The Complete Karma Trilogy (29 page)

“The ethics of this are perfectly in order,” Mr. Perry affirmed. “You should be well aware that, for all ground-breaking things designed for humans, eventually a human will have to try it, to see if it works. How do you think airplanes were perfected, or parachutes? Submarines. Someone had to jump off a cliff, and rely on their science. You’ve done the best you can to design Kaishin, haven’t you? What is there left to worry about, other than your own inadequacies surfacing when something wrong happens to these people? You better make sure now that you’ve got everything in perfect order—we’re testing in three days.”

“Everything is obviously not in perfect order,” Reiko said. “Let’s call them our inadequacies, we’ll admit they are ours, because who cares? Either way, we’re not ready for the next step.”

“I gave you your warning,” Mr. Perry said. “You’re out of this meeting. If you behave well in the coming days, perhaps you’ll be invited to the next one.”

Reiko didn’t argue. She made a lot of noise as she pushed herself away from the table, stood up, and marched out of the room, leaving the shameful spectacle behind her.

She went to her empty room, and sat in a corner with her head on her knees. When the ambient noise that her movements made had faded, she could hear the sound of the air-conditioning moving through the walls, and a gentle humming below her. She thought about what it was that she was doing in such a large building, in such a large city, and where she could go instead. Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of people filing down the hallway, past her door, and to the elevator in the reception room. She waited until she thought she heard the elevator arrive, and then went back out into the hall.

All of the Kaishin employees stood in the reception room. Mr. Perry and his guards had left. Mr. Laurel was the only American left, looking uneasy for some reason. She went to Toru, to find out what was going on.

“There’s some kind of rebellion going on upstairs, apparently. Some American bureaucrat came to tell Mr. Perry, and since we were all there at the meeting, we all heard. It sounds like a real rebellion, Reiko. Not just people being stubborn, or arguing. The guy made it sound like there were weapons, and people actually dying.”

Reiko immediately went to the elevator, and hit the button for going up. Toru followed closely behind her. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“I want to be a part of it.”

“Don’t be so reckless.”

“Come with me,” Reiko said.

“How many times are you going to do this? Go places that we shouldn’t go, and ask me to come with you?” Toru was careful not to directly mention their ordeal with Haru, because Mr. Laurel was listening to everything they said.

Mr. Laurel interjected. “As your boss, I forbid you to go upstairs. It is a private matter, for Mr. Perry alone to attend to.”

The door opened behind Reiko, who was facing Mr. Laurel. She said, “Which is it, Mr. Laurel? Am I an employee here, or aren’t I? You can’t have both.” She stepped into the elevator.

As the doors began to shut, Toru said to Mr. Laurel, “I’ll bring her back,” and squeezed in. He was alone with Reiko in the elevator, moving up. She had already pushed the button for the sixty-third floor.

“What floor is it, do you know?” Reiko asked. “I was just going to guess, but since you’re here…”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me, Toru. They told Mr. Perry right in front of you what was going on, like it was an emergency. They had to have mentioned a floor.”

He hesitated. “The seventy-sixth,” he said.

She pushed the extra button, and waited impatiently by the doors as the elevator took them upward.

“What are you planning on doing when those doors open?” Toru asked. “Are you going to grab the nearest heavy object you find, and bludgeon somebody to death? They’re fighting, Reiko. Do you know how to fight? What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got you, now,” she said. “Weren’t you bragging about how long you’ve been training to fight? Now’s your chance to show me. I didn’t get to see, last time.” The doors opened and closed on the sixty-third floor, as they waited in silence.

When the doors opened on the seventy-sixth floor, she left without a second thought. She rushed through the unfamiliar hallways, and Toru nearly had to run to keep up with her. She took several random turns, and finally came to a stop in a large room of cubicles. “Nothing’s happening,” she said.

There were quite a few busy-looking Japanese men that were walking around, carrying briefcases and talking about work-related concerns in the narrow hallways, as people sat hunched over computers inside the cubicles, typing away like nothing unusual was happening.

She turned to Toru. “Did you lie to me? Or is this the most pathetic violent rebellion in history? Which is it?” She grabbed him with both hands by the collar of his shirt, and pushed him against one of the short walls that defined the small cubes. Quickly she had the attention of at least ten employees, who stopped their work to see what she was doing. An American on the other side of the room had stopped what he was doing, and was slowly making his way over. “You tell me now what floor it is.”

“Can I help you?” the American asked, in horrendous Japanese.

Reiko ignored him. “Take me there,” she told Toru.

“Fine,” he said.

As they walked away, Reiko said to the American, “You can’t help at all, unfortunately. Just completely useless for what we need.” She was sure to say it very colloquially, to reduce his chances of understanding.

