The Complete Karma Trilogy (14 page)

On that particular occasion, Mr. Ishiba had called him a “murderous, lying bastard, who should have been drowned as a child,” a statement made in private conversation between Mr. Ishiba and one of his direct underlings in Mr. Ishiba’s office on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.

The house was reserved for people that had disagreements with Mr. Perry on a concrete issue, which couldn’t exactly be said of Mr. Ishiba. Mr. Ishiba had, as Mr. Perry liked to think of it, a belligerent attitude, one that wouldn’t be improved by exploding a rat in front of him. He decided instead to perform a specialized lesson for Mr. Ishiba.

On Thursday, in the late afternoon, Mr. Perry sent a “last minute reminder” to “all of the main executives and other pertinent employees” that a special meeting would be held first thing on Friday morning. Mr. Perry made sure to reserve the same room that was used before, when he had first arrived in the company. When the time for the meeting came, Mr. Perry was the only one in the room.

The man seemed perplexed when he saw only the foreigner, he said, “My apologies sir, I thought the meeting was scheduled for eight o'clock, but I must be wrong...” the man offered the excuse like an invitation for an explanation, since Mr. Perry’s presence seemed to indicate that perhaps something else was going on.

Mr. Perry said, “Not at all Mr. Ishiba, please take a seat.”

Mr. Ishiba grew more irritated by the moment, exposing the attitude that Mr. Perry had set out to correct. He said, “You’ve killed all of the rest of them, have you? And I’m the only one that’s left.”

Mr. Perry said, “It is very awkward, Mr. Ishiba, that you’ve hit the nail so squarely on the head. But you’ve spared me the necessity of explaining it myself, for which I thank you. I think I only killed half of them, and the others were either disappeared or run away. I admire your tenacity, to still be here when that is the case.”

Mr. Ishiba sat and waited for the punch line of the joke that he was sure was being told. He said, “But really, the others will be here shortly? Was it delayed to 8:30?”

“I promise you that this is the meeting, and we are the only ones who will be in attendance.”

“I’m tired of these charades.”

“I thought we could discuss,” Mr. Perry said, ignoring the ire of the other man, “as a matter of official business, how it is that you would prefer to die. I don’t want to make the wrong decision, so I’ve called all of the remaining brass to advise me. Unfortunately that is only you, so you’ll have to decide for yourself, the best way to get rid of you. And please be as objective as you can.”

“I am a serious man,” Mr. Ishiba said.

“If you can’t make the decision, I will make it for you, and I regret to inform you that I am a very crude man.”

Mr. Ishiba stood up. “They’re really all gone, aren’t they.” He left his briefcase under the table, where he forgot it entirely in leaving. “I need out of here. I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he said as he walked out of the door, leaving Mr. Perry alone.

Mr. Perry called out after him, “Take the weekend to think it over.”

In a few minutes, or maybe after an entire weekend, he would find out that he had been deceived, and that a majority of the people who would have been at such a meeting were still alive. But Mr. Perry would let him figure that out on his own.

Ronin 6

The Erratic Life of Haru

All of the
rats knew four tricks, and exactly the four they were expected to know. The rats did not know the tricks that the other group of eight knew. It seemed like perfectly good evidence of success, to Reiko.

They also had a much harder time not responding to names that belonged to any of their other partners, which Reiko found a little frustrating, and slightly disappointing, but they were just rats after all. So she tried not to expect too much out of them.

She tried a few other experiments, mostly for her own entertainment. She put a huge stack of food in one of the other rooms, now that she was starting to know her coworkers better, and she took one rat from each group to the room, making sure they had enough time to see the way to get there. She then let one rat at a time go from her room, to see if it would find its way to the food. As they were crossing the perilous hallway between the rooms, she yelled, “Don’t step on them! Experiment in progress.”

Invariably they all made it to the food, and without a single moment of deviation between the two points. Before they could eat too much, she brought them all back to her room.

She put food on a table, three and a half feet above the ground, to see what they would do. It was just outside of the range that Kiiro could jump up to, so they would have to figure something else out if they wanted to get any. Reiko waited to see what their solution would be, if anything.

Their actions amazed Reiko. Even though they couldn’t climb up the table legs, they could stand on their hind legs and hold on to it—the next rat would climb on top of the first rat, and do the same thing, until they built two separate rat pyramids. The rat pyramid that had Kuro in it didn’t reach the top of the table, because of the rat’s continued resistance to cooperation, but the other group was able to send a single rat to the top of the table, where it dropped food down to the rest in its group. The members of the unsuccessful pyramid broke up to try to catch some of the falling food, which caused a fight that Reiko had to break up by putting them all back into their cages.

