Karma-Marketing

Chapter 1

Pavel Sergeevich Kuznetsov sat in the open office of the IT company "SocNet Development" writing code for an app that was supposed to change the world. Or at least earn him a New Year's bonus.

The idea came to him during meditation—that is, while smoking on the balcony, which in

Pavel's understanding was pretty much the same thing. Both required proper breathing

and thinking about nothing at all. Pavel smoked and looked at the frozen Moscow River,

pondering how great it would be if every like under a post about helping homeless cats

earned a person real-life benefits.

"Karma marketing," he said aloud, and a cloud of vapor escaped his mouth, instantly

transforming in his imagination into the logo of a future startup.

The "KarmaCoin" app was supposed to work simply: users perform good deeds

online—like posts from charitable foundations, repost information about missing people,

donate to children's medical treatments—and receive digital karma points. The more

points, the higher the user's rating in the system and the more "random" good fortune

awaits them.

Well, not exactly random. Pavel had built a clever system into the algorithm: the app

analyzed users' social media, determined their needs (wanting to find a job, a girlfriend, or

lose five kilograms by summer), then created "happy coincidences" through a partner

network. HR managers received notifications about candidates with high karma,

advertising algorithms showed such people discounts on gym memberships, and in dating

apps their profiles appeared in top search results.

"Pavel," called out his team lead Zhenya Krysakova, "how's your karma coming along? Can

you show a demo by Friday?"

"Almost ready," Pavel lied, though he still had about ten days of pure coding ahead. "Just

need to integrate with the social media APIs."

Actually, the APIs had been integrated for a week. Pavel was stuck on a more

philosophical question: how do you program karma? What is good from the perspective of

machine code? Can you translate metaphysical categories into "if-else" conditional

operators?

He'd created a basic weighting system: reposting information about a missing child

earned +100 points, liking a selfie from an expensive restaurant cost -5 points,

commenting in support of the homeless earned +50 points, hate directed at emergency

services cost -30 points. But the longer he worked on the algorithm, the more he realized

he was creating something like a digital deity that would judge human actions by criteria

established by a programmer from the Moscow suburbs.

That evening, when the office emptied and the lights of Moscow City lit up outside the

windows, Pavel stayed to finish the analytics module. At that moment, a message

appeared in the app's chat from an unknown user with the handle @Avalokiteshvara:

"We've been monitoring your work. Meet tomorrow at 6:00 PM at the 'Samsara' café in

Kitay-gorod. Bring your laptop."

Pavel stared at the screen. There were no users in the app's database yet—he hadn't even

released an alpha version. How could someone have written this?

He checked the server logs—nothing. Checked the git commit history—clean. Opened the

chat code—everything was standard, the usual React and stack, nothing mystical.

But the message hung in the chat, and this was a fact: "Bring your laptop."

Pavel saved his changes, closed the IDE, and realized he would definitely go to that café

tomorrow. Not because he believed in mysticism, but because he was a programmer. And

programmers, unlike normal people, don't fear bugs—they hunt them down and fix them.

Even if those bugs invite you to cafés.

Chapter 2

The "Samsara" café turned out to be the kind of place you could find in any Moscow
district—gray and unremarkable. Pavel walked past it twenty times. The sign was so banal
that his eyes simply refused to register it.
Inside it smelled of green tea and something else—either incense or old books. Pavel
ordered a cappuccino and sat at a table by the window, placing his laptop beside him.
Exactly at 6:00 PM, a man about forty-five years old in an oatmeal-colored sweater sat
down across from him.
"Pavel Sergeevich?" he asked, though his intonation was more declarative. "My name is
Oleg Vitalievich. Just Oleg is fine."
"Did you write in the chat?" Pavel tried to get a good look at his companion.
Oleg looked like a typical middle manager from any IT company—nothing mysterious
about his appearance.
"In a sense," Oleg took out his phone, placed it on the table, and asked, "Will you show me
what you've created?"
Pavel opened his laptop and launched the local version of the app. Oleg studied the
interface carefully, nodding from time to time.
"Interesting," he said finally. "You've intuitively found the right direction. But you have a
fundamental error in your architecture."
"What error?" Pavel exhaled.
"You think karma is a metaphor. That you can take an abstract concept and reduce it to
an algorithm. But karma isn't a metaphor. It's a protocol."