When they were back on the elevator, Reiko said, “If you lie to me again, I won’t forgive you, Toru. I like you, but I can’t tolerate that kind of thing. Which floor is it?”

“Fifty-two,” he said. She hit the button as Toru continued to speak. “And you can’t tolerate a lie? What about you being Mr. Okada’s daughter? You’re happy lying to others, if it suits you, but if others lie to you, entirely for your own sake, that’s intolerable.”

“I didn’t ask for Mr. Okada to lie for me,” she said. “We’re supposed to be building trust, me and you. That’s part of what it is to be a team. We should be lying to the Americans, Toru. They’re not on our team.”

“Well for me, it’s not about teams. It’s about keeping you safe. And you really shouldn’t be on a floor where people are fighting, and dying.”

Directly after he had finished his sentence, the door opened, and ten Americans piled into the elevator, each one escorting a beaten Japanese businessman. Reiko and Toru couldn’t even get off of the elevator if they wanted, they were forced into a back corner where they could hardly move. The doors closed and they continued downward.

The American closest to Reiko was holding on to the cuffed hands of a middle-aged man, who was balding heavily across the top of his head. The bare scalp had been split by some traumatic force, and blood was seeping through the small island of hair above his left ear and down onto the shoulders of his suit, which was torn badly. Although she couldn’t see the other captives very well, she got the impression that they were similarly beaten.

The American turned to her, when he saw that she was examining his captive. From what she could tell he couldn’t speak any Japanese, but that didn’t curtail his desire to communicate with her. He stared directly into her eyes as he pushed the man face-first into the back of the elevator wall, for no apparent reason. With his hands bound behind him, the captive couldn’t do anything to prevent the impact.

“Where are you taking them?” she asked. None of the ten Americans responded.

“Toru, kill this man, right now,” she said.

“You’re insane, Reiko. Don’t say stuff like that.”

“They don’t understand. Look at them, they didn’t react at all. Do a single one of you shitheads speak Japanese?” she asked loudly. Speaking to Toru again, she said, “They just look at me, like I’m making stupid noises for stupid reasons. They don’t understand anything. They’ll take these people, our fellow employees, off to be killed somewhere, because that’s what they were told to do. You can stop them, Toru.”

“No I can’t. Maybe I can kill the one next to us, before the others notice, but then it would be over for the both of us. We’d be in the exact same position as these rebels. This is what I was warning you about. There’s nothing to be done.”

Instead of continuing her conversation with Toru, she spoke to the foreigner. She leaned in close to his face, so that he wouldn’t mistake the fact that she was talking to him. “I’ll kill you myself, one of these days. Even if my friend here won’t help. For the injustices you’re doing, I’ll pay you back everything in full. You lead a disgusting existence, and that’s all you’ll ever lead.”

Even though the man couldn’t understand, he could sense the threat in her voice. He gestured to a gun that was clipped at his belt.

“Yeah, real impressive,” she said. “Shoot me with that.”

“Reiko.”

Ronin 10

A Joint Life

It was two
days before the scheduled experiment on the human test subjects, of which there would be sixteen, corresponding to the experiment with the rats. The surgery was scheduled to take two hours, after which they would be put into pairs of two. Instead of waiting days for them to mentally adjust, they would be allowed only two hours between steps, so that the whole thing was only scheduled to last eight hours from start to finish. It therefore fit conveniently within a normal workday.

Reiko asked Toru, as they were walking from work to the subway at the end of the day, “Are we really going to go along with this?”

“What else can we do?” he said.

“We could stop them somehow. We could sabotage everything they have and they could never recover, since you guys are the only ones who know how it works. And we could start over again, somewhere new.”

“I love the ownership you take over our project.”

“But we could do that, couldn’t we?”

Toru said, “Haru has been on the run, ever since he left Kenko. Admittedly, I don’t know whether it’s because he’s paranoid or because they’re actually after him, or because they know it’s him hacking into their computers, but whatever it is it doesn’t sound like the kind of life I would want to lead, running away all of the time. And that’s what would happen to us, if we sabotaged this project. They would find us, and force us to do it again. Don’t you agree? They’re pretty adamant about getting it done.”

“We could make sure they couldn’t follow us.”

“That sounds pretty ominous. To be honest with you, I don’t want to talk about things like this in public anymore. Any one of these people around us could be a spy for the Americans.” He indicated with one hand movement hundreds of faceless strangers, walking by. “If you want to talk more about it, we should do it in private.”

“What do you suggest?” she asked.

“Come over to my apartment. We can talk about it there. I’ve heard stuff from Haru that I’d like to share with you anyway.”

“That sounds wonderful,” she said. “Right now?”

