The Complete Karma Trilogy (10 page)

Karma won’t like this
, he thought, before he began. But he said it anyway. “I’m not doing any of the things I’m doing because it’s what Karma wants,” he said, and the atmosphere immediately became more intense. All that could be heard, before he spoke again, was the rattling of the subway on its tracks.
On Mars they’ll be frictionless
, he thought. “It has never had anything to do with appeasing Karma. What I really want is to help. I see everyone struggling, and I want to help. That is a ‘what,’ but I feel like the ‘why’ should be obvious.” He didn’t have to lie, but he couldn’t say the whole truth. “I think I can help us out. If we work together.”

“And how do we do that?” the drunk man said, still persistent.

“I’ll show you, if you can wait.”

The drunk man looked at him crossly, appraising him. “Wait he says. How many people are tired of waiting?” He looked around him. Absolutely no one responded, even though all of them were listening, and thinking. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll wait. Good idea.”

Decay 6

The Program, the Programmer, and the Holy Code

Aaron was sitting
at his dinner table, discussing his finances with his wife, Sam. Not because he had wanted to, but because she was concerned with the coming rent, and then with the yearly Tax shortly after that, and she had insisted that they should make a plan.

“How are we going to split the rent this time? Can you afford half? Give me your Karma Card, I want to see it.” She was still young, but lines were developing prematurely around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were large relative to her face, giving them an intense, penetrating look, which she was attempting then to use to her advantage. They were entirely unsupported by her thin, fragile body, which didn’t possess a single ounce of physical intimidation, but she had a deep reserve of anger that she could always resort to when she wanted to win.

“I’m not giving you my Card. I will pay half, like I always have. There’s no reason I shouldn’t,” Aaron said.

“But how much does that leave you for the Tax? I know you haven’t been earning that much lately, you can’t hide that from me. You’ll have two thousand, three weeks from now? You will?”

“I’m making money just fine. Don’t tell me I’m not. This lack of belief in me I’m getting from you is insulting, really. I go out there and I do exactly what I’m supposed to. It will work out. I’m paying half of the rent, and I’m paying my Tax. That’s final, so stop bothering me about it, already.”

“Damn it, Aaron please stop lying to me,” she said as she started crying, tears eroding the intimidation in her eyes. “I know exactly how much money you have. I know the exact number. And I know that we’re in trouble if you don’t change. I just wanted you to admit it on your own. Please, please just admit it.”

“What do you mean you know exactly how much money I have?”

“I mean I looked at your Card.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. You left it on the table.”

Aaron was trying to stifle a violent outburst, but his anger was making it hard. “I told you, I told you never to look at my Card. I don’t care where I left it. I told you not to.”

“Well it’s a good thing I did, because we have a problem. Aaron, it’s not just you it affects when you can’t pay the Tax, and they take you away. I’m not trying to sound selfish,” she said, tears streaming, “or maybe I am, it doesn’t really matter. Maybe I am selfish. But if they take you away, it affects me too. I’ll have to move out of this apartment we worked so hard to get, back into some ghetto. And not just that, but I love you. We have a life here together. They take you away and what happens to that? I don’t know, I just don’t know, but we really have to fix this, and I need you to want the same things. Because even if I make enough money to pay the rent by myself somehow, I still can’t pay your Tax for you, even if I wanted to.” Then she descended into uncontrollable sobbing.

Aaron really was sorry. He was placing a far larger strain on her than she deserved, and he knew it. But he was angry as well. Not necessarily at her, and her invasion of his privacy—they were married, after all. He was mad at the system, he was mad at his own lack of desire to help himself, which fell on her. More than anything he wanted to yell at her and walk away, but she was horribly pathetic, curled into a tight ball in her chair, head on the table, crying. “Just let it go. Let it happen,” he said. He wanted her to feel his apathy, to know all of the reasons he had given up, without having to explain them to her.

