Read Online The Complete Karma Trilogy by Jude Fawley - Free Book Online
Authors: Jude Fawley
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subway car, so that he was directly facing a stranger across the hall. The man was already asleep, head tilted painfully to one side, a channel of drool draining the dam of his mouth into the top of his chair. Matthew hated public transportation, and found the seating arrangement especially unfortunate. Five hours made for a long subway ride.
A half of the remaining passengers were people that worked under him, in some capacity or another. Several were personal bodyguards, and a majority of the rest were clerical workers. The guards were constantly glancing at him around newspapers, in performance of their duties. It had taken him a long time to adapt to the nagging feeling of always being watched, but once he had, he found their presence comforting. The clerks all had large briefcases, and nearly all stared blankly forward from where they sat, apparently opting to fill the long expanse of time with nothing.
He had been chosen to lead the operation because, although he had never been to the country, he was one of the few people in his position that spoke the language. Only one other person in their group of fifteen also spoke Japanese, which meant that unless they hired a few interpreters, a majority of the burden of translation would go through him, a thought he found entirely distasteful. He could tell already that he would be far too busy overseeing business to be bothered with such a menial task. He sifted again through papers sitting in his lap, lists of names, descriptions of various sorts. The hours whittled away.
In a slightly different life, there wouldn’t have been a Japan to go to. The thought resonated deep within his consciousness, so he focused on it. Japanese would have been a dead language, like Latin, everything practical about it evaporated away until only historians cared. And he was far from a historian at heart. In a slightly different life, Japan would have sided with Russia and China in a war that saw the complete eradication of both. The map at the front of the cabin was generous in its coloring of landmasses—it painted green across thousands and thousands of miles of black wastelands. He had seen the pictures. The only habitable portion of continental Asia was Siberia, a historical fact that would have made him laugh if he was aware of it. The Atlantic Union had hesitantly but thoroughly desecrated the rest of it, everything and everyone. And why not, Matthew thought to himself. The planet was already on its way out, so why not speed it along? And then the human race would move on to Mars, repeat the process, on and on. It had already started, and in fact would never end. That was his view on the matter, at least.
His job, in Japan, was to manage the takeover of a company that was of interest to the American government. He in particular had been assigned to it because, besides the fact that he spoke Japanese, the takeover was far from voluntary, and he had experience from before in such dealings. It took a somewhat brutal character, which he knew he possessed. As he understood it, he was part of a larger front to install an even larger American presence in every country that was not a member of the Atlantic Union. Similar parties were being sent to Africa, South America, and what remained of the Middle East. The only thing that mattered to him, though, was the performance of his own duties, which he intended to fulfill to the letter.
If a human was in charge of America, he doubted that any of the current events would have happened. A human would have been hesitant to kill six billion people as an expedient, and a human would have felt compunction ignoring the collective will of the Atlantic Union to, for all intents and purposes, invade the satellite governments left in the wake of the explosions. But for the last ten years the leader of America was not a human, but a computer program. A sophisticated computer program, to be fair, one that could predict social outcomes as easily as economic,
A half of the remaining passengers were people that worked under him, in some capacity or another. Several were personal bodyguards, and a majority of the rest were clerical workers. The guards were constantly glancing at him around newspapers, in performance of their duties. It had taken him a long time to adapt to the nagging feeling of always being watched, but once he had, he found their presence comforting. The clerks all had large briefcases, and nearly all stared blankly forward from where they sat, apparently opting to fill the long expanse of time with nothing.
He had been chosen to lead the operation because, although he had never been to the country, he was one of the few people in his position that spoke the language. Only one other person in their group of fifteen also spoke Japanese, which meant that unless they hired a few interpreters, a majority of the burden of translation would go through him, a thought he found entirely distasteful. He could tell already that he would be far too busy overseeing business to be bothered with such a menial task. He sifted again through papers sitting in his lap, lists of names, descriptions of various sorts. The hours whittled away.
In a slightly different life, there wouldn’t have been a Japan to go to. The thought resonated deep within his consciousness, so he focused on it. Japanese would have been a dead language, like Latin, everything practical about it evaporated away until only historians cared. And he was far from a historian at heart. In a slightly different life, Japan would have sided with Russia and China in a war that saw the complete eradication of both. The map at the front of the cabin was generous in its coloring of landmasses—it painted green across thousands and thousands of miles of black wastelands. He had seen the pictures. The only habitable portion of continental Asia was Siberia, a historical fact that would have made him laugh if he was aware of it. The Atlantic Union had hesitantly but thoroughly desecrated the rest of it, everything and everyone. And why not, Matthew thought to himself. The planet was already on its way out, so why not speed it along? And then the human race would move on to Mars, repeat the process, on and on. It had already started, and in fact would never end. That was his view on the matter, at least.
His job, in Japan, was to manage the takeover of a company that was of interest to the American government. He in particular had been assigned to it because, besides the fact that he spoke Japanese, the takeover was far from voluntary, and he had experience from before in such dealings. It took a somewhat brutal character, which he knew he possessed. As he understood it, he was part of a larger front to install an even larger American presence in every country that was not a member of the Atlantic Union. Similar parties were being sent to Africa, South America, and what remained of the Middle East. The only thing that mattered to him, though, was the performance of his own duties, which he intended to fulfill to the letter.
If a human was in charge of America, he doubted that any of the current events would have happened. A human would have been hesitant to kill six billion people as an expedient, and a human would have felt compunction ignoring the collective will of the Atlantic Union to, for all intents and purposes, invade the satellite governments left in the wake of the explosions. But for the last ten years the leader of America was not a human, but a computer program. A sophisticated computer program, to be fair, one that could predict social outcomes as easily as economic,
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