Hamilcar Pande worked for Central Administration. He came from a bastardized offshoot of a Kshatriyan noble family, somehow crossed with Carthaginian blood, his mother some relict of ancient Punic glory, so that within him were the crossroads of most of history, the blood of warriors and explorers, and a distemper in some fold of his brain that made him restless and yearning.
No one was quite sure what he did, including himself. Central Admin itself was a strange place, because there wasn’t really much to administer. The city was run by Karma, and Karma was not self-aware. Karma didn’t care, she simply did her job, and did that damn well. Kathmandu ran without fear or failure. Central Admin was the failsafe, but what failsafe made up of meat could possibly deal with a situation where Karma herself failed? Could Hamilcar Pande make the trains run in the sky? No. Could he make water fall upward? No. Could he scrub from the air the evil nanotech the world shoveled at Kathmandu every day? No. Karma did this and everything else. Or rather, her subsystems did. Karma’s main job was not running city systems. There were plenty of AI around the world doing just that, maintaining microclimes, running water, food, shelter. Karma did math. Her job was to keep score. Of everything.
Every so often, an aberration occurred, which disturbed Karma’s vast mind. She had no sense of self, allegedly, so there was no emotional subtext to her disquiet. Still, Hamilcar could feel it, that light flutter along systems, which denoted something irregular. It was his job to investigate. No one had appointed him to this job, at least in his memory, but being of Puritanical nature, he hated sitting around doing nothing.
His previous attempts to help had rated approval from Karma. For that is what Karma did, of course, she rated the works, efforts, even the intentions of all her flock, and she awarded points for public service. She sifted through all the shit of humanity and she gave value, market value, and her judgment was beyond contest, for who in their right minds would argue with the vast computational power of Karma, whose creation was shrouded in mystery, whose systems could not be understood even by other AI?
And Karma wanted nothing, her systems were infallible, she was relentlessly fair, she predicted well beyond the ken of human understanding, and found the truth in actions and inventions that benefited the city in ways far removed from what mammalian logic or instinct could anticipate. Was she divine? Half of the city seemed to think so, yet in a laughing way, as if keeping pocket gods was now a birthright for men.
Kathmandu was rich, Karma made it richer beyond measure. Hamilcar yearned to be useful, to do, but he understood that his credo was hopelessly outdated. New philosophies had come to play these days, thoughts based on Hedonism and Epicureanism, ideas entirely necessary because there simply wasn’t any work for all those Puritans hungry for salvation, nothing useful to do, no crops to grow, no factories to work, no armies to man, no roads to build, nothing manual, nothing intellectual, only a series of human interactions pandering to each other in turn. And when bodies could be healed at whim, when the brain could be played with on a molecular level, why not search for pleasure, why not explore the absolute limits of excess? There were sybarites and daredevils, madmen and savants, celebrities famous for being famous. Yet people like Hamilcar persisted, and so unhappiness persisted, that annoyance at becoming irrelevant to the essential working of one’s own society, until Karma came, Karma who tweaked the system and gave value and validation, who made people useful, because she could see far and wide into everyone and everything.
And so when Hamilcar felt her process list spike and flutter, he turned his Echo to the cameras, and took the feed from the western gate. Two men, waiting. They were wilderness people. Had they walked here? Karma had already scanned their bodies several times. Ah. They had no Echo, no PMD. No wonder they were invisible to most of her systems. They were trying to physically talk to the gate. These were primitives. Rare. Primitives had mostly died off during the first two decades of the Dissolution Era, before the necessity of microclimates had been fully accepted. Karma didn’t like people without Echos. She couldn’t read their minds.
Savages. One of them was actually wearing an animal skin. Yes. This deserved the full attention of Central Admin. Hamilcar Pande subvocalized a command, and his Echo sent a request for microdrone surveillance to Karma. Karma’s assent was instantaneous. Of course, inside her machinery, algorithms computed his public standing, his request history, his intentions, and every other myriad variable against possible plotted outcomes, but that was the calculation of God, hidden in the tick of a second, and to Hamilcar, it seemed as if he were part of the whole glorious design, an extension of her will. It was difficult to remember that she had neither will nor desire.
“Let them in,” Pande said to no one in particular. “Watch them. Tally reports and give me highlights every three hours. And rate them for Human Intervention. They’re prims. Might not understand how we work here.”
“As you will, Sheriff,” Karma said. Sometimes she had a damn strange sense of humor.