Pavel blinked: "A protocol?"

"Imagine that the universe is a huge system. Every human action is a transaction. Karma

is the consensus mechanism that ensures system integrity. The problem is that until now

this protocol has been running on... let's say, analog hardware."

"Analog?" Pavel repeated.

"Monks, priests, shamans. People who spent years learning to properly read karmic

transaction logs. But analog systems are slow and unreliable. Human factor, you

understand?" Oleg smiled. "We decided to modernize the infrastructure."

"We—who's 'we'? Could you explain?"

"An organization that's been monitoring the protocol's proper operation for... very long

time. Previously we worked through temples and monasteries. But times have changed.

Now people spend more time on the internet than in real life. And we thought: what if we

adapt ancient technologies to modern realities? Karma, Pavel Sergeevich, has existed for

thousands of years. It's existed as long as consciousness itself. We just didn't have

sufficient computational power before to process all transactions in real time."

Oleg picked up his phone and quickly typed something. The screen on Pavel's laptop

flickered, and a new menu appeared in the app: "Advanced Karmic Engine Settings."

"How did you do that?" Pavel tried to find new lines in the code, but they weren't there.

The app worked as if this section had been there from the beginning.

"We simply connected your app to the main network," Oleg finished his tea. "Now it can

work with real karmic data, not simulations."

"Real?" Pavel exhaled.

"What did you think?" Oleg stood up and placed a business card on the table. It only had a

name, phone number, and the mysterious abbreviation "DKAP." "Tomorrow, upload the app

to the stores. We've already arranged with the moderators—you'll pass review in a few

hours. And the day after tomorrow you'll see how real karma marketing works."

"Wait," Pavel tried to stop him, "what does DKAP stand for?"

Oleg turned around at the exit: "Department of Karmic Accounting and Planning. We've

been in the Ministry of Digital Development for about fifteen years. We just don't advertise

it."

The café door closed, and Pavel sat there with his laptop, which suddenly contained code

he hadn't written, and with a business card from a government agency no one had heard

of.

Chapter 3

Pavel woke up feeling drained. His dreams had been strange: as if he'd been wandering

through endless nested loops, trying to find an exit while variables around him changed

their values without his participation.

First thing, he checked his laptop. The app was working, the counter showed 1,204,847

users, and analytics sections appeared that Pavel definitely hadn't created. Usage

geography, demographic breakdown, even some kind of karmic heat maps of Moscow. The

strangest part—the app still hadn't been published.

"Good morning," Zhenya wrote to him in corporate Slack. "How are things with the demo?"

"Ready," Pavel replied, attaching a screenshot of the main screen. "Ready to show the

client."

"Cool! And who are these one and a half million users in the statistics?"

Pavel stared at the message. How did Zhenya know about the users? He'd sent a clean

screenshot without counters.

"What users?" he wrote.

"Pavel, I can see your screen through the Slack bot. The statistics are impressive. The

client will be thrilled."

At lunch he decided to take a walk and stopped by the former McDonald's. He ordered a

former Big Mac, held out his card for payment, and the cashier suddenly smiled:

"The order costs 150 rubles, but you have a discount for high karmic rating. So it's 50."

"What discount?"

"Partnership program with KarmaCoin," she pointed to the terminal screen, which

displayed his app's logo. "You're the developer, right? It says so in your profile."

Pavel slowly took out his phone. The KarmaCoin icon was indeed displayed on the main

screen. The app showed his karmic balance: 15,847 points, status "Enlightened Developer,"

achievement "Creator of Beneficial Algorithms."

He opened the App Store. KarmaCoin was hanging at number 3 in the free apps chart.

