The Complete Karma Trilogy (7 page)

Several of the men nodded.

Matthew broke from his reverie of staring at the CEO’s face, since he felt it was a moment at which he should respond, before any of the other men chose to extend the rant with their own views on the matter. He said, “Unfortunately, these rash changes that concern you will have to be made now, instead of in the near or distant future. You must realize that the clear vagueness of the time frame you propose is unacceptable for a man in my position, do you not? But to address those concerns, I feel you’re being a little overly sentimental about your autonomy, and that the changes will not have as large an impact as you seem to believe. You’re probably giving yourself too much credit, imagining that your leadership has such a large impact on the course of this company. A ship with a new helm is hardly a new ship—if it was seaworthy before, so will it continue to be. In the meantime, I’m a fairly accomplished navigator, so if you would all take a few deep breaths, I propose we move on with the matter?”

With every sentence, a wave of disruption was sent across the room. Matthew smiled involuntarily at every period. They were all very serious men, he realized. Very self-confident, very attached, very difficult to displace. He could feel it already.

“Unacceptable,” one of the men said.

“Well, the terms are not yours to make,” Matthew responded.

Several of the men jolted to their feet, surprisingly fast for their weight. Matthew stayed calmly seated. His guards stood up, and slowly removed the Pens from their breast pockets. He could feel a small amount of adrenaline being secreted into his arteries, but he let it float around uselessly.

“Under what authority is this happening?” another man asked. “No one has answered that question yet, and it’s a very glaring omission.”

The CEO at the end of the table, the man Matthew watched intently, cleared his throat. The attention of the room was unanimously given to him. Deep wrinkles formed in his forehead, as he frowned and mentally prepared a statement. “We will perform as Mr. Perry says. That is the final word on the matter. I will ask, of course, that he be understanding of circumstances, which have been mentioned by several gentleman already. This is a respectable business, and should always be. The quality of the product we make is our utmost priority, and the livelihood of our employees. Do you object to those priorities, Mr. Perry?”

Matthew pretended to give it a moment of consideration. He could sense, by looking at the faces around him, that the decision of the CEO would override any objection that the rest would make. “Quality and livelihood. I can work around those two words. My methodology may be slightly different than you are used to, though.”

“Damn Americans,” one of the more elderly gentlemen couldn’t help but mumble, after Matthew’s response.

“Racist comments will have to go. That’s my first dictate. If that’s such an unacceptable change from normal operating conditions, then I wonder that this company does as well as you say it does. Xenophobia can hardly get you very far, in this modern world. What a tense working relationship this will be, if I’m disliked on such irrational grounds, right from the start.”

The room became hushed. It was a fairly dramatic situation that he was centered in, but Matthew’s mind couldn’t help but wandering. He simply had to wonder what the situation looked like to his bodyguards, who didn’t understand a single word that was being said. Comprehension would have to resort to a more abstract level, for them—it would look like a bunch of old, humanoid organisms being irritated by random vibrations in the air. And that’s all it was.

Furthermore, one of those old men could say directly to Matthew, “I will kill you in the next five seconds. But not by using a physical weapon, nor will I make a single violent motion. I will not even move. Nevertheless, you will die in five seconds, if I can concentrate in peace for that long.” And his bodyguards, there to ensure his livelihood, wouldn’t do a thing to protect him, even though they could turn the man to a cloud of smoke in less than a second. He laughed at the thought.

“If we can all be grown men, I’d like to move on to matters of business, which is what we’re all here for, is it not? I will require a tour around the building, to inspect operations, if someone could kindly be provided to do this for me.”

Ronin 3

Seppuku

Reiko dived into
her project with an enthusiasm she’d never had before. She rearranged the entire room into a configuration she thought would be the best compromise between her and the rats, between her observation and their comfort. She put a lot of thought into it. When she found out that she had a fairly large budget, she had cameras installed to monitor them at all times and to record everything. From the outskirts of the city, lying in her bed at night, she would watch them on her small laptop as she drifted to sleep.

One week had gone by since her first day at Kaishin. In that time, the rest of the fourteen rats had been fitted with a machine in their heads, she had named all of them, including the control rats that had no machine, and they had all learned their names. She had learned their individual personalities, how often they slept, their nervous habits, how sociable they were. Using that information, she started writing little biographies for each.

To start with, she had decided to keep the rats that were mentally paired together in the same cage. To those eight different pairs, in eight cages, she taught one simple, unique trick. Her thought was that if, after the groups were combined into four, each rat knew two tricks with only having been taught one, that would be the simplest indication she needed that the machine worked. She taught Tako and Maguro how to roll over, Yasai and Niku how to spin in circles on command, and Neko and Inu how to play dead.

