The Complete Karma Trilogy (23 page)

“I do not mean your Ranch,” Karma said. “Although this does contribute to the numbers, and as a leader of a country I would be remiss not to always be concerned about our finances. I’m speaking more directly about all of these charges that have been made for prostitutes and alcohol. I know, although I cannot empathize, that human impulses are hard to control, but a man in your position should be expected to show some restraint, don’t you agree?”

“Who has been buying prostitutes?” Mr. Perry typed nervously. “With company money? That’s not possible.”

“The transactions were made using your credentials. I will forgive this incident, if it does not continue into the future. Understood, Mr. Perry?”

“I will look into it,” he replied.

“If you have nothing more to say, than I will let you go back to work as you suggested, Mr. Perry.”

“Pleasant getting to know you,” he typed, and stood up. He wanted to leave the room. Outside, his guard fell in behind him as he walked past, back toward the elevator. He couldn’t help but eye every security camera that he passed, and he knew that every ten feet there was an audio recorder buried somewhere. It was always watching—Karma. He wanted to get back to his Ranch, and have a nice drink.

Mars 4

New Karma Society

To explain Hardin’s
duties, they took a tour of the New Karma facilities. First they went through the dormitories, which were more like a barracks—rooms that had once been kitchens and living rooms were stripped of all their former appliances and replaced with beds. At least fifteen beds to a former three-room apartment, Hardin counted. There were three floors of dormitories, one of his guides explained, and then there was the fourth floor, which was a large mess hall of sorts, with a lot of the walls knocked out, a sprawling set of kitchens grouped in a corner, and a large supply of tables and chairs. While they were walking through, Hardin saw quite a few people eating their lunch, heads shaved everywhere. A few waved at his guides, and even introduced themselves to Hardin, as the three made their way to a staircase that took them to the fifth floor.

Even more of the walls and support beams were stripped from that floor, making room for a large growing operation. Hardin had seen larger, in some of Earth’s old production facilities, but it was still impressive in magnitude. And the floor above was the same, and the whole arrangement was replicated twice more in the other two buildings of the complex. It was its own little self-sufficient community. Or at least it was pretending to be. “You grow enough here to feed everyone?” Hardin asked.

“Not quite,” the bald man said. “We still get extra provisions from the government, like everyone else does. But we’re on our way towards independence. There are a couple new growing techniques that the boss is about to implement, and we’re all very hopeful about their success.”

To be a part of them, Hardin would have to work a few hours of every day tending the plants, which didn’t seem to be too much work, since they grew on their own. Apparently, every now and then he would re-pot some potato growths, or something to that effect. And then there was some sort of cleaning detail, in which the inhabitants of a dorm took turns doing the laundry for everyone they lived with, and scrubbing the walls and cleaning the floors. None of it seemed too strenuous. When the tour was over, Lucretia asked him, “What do you think?”

“I think I’ll join, but only on the condition that I may speak to your leader at the nearest time available,” Hardin said.

“You might have to wait a while,” Lucretia replied. “He’s always busy organizing everything. But I’m sure that eventually you would be able to.”

They made him sign a ledger, which was supposed to be impressive from the fact that it was made out of paper. It was old and yellowed, and on the first page it had the New Karma Creed, which he was forced to read and agree to. It said, “Our lives are best lived when they are guided by a higher authority. Our limited understanding is best used when it is supplemented by a higher authority. We submit ourselves to a higher authority.”

Lucretia said to him, “This isn’t a pledge to take lightly. You sign this page, and you become one of us.”

Hardin didn’t hesitate. He had already made his decision, years before.

Before he was allowed to do anything at all, they shaved his head. Hardin felt weirdly exposed, but he didn’t complain. Then they took him to a surgery room, where he became very nervous. Lucretia said, “So we didn’t tell you everything, and I hope you’ll forgive me for that. Our leader has developed a new version of Karma. In a way, you weren’t misled—we call ourselves New Karma, and we mean it. We live our lives the way it used to be done, the way it was before the whole world collapsed. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

“But the Chip in your head is encrypted. There’s a bunch of technical stuff, but it comes down to the fact that we have to get that encryption key. The original Karma knew all of those keys, but of course that data was destroyed. The only other way to get it is to open up your head—the number is written on one of the sides of your Chip. It’s a small operation, they just make a little cut and use a little camera. You’ll hardly feel it.”

