Hamilcar Pande’s first instinct was to confront the rustics. He was a straightforward man, unused to subtlety. By the time he reached their last known location, however, all he found was a quartet of distraught police drones and a completely wrecked tavern. He had seen some wild parties, especially in the tourist quarter, but this was insane. Every autonomous system had been dismantled, in most cases literally ripped out of the walls. Vomit, piss, blood, and unlikely amounts of semen pooled on almost every level surface, accompanied by lewd graffiti and knife marks gouging the walls, as well as various fist-sized holes, burns, acid scars, and other inexplicable damage, as if a convention of well-armed psychopaths had decided to distill their annual rampage into a single night.
Hamilcar was appalled. This was a zero bar, so technically there was no theft, as the drinks were free. Wanton destruction of property called for a negative balance, a karmic demerit, but in most cases Karma forgave minor debts. Here it was impossible to even levy it, for it seemed that whatever distorting effect emanated from Rustic One, it covered a wide enough area to obscure all the other patrons. The drone feeds had nothing but blurry faces, if that. For a system used to total and instant visual surveillance, this was disturbing. He could feel Karma’s disquiet, and it upset him further.
“Shall I ferret them out?” he asked subvocally. “Surely there is enough cause now to eject them from the city.”
“I cannot assess their threat level. Drunken debauchery is not sufficient cause for any action. I am curious,” Karma said. “They appear harmless, yet this ability to avoid surveillance is disturbing. There might come a time when more overt threats utilize this camouflage. We require more information.”
“Can you locate them?”
“Not precisely,” Karma admitted. “By process of elimination, I can give you a probable area, perhaps a block. I think they are stationary somewhere. It is easier to find them if they move around. By my calculation of the depleted stock in this bar, the patrons present must have ingested alcohol and narcotic substances meant to supply two hundred people, yet there were hardly thirty individuals in here, including the rustics. They must all be comatose.”
Hamilcar followed the trail of destruction to the back corner. Was that a decapitated goat? Ritually sacrificed? It was. These people were disgusting. Where the fuck did they get a live goat?
“I will investigate another way, then,” he said to Karma.
Later, curled up in his couch, Hamilcar delved into the past. Karma Day One. The big change. It hadn’t come as a surprise, of course. Months of debates, votes, warnings, fights. The consensus in the end had been either to try this radical gamble or to abandon the city altogether. The confluence of pollution, harmful nanotech, economic meltdown, and an angry, bitter population had made the leap of faith possible. So many people must have gambled on this day, anticipated the new world and how to get on top of it. Karma took everything; money, land, companies, stocks, bonds, vehicles, food, even a grandmother’s famous momo recipe. It gave only one thing back. Points. Points for service, points for good works, points for intellectual copyright, points awarded by algorithms that snaked into the future, mathematical prescience that would have beggared the Oracle of Delphi.
Fair trade and good works, this was the basic heart of the system; Karma couldn’t be swindled, she couldn’t be bluffed, she didn’t permit price gouging or fixing or hoarding or adulteration or IP theft, or all the unfair practices corporations used to control the economy, and despite the serpentine mathematics involved, the end result was simple—Karma made the market for every human transaction, big or small, and in circumstances of the public good, she awarded points herself. Altruism was a big thing these days, with god watching.
But just one time, on Day One, Karma gave points as compensation, for all the private property the city needed, all the things it deemed useful and “confiscated.” Not money. Electronic money was deemed useless, artificial, fiat currency backed by nothing. Karma took physical infrastructure, physical properties, food stocks, and she put her own value on things, and this value was indisputable. There were no courts, after all, no appeals, only the tiers of her vast mind.
So some people had lost. The wrong kind of wealthy, the ones who didn’t see it coming. But the clever ones did see it coming. They had done the math, had retooled their investments. There were men and women in this city with stratospheric karma, people who could requisition and repurpose entire city blocks for their personal use. Even in paradise, there were movers and shakers, people who could translate karmic clout into external force, whose tentacles no doubt extended to other cities. He glanced through the leader boards. Barsha. Doge. Ankhit. Thapas. Basnyats. A few Pandes. Some old names cropping up, and some new.
So who was Bhan Gurung, to warrant a death penalty? And who was it that had the clout to destroy the records of his case? Someone who did it before Day One, who knew what was coming. Karma relied on databases. She needed information; without it she was blind. Almost forty years. Hamilcar smiled to himself. There were databases that could not be erased so easily. Data imprinted in meat. There were still people who remembered things from back then, who droned on and on about the good old days. He had to find that oft-ignored resource: old people.
A quick series of calls later, he found himself none the wiser. None of his thirty-six relatives over the age of fifty-five remembered any such case, no grisly murders, no sensational case, no Bhan Gurung. Many of them openly mocked him for being delusional. He expanded his conversations to general acquaintances, and still found nothing. Plenty of people seemed to remember the name Gurung, but whether this was the same man was highly debatable. One old gossip hound recalled a famous knife fighter from back in the day called Bhan Gurung, who most likely came to a disreputable end, for they always do, don’t they? Another lady recalled having an affair with a dashing Gurung fellow who could snake up balconies like a flying eel, and oooh, imagine what he could do with those hips in bed . . . Of actual murder trials there was no recollection, not even from two foul-mouthed cigar-smoking octogenarian lady journalists who claimed to know where every single body was buried.
Later at night, even though it was not a Tuesday, he called the colonel, sketching out the case, and she reluctantly came over to help him brainstorm.