Only one of the rats, Kuro, was defiantly stupid. He wouldn’t respond to his name and refused to learn to jump when told. She went so far as to lightly starve the poor thing, by insisting that he would only get food if he jumped, but for some reason beyond her comprehension he would only eat food that was easily accessible to him, no matter how hungry he was. What was most interesting about the situation, to Reiko, was that his mental partner Kiiro was his polar opposite. Kiiro learned his name the second time that she reinforced it with food. After she taught Kiiro to jump, he literally would not stop jumping whenever she was around, unless she held him on the ground with her hand. He ate all of the food that Kuro refused to try for, which she left on a little ledge in a top corner of their cage. “I’m sorry, little Kuro,” she would say, looking at his hungry little body, in stark contrast to Kiiro, who was getting plump in spite of all his jumping. “He must be sucking it all out of you. But I can’t go easy on you just because you’re stupid, ok?”

The pair of Kiiro and Kuro led her to the conclusion that, even if their minds were in a sense shared, their very distinct personalities could be left intact. Reiko wrote into a little book she carried around, “He can see, both physically and apparently in his mind as well, the rewards of learning. And yet he defiantly chooses to be the hungriest rat in the group. It remains to be seen whether Kiiro has been holding him back, or is slowly repairing this laziness. When we group them into fours, hopefully this question can be definitively answered.”

Reiko would let them all out of their cages, sit with her legs apart on the floor with a bag of food, and have them all roaming around in front of her. Invariably a large group was directly in front of her, eying the bag of food. She would call them all by name, one by one, and lightly knock away the ones that came to her when they weren’t supposed to. As she anticipated, the mentally paired rats had a harder time distinguishing between their two names, even though they still got it right most of the time.

Towards the end of the first week, it occurred to her that maybe Kiiro and Kuro were a clearer example of something that was happening with all of the rats. Even though she had named and taught the control rats a few things, she had yet to use them in a scientific capacity. She spent an entire lunch—which she always took at a cafe across the street from the building—absorbed in thought, instead of eating. When she came back, she set up her first real experiment.

At the beginning of the week, she had already divided the eight control rats into four groups of two, kept in four separate cages, trying to keep their experience as similar to that of the other rats as possible. In preparation for her experiment, she decided to spend the next two days getting them acclimated to a more regular diet, rather than to feed them treats for good behavior. She had to somewhat compress her experiment as she otherwise would have done it, since it had been decided by Mr. Okada that on her ninth day the larger experiment would be moved forward with, whether Reiko was ready or not.

The difficulty of her experiment was that, as common an experience as hunger was, there was no real quantitative measurement of it, unless she wanted to bleed the rats out and measure the ghrelin expression she found there. She ultimately decided that she would prefer some behavioral indication of hunger.

She inserted a divider between the two halves of the cages, keeping the rats isolated. After she had the rats adjusted to a scheduled time for eating, she began to look at the behavior they exhibited around their feeding time. They nearly universally became somewhat anxious in the minutes before a scheduled feeding, with an accuracy of time that she found outstanding. She took care to arrive at work and leave at the same times every day, to reinforce their biological clock, but it still amazed her.

She took careful note of their behavior after their meals as well. They were slightly indolent, which was entirely within her expectations.

When two days had gone by, she stopped feeding one of the two rats in each cage, selected at random. She wanted to know if, somehow, the mentally paired rats were being provided a sense of satiety from their fed partner.

It was hard for her to believe, but the results seemed to conclusively prove her hypothesis. The control rats stayed anxious long after the scheduled feeding time had passed, whereas the other rats seemed satisfied by the feeding, whether they were actually fed or not. An extreme example of which was Kuro, the obstinate rat, who perhaps had the kind of personality that could easily float along the successes and feelings of his partner Kiiro, even if they weren’t his own, like some sort of emotional leech.

Mr. Okada would come in and visit nearly every afternoon, and on the day she saw her results, he politely knocked and entered at around two. The first thing he said was, “Ready for tomorrow? I’m sure you must be as excited as the rest of us to see this move forward.”

Instead of answering, Reiko said, “I think they share something deeper than information, or at least the way I see it.”

“What do you mean?” he said, smiling and taking a seat in one of the office chairs in the middle of the room.

“Well, so for the most part, they still seem like pretty normal rats. Except, even though I tried teaching them all their own name, they all to some degree associate two names with themselves. And that makes a good deal of sense, they can’t be blamed, because they hear in all four ears, and when I call the other rat they’re mentally right there with it, being called.”

Mr. Okada nodded, saying nothing,

“But it’s deeper than that. When one eats, the other feels less hungry. It’s somewhat abstract, but I feel like hunger is further along the spectrum towards personality, like their personalities are slowly being shared. Like they’re really becoming one organism. I sort of starved one of them from each pair, and fed the other, to test all of this. And it’s as if they said, ‘I ate, and even though these organs I have still feel hungry, these other organs feel nice and full, so I should be okay.’ And then they move on. How far could that go? Could one of them starve to death, and not even know it, because satiety is being fed to it through a wire in its brain? It’s absurd.