Hardin was not consoled by her description of the process. He didn’t want his head tampered with. “I know my encryption key. Can I just tell it to someone? The surgery is unnecessary.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “How could you possibly know what your encryption key is?”

“Can’t you just trust me? It’s easy enough to verify if I am right, isn’t it? They would just have to give the numbers to your New Karma, and see if they work.”

She frowned. “I guess? I’ve just never heard it done that way. But why not? If we can avoid cutting you open, then I don’t see what the problem would be. Here, I’ll take you to one of the technicians, and we can try that.”

She took him to the seventh floor, which was unique to the building they were in. At the top of the staircase there was a landing and a single hallway, and two men standing guard. She said to the guards, “Can you take us to one of the operators?”

Silently one of the guards turned, and led them down the hallway. The other remained at his post. As they walked, Lucretia said to Hardin, “You’ll rarely be up here. It’s where we take new recruits to figure out their encryption keys, it’s where we keep New Karma, and it’s where Percy lives. You’ll get to come up here just one more time, to meet New Karma. They make you wait a week or two after you start, but it’s well worth the wait.”

“Why do I only get to meet New Karma once?” Hardin asked.

“It used to be that no one got to meet it at all,” Lucretia replied, “but there was a bunch of people that believed it didn’t really exist, and that Percy was lying to them, so he changed the policy.”

They arrived at a door. The guard opened it for them, and revealed a room with a few chairs, a long table, and a drill. “Demarius should be here shortly,” Lucretia said. The guard continued down the hallway, ostensibly to retrieve Demarius.

“Tell him I know my encryption key,” Hardin stuttered. He was staring at the drill, which filled him with dread.

“I know, you already told me.”

Two days later, Hardin was on his knees and elbows, scrubbing one of the communal bathrooms. He had already cleaned the urine collector, which was in the corner of the room. It was piped directly up to the growing floors, where the urine was diluted with water and given as fertilizer to the plants. All of the other toilets went to the sewer system, which Hardin thought was inefficient. Humanity had yet to adopt all of practices that would make their world run the smoothest, and he doubted they ever would. The terminally grey sky above was all the proof he needed.

He had with him three brushes of varying width and bristle density, since no one brush worked best for every application. He used a decade-old toothbrush for the finer details, a brush with a triangular tip for all of the edges and corners, and a large, round brush for all of the open spaces. Because he only had two hands, he always carried one of the spare brushes in his teeth, so it would be readily accessible when he needed it. He was under the sinks when one of his comrades found him.

“You know, that’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen,” the man said, indicating the toothbrush in Hardin’s mouth. “You’re going to get sick that way.”

Hardin didn’t have to try very hard to find a counterargument. “I sterilized these beforehand. And the only thing that touches the handles are my hands and my teeth, and I’m not touching anything with my hands except the handles of the brushes. The only route of exposure I have to bacteria is if they travel up the handle to my mouth. But even the fastest bacteria only travel at a rate of fifty micrometers per second, and the head of the toothbrush is about four centimeters from my mouth, so it would take at the very least thirteen minutes and twenty seconds before I was exposed. And that’s assuming they went perfectly towards my mouth, which is statistically implausible. Either way, I’ll be done within thirteen minutes.”

The man was baffled, but still disagreed. “That doesn’t make it any less disgusting.”

“If you reflected on it for even a little bit, you’d realize that it does,” Hardin replied.

He caused similar revulsions in the growing rooms, the next day. He was inspecting the dirt with his hands, to get a feel for its composition, when a woman told him, “You know that it’s not sanitary to touch the dirt directly, don’t you? I know that you’re new, so you might not know this, but they actually use everyone’s pee to help fertilize it. We have some hand shovels you can use over there by the door if you need to move any dirt around.”

Hardin wanted her to get a sense of how irrational her statement was, so he said, “You’ll be eating the food we grow here, eventually, won’t you?”

