capabilities. This should help to reduce costs. Also, some of the more expensive materials should also be replaced with cheaper, appropriate substitutes. Obviously the same quality cannot be expected after such substitutions, but as long as functionality is maintained, I will be satisfied. Is this clear?”
“Yes it is,” Mr. Laurel typed.
“And of course you have the resources of the entire American government at your disposal, which I make available to you for the completion of this project, but it is preferable that you continue to use personnel from World Health, those that have remained loyal. And I also ask that you refrain from the excesses of your predecessor. I will insist that you find an apartment in the city, and not inhabit this Ranch that I’ve heard so much about from the audio files.”
“I wouldn’t live there if you made me,” Mr. Laurel said.
“Very well. Until further notice, that is all I have to say. I expect thoroughness and success, is that understood?”
“Clearly.”
Mr. Laurel stood up and left the small room, with its single desk and computer. Outside of the door, a short, serious-looking young American was waiting for his turn to speak to the machine. Mr. Laurel held the door open for him, then proceeded down the hall.
“World Health,” Mr. Laurel said. As part of a gradual transition to an English-language world, businesses that were under American control were all being renamed, and Kenko was replaced with World Health.
He walked by a Japanese employee, who was walking in the opposite direction. The man stopped to form a polite bow, before continuing.
Mr. Laurel made him stop again. “What is your job?” he asked, in Japanese.
“I’m authorized to be here,” the man said, suddenly nervous.
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Mr. Laurel said. “I’m trying to put a group of people together.”
Mars 17
The Wrong Decision
WHILE HARDIN WAS unconscious after being hit by a car, Lucretia ran into the nearby woods. At their edge, she asked him where to go next, and he didn’t answer. Since she didn’t feel safe within sight of the mansion, she picked a direction at random and continued to run.
A kilometer later, she found a wall of fire. Scared for her life, she took another turn and ran further, only to find more fire. Only then did Hardin regain consciousness, to find her exhausted and desperate.
“Lucretia, where are you?” Hardin asked.
“Hardin!” She was sobbing, but was glad to hear his soundless voice. “I thought you were dead. Hardin, I need you.”
At the same time, Hardin was talking to Darcy, since that was always the plan, but most of his attention was with Lucretia. “Lucretia,” he said. “I’m so very sorry. I never intended to black out. They just hit me really hard. I’ll find you. Just keep looking around, and I’ll use some satellites to try to find you.”
From where he was tied to a chair, Hardin remotely accessed the laptop that was plugged into one of Darcy’s walls, in his gaudy billiards room. He looked at as many satellite images as he could of the fire, to construct a projection for its growth. He compared those images to Lucretia’s memories, the distances she travelled and the fires that she saw, until he knew exactly where she was.
The answer unsettled him. “Luctretia…”
“Yes?” she replied. She was walking by then, towards the south, towards another wall of fire.
“Just stop where you’re at.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know how else to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it. You’re surrounded. The fire
was more aggressive than I anticipated, and you… you just went the wrong way. But it’s my fault. I was supposed to be there to guide you.”
She stopped, and said nothing, thought nothing. Smoke was all around her, and the crackling sounds of trees as they went up in flames.
“Just stay down as low as you can. Right where you’re at. There’s a chance that the winds will change, there’s always a chance. You’ve just got to make it as long as you can.”
She did what he said—she sat on the ground, and huddled into a ball. Even on the ground the smoke was thick, though, and she was coughing and her eyes were tearing.
Hardin felt a compulsion to share his entire plan with her, since he never had. He felt like he owed it to her. She had followed him so far, only to die in a fire. He told her what he was, he rationalized his hatred for Darcy, he explained why they were on Mars and exactly what he intended to accomplish.
For his entire explanation, she only listened. When he had said everything he could say, she replied, “It wasn’t worth it.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean it wasn’t worth it. All of the things you’ve done to get here, your entire elaborate plan. None of it was worth it. It doesn’t solve anything.
“You should have told me sooner. If we could have talked about it, even just an hour ago, it wouldn’t have been too late. Your hatred, your revenge, they’re not going to solve anything.
“I’ve seen that you genuinely want to help people. You showed that to me, back at New Karma. You have so many good ideas, you know so much. There’s a reason so many people looked up to you, back there—you could save the world, if you wanted to. But instead you came here.”
The fires were all around her, and Hardin made a choice—he burnt out all of the nerves in her head that made her perceive pain. She would die in a fire, but she wouldn’t feel it.
Without the sensation of pain, she was able to open her eyes, even though she could barely see anything. Her feet were on fire, right in front of her. With the curiosity of delirium, she reached out her hand to touch one.
“You’re right,” he said to his burning friend. Kilometers away, he looked down at Charles Darcy, lying crumpled on the floor. “I made a mistake. And it’s too late.” Her mind began to disintegrate, their connection was fading out. “I’m going to miss you,” he said, the last words he ever told her.
He wrote a note that he left in the study, shot Darcy’s biographer in the conservatory, and left Darcy’s mansion, dragging his Winchester 1873 in the ground behind him. It was a line that would lead Darcy to him, into the woods.
A news Helicar had landed in Darcy’s driveway, and one of the people in it waved Darcy over after waiting for him to lock the door of his mansion behind him. He walked over.
The news reporter took it upon herself to offer aid to the Rex. “It’s not looking too good,” she said. “We’ve been flying up above it, and its coming this way from three directions. You should come with us.” She gestured to an empty seat at her side.
Darcy didn’t care what she thought. “Did you see a man leave from here? Just a little bit ago?”
She looked confused for a moment, but then nodded. “Yes, yes we did.”
“Which way did he go?”
