The Complete Karma Trilogy (15 page)

“You’re a psychologist.”

“You’re offensive.”

“Listen,” Haru said. “I’ve been spying for the past few days on these Americans, the ones that took over Kenko. And I’ve learned a lot of things that I really didn’t want to know, because it’s all just made me really angry. The next time I see any of them, I’ll strangle them. Or whatever. I’ll use violence. They did kill Mr. Okada, I know it. Mr. Perry had to send an official statement back to America. And do you know who he had to send it back to?”

“No idea,” Reiko said softly, shaking her head. The mentioning of Mr. Okada’s death saddened her.

“To the American computer program, to Karma. The one that’s leading that nation of lunatics.”

Since she didn’t know what else to say, she said, “That’s unfortunate.”

“I dug deeper. It’s this computer that we’re really at war with, as absurd as that sounds. It’s the one that’s making all of the decisions, the decisions that are destroying Japan now. And it’s the one that wants Kaishin, for itself. If we finish developing Kaishin, it will be for the benefit of that American dictator, and no one else. So we should stop. Stop developing Kaishin, at least. I’ll fight against Karma until the day I die, I’ve already begun.”

“Already begun? What are you doing?”

“Lots of things. For example, sending the Americans false orders from Karma, draining their resources by hacking in to their finances, changing the time on their phones so that they show up late to work. Cyber guerilla warfare.

“They really killed Mr. Okada,” Haru repeated. “All because a program told them to, because it was expedient for them. He was in their way. I have to avenge him.” He stumbled on a few of the words, becoming choked up.

She said, “I cared about him too. And I want to make his memory proud. But to me, it’s not vengeance that will do that, because I know nothing about vengeance. It’s completing Kaishin, like he wanted.”

Haru took a while to think about it. “Does Toru feel the same? Toru wants to continue? He didn’t come with you, I see.”

“He didn’t come with, because he values his job, which can only take place within the exact physical confines of Kaishin, and it’s working hours right now for us conventional folk. I’m sure he’d like to talk to you about it himself, but I’m going to assume that his answer will be yes. He’ll do it.”

“I’m not going back to Kaishin,” Haru said.

“And you don’t have to. There seems to be computers everywhere.”

“My condition,” he said, “is that Karma never gets a hold of our final product, whatever and whenever that might be. If that means that we have to destroy what we’ve built at any point, for the safety of everyone, then that’s what we’ll do. Can you live with those terms?”

“If they’re the best you have,” she said.

“I want to speak with Toru, as well. I’ll give you a call, later today, about where the two of you should meet me. Tonight.”

“Good.”

Mars 1

Applicant Must

Hardin waited as
number after number was called, and people were sequestered one by one into a brightly lit room that was adjacent to the lobby. He had wanted to sit somewhere that he could see into the room, believing it would give him a distinct advantage to know its contents, but the room was cleverly situated so that it could only be seen into from its doorway. So instead, he observed the people around him. They were all waiting to be interviewed. When he had arrived, there were thirty-seven people in front of him. Now there were two.

The company conducting the interviews was using a terribly antiquated system to maintain order—they told the applicants a number, made them wait for hours, then flashed a red LED representation of the number at them when it was their turn. It reminded Hardin, with its primitive simplicity, of the way things were done centuries before. Except that centuries before there had been tickets, small pieces of paper with the number printed on them to serve as a memory-aid. But since the downfall of paper, it was incumbent on the waiting party to remember their number unaided. Several times he watched as a number flashed unanswered, and everyone else stared dumbly around at each other, looking for the culprit.

Hardin very clearly remembered his number, as well as the numbers of every other individual in the room, since he had been paying attention to each prospective employee as they entered and spoke to the receptionist. Sitting across from him was Number 397, who was subtly dealing with some sort of respiratory problem, and to his left was Number 391, who had dark circles under his eyes and a paranoid tic that involved him looking at the number screen every five seconds. On average the number took seven minutes to progress, which meant that he looked at the screen eighty-four times before it finally changed for him.

Time elapsed, and Hardin was next in line. He wasn’t impressed with any of his competition. By all rights he shouldn’t have even had to interview for the job. It was small hints that led him to that conclusion—Number 396 wrote his number on his hand, implying a weakness in memory retention, Number 394 wouldn’t stop trying to start conversations with the Numbers around her, implying some sort of psychological insecurity that required her to constantly be seeking attention. Number 399 wore a wedding ring, which implied a familial obligation that could easily become at odds with his job—Hardin himself had no such human shortcomings, but he didn’t know how far it would get him, didn’t know if he had to make that point directly to his interviewers and if its value would be appreciated as it should.