She nodded, because that was the appropriate thing to do.

He said, “It seems strange to me that you will willingly eat something that you refuse to touch. Your waste is incorporated into the plant, otherwise there wouldn’t be a point in using it. The same atoms, and often times the same molecules, will be present in the final product. You are mistakenly calling unsanitary something that is merely uncomfortable to you.”

She stared harshly into his eyes, apparently looking for a human element there. He gave her nothing in return. She said, “Well, you do what you want, but that doesn’t make it right.” Then she walked away.

Standing alone in a growing room full of people trying to be a society, Hardin had a realization. For five years he had not cared if anyone was bothered by his idiosyncratic worldview, but if he wanted to form any relationships, he would have to change—he was only creating distance between the people around him, even if all of his arguments were technically correct. He let the dry, infertile dirt fall from his hands, and walked up to the nearest group of people.

They looked at him with condescension—he understood faces very well—but he persisted anyway. He had to impress them with facts they were comfortable with, instead of what he had been doing. He said, “You know, these fluorescent lights would work better if they were another half-meter away. The change won’t be drastic, but it will be for the better—the light you’re using is too intense, especially for the lettuce over here. That light should probably be brought up a whole meter. It might seem like you’re wasting the light if you put it that high up, and in fact you would be, but as it is you’re gently frying your plants.”

They looked dumbly at Hardin, and then at themselves. Then they looked at the lights, hanging by old strings and wires all around them. One of them finally said, “They’ve been growing just fine, just like this.”

“Which does not mean that they couldn’t grow better, if their conditions were more favorable. With that simple adjustment, your output could increase by at least five percent. That might not seem like a lot to you, but in the long run it will amount to a lot, and it costs you nothing to implement.”

“Where is it that these numbers are coming from?” another one of them asked. “How would you know that another meter away is the best place for the lights? Let me guess, that’s how the last group of people that you grew with did it, so you’re just assuming that’s best. And you’re making up random numbers like ‘five percent’ to make it sound more scientific and shit. Why don’t you just go back to them, if they’re doing it so much better?”

Hardin didn’t understand where the sudden animosity came from. He said, “I can write down the equations for light intensity for you, if you want. And radiation absorption rates for all of the different shades of green. But if you need hard evidence, that’s the kind of thing that will take a few weeks. Then you’ll see that plants grown by my methods grow faster, and larger. My guess is that none of you were farmers, before Karma died? If anyone’s making up numbers around here, it’s you.”

The man that Hardin was arguing with punched him in the face. He blacked out for a second, and fell over onto the ground. His first reaction was to quickly go through all of his memories to see if any were missing. Head injuries were his greatest fear.

“Jared, you don’t just punch people in the face,” a woman said. “He’s just a little socially awkward. And he’s one of your comrades now. Here, let me help.” She took Hardin by the hand, and pulled him up. She continued, “You know, he might be right, Jared. What do you know?”

Assured that no permanent damage had been done, Hardin returned to trying to analyze the conversation that he was participating in. He said, “I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I was just trying to be helpful.”

“There, you see?” the woman said to the man named Jared. “Just trying to be helpful.”

“Well,” Jared replied, “until he’s been here for longer than a week, maybe it’s best he kept all of his ‘ideas’ to himself.”

“Why wait that long?” a voice said from behind them. They all turned to see who it was.

It was Percy Edwards, the leader of their society. He walked up to join them, and spoke to Jared. “If I had to guess, I’d say that New Karma will disapprove of your violence, Jared. I hope you’re prepared to go hungry for a while. And if you were all really as hungry as you say you are, you’d be more receptive to new ideas.”

The formerly defiant man was instantly deflated. He bowed his head sheepishly, and said nothing. Hardin could hardly comprehend the sudden transformation, but it seemed to stem from his relationship with Percy somehow.

Percy extended a hand to Hardin, and they shook. “Always nice to have new members,” he said. “And with new ideas. Your name is Salvor, isn’t it? Salvor Hardin? I know we haven’t met, but I learn names very quickly. I came here to tell you that I set up your appointment with New Karma, three days from now. From 1:00 to 1:15. I’ll have Lucretia remind you.