The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday Read online

  His distortion sphere flexed around him like a swarm of bees, a sound and atmospheric effect that made the Humes retch as he floated above them, his outline hazy with power, and landed with a crunch on the bar, cracking the hard laminate surface. His eyes were red, his skin red, like fire licking at the edges of it, and his archaic claims did not seem so funny anymore. The Humes cringed on the ground, expecting fury. But Melek Ahmar, at this moment, was not interested in destruction. He had been asleep for so long. What he really wanted was a good party. He grabbed the blinking bar unit and ripped it out of the wall. The drink cubes stopped their aerial ballet and fell helter-skelter, pelting the hapless customers. With two impossibly strong hands he wrenched off the bar counter itself, revealing a large stock of cubes underneath. If this was the only shit they had, this was what he would drink.

  He started throwing them around. “Zeroes! Rejoice, for your king is here! Tonight we drink until the little machines in your spine cry for mercy! And enough of this blinking shit. Someone play some music!”

  Zeroes stared at him, lost. Gurung got up from the floor, grabbed two cubes, and calmly drained them both. He grabbed two more, bit them in half, raw liquor sloshing over his face, tipped his head back, and gave out an ululating Gurkha warrior scream. Someone smashed a cube into Gaje’s face, and the old man suddenly echoed Gurung’s war cry, eating the cube like a watermelon, even as it dissolved into dark rum. The bar seemed to unfurl en masse, a bud suddenly flowering into something jagged and colorful. A couple jumped onto their table and began kissing, a group started singing loudly, off key and tuneless, but an old melody everyone knew. Zeroes around the room started leaping about, dancing, shouting; the party had begun.

  Chapter Five: Sheriff John Brown

  Hamilcar Pande lived in a modest ovoid building, far removed from the fashionable towers where the Kathmandu jet set played. He could have afforded more, of course: as a stalwart of Central Admin he had the points to requisition almost any living quarter. He was borderline ascetic, however, and all the indulgences of drugs and sex and Virtuality had limited appeal for him. There were people who staggered from orgy to mind-altering orgy, while their PMDs burned hot cleaning their blood, and it seemed to Hamilcar that they soon descended into one gigantic mindless beast, no longer harboring even the individuality they desperately craved.

  He maintained real, if limited, relationships. He saw his parents once a month, at their home (they were still married) for dinner, which his mother still tried to hand cook, although that was nigh impossible now that all the ingredients came in cube form and were inevitably made of some variety of seaweed. Still, there were traditions to maintain, momos to pinch shut and steam, tea that had to be served a certain way.

  His siblings lived all over town, and cousins and half cousins, and he conscientiously messaged them and attended reunions. They even had a family militant order of knights in Final Fantasy 9000, and played missions once or twice a month. He had no wife, but there was an attractive colonel who lived above him whom he had feelings for. Kanelia Shakia worked at Defense, which fielded a reserve force of human officers and soldiers in case the drone system ever went down. They mostly war-gamed simulations and did live drills with archaic equipment. Karma kept human contingencies for everything, anticipating her own failure: necessary redundancies or busywork, no one was ever quite sure. Still, public service awarded points, and that was good enough for most people.

  Once a week, Tuesdays in fact, Hamilcar had dinner with Colonel Shakia and then spent the night in her bed, where they had wild and inventive sex until exhaustion. He wanted more, but she had him on a strict schedule and seemed unwilling to deviate. He often wondered whether she had other lovers on rotation, but there was nothing furtive about the colonel, and he had never seen anyone else even visiting her, let alone spending the night. It was perfectly acceptable to have multiple partners, but Hamilcar was old-fashioned, and somehow over the past two years of seeing her, he had become half-enamored with her rigid routines.

  This morning he woke up to find her gone, but she had made hot tea for him and left a sweet note. He was perfectly welcome to take his time, but alone in her apartment, he always felt like an interloper. The urge to root through her drawers or the back of her closet was almost irresistible, but Hamilcar was a man of honor. Besides, any illicit information would cheapen the hard-won confidences the colonel dropped to him from time to time, slivers of her life that he cherished and kept like polished stones in the back of his mind.

  Her tea was excellent, made with perfect amounts of sugar and milk, stewed together in a pot rather than from the kitchen unit, so he drank it by the window, naked, and reflected on the city. He thought that perhaps he was a boring man, with a boring job, that somehow life kept him at arm’s length at all times, as if he were merely gliding along the surface of the thing without ever experiencing the real blood and guts of it. Was this what the colonel saw in him, a prop, a mannequin man?

  Was there anything such as achievement left anymore, anywhere in the world? There were still places hideously poor, places destroyed by nanotech, this was a planet of heaven and hell juxtaposed, post-human and stone age jumbled up, and he supposed he should be grateful to be living in the former. He was grateful. He believed in Karma with a confidence that far outstripped his belief in gods or nirvana. After all, he could see up close her workings. There was nothing secret about her algorithms; normal human minds couldn’t follow them, but they could see the symbols and numbers whenever they wanted, study the bits that interested them. Which god had ever lifted her shirt and let the faithful look inside her skin?