Rating 4.9, over two million downloads. Reviews were enthusiastic: "Finally karma works

fairly!", "Got promoted at work after a week of use!", "Met my wife through karmic

coincidences!" Publication date: three months ago.

Pavel called Oleg.

"Pavel Sergeevich," the voice sounded as if Oleg had been waiting for this call, "how are

your impressions from the first day of operation?"

"How is this possible? The app has been in stores for three months, but I only started

developing it two weeks ago."

"Time is a relative quantity," Oleg replied philosophically. "Especially when it comes to

karmic algorithms. We simply corrected the timestamps in the reality database."

"In the reality database?"

"Pavel Sergeevich, you're a programmer. You should understand: if an interface exists,

then there's an API. If there's an API, then there's a database. Did you think reality works

differently?"

Pavel sat on a bench in the square next to the office. People walked around, and many of

them stopped, took out their phones, tapped something, then smiled and walked on with

lighter steps.

"Are they all using the app?" Pavel asked.

"So far only Moscow has the pilot launched. But results exceed expectations. Road

aggression levels have dropped 23%, charitable donations have increased fourfold, and

random meetings that grew into serious relationships have increased sevenfold."

"And this is all because of my app?"

"Because of ours," Oleg gently corrected. "You wrote the interface. We connected it to the

main system. By the way, we have a planning meeting tonight. We'll discuss regional

expansion."

"Planning meeting where?"

"At the DKAP office, 15th floor, Federation-East tower. Elevator to the 14th, then take the

service stairs. Door without a nameplate, but you'll recognize it."

"How will I recognize it?"

"You now have karmic navigation in the app. Trust the algorithm."

Oleg hung up, and Pavel looked at his phone screen. A new section had indeed appeared in

KarmaCoin—"Destiny Navigation." The route to Federation-East tower was already built,

with the note: "Important meeting in 4 hours 27 minutes. Life-changing probability: 87%."

Pavel stood up and headed toward the metro.

Chapter 4

The DKAP office was located in that part of the building that didn't exist on evacuation

plans. Pavel went up to the 14th floor of Federation-East tower and at the end of the

corridor found an inconspicuous door with a code lock. Behind it was a service elevator

that took him to a small office space—apparently a technical floor converted into an

office. The door was indeed without a nameplate, but with a lock that opened to his

fingerprint—though Pavel had never given his biometrics anywhere in his life.

Behind the door was an ordinary IT office—bean bag chairs, open space, free coffee

machine. On shelves between O'Reilly bestsellers and technical manuals stood books on

quantum physics and Eastern philosophy—and they all looked equally well-read. Pavel

noticed that everyone had small widgets spinning in the right corner of their monitors—at

first he thought they were currency rates, but then he made out the labels: "Average

happiness level," "Regional good deeds index," "Justice balance in real time."

"Pavel Sergeevich!" Oleg appeared from behind a shelf of technical manuals. "Come in,

meet the team."

The team consisted of people who looked like IT workers who'd decided to move to an

ashram—with blissful smiles and laptops with dharma wheel stickers.

"This is Anna Petrovna, our chief karmic analyst," Oleg introduced a girl in a gray cardigan.

"She's responsible for balancing karmic weight algorithms."

"I thought the universe did that," Pavel said.

"The universe delegated part of its authority to us back in 2003," Anna Petrovna replied

seriously. "After social networks appeared on the internet. The volume of karmic

transactions grew exponentially, and the old processing methods couldn't cope."

"Have a seat," Oleg suggested, pointing to a bean bag chair next to a flip chart. "We'll show

you a presentation."

On the flip chart was a diagram: in the center—"Karmic Blockchain," with arrows

extending to blocks labeled "Desires Module," "Coincidence System," "Destiny API," and

"Karma Support Service."

"You see," Oleg pointed the marker at the diagram, "before your app we worked mainly

through analog interfaces. Temples, monasteries, fortune tellers. But bandwidth was

extremely low. One lama could process a maximum of a hundred karmic requests per

day. But your app can process millions of transactions."

