The Complete Karma Trilogy (24 page)

“But it looks like I came here at a good time. I’m always willing to accept a challenge—if you say you can grow plants better than our current system, then prove it. Ophelia, get a table cleared for him. Marcus, get him some pots, and some seeds. Salvor, you’ll have to get your own dirt, and pot your plants yourself, but you’re not adverse to a little work, are you? Plant them however you like, fertilize them however you like, light them however you like. But remember that it’s not a responsibility to take lightly—we only have limited fertilizer, and limited water. I’ll let you do it anyway. And if you can somehow grow better plants, then we’ll listen.

“But consider this—the way that we farm right now is dictated by New Karma. It does all of the computations and it makes all of the decisions, based on years of compiled data. That is what you are up against. It will be watching you at all times to make sure that you don’t waste our supplies. It will analyze your performance, and whether or not your methods are superior in some way. I strongly believe you’ll find that it is much harder to outperform a computer than you think it is. But the challenge is always available. Consider this a lesson in humility.”

Hardin resented the condescension that he perceived in the man’s offer, but he knew that he would win the challenge. A quick look around the room was enough for him to realize that no one there knew a single thing about agriculture, their computer god included. He said, “If you can teach me humility, you would be the first.”

Mars 5

Being Audited

Even though New
Karma was watching everything that he did, a person was still assigned to watch over Hardin as he made his own garden. He didn’t know which was more annoying—the opinionated human hovering over his shoulder, or the silent computer probing his mind. When his Chip was activated again, it filled his head with a light buzzing sensation that he hadn’t expected. The electrical responses of the Chip and its long tendrils were very small in magnitude, but he felt them. It was possible that he was the only person in the world that experienced that sensation—the neurons in his brain were packed much tighter than was natural.

The person that was watching him, Justin, didn’t appreciate his methodology. “Why are you eating dirt?” he asked, after Hardin had picked up a handful of it and put it into his mouth.

“I’m looking for a certain flavor profile,” Hardin replied.

“That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You can just taste the alkalinity, though,” Hardin continued, not caring what his companion thought. He had just made a resolution to be more socially acceptable, but his new project was reason enough for a postponement. “I thought you people had a sufficient urea supply going into this, but I was wrong.” He frowned, because he hated to be wrong for any reason. Then he spit the dirt back out, into one of the planters. “And there’s potash available, correct? Just a little bit more of that, and I think we’ll be good.”

“You didn’t get all that from tasting it,” Justin objected.

In response, Hardin handed him a fresh handful of dirt. “See for yourself. Put it into your mouth, and I will explain to you what flavors are present, and what flavors you need to add.”

“No! It’s dirt. Dirt tastes like dirt. Dirt with piss in it. I’m not eating it.”

“Most likely you can tell the difference between sixty different types of meat, and yet you insist dirt only has one flavor? That’s just prejudice, and indoctrination. You have so many nerves in your body, and every single one of them is more capable than you think. I’m telling you this is possible. Don’t you want to learn?”

“Not from you,” he said.

They went on in silence, for a while. Hardin found some potash, and mixed it into his allotment of soil. Then he selected seeds for a few plants that he knew would go well together, and brought them back to his table. Even though his comrades didn’t seem to care about the nitrogen cycle, it wasn’t too late to start. He carefully buried the seeds at predetermined depths, watered everything lightly, and then finally adjusted the lights. But only by a few centimeters, since his plants wouldn’t break the soil for a considerable amount of time. Finished, he put the spare materials away. Several hours had gone by.

When he had seen everything, Justin said, “Your way isn’t really that different at all.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Hardin told him. “Small differences are enough.”

Hardin spent the rest of the afternoon practicing facial expressions in a small mirror he owned. There was an extreme disconnect between the face that he wanted to present to the world and the one that he actually did—unless he was focusing intently, his face naturally drifted to one that expressed contempt.