“I’d like to eat first. But if you wanted to accompany me to that as well?”

“You drive a hard bargain,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He took Reiko to a restaurant he frequented in Nakano, which was close to his apartment. They ate yakitori with rice, and talked about the city.

Reiko said, “You know, it seems like we’re always talking about work, you and me. Don’t you think? And isn’t that a little overwhelming? It’s nice to kind of just let it all go, not to think about it, even though I hardly know you outside of what you do at Kaishin. Do you read books?”

“No, not really,” he said.

“That’s a shame. But you like beating people up? I know that much about you. Lots of karate, lots of violence. Except not Americans in elevators, you draw a line there.”

“I don’t really think of it as violence,” he said, ignoring the rest of her comment. “It’s like dancing that has nothing to do with music. Except I hate dancing. I think what I like best about it is how old it is. They’ve been doing it here for so long, all of the martial arts, and I just wanted to be a part of that tradition. Who will keep doing it if we don’t?”

“The Americans do it, don’t they?” Reiko suggested. She glanced sideways at an austere-looking American man that was seated alone, a couple of seats away. “They’ll keep our tradition going for us, long after we’re all dead.”

“You’ve got a lot of hatred in you,” he said. “They can’t all be bad. They’re just following orders. I could see us in their same position, if the roles were reversed, and so I feel a lot of empathy.”

“How can you say something like that? Mr. Perry?” She was talking far too loud for the intimate setting of the restaurant.

“Mr. Perry is an exception,” Toru said calmly. “He could easily be less of a demon, and do his job. I still hate everything about him, but it is just a job he is doing, after all. He came to Kaishin to do a job, and from what I’ve seen he’s actually very thorough about the details, and the proper allocation of people.”

“Like those rebels we’re going to kill. They were properly allocated”

“Damn it,” Toru said. “I thought you said you would be glad not to talk about work.”

“You’re right,” Reiko said, and settled down just as fast as she had become emotional.

They settled their tab and walked the rest of the way to Toru’s apartment. Overhead, the sky was already becoming dark, and lights were going on by the thousands in the buildings, like fireflies born in spontaneity.

Reiko said, “I want to be in control of all the lights in this city, one day. Just for a little while—they could have their switches back when I was done. I used to play piano, as a kid, and I didn’t stick with it very well, but that’s what it would be like—a huge keyboard, each key a light. It would be a countless number of keys, just millions, but if I practiced long enough it wouldn’t seem like so much, I could handle it. What do you think the Well-Tempered Clavier would look like, played in the lights of a city? With chords that lit up whole buildings, and scales that lit up entire neighborhoods, only for a second before they blinked out again?

“But that wouldn’t be enough. It’s a new art, after all, so that you can’t expect to attain its perfection by transplanting the old art on top of it. New songs would have to be written, songs that would only make sense in light. And I would need more colors—people would just have to live with it if I needed their kitchen to be a deep magenta for a while, while they’re trying to have a quiet dinner. I could make entire movies, if I had a building large enough, and enough colors. The city would be the largest television ever produced, and no one but the astronauts would be far enough away to see it, so it would be entirely wasted on everyone—except I would know. The mastermind, I would know the picture I made even if I couldn’t see it either. I could write an entire book, that the gods could read from above, if they happened to look down—they would say, ‘my goodness, look at this story unraveling below us.’ And I would make sure that it was the most perfectly boring story ever written, to pay them back for the negligence they’ve shown toward my life.”

Toru said, after listening for so long, “If you never learned to play piano well, I doubt you would have the patience to learn this new instrument of yours. You’d probably say to yourself, ‘It will be so awesome when I finally know how,’ but that won’t be enough to keep you dedicated. And so you’d give up, after causing so many unnecessary seizures.”

“You’re an entirely rude person, Mr. Toru,” Reiko said. “I share a dream of mine with you, a real dream, and you can only criticize. It’s like you never believe anything can be done. But people have been doing things for thousands of years, I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Just being realistic,” he said.

“Well you better stop,” she said.

Up in his apartment, which was unreasonably well-furnished for a person his age, he said, “I’ve been told by Haru that he has a working program. One that can be used for humans.”

“That’s great!” Reiko said.

“You realize the predicament that puts us in, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, this program most likely works a hell of a lot better than whatever those programmer hacks put together, the ones that Mr. Perry found. I sat with them a few times, to see how well they handled unraveling his puzzles, and they were taking a lot of shots in the dark. So when they try Kaishin out on these humans, in less than two days, they’d stand a much better chance of surviving if we gave them Haru’s program. But then they would know that we have that program, and furthermore are in communication with Haru, which I told them we weren’t. So that’s the predicament. People’s lives, or our project.”