“A trial that no one remembers. It’s crazy. A death penalty, and no one recalls a thing. Not even my great-aunt the judge.”
“It’s easy,” the colonel said after a few minutes of wrinkling her forehead and thinking ferociously.
“Er, what?”
“If it wasn’t a public trial it could have been a military one.”
“Of course!” He kissed her on the lips. She kept them firmly shut.
“I have an uncle,” the colonel said. “He used to be military police back then. I’ll ask him.”
“Now, please?”
“Yes, fine.”
“And would you like to stay over? I’ll get dinner . . .”
“It’s not Tuesday.”
“True. However, you’re already here and there isn’t, you know, a fine-print agreement about Tuesdays . . .”
“I’m not . . .”
“We could keep working on the case,” Hamilcar said. “I already asked Karma, she said I could deputize you.”
The urge to do something interesting won out. “Fine. Why not?”
“Great.” Hamilcar beamed. “This is real, I feel it, it’s important. It’s not just busywork.”
* * *
The colonel’s uncle did remember. He had been a freshly minted brigadier in the army back then, when the army still meant regiments and guns and tanks.
“Bhan Gurung,” he said. “That name haunts me still. He was a soldier in my friend’s regiment. Gurkha, you know, they were all in the army back then. Bhan Gurung. That man could use a kukri. Three times champion in close-quarter combat, before he was twenty. He was a star, a stone killer, and his ancestor was a legend from WW2, Bhanbhagta Gurung, so the boys were in awe of him, even his commanding officer. Anyway, something happened, one day he snapped, broke into the compound of a very rich man and killed everyone inside. Twelve bodyguards, either decapitated or stabbed to death. Two cooks, three maids, the housekeeper, two bearers, all dead. The compound was an abattoir. The owner’s family was not home, fortunately, for I’m sure they were the target. His younger brother was, and he died a gruesome death. Bhan Gurung tied him up and cut off bits and pieces until he bled out. The businessman himself barely escaped with his life. He arrived home midway, and Gurung waded through his guards and driver, stabbed him in the neck. By this point Gurung himself had been shot multiple times. They collapsed on top of each other, both on death’s door. Both survived. Of course, the police came and then the military police took over. The case was hushed up, and the trial was closed doors. Gurung admitted to murder, there was hardly any need of a trial. Me? I didn’t attend, no. Only three or four officers, I think, and they’ve all passed away. I remember talking to one of them after, General Thapa, he was the ranking chap at the rally, get this, he said this was the first time he had cried in all his life, since he was a toddler. I pressed him for details, but he never gave me any, other than saying that to a man they all wept, and Gurung was sentenced to death, and he refused to appeal.”
“They cried?”
“I don’t know why, he would never discuss it. I don’t know what happened afterward, either. I suppose Gurung was executed. Karma came and the world turned upside down, and everyone forgot about Bhan Gurung. The rich man’s name? I can’t quite recall . . . He wasn’t famous or anything, just some wealthy businessman, I guess. Dorji? Doje! That’s it, Doje! It wasn’t in the papers, Doje and the military hushed everything up. He wanted privacy, I guess, to protect his family. Hmm that’s all? What a memory to bring back . . .”
Doje!
“He’s number five on the karma scale. Doje. Has to be the same guy!” Hamilcar stabbed the list with his virtual finger.
“Fifth richest man in the city,” Colonel Shakia said. She scanned his points history. “Exemplary life. Requisitions are nothing extravagant, not for someone his level. A lot of philanthropic work. Hasn’t put a foot wrong since KD1.”
“Why’s he so rich?” Hamilcar asked. “Why does Bhan Gurung cause a small massacre trying to kill him? And why does he—or his people—erase all records of this crime?”
“I can answer the first one,” the colonel said. “He got his points on Day One. Karma requisitioned all his property, and he had the buildings most desirable for her infrastructure. Not the most expensive land, mind you, just the most useful. Almost like he knew . . . So many points. Just for land? Something feels off to me.”
“You ever wonder how it happened?” Hamilcar asked idly. “I mean how Karma came here?”
The colonel shrugged. “It was detailed in the KD1 announcement.”
“Blah blah yes, the city was failing, we were losing the nannite war, there wasn’t enough food or power or anything, people were literally about to eat each other . . .” Hamilcar said. “I’m talking about the actual nuts and bolts transfer of power to Karma.”
“We had a plebiscite.”
“Yes. But who actually brought the initial offer? Karma didn’t appear out of thin air, where was she made? Who made her, and why did they pick us? Who negotiated on our behalf?”
“The government? What was it then, a parliament?”
“There barely was a government back then,” Hamilcar said. “The city was failing, remember? No. I get the feeling Karma first approached the actually powerful people, the oligarchs, the nobles, the rich. People like Doje, maybe. And they negotiated in a way that let them preserve their clout. Look at the points list. Most of them made the top hundred on KD1, and have never left.”
“But the system works,” the colonel said with a shrug. “Who cares about the points? Karma saved the city, and now it’s a wonder of the world. People thrive. There are no poor, no unhappy people. And Karma is merciful. She pardoned even Bhan Gurung, who murdered twenty-three people and crippled several more.”
“Yes, I have not seen Karma falter at all. But this is before KD1. This thing happened when it was men in charge, and then the records were deliberately destroyed. So what I want to know is, why did Bhan Gurung kill twenty-three men and women to get to Doje?”
“That’s a damn good question,” said the colonel.