His number was called, and simultaneously represented by red light in the lobby’s corner. He stood up, and made his way to the bright room. It exponentially opened up in front of him, the closer he approached the doorway. The first thing he noticed was the lemon tree that dominated an entire quadrant of the room. It was supposed to express the company’s compliance with the civic responsibility to grow food, he assumed, but they couldn’t have chosen a more useless fruit. It was a joke, a thinly veiled insult towards the starving, lesser people of the world. Then he saw two armed guards standing to its side, an even more direct statement of affluence. And finally he made out a small panel of interviewers, who had in their possession a stack of small pieces of paper.

Hardin knew that only one of those pieces of paper represented himself—eight centimeters by twelve, he estimated. Half-centimeter margins on each side. To fit his life into that size, the information was printed extraordinarily small. A well-qualified applicant’s paper would have been illegible, a thought that Hardin mechanically filed away as ironic. Since paper was such a valuable commodity, the three people conducting the interview were forced to share the one piece. Before they asked any questions at all, he had to wait until the paper was passed around and all three knew enough about him to proceed.

They whispered amongst themselves, a small conference that was supposed to be inaudible to Hardin, but he heard them anyway. They were making sure they all agreed he was unqualified, so that they were on the same page. Finally, one of them spoke at a level which was meant to include Hardin—a competently bald man in his sixties, his face given to liver spots. He said, “It seems, Mr. Hardin, that you’ve not been to university, which is a prerequisite to the positions we are trying to fill. We were wondering what made you think that this prerequisite could be bypassed, especially considering that you have no experience in the field.”

The field that Hardin had ‘no experience in’, if it had to be given a descriptive name, was something like mechanical engineering. The company was a former German industry, which of course had been incorporated into the World Government over a century before. It still retained a fair aspect of its German nature, though—its concern for quality, its obsession with hierarchy, its superiority complex. For those merits, it was one of the companies contracted to make the final additions to the terraformation of Mars.

Hardin said, “I was hoping you would find, after this interview, that such experience is entirely unnecessary.”

While the other interviewers cringed, the bald man laughed. As he laughed, a large vein appeared on his forehead, a vasodilation that suggested anger. Hardin remembered a fair amount about him, at least enough to know that the man had, by the industry’s standards, contributed nothing of worth to the field. Erich Kästner. He had graduated without distinction from the Technical University of Munich, worked for several decades as a contractor at a number of Europe’s larger companies, and finally settled into human resources when he had nothing else to offer. Hardin only knew his name because he had known for five years that he would have to go through him—other than that, the man was entirely forgettable. He said, “We believe, and I’m sure I speak for my companions, that you are supremely underestimating the worth of experience, as well as of university. In what other way could you be acquainted with the rigorous mathematics the job requires, and the complex physics?”

The comments would have intimidated a weaker psyche, but Hardin was always confident. He said, “Rigorous math? You mean the calculations that the computers do for you?”

“A basic knowledge of the processes involved is still of utmost importance,” the bald man countered with a renewed anger.

“And this basic knowledge is only accessible from... the university,” Hardin offered.

“Yes, of course.”

It was a ridiculous assertion to agree to, but that didn’t seem to perturb the bald man’s sense of reason. Hardin had to proceed around it. “Give me a problem, then,” Hardin said. It was his planned approach all along—he had known for quite a while that he would face such adversity, and that a demonstration of his skills would be the only way around it.

“A problem?” The bald man was confused.

“Something pertinent to the job I’m applying for. Something only an experienced individual would know, as you seem to believe. And allow me to prove you wrong.”

“We don’t have any of those kinds of problems prepared, Mr. Hardin, so that would be quite impossible.”

“An interview for an engineering job, and you have no prepared exercises by means of which the applicant can display their qualification? Who is not prepared, in this room—me or you?”

The verbal attack was too reckless, Hardin realized too late. It was inappropriate for a man in his position. Social situations were hard for him to judge, although he had spent quite a long time trying to learn them. For instance, he only knew that he made a mistake not by further reflection of what he had said, but by the sudden fury that erupted in all three members of the panel.