“They might not die,” Reiko said. “They might be just fine.”

“You said the exact opposite to Mr. Perry. You said it was completely unsafe. Which is it? You’re changing your mind now, even when people’s lives are still at stake?”

“What about our lives?” Reiko responded. “Will we be accused of rebelling, because we kept our secrets? Will they beat us and kill us like those people in the elevator? It’s not as simple as you’re making it. You’re trying to make me feel bad. But we’re keeping the program a secret.”

The two sat in silence for a while, on Toru’s only sofa, immersed in their private thoughts. Eventually Reiko said, “There’s another way. It’s a false dilemma, what you said. We can save everyone.”

“And how is that?” Toru asked, somewhat exasperated.

“We could use Kaishin ourselves. With Haru’s program. And we could make a better rebellion, somehow. I feel like individually we don’t know how to overcome these problems, Mr. Perry and the Americans and what remains to be learned about Kaishin, but if we could all be together—”

“Who is this we?” Toru interrupted her.

“Everyone. You, me, Haru, Saori, Nami, Ichiro, Hideo.”

“Half of those people would never agree to do that. And I have plenty of reservations about it myself, still.”

“You’ve worked on this for so long,” Reiko said. “What was your ultimate goal, if not to use it for yourself? And why not be the first person to do it? If we’re all going under, on this sinking ship, why not at least experience what you were after before it’s too late? Because even if we play their stupid game and finish it, make Kaishin, there’s no guarantee the Americans would ever agree to let you use it. They own everything now. Our only chance would be to steal back what was ours, while stealing is possible. And maybe then we’d figure out a way to prevent the deaths of these innocent people. Or all die before they do, when things go wrong.”

“You’re insane,” Toru said. “More insane than Haru.”

Reiko leaned across the sofa, and kissed Toru on the lips. They stayed that way for several seconds, until she pulled away. “Don’t be scared, little Toru,” she said.

He was speechless for a moment. Finally, he said, “If you can get everyone else to agree, and I mean everyone else—I know you’ve never been on good terms with Ichiro and Hideo, so I’m not terribly worried that you’ll succeed—then I would do it.”

“Promise,” she demanded.

“Promise.”

The next day, Toru was uncharacteristically late to work. He didn’t care much anymore—he took an extra-long breakfast at a small restaurant in the city, and walked through a park, before eventually meandering toward the subway that would take him to Nakai Station. The whole time, hardly a thought entered his head. He was just floating, following a breeze. But even a random breeze took him to work after a time. It was ten o'clock when he entered the Kenko building, and took the elevator up to the Kaishin floor.

He had begun to wonder what he would do with his time at work, in what ways he could best prepare for the human experiments that would invariably happen the next day, when he ran into Reiko, who was leaving from Saori and Nami’s room.

“What were you doing in there? You weren’t talking to them about it now, here at work, were you?” In a quieter voice he said, “Mr. Laurel is around here somewhere, isn’t he?”

“He’s in his office,” Reiko said. “And don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.” She pointed back at the room she’d just left. “You should go in there. They’re waiting for you.”

“For what?” he asked.

“You promised me,” she said.

“You couldn’t have possibly...”

“They’re being engineers about it, it’s kind of funny really. They’ve already inserted theirs. Hideo and Ichiro are next. Not turned on yet, but inserted. They’re going to do it first. And think about things, improve things, maybe. Before bringing us in. Safest that way.”

“How could you possibly have convinced them?” he asked, in complete disbelief. “I was two hours late. Two hours. That’s a huge decision for them to make in just two hours.”

Reiko looked both ways down the hallway. “And I thought you were nervous about talking about these things here at work? And we’re right here in the middle of the hallway, who knows who can hear us...”

“Tell me.”

“They’re more emotionally invested in this than you might think. All of them. And I may have mentioned Mr. Okada once or twice. Go. We shouldn’t be loitering like this.”

She walked away, leaving him alone at the door into Saori and Nami’s room. He entered.

Inside, the two women were inconspicuously discussing things with Hideo and Ichiro. Saori acknowledged him as he walked in. Hideo was holding one of the newest prototypes of the chip, showing it to the other three and saying things that Toru couldn’t make out. Toru jumped when he heard the door opening behind him, and turned around to find Mr. Laurel in the doorway.

“A little late, Mr. Watanabe, aren’t you?” Mr. Laurel said, inspecting the young man, as if to find a reason for his lateness somewhere on his person.

“I had certain affairs to attend to, Mr. Laurel, and am deeply apologetic.”

“This is a warning. Punctuality is of utmost importance.”

“Absolutely.”

“What brings all five of you in here?” Mr. Laurel asked. Toru froze completely, unprepared for the question.