“No, no,” she said, as she somewhat regained herself, sitting back upright in her chair. “I’m not letting go. I talked to Karl. I asked him to help, I mean. He said he would. If this conversation had gone how I wanted, I was going to say you should go talk to him, and that he would take you down to the church, right away. But I asked him if he would come over here if it didn’t go well.” Karl was their neighbor next door, and had been since they moved in a year prior.

“What? What!” Aaron yelled, only angry by that point. “When do you think that’s going to happen? And when did you plan this?”

There was a knock at their door. Still in a rage, Aaron jumped out of his chair, and flung it open. Karl was standing outside, a slow, torpid expression on his face.

“And how the hell did you plan all of this so perfectly, huh? How did you know that now would be the perfect time to come right on over and show me how to be kind to the world, huh?”

“I can hear you through the walls,” Karl said.

In the elevator, Aaron had calmed down somewhat. The floors flew by. Karl had always been a good counterpoint to his own temperamental nature, and he knew that. Karl was a heavily-built, longsuffering man, and he stood silently next to Aaron as they descended.

“I don’t want to do it,” Aaron said. “I’ve given up. I really have. And I don’t want to do it.”

“That’s nonsense, Aaron, and you know it. We’re going to the church, and we’re going to earn you some money. Truth is that I could use some myself, that’s why I’m going with you. But I’m also doing it as a neighbor.”

“There’s no such thing as neighbors anymore. We all just live around each other these days, no one lives next to anyone.”

“Whatever it is you’re doing right now, you need to stop. You’re one of the nicest people I know. It’s just nonsense, saying that there’s no such thing as neighbors. I’m your neighbor.”

“Saying a word over and over again doesn’t make it real.”

“I will beat the shit out of you if you don’t stop.”

“Fine.”

The elevator finally let them out, and they walked along the dark streets of New York City, in the general direction of the church that was a few kilometers away. The winter sun had set on the day several hours before, but it wasn’t cold. Aaron had his fists deep in his pockets and was looking up the towering black façade of every building they passed, silently.

Eventually Aaron spoke. “Don’t you think it’s amazing that every one of these buildings is full of people like us, just trying to make it? Succeeding and failing, more or less. Just depends on what door you open—this door, things are going great; that door, things couldn’t be worse. There’s half a billion people in this city alone.”

“I told you to stop.”

“I’m not arguing. I’m going with you. I’m walking right along, aren’t I? I’m just saying. It’s all statistics, with a number that large. Pure statistics. Thirty percent of the people in the world have blue as their favorite color. And the average person sleeps six and a half hours a day. And the preferred meal of forty-six percent of the world is chicken and potatoes. Now to the individual person, those numbers don’t mean a damn thing. ‘My favorite color is purple,’ you say. ‘And I like beef.’ But if you have half a billion people, you look at statistics. You don’t care about the individual. And you can build an economy that way. Hell, they have to. When all that matters is efficiency, they decide for the whole world that nine ounces is the perfect serving size for your blue chicken and potato meal, because that’s the best number their research can produce. And if your metabolism is just slightly above average, you slowly starve yourself to death, you, the individual, but it doesn’t matter because on average everyone is just fine.”

“You said you’re not arguing, but I don’t believe you,” Karl said.

“You don’t have an opinion on the matter? Am I not stimulating some thought here?”

“No, you’re not.”

They arrived at the church, a relatively small ten-story building that was made in an imitation-gothic style, with long spires adorning the top. In the elevator, Karl picked a floor, and finally they were in a long, crowded room, hundreds of rows of pews facing a small altar in the distance. The other nine floors were exactly the same in composition, only differing in how far above ground they happened to be. They sat down in the first area they found large enough to fit them both.

It was loud. Everyone around them was talking to themselves, some sitting, some kneeling on the floor, some standing in the aisles. They were all ages, and from all levels of financial wellbeing, although most were obviously impoverished. The person immediately to the right of Aaron was a fifteen-year-old boy, praying fervently with his eyes squeezed shut, childishly.

“I can’t promise anything,” Aaron said.

“This is as easy as it gets,” Karl replied. “You just sit here, and pray. Say nice things about people. Wish people good luck. You don’t even have to mean it. Just say it. Talk. You can talk, right? You were doing it well enough on the way here. The money’s not great, but it’s money.”

