Melek Ahmar sat in a very uncomfortable chair. Gurung had procured it from somewhere. It had great arms and a sprawling ornate back and thick curling legs, a grotesque gilded runaway exercise in wood carving by some megalomaniac carpenter with delusions of grandeur. Throne. It was actually a throne. There were dragons and apes and rams carved into it. One of the ram horns was digging into his back. He had suggested they operate from the shadows like ReGi, but Gurung insisted they needed a spectacle.
“It’ll bring the punters faster, he said,” Melek Ahmar muttered. “I’ve got to look like a king, he said . . .”
The first ten customers, predictably, were there for ReGi’s magic THC-aligned organic weed, which grew by the bushel in her alternate garden, and they were slightly nonplussed at his glorious majesty. Still, as his voice thundered out gibberish, making their bones quake, and oversized bags of weed appeared in their hands, they were reasonably pleased. A few judicious pricks from Gurung’s kukri encouraged half-hearted bows and curtsies, until the rest of the line caught on; there was new management in town, and a bit of bowing and scraping was necessary.
The eleventh guy was different. He came in holding an urn and caused an immediate furor. Gurung, fielding the wish-makers in his laconic manner, looked up with a frown.
“He wants his wife’s ashes scattered on the Kanchenjunga.”
“Is she dead already? Or do we have to take care of that as well?”
Gurung gave him a weird look. “Yes, yes, she’s passed already.”
Melek Ahmar shrugged. Who knew, with Humes?
“Top of those mountains, right? So that’s not hard, is it? Why can’t he get up there?”
“It’s forbidden to climb, first of all, and secondly, there’s no microclime, he’d be dead half a day outside the city limits,” Gurung said. He shrugged. “You could get up there, but it would take you weeks. Seems like a hassle.”
“Weeks? That was when I was weak.” Melek Ahmar smiled. “Watch, Hume, what a King of the Djinn can do.”
He leapt off the chair, which had already murdered his spine, and sucked in a lungful of power. Ahhh. It felt good to flex everything. His distortion field thickened around him into a palpable black aura, and he could sense the Humes retching and writhing in its proximity, an unfortunate effect of the particle-twisting nature of distortion itself. He grabbed the hapless widower, tucked him under his arm, and launched himself into the air, a homing missile aimed at the clouds, his raw power streaking behind like the tail of a comet. Within seconds the city was dwindling beneath him, and the man under his arm was shrieking in fear. Ahhh. This was it. Air rushing at you, birds flapping away, a struggling Hume in his talons, what sport!
Melek Ahmar returned to the garden several hours later. He was slightly bedraggled, but that was to be expected, given he had been bouncing off mountains. A very large crowd had gathered, awaiting his return, the air abuzz with excitement and conjecture. People craned their necks to get a look at him, or the hapless widower. Who was unfortunately not present.
“We had a slight accident,” Melek Ahmar said. “He wasn’t enjoying the jumping around and flying.”
“What? Did you leave him in Kanchenjunga?”
“Look, he said any mountain would do at that point, so we picked one of the closer ones.”
“Showoff,” ReGi said.
“So where is he?” Gurung asked.
“He died, just like that. His heart gave out.” Melek Ahmar looked up with a kind of wonder in his eyes. “So fragile. He smiled at the sun. Said it was beautiful. Then he was gone. So I burned his corpse and scattered his ashes with his wife’s.”
“He died?” Gurung spat. “So. Negative karma.”
“Hold on.” ReGi was staring into space, her implants scrolling data across her eyes. “He died happy, you said?”
“What do I know?” Melek Ahmar groused. “I held his head up so he could get a good long look across the sky. Fucking Humes.”
“Must have been a good fucking view, dude,” ReGi said. “He gave you everything. Every single point with his last breath. It’s a fair trade. Karma ratified it. He had no one else, no living family. You made his day, apparently.”
“Fucking Humes,” Melek Ahmar said. They break so easily . . . why the hell aren’t they more careful?
Gurung beamed. His knife flashed in his hand as he cleared the gawkers. “Next!”
* * *
Hamilcar lay supine on Doje’s couch as layers of data cascaded over him: grainy images, drone infrared and raw footage on spectrums only the Echo could decipher; garbled audio like the imaginary susurration from an ant farm; the click counter of karma changing fast, of the algorithm firing like an ancient stock market bull run; a sweaty, stocky beast of something snarling in the serene Garden of Dreams, a garden suddenly hazy and inaccessible to their mechanical eyes. He was covered in sweat. The data was relentless, frenzied. Tiers of Karma’s mind were now focused on him with a palpable weight, a gravity that he had never experienced, as if he were strapped to a gigantic wheel whose inevitable turn would pulp him any moment.
Kanelia Shakia had her own feed, lay in her own pool of sweat, her weapons laid out in front of her like fetishes. Gurkha knife. Gun. A newly acquired electric wand, designed for stunning. Three metal pinballs, drones that could fire up into the air like attack hornets, controlled by Echo. Her lines of inquiry were military: defense of the tower, and a possible invasion of the garden. She was held in rapt attention, a child wandering through the deadly basement of Karma’s arsenal, a shop seldom open for humans.