  When his tea was finished he washed the cup and pot and set them to dry. Then he dressed, made the bed, and changed her sheets and pillowcases, spending a last few minutes erasing any further signs of his ingress. He did this every time, although she never asked for it, never even seemed to notice it. This routine of physical work helped to center him, and seemed the least he could do, for messing up her orderliness. He took the stairs down to his own place, a bit heavyhearted as he was every Wednesday morning. Later, showered and shaved, he settled into his couch for some work.

  Security reports were normal, point scammers, glitch riders, grifters were all within known parameters, the violent watch list was under drone surveillance, there was an uptick of noncitizens, but that was expected during this tourist season, and anyway, well-heeled travelers never caused trouble. The days of European backpackers looking for prayer wheel philosophy and life affirmation plus some cheap hash were long, long gone. Karma taxed visitors in hard currency, and they paid well to come see the Jewel of the Himalayas.

  Something was bothering him, some tick under his skin, and it was well past lunch when he remembered the two rustics. No Echo, no PMD. He had requisitioned direct surveillance. Where was the report? He queried Karma and found a glitch. Not a glitch. More like an absence. There were a few images. Blurry. And then nothing. Large patches of time, nothing, as if the drones suddenly couldn’t see in every frequency of light and sonar and magnetic fields. Drone failure was technically possible. Unlikely, but possible. So why did he feel a gut certainty that the rustics were responsible?

  He blew up the pictures. Rustic One was big, hazy, of indiscernible ethnicity. He was the one wearing a goat. Rustic Two was unmistakably Gurkha. There was a look to his face, the deadpan expression, something pent up. What was it? Who was this man? He was not that old, why did he not have a PMD or Echo?

  “Facial history search,” he called to Karma. “Central Admin requisition account, please.”

  It was still official business. Hamilcar was scrupulous with requisitions. If it ever even felt personal, he would spend his own points, and let Karma decide on reimbursement.

  “No citizenry of Kathmandu or any known incorporation,” Karma reported. So he doesn’t belong to a foreign power, either.

  “Search pre-citizenry please. He’s definitely Gurkha, so regional search. Requisition external records i
f required.”

  “External” were pre-Karma databases, which had to be paid for with hard currency from entities that were not on the Karmic points system. Hamilcar was actually affecting Kathmandu’s external balance of payments from his couch, albeit in a miniscule way. Karma was following directions for now, like a normal input-output AI. If his query ever got more serious, she would take over, engaging higher mind tiers, and her analysis would reach levels far beyond human logic or serendipity.

  This search took longer, long enough for him to have an illicit hand-rolled cigarette, the effects of which his body purged almost before the flame was out.

  “Bhan Gurung. Eighty percent match.”

  “Good enough. Who or what is Bhan Gurung?”

  “Male, early sixties. No permanent address, affiliation, or data trace. Recidivist, most likely.”

  “No scores? Not even guest scores?” Karma kept unofficial point scores for visitors, in case they ever wanted to requisition something against any good deeds. It was also a fad for travelers, to come to Kathmandu and accrue some of those famous karma points. She even issued certificates upon leaving, if someone had done something particularly useful.

  “None. Not even any gaming records.”

  “So a luddite of some sort.” A flash of insight. “Where was he, Karma Day One?”

  A longish pause. He felt a flutter in Karma, as if a second gear of her mind was now engaging. “Prison. Death sentence. He was to be executed on Karma Day One.”

  “And you stopped it?”

  “Day One was general amnesty, erasure of debt, cancellation of all contracts, deposit of all currencies, and nationalization of all private property,” Karma said. “Yes, his execution was stopped with two hours to spare.”

  “What was his crime?”

  “Records sealed and unavailable.”

  “He’s inside our walls. Requisition in the name of national security!”

  “Not sealed in an ethical sense. Hard sealed with crypto, and even then the files appear empty. Flushed. Records are physically unavailable.”

  “Even for you? I mean the top tiers of you?”

  “There is no cure for full and final erasure.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “It is irregular. Many things were irregular before KD1.”

  “Can we pull him in?” Hamilcar asked.

  “He has done nothing wrong so far. Pulling him in is not a requisitionable option at this point.”

  “Please run your advanced predictive algorithm for future threat levels.”

  “This is a problem,” Karma said.

  “What? Why?”

  “The predictive algorithm is not working for them. The nameless male . . . Rustic One. He is blocking the algorithm.”

  “What? How? Is he a hacker? He’s wearing a goatskin, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Not hacking. By existing. He is blocking the algorithm just by being there,” Karma said. There was a weight to her voice, as if an unknown number of mind tiers had crashed the conversation. “Sheriff. You are authorized to investigate in person.”

  Somehow the sobriquet did not sound so mocking this time.

  Chapter Six: Goat Blood Café

  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 dea
th 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.