Later, Reiko tried the same thing, but she brought Toru in to watch, since she wanted someone else to see it with her, and had no intention of showing Mr. Laurel. “Isn’t it the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?” she asked Toru.

“It’s pretty disgusting,” he said, as the rat’s edifice was nearing completion.

Reiko ignored him, too enthusiastic to care about his distaste. “Natural rats cooperate as well, but not to this extent. It’s like they don’t recognize the separation between their bodies—to them, they’ve just become a bigger, more complex rat. And they’re adapting perfectly.”

“Do you think it will be safe for humans, then?” he asked.

“What the hell do I know,” she said. “I just know it seems to be safe for rats. That’s all I’m here for. I’m just trying to figure out the nature and completeness of their connection, at this point. It’s hard to see into their minds.”

“They don’t really have minds, that’s probably what’s making it so hard,” Toru said.

“If they don’t have minds, then neither do you, I’m afraid. If a brain isn’t good enough.”

“You’ll be going to lunch here soon, won’t you? At the cafe? You usually go around twelve.”

“That’s what I do.”

“Then let me go with you. I have something I want to talk to you about.”

“I’ll let you know when I’m leaving,” she said, glancing at the time on her cell phone.

They sat in Reiko’s corner, which she had conquered as her own in the two weeks of her employment with Kaishin. The cashiers all knew her by name, and the store manager. They even prevented people from sitting there, entirely for her sake, when it was noon.

“They all seem to like you,” Toru said, as they sat down.

“And you don’t? That’s the benefit and the price of being such a habitual person, coming to the same cafe every lunch. The people you see every day, if you say at least one word to them every time, slowly become either a friend or an enemy, one word at a time. There’s no in between. That’s what we’ll be, either friends or enemies, if we keep talking. Don’t you think so? You think you’ll always be indifferent to me, Toru? Of course in a couple months I’ll be gone and it will all disappear, so what does it matter.”

“If you hadn’t spent your first week alone in a room, maybe I’d know what you meant, but at the moment I feel like those cashiers know you better than I do. Seems sort of unfair.”

“I have my priorities, I’m afraid. First I have to spend all of my energy making sure I have a secure source of food, by making the proper relationships. Physiological needs. Step two is safety. Only then can I start with step three, love and belonging, and making friends. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in case you were wondering. Some very basic psychology.” Reiko laughed at her own joke of seriousness she had been making.

“If step two is safety, you might never make it to step three,” Toru said. He looked at the people around him, to see if any of them were listening in on their conversation. “It’s impossible to feel safe back at work right now, don’t you think?”

“It’s just a little hard,” she said, nodding sternly, although her mood was too light to take even serious matters seriously. “Is this what you wanted to talk about?” she asked.

“No, not exactly,” he looked around again, paranoid. “It’s about what we were talking about, last time we were here. You thought maybe Haru would still be interested in our project. I talked to him, and he said he would help us out.”

“You know where he is?” she asked in hushed voice, leaning in over the table.

“I have a number you can call, if you want to talk to him. He moves around a lot, so maybe seeing him in person will be difficult, but he told me we could always talk to him over the phone.”

“Why is he so paranoid? Mr. Perry, as deranged as he is, said that he would gladly welcome Haru back, if we could find him. And I believe him, I think he would be safe, as long as he did the job. Can’t we just tell Haru that, and be a team again?”

“You can ask him yourself, but I doubt it. Without Mr. Okada, Haru will not go back to Kenko. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I don’t know any of them. I just know that’s what he says. He’s a very paranoid person, Reiko. With everything that’s going on around Kenko these past few weeks, I don’t blame him.”

“Well give me the number. I’m calling him right now.”

“Right now?” he handed her a slip of paper that had a number written on it in a tiny, wild hand.

“Is that a problem?” Reiko asked, already dialing in the number.

“It’s not a problem, it’s just... you’re really impulsive, aren’t you.”

“No, don’t think so,” she said, as the ringback tone was sounding into her ear.

“I think that’s the one thing I know about you so far, actually. That, and where you eat your lunch.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to take this call,” she responded. “So I’ll be outside.” She stood up, gathering her things. To the phone she said, “Hello, is this my dear friend Haru?” She left half of a salad uneaten, and since Toru didn’t think she was coming back he ate the rest of his sandwich in one bite and followed her outside.

“You probably don’t remember me, but we worked together,” she said, walking through the door to the busy street outside, where it seemed to Toru like it would be much harder to talk on the phone. “I’m Reiko... yes, Reiko. And I had a lot of questions for you, so I was hoping I could meet you somewhere... yes, that’s very difficult, I understand, meeting people is an extremely difficult process, two people being in the same place, but...”