“He’s granting wishes,” Hamilcar said at last. “That’s the only explanation. I don’t know how.”
Statistics slammed into his Echo, making him groan. Murders, up. Robberies, up. Assaults, up. Suicides, up. Destruction of property, up. Use of illegal and arcane weapons, up. Bizarre and unnatural sexual acts, up. Recidivism, up. Every bad metric up, as if some base craving for disorder and pent-up lawlessness had been unleashed in the populace. And on top of everything, a plethora of weird anomalies such as flying men and giant ghost trees, Kathmandu transplanted into the middle of a jungle, as if the garden existed in two forms overlaid upon one another, one tranquil and the other full of primordial beasts.
It all came from verbal accounts, fevered dreams of men and women, of the thousands who now thronged that damn garden, all they had to go on with the failure of electronic surveillance. Karma was flying in blind, and beginning to comprehend the dismaying fallibility of the human mind, running up against the wild drinking gleeful satyr of chaos loitering inside the hindbrain, demanding to call the shots.
“He is accruing karma points at an alarming rate,” Karma said.
The Karma ticker momentarily overlaid Hamilcar’s Echo and he almost yelped. “Shut it off! He’s already in the top two hundred. Why are you still giving him points?”
“It is the algorithm,” Karma said. “My job is not to assign value. I merely ensure a true fair market. Ultimately, the actual value of anything depends on you humans.”
“But . . . but he’s helping them murder each other. He’s making them deviant.”
“I think they were already deviant,” Colonel Shakia said with a tight grin. “They’re all rounded up in one place. Why don’t we just nuke the damn garden and get it over with?”
“What? Are you crazy?” Hamilcar trailed off as he saw Karma actually computing the cost benefit of this proposal.
“Is that your formal suggestion, as the lead Defense member of this committee?” Karma asked on the audible channel.
“Committee? What the fuck? Now we’re a formal committee?” Hamilcar asked. Both women ignored him.
“It is,” Colonel Shakia said.
Karma whirred some more. “Regretfully the loss of life and general uncertainty of the outcome renders this option currently negative in value.”
“Uncertainty of outcome?” Colonel Shakia raised an eyebrow.
“The effect of our fusion weaponry on Rustic One, Lady ReGi, and the garden itself is uncertain.”
“You’re telling me a nuke is not certain to kill them?”
“Correct.”
“Hmmm.” She unconsciously fondled the butt of her gun.
“Tell me you’re not seriously considering blowing up the city,” Hamilcar said.
Colonel Shakia shrugged. “I’m the military option. That’s my job. You’re the investigator. You find a different solution, if there is one.”
“Or else?”
“Eventually we—I—will go in with an extraction team and find out the hard way.”
“Karma, I think we can all agree we are dealing with nonstandard humans here?” Hamilcar said.
“Almost certainly.”
“Alien? Something technologically augmented? Some kind of post-human?” He asked.
“Djinn. At least Rustic One and Lady ReGi.”
“I see.” Hamilcar did not see, but if Karma believed in djinn, who was he to argue? “Look, Rustic Two, Gurung, he’s the interesting one. Don’t you get it? What’s he doing there among these . . . these djinn? He’s the one who knows the city, he’s the one with some axe to grind.”
“So?” Colonel Shakia asked.
“So he’s calling the shots. I don’t know how, but he’s the one making their agenda. He tried to kill Doje before, and possibly he wants to kill him now. The real question is why. What the hell happened back then?”
Hamilcar could almost taste the reluctance of Karma to answer.
“Information immediately prior to KD1 in this issue is not accessible.”
“To us, or to you?” Colonel Shakia asked, suddenly paying attention.
Excellent question, Hamilcar thought. You are an investigator after all, my dear colonel.
Karma was silent. It was unnerving. He could not tell if she was unwilling or unable to answer.
“Let me ask a different question,” Hamilcar said. “We found out that Doje purchased many private and public properties, prior to KD1, which were subsequently requisitioned by the city. That’s how he accrued so much karma. I found certain old newspaper records, which reported an approximation of Doje’s wealth prior to KD1, among other members of the plutocracy. Converting the entirety of his value to bitto, and taking into account property prices of that era, there seems to be a gap. He was not among the city’s wealthiest men, certainly not from the noble class, yet he was able to fund huge cash purchases on the eve of the plebiscite. Where, dear Karma, did he get his funds?”
“It is not pertinent to this investigation. Doje is not under investigation.”
“I see,” Hamilcar said. It fucking is pertinent.
“Find another way, Sheriff,” Karma said. “Negotiate their exit from this city. Or Colonel Shakia shall lead the strike team in.”
Colonel Shakia got up from her couch and stretched. Her face was, as ever, inscrutable. “I’ll get cracking on that, then.”