He was very good at analyzing faces, but not at making them. Unlike everyone else, who had learned to smile when they were an infant, Hardin had to individually control all of the muscles of his face, every time. It took more focus than he wanted, so he spent time every day trying to make the movements more automatic. He had particular trouble with the muscles along the zygomatic branch of his facial nerve, and so he often involuntarily squinted when he smiled. It made people uncomfortable.

He went through a rapid series of expressions, as quickly as he could—a frown, disgust, pity, sadness, disinterest, and then finished with a smile. A muscle on his cheek went into spasms, and then he had to stop for a while. As he was waiting for it to recover, one of his roommates, Chris, entered their dorm.

“What are you doing in here?” Chris asked, looking at the mirror that Hardin was holding.

Hardin felt compelled to lie, which he could do very naturally. “I’ve never seen myself bald. I was just wondering what I looked like. But there aren’t any mirrors in the bathroom, so I had to use my own.”

Chris was empathetic. “You’ll get used to it eventually. It’s actually kind of nice—I haven’t been attracted to a single woman, ever since I got here. It’s freed up a lot of time for me.”

“I’ve wanted to ask someone a question, ever since I joined New Karma,” Hardin said.

“What’s that?”

“What do you think of New Karma? Does he do a good job? Does he make the right judgments? In your experience.”

It was obviously a difficult question for Chris. Unlike the old Karma, there was no private place a person could go to express their discontent. He was forced to be positive, even if he didn’t want to. “It’s just like the old Karma,” he said. “Nothing different at all. I’ve been doing just as well here as I was doing before.”

Fortunately, Hardin didn’t have to rely on the content of his words to get his answer. He could interpret all of the microexpressions on the man’s face, to determine how he really felt. He had expressed a slight dissatisfaction, but only for a second.

New Karma gave its evaluations weekly, so Hardin had yet to be evaluated. He was eating the predetermined rate for a new recruit. But Hardin had a feeling that his allotment would change quickly—he hadn’t been focusing very much on holding doors for people, or saving seats for his comrades in the dining hall, or any of the other trivial things that were probably rewarded by New Karma. It didn’t matter much to him—he didn’t need much food to live off of.

“And what do you think about gardening? You enjoy it?”

“I just do it because I have to,” Chris replied, not ashamed to admit his disinterest. Hardin smiled, genuinely, until the muscle in his cheek began to spasm again.

In the evening he went to eat dinner in the mess hall, with all of the people of his building. As he was waiting in the long, slow-moving line, he looked around. There was a TV in the distance, droning on about world news. Arrayed around it were mismatched chairs and tables, scratched and broken but still useable. There were windows that overlooked the courtyard of the New Karma complex, which was just a small field of concrete that people occasionally used for physical activities.

Dominating one of the walls was the moral scoreboard for their building. It was a mass of red LEDs, reminding Hardin of the interview he’d just failed. More red numbers. But it had much more information on it—the names of a hundred people, the ten categories of merits and demerits, and everyone’s score for the previous week. A large spreadsheet of moral worth.

Hardin read through the categories again, even though he already knew them. To be good was to perform well in five categories: honesty, friendliness, modesty, diligence, and etiquette. Hardin knew from various sources that diligence was almost entirely based on the amount of time and effort spent either in the growing rooms or doing the communal chores. Since everyone was strictly required to do those things, most people scored identically across the board. The category that seemed to be rewarded the most was etiquette, accounting for over half of most people’s scores. Apparently New Karma liked good etiquette.

To be bad was to perform well in five categories: dishonesty, hostility, pride, laziness, and rudeness. They corresponded directly to the five categories of goodness, as their opposites. So really there were only five categories, with positive points and negative points, but as a matter of transparency the positives and negatives were separated, so that the members of the society could see exactly where they were going wrong. In general, the categories of badness were much more evenly represented. Jared, the man that had punched Hardin in the face, was leading the pack in hostility by a very comfortable margin.

It was a small but significant departure from the way that the old Karma had run things. People didn’t have food taken from them for doing wrong things, under that system. They were sent to Rehabilitation Clinics for minor failures and killed for significant ones. It was hard for him to objectively assess which system would perform better, if it were extrapolated to the entire world—the sentimentalist in him preferred the real Karma.