Toru felt very awkward walking alongside of her, as she completely ignored him. They were walking away from Kenko, in a direction that had to have been random, since it was unlikely Reiko knew any of the places in their vicinity. A part of him thought he should just return to work, since his time allotment for lunch was coming to an end and he was actually an employee, unlike the heedless person that he was following.

She said, “I assure you I’m not going to tell anyone. Maybe Toru, but only if he deserves it... that seems like a very extreme condition, but I’ll take it... I didn’t think anyone went to libraries these days, that’s very strange of you. But yes, of course.” Then she hung up.

“Want to go on an adventure with me?” she asked, finally speaking to Toru.

“You mean later, right? We work until five.”

“We’ll be working, just not in a building. It’s very stubbornly traditional of you, to insist on being in a building to work, Toru.”

“Listen, I’m being serious. I have to work. You can do whatever you want, but I have to go back. You know as well as I do that I can’t tell them I went to see Haru on business, or they will ask me where he is. Let’s just go back, and meet with Haru later, when we can both go. Okay?”

“I like your reasoning, Toru, but I agreed to go see him now, and not some other time. So make a decision. I’ll go with or without you.”

Toru was very frustrated. “I shouldn’t have given you that number. I’m regretting it already. I’m going back to work, I’ll talk to you about all of this later.”

“Bye!” Reiko yelled back at him, as he walked away.

Reiko found Haru in Chou Library, where he was sitting at a row of computers, making nervous glances at the people around him. She took a seat next to him, as if she didn’t recognize him, and tried to log on to the computer she sat in. When the computer asked her for her credentials, she had to give up pretending, since she didn’t have an account. She waited for him to acknowledge her.

Haru looked over at her failed log-in attempt, and said to her, “Excuse me, miss, but I couldn’t help but notice you are having troubles logging in to the computer.”

She gave a coy smile, and said, “I’m afraid it just won’t let me.”

“What do you need a computer for, if I might ask you? Perhaps I can be of service.”

Reiko looked one by one at all of the perfectly normal people around her, none of whom seemed to care what the two of them said, and told Haru, “I like how secretive we’re being right now. It’s like we’re spies, or something.”

“I assure you, miss, I have no idea what it is you might be talking about.”

“That’s because you’re stupid,” Reiko said. “And a complete stranger. Anyway, I was hoping to finish this project I started. Maybe move up to a group of sixteen. Also, and I know this means absolutely nothing to you, but this thing I’m working on is only good for rats, and I was hoping to expand to, say... humans? Seems farfetched, but I’ve got optimism. But I imagine I’ll need a computer, and I can’t even log in.”

“Let me show you something,” he said, and scooted his chair over to her computer, while she moved away to give him space. He typed in a few things, and the screen changed to the desktop.

“This is all so sudden,” Reiko said.

“If you can’t take this seriously, I can’t help you,” Haru said. “Computers are for the serious.”

“I’d better leave.”

“Just watch.” He opened windows and typed things faster than she could follow. Watching did her no service, she had no idea what was happening behind all of the flashing pixels and rapid keystrokes. “There, I think I’ve resolved your group of sixteen, at the very least.”

She clapped her hands together. “Wonderful! Very wonderful.”

“As for the other thing you mentioned, it will be a much larger project. It’ll probably be more convenient for us if we found a private room here, and see what we can do there.”

“Well why didn’t we just start there?” she said, somewhat annoyed.

He didn’t answer. He simply stood up and started walking towards an elevator that was housed between two rows of computers, and she followed. She let him press all the buttons and pick the floor without saying a word.

When they were finally in a room that he selected, he acknowledged her directly for the first time. He said, “How has it been there without me, these past few days?”

“If I had known how important you were, I would have treated you better,” Reiko said. “That’s always the hard part, knowing how to treat a person you’ve only just met. I usually err on the side of treating them like peasants, because I’m usually right and it’s just more efficient. But sometimes I’m wrong.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Haru said, impatiently.

“Oh I’m sorry. Well no one knows what they’re doing, as far as the programming is concerned, and apparently that’s the centerpiece of the project, for reasons I still don’t understand. Of course, I lack the technical background to appreciate any of your jobs, but yours especially eludes me. We’re completely behind schedule.”

“That’s wonderful to hear.”

“They want you to come back, Haru. Mr. Perry himself said so. Frankly, I don’t understand why you left. You got a little rough with Mr. Laurel, but I think everyone’s moved on, and we really need you.”

“I can’t go back. The situation is more extreme than you realize, I’m afraid. We should just abandon Kaishin, if we’re being honest with ourselves.”

“We can’t abandon it!” she pleaded. “In the name of science, we have to move forward.”