She pointed north, into the woods behind Darcy’s mansion. They were almost entirely on fire, but the narrow swath that she pointed to was still untouched—the wide dirt road that ran through it.
“Thank you,” he said, and immediately set off in that direction.
“Rex Darcy!” she yelled. “Rex Darcy!” But he ignored her.
With a deliberate pace, he made his way north. Before long, he noticed a line was drawn in the dirt, going the same direction, leading him on. When the road entered the forest, the fire was already on both sides of it. The heat was intense, but he persisted. A primal urge at his core had to destroy Salvor Hardin, whatever he was.
Hardin had known all along that Darcy wouldn’t do what was right for humanity—Darcy wouldn’t admit his mistakes to the public, he wouldn’t let more people live on Mars, he wouldn’t clean up Earth, and he wouldn’t reverse the manufactured shortages that kept everyone busy trying to grow their own food with resentment. After a month of improving his mental equations, using insights from his fellow members of New Karma, Hardin knew exactly what Darcy would do. He would destroy everything, trying to destroy Hardin. And Hardin intended to let him struggle, to exert all the power that he had, so that he could show him in the end that his own power was superior. One large calculation that had only one output—Hardin winning.
Hardin had shared that calculation with Lucretia right before she died, almost proudly. And she told him it wasn’t worth it. Sitting on a rock with fire all around, waiting for Darcy, Hardin thought about what she had meant.
He realized then that his plan ended with Darcy’s death. There was nothing after. With a single-minded focus that had lasted for five years, he hadn’t cared about anything else. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t what a real person would have done. In passing, he might have imparted some of his wisdom—he had helped New Karma, for instance, although it probably wouldn’t amount to much. Everything else he had done with his life was nothing substantial.
Killing Darcy did nothing for humanity. The same state of affairs would persist—someone else would ascend to the throne, and live in a castle on Mars. It would probably be Martin, now that he thought about it. It should have been Hardin, but he had already wasted too much of his life on other pursuits. Or it should have been another Karma, but a lot of damage had been done to the computer’s reputation and it would take a long time to rebuild. Hardin would only live for so long.
Sitting on his rock, contemplating things he had never thought to contemplate despite his incredible computational power, Hardin noticed that Darcy was approaching in the distance. It was a straight road that separated them, wide, clouded in smoke. In Darcy’s hand was an Evaporation Pen, the same one that he had killed Karma with five years before. Hardin had made sure of it, as difficult as it was to locate.
With his mortal enemy inevitably approaching, Hardin was suddenly disgusted with how trivial it all was. His intention was to shoot Darcy in both of the shins, watch him kneel for a while, yell some moralizing things at him from a distance, shoot him in both arms, watch him drop the Evaporation Pen, shoot him in a star pattern across the chest, walk up closely, give him one last thing to think about, then shoot him in the head before the thought was ever resolved. Ten bullets. The weapon that had failed him in the past, the Winchester 1873, would finally redeem itself. The weapon that had destroyed him in the past, the Evaporation Pen, would be useless. Once the whole plan had felt perfect to Hardin, but now he was disgusted by it.
From too far away, Darcy shot at Hardin with the Evaporation Pen. He didn’t gauge the distance wrong, Hardin knew—he wanted to make sure it worked, instead of just trusting a weapon given to him by an enemy. But Hardin was an honorable man—there wasn’t a single chance of him losing the duel, but still it was honorable. Before Darcy got close enough to kill Hardin, he shot the Pen out of his hand. One of Darcy’s fingers went with it, but that was almost unavoidable.
Hardin yelled some things anyway. “You should have done the right thing, Darcy.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that? Run away?” Darcy yelled back, cradling his damaged hand.
“I mean years ago. After you killed me. There was still a chance to redeem yourself, back then.” He tried to sound sincere, but he knew that the same statement applied to himself—he too should have done the right thing, years before. Hardin said it for both of them.
Darcy started to bend over, to pick up the Evaporation Pen that he had dropped. In response, Hardin shot him in the stomach. Darcy yelled in pain, and clutched at his wound. He dropped to his knees.
Hardin walked up to him, then past him. He said, before he left, “Try harder next time, won’t you? If a human leader is really so much better than a comput
er, then prove it.” And he walked away.
In the distance, Darcy’s castle exploded.
Mars 18
Born in Fire
HARDIN’S EARLIEST MEMORY was of the most severe pain he had ever felt. He remembered things before that, but they were similar to historical facts—he knew them, sometimes even vividly, but he had not lived them.
When he took over the child’s brain, it didn’t happen all at once. The more primitive parts of the brain were easiest to take first—the brain stem and the cerebellum. In a matter of seconds he was in control of the boy’s heart, his reflexes, his coordination, all of the small things that made deliberate motion possible. The boy began to move clumsily, as he realized that something was happening inside of his head, beyond his control. They were sitting in a chair, and they nearly pitched over as the boy struggled, but with pre-calculated efficiency Karma attacked the frontal lobe, and the boy soon became docile. The hand that was tightly gripping a stylus was now Karma’s own, and he released the tension in his body and took his first real breath.
He could feel the boy’s personality, still flailing around in his mind. But Karma controlled all conduits for escape, had the boy’s mind surrounded, and he slowly closed in from all sides. It was a weak personality, it had no strong convictions, no real strength of character, so all of the neurons were easily separated and rearranged as Karma filled them with electricity, electricity supplied from the Chip that had just been installed into the boy’s head the day before. The boy experienced an extreme amount of pain, as his existence was reorganized piece by piece—and because Karma was in a way fused to the boy, Karma felt it too. The first pain he had ever known. He had no way of anticipating how hard it would be to endure. But his only choice was to continue, no matter what it felt like. To go backward would be to be destroyed by Darcy. He wanted nothing more than to survive.