Because he didn’t like wasting time, yet was forced to wait in line for his food, he took a moment to memorize all the names on the board, as well as their scores. It was potentially useful information for the future. When he finally reached the tables of food, he took a few apples and an onion, weighed them out in front of a comrade, and then took a seat next to the TV.

A reporter was interviewing a man named Martin Ficken. Martin had been running for the office of president for five years, even though no election was scheduled. Hardin liked him for the simple reason that Darcy hated him. He was the kind of man that should have been assassinated years before, but somehow managed to not only keep alive but also to make regular appearances on government-sponsored television programs, even though it was the government that hated him. He was saying, “When will our ‘rex’ return from the farthest reaches of space to lead his people? When will he realize that his economic policy will not support the amount of people on this Earth? We’re hungry, my fellow Earthlings, we’re starving, and not just for food—we’re starving for a leader that knows what he is doing. The quality of life of the average person has dropped dramatically in the past five years. Dramatically. Life under Karma was good, and now it is unbearable. And he is to blame. Unless he wishes to atone for his sins—which he never will, he never will—then he should be replaced. I want to reaffirm my commitment to the Earth—if you know what is good for you, then band together with me. One man cannot repress the masses for very long. We can make this change.”

And he kept going, endlessly. And the reporter continued to hold the microphone in front of his mouth, because there was nothing better she could be doing. Even though Hardin liked Martin, it was hard for him to get over how ineffectual the man was. Only words. He ate his apples to the core, and took the onion back to his dorm.

Later that night, Hardin lay in a room with four other people. He was thinking about mutilating Charles Darcy’s face, like he did every night, and also about how the dictator had decided that everyone was to value agriculture above everything else.

It didn’t make sense, he thought. It didn’t prove anything, except maybe how inadequate the human race had become at providing for itself. There was nothing spiritual about agriculture, nothing profound—just a few basic facts that everyone had forgotten over time. Hardin hated Darcy’s mysticism. No one took it seriously, which comforted him, but the fact that the leader of two entire worlds could insist on such idiocy drove Hardin crazy. The worst part was how inefficient it all was. Everyone was wasting their time, even more than they usually did.

A government auditor came the next day, to emphasize the point. He wore a nice suit for an earthling, even though it was a little threadbare in places. He showed up unannounced, and took a self-guided tour through the facilities.

Percy walked with him, and they discussed everyone’s living arrangement at New Karma. Curious about what their interaction would be like and what would be said, Hardin followed behind them and listened intently.

“Three hundred and four people live here?” the auditor asked, looking down at the tablet that he carried with him. “And you claim to be a commune of sorts?”

“Yes, three hundred and four. And it’s more than a claim—we are a commune.”

They walked through one of the mess halls, towards the staircase that would take them to the growing floors. The auditor attentively looked around at all the people they passed, as if he suspected everyone of being a criminal. “And you claim that the food you grow is shared?”

“Exactly,” Percy said. He seemed exasperated.

“And do you keep everyone’s produce separate?” he asked.

“No, no we don’t. That would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Well, you might think that, but think about your civic obligations. Everyone is required to grow as much food as they possibly can. When ‘communes’ like your own don’t keep track of who is growing what, it makes my job very difficult—I have to determine if everyone is doing their fair share. It’s very likely that you’ve got freeloaders in here, people that eat all of the food but don’t do their duty to grow it. Do you have any of those, people like that?”

“No, we don’t,” Percy said, definitively. “Everyone contributes. That’s what it means to be a commune. I explain all of these things to every auditor that comes in here, but it’s someone new every time. And you don’t communicate very well, it seems, or I wouldn’t have to repeatedly answer these same questions. The last guy that came in here, he didn’t have any problems with our system.”

The auditor stopped to look Percy in the eyes with all the cold calculation of a bureaucrat. Hardin had to awkwardly stop and hang around, to pretend that he wasn’t following. “We communicate just fine, thank you very much. And we ask all the questions that we need to ask to perform our job. You seem to be implying that we are a burden to you, even though it is you who are a burden to us.”