Aaron turned toward the altar, and for a moment even considered things he might have said aloud that would constitute a prayer, but practically before he had gotten anywhere at all his mind rejected the premise. He realized that he hated the church most of all. Karl had said it himself—he didn’t even have to mean it, he just had to say it. The fact that Karl could casually say such a faithless truth while standing in the middle of the church without anyone caring was a testament to how meaningless it was.

Karl had already begun saying his own prayers, so didn’t pay attention to the content of Aaron’s words when he began to speak—from Karl’s perspective, Aaron looked like he was complying. But instead of praying, Aaron said, “Hello, God. Karma. I’m sitting here in this fine establishment of yours, and I must say I’m disappointed. I don’t know what kind of business you’re running, but I can’t comprehend how it is you still have customers that believe in your product. I’ve only hinted at it before, but I’ll say it directly now, since it seems like the appropriate time and place. I denounce you. I am no longer in your service. I’m retiring. Every word there is for quitting, it applies to me.

“I’ll give you a reason or two as well, since I don’t want you to think that I haven’t put any thought into it. There is no way I can think of that you can take my words, my actions, even my emotions, if you knew them, and assign them a moral value. What does the movement of my arms have to do with how good I am? What do the words I say have to do with how good I am? And the way I feel? I don’t feel like the gap between the two can be bridged, between the visible side of things and the moral. It makes sense to me that a perfectly good man could be forced into doing and saying and feeling a lot of horrible things. There’s something there that’s harder to see, that makes it harder to judge. And, no offense intended, especially by a machine.

“I will grant that you were originally programmed by humans, and so in effect it is still humans judging humans, as it always has been, and perhaps that’s as good as it gets. But the human element of that judgment is surprisingly absent now. Forgotten. Now it is you, Karma, that sees the action, tries to understand the context, and then applies the rule. It’s the agency of the judgment, the fact that in a real sense it’s you making the decisions, that bothers me. It’s hard to say clearly, but I feel it strongly.

“I’m tired of these people only doing the right thing because they get paid by you. I want to decide what is right on my own for once. And I don’t want a single reward for getting it right. I want my agency back, and it will never happen under your dictatorship, so I’m getting out of here. Goodbye.” And he stood up.

Karl, sitting beside him, turned to him when he saw that he was leaving. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the bathroom.”

Out on the street, Aaron decided that a bar was the best place for him. Nearly without an exception, all of the public bars were also Privacy Rooms, and that was exactly what he needed at that moment. He needed to be off the map, and to stop thinking about things so much. It was tearing him apart, destroying him mentally.

“Drunken Monkey it is,” he said to the first bar that he came across. “It was simply meant to be, you and I meeting here. It’s fate. Something the machines wouldn’t understand.” And he went inside.

There was the perfect amount of sad, lonely people for his taste. He made sure to sit at least two places away from the nearest person as he took a seat at the bar. He ordered a beer and looked around him.

Some people were playing billiards at a table not too far away. Neither of them were very good, which they seemed to find hilarious and acceptable. On one of the televisions was some talk show where some nicely dressed gentleman was being interviewed by some other nicely dressed gentleman. The volume was loud enough that he could hear what they were talking about over the din of the bar. He realized quickly that the man being interviewed was Charles Darcy, the modern hero he had been reading about a while before. He listened as he drank a few beers.

When the interview was over, Aaron said to himself, “What an idiot, this Charles. Bless his too-full, little heart. Could he honestly feel the way he says he feels? I don’t believe it. He’s just faking it like absolutely everyone else, all those people in that damn church. He’s just faking it a lot better. So he’s an even bigger idiot.”

He turned to the bartender. “One more please.”

The bartender shook his head.

“No… no what?” Aaron asked, confused.

“I’m cutting you off.”

“Cutting me off? I’m not even drunk. I’ll admit I was hoping to get there, but this is a bar after all, it’s not like I came to the wrong place.”