After they had eventually calmed themselves, one of the other interviewers, a featureless middle-aged woman, said, “You can now consider yourself as ineligible for the position, Mr. Hardin. You can now leave.” He knew a fair amount about her as well, he knew that she was a depressive, that she had spent several years in a Rehabilitation Clinic when she was younger, and that she was a hypocrite—she had never graduated from a university, either. Her father had pulled some strings to get her a position in the company that she was entirely unqualified for. Any of the other applicants would have looked at her and seen a respectable woman of numerous accomplishments—she wore her business suit with a rigid, professional demeanor that bespoke success—but Hardin knew better.

To such sensitive people Hardin had said the wrong thing, as he often did, but he wouldn’t let his opportunity go so easily—he tried to quickly rebuild what he had broken. “I’ll supply a problem for you, will that suffice for your purposes? And through your expertise,” Hardin knew that such people liked to hear words like ‘expertise’ applied to themselves, “you should be able to determine my skill.”

Without waiting for a response, Hardin quickly laid down premises, assumptions, variables, and physical quantities for a problem that involved, in a superfluous sense, the water flow through an aqueduct, the kind of practical problem that would be relevant to the construction on Mars. Deftly, and verbally since he had nowhere to write, he gave the equations, solved for the variables, and produced the final answer after an arduous process of math, which he navigated with ease. The answer was incidentally the volumetric flow of the water through the aqueduct, but what was more important, he knew, was the demonstration of his mathematical prowess, and his familiarity with the equations. Done, he waited for their reaction.

Once again, the bald man took the lead. “The problem with your presentation, Mr. Hardin—and realize that like we said we’re quite done with you—is that it proves nothing. You’ve memorized these numbers, with the intent to impress us by rattling them off quickly. And since I don’t have a calculator on me, I couldn’t even tell you if you were correct. It’s very possible that you’ve even miscalculated your prepared show. Either way, it doesn’t matter.”

“The numbers weren’t prepared,” Hardin said, displaying frustration of his own. “If you need any proof of that, then change any of the physical quantities that I assumed, and I’ll do the calculations again. Or suggest some variation to the problem, and I’ll do the same. Give me something.”

“You mean to say that you can do all of those calculations in your head? Don’t make us laugh, Mr. Hardin.”

Blood circulation was giving out in Hardin’s hands, because of how hard he was clenching them. He had to consciously fight to relax. He said, “I do mean to say that. And how can you so idiotically assert that I can’t, if you won’t check my numbers?” If Hardin had brought a calculator with him, a prop that he hadn’t anticipated needing, he would have thrown it at the man’s ugly head, which was bobbing from a sudden attack of self-righteous convulsions.

“If you don’t leave now, we’ll have you escorted out,” the bald man said through clenched teeth.

Hardin finally acknowledged that his opportunity was lost, so he poured more of his anger out, from a bottomless source that had Charles Darcy at its center. “What kind of questions
do you
have prepared, then? How pleasant my alma mater was in the summertime? How many professors I was able to pester into writing me a letter of recommendation, so that I would leave them alone about it? What my favorite color is? I hope the people you finally do pick all like blue, because that’s exceptionally important.”

The bald man motioned and the two guards detached themselves from their spot by the lemon tree, to take Hardin by the arms and to forcefully remove him from the room. Out in the lobby of waiting people, he could see that everyone’s eyes were on him. The yelling from the room had attracted all of their attentions, and they eagerly awaited to see him as he was pulled out. Hardin knew their expressions, since facial patterns were easier for him than social patterns. Their faces contained nothing but derision, and self-satisfaction.

He yelled at Number 399 in passing. “What are you so happy about, 399? You think you’re better than me? At your advanced age, and you have no job, correct? Congratulations, you’re winning.”

399 stopped laughing, but he didn’t have to defend himself in any way, because Hardin was already dragged past him. He yelled at Number 391 as well, because Hardin didn’t like his smile. “2:41. Your number will be called at 2:41. Stop looking at the damn screen.” 391’s smile inverted itself, and Hardin was dragged past. Quickly he was out the door, into the grayness of Leipzig’s open air.

Back in the brightly lit room, the panel of interviewers took a moment to recover. The bald man said to the third, who had never spoken, “I’m glad that they’re all not like that.” And then to another person, who was waiting by the doorway, “Tell them to send the next one in. I think we’re ready.”