“Or what if instead of another rat on the other end of that connection they have, it’s a computer that’s not experiencing anything, yet knows how to make data representative of the most profound rat experiences possible? Could a rat god be made from such a connection? What’s to stop it from happening, the technology?” Reiko was becoming a little overly excited, and had to catch her breath for a moment.

Mr. Okada said, while she breathed, “The possibilities are really endless, aren’t they? That’s why I’m here. Where there’s so much open territory to conquer, that’s where I want to be. Would you like to see that happen, a rat connected to a computer program? I’m sure that Haru could make it happen, if you just asked him. Maybe not a full rat god program, but he’s pretty good. And he could use the distraction, he gets pretty out of hand when he doesn’t have an interesting project. You have people here that can help you answer these questions you have, if you really want them answered.”

Mr. Okada’s visit reminded Reiko that she had hardly spoken to any of the people that she worked with, except for one short meeting that Toru had set up for her with Haru to discuss the inner workings of his program, which had confused her more than anything. She had been extremely isolated for an entire week, even though her coworkers were all just a few doors away, in such a small office suite. She went straight to her room in the morning, straight to lunch, straight back, straight home, never looking to the sides. And everyone else seemed to leave her alone in turn, except Mr. Okada. The thought worried her. Had she been at fault, for isolating herself from the others so early on? She decided to go and see what everyone else was doing, to repair the damages she might have done.

At the end of the hall, she could see that a meeting was being held in the conference room, or at least a gathering of the employees, which she hadn’t been invited to. Even though she couldn’t make out any of their features, since they were obscured by the glass, she sensed a certain tension, like they were all sitting too still. There was another person, standing, that wasn’t any of the people she knew. Whoever he was, he had strikingly blond hair, which caught her eye.

Hesitantly, she made her way down the hall. The door was slightly ajar, and she could hear the words being exchanged between her coworkers and the foreigner.

The man was saying, “...merely to oversee the nature of the project, the quality of the workers being used for it, and the amount and necessity of company resources being used for it.”

It seemed strange to her that a man other than Mr. Okada would be talking about such managerial matters, since she had always assumed that it was Mr. Okada who owned the company. Reflecting, she realized that it had never been said explicitly that Mr. Okada was in fact the owner—he just exuded the confidence of ownership, so she took it for granted. Whoever the stranger was, he seemed to be challenging the authority of Mr. Okada.

She could hear Mr. Okada’s voice responding, “I assure you, Mr. Perry, that if you watched over every single one of us for the next month, you’d find not a single superfluous motion being made. These are all highly qualified individuals, and the quality of science being performed could hardly be greater. Have you seen anything that would lead you to believe otherwise?”

Both men seemed exceptionally in control, which could not have been possible, since they were obviously at war with each other. The other man, Mr. Perry, spoke perfect Japanese, but with a definite American accent, and, whether due to his foreignness or from affectation, his word choice and the small decisions he made in expression all had a sharp edge to them.

“I never doubted the quality of the science, Mr. Okada. And I’ve looked through the merits of all your team members, and as you say they are second to none in the whole company. I’m actually more concerned about how exceptionally qualified they are, and how you ended up with all of these individuals, when they could have been of extreme use in some of the other projects of the company.”

It didn’t seem to Reiko like the kind of conversation that should have been occurring in front of the people that it concerned. Perhaps it was an American way of handling things, but she found it unsettling. Also, the implication that there were other projects similar to their own, in the same building, surprised her. She had heard nothing about them, until that moment.

Mr. Perry continued, “I recognize you from the conversation we had as a group a few days ago, Mr. Okada. You were the only one that never said a thing. Now I don’t know the exact job title this company has given you, but the responsibilities you have for it are very important, and yet you spend a large portion of your day down here, supervising your own project. And you’ve diverted all of the company’s best employees into your own pet project, which seems like a willful abuse of power, to an outsider like myself. Is that a wise use of company’s resources? What do you yourself provide to this little endeavor, this Kaishin?”

Reiko wanted to burst through the door and hit the man in the face. She clenched her hands into fists, subconsciously. Yet, on the other side of the door, Mr. Okada didn’t sound phased in the least. He responded, “It’s not enough to just assemble the best people you can find into a group, Mr. Perry. If you assembled the best pieces of thirty different deer, a leg here and an eye there, you wouldn’t have made the best deer.”

Mr. Perry laughed. Cold and hard, but a genuine laugh. It sent chills through Reiko’s spine. Mr. Perry said, “Unfortunately a beautiful metaphor like that will not suffice as an answer to my questions. Unless I can be convinced otherwise, I am reassigning this project to someone that has less important things to do with their time, Mr. Okada.”

Reiko couldn’t help it. She had only known Mr. Okada for a week, and had only seen him for about eight hours within that week, but the foreign man’s decision seemed to be an affront to her personally, through Mr. Okada. She burst through the door, startling everyone in the room except for Mr. Perry.