"And what's next?" Pavel asked, feeling like Alice in IT-Wonderland.

"Next is scaling," Anna Petrovna joined the conversation. "We're launching KarmaCoin

throughout Russia by the end of the month. Then the CIS, then the whole world. The goal is

to transfer the entire planet to digital karma by 2030."

"What will happen to the old system? To temples and monks?"

"Legacy support," Oleg shrugged. "We'll leave it for those who don't use smartphones. But

that's a niche market."

Anna Petrovna opened her laptop and showed a real-time dashboard. Numbers flickered

like in hacker movies: good deeds per minute, average karmic debt processing time,

percentage of users who got what they wanted within a week.

"73% positive conversion," she said proudly. "Better than any advertising platform."

"And the other 27%?"

"Bugs in the desires algorithm," Anna Petrovna smiled embarrassedly. "Sometimes the

system incorrectly interprets user requests. A person wants to lose weight and gets food

poisoning. Or wants a promotion at work, gets fired by a tyrannical boss, but then finds

their dream job."

"Is there a technical solution?" Pavel asked purely professionally.

"We're working with a neural network," Oleg replied. "Training it on a corpus of all prayers

spoken over the past three thousand years. Soon we should roll out KarmaCoin 2.0 with

improved human desire parsing."

Pavel sat listening to how the ancient mystical concept of karma was being discussed in

terms of technical specifications, and thought about where this world was heading, where

spirituality had become a startup and enlightenment was one of the premium subscription

features.

"I have a question," he said finally. "What if the system fails? What if someone hacks this

karmic blockchain?"

Oleg and Anna Petrovna exchanged glances.

"Pavel Sergeevich," Oleg said quietly, "haven't you wondered why exactly you wrote this

app? Why exactly you came up with the idea of karma marketing?"

"Coincidence?"

"There are no coincidences in the karmic system. There are only events whose causes we

can't yet trace."

Anna Petrovna turned her laptop screen toward him. It showed a database with his

personal profile. Karmic balance since birth, life events graph, future predictions.

"According to our calculations," she said, "you were chosen by the system before you were

born. KarmaCoin isn't exactly your invention. It's the universe's way of updating its own

software."

Pavel looked at his life graph, where every important event was marked as "systemic."

Entering technical university—systemic. Working at SocNet Development—systemic. Even

smoking on the balcony that day when the idea came—systemic.

"So I never had a choice?"

"There's always a choice," Oleg smiled. "The question is who makes it—you or the

algorithm that created you."

Chapter 5

Pavel walked home on foot, ignoring the karmic navigation. He wanted to make at least

one independent decision. But the app still vibrated every hundred meters, suggesting

"random meetings with interesting people" and "spontaneous discoveries of new places."

He reached his building in two hours instead of the usual forty minutes, but met three

classmates he hadn't seen in ten years, found a café with the best coffee in the

neighborhood, and got a flyer with a discount on meditation courses. The system worked

even when he tried to resist it.

At home Pavel opened his laptop and tried to access KarmaCoin's admin panel. The login

and password worked, but instead of familiar database settings he saw an interface that

would be more suitable for a spaceship control panel. Tabs were labeled "Quantum Event

Correction," "Desire Synchronization," "Coincidence Moderator."

In the "Active Users" section he saw familiar names. Zhenya Krysakova, karmic balance

+5,847, status "Junior Mentor," last action—"helped colleague with production bug." His

neighbor Uncle Vova, balance -347, status "Tram Boor," last action—"yelled at delivery

guy."

And then Pavel saw his mother. Tatyana Ivanovna Kuznetsova, balance +127,483, status

"Saintly Old Lady," last action—"fed yard cats." In the "Karmic Privileges" column was a

list: "Disease protection," "Children's luck," "Longevity," "Intuitive understanding of

grandchildren."

"Mom was always in the system," Pavel realized.

He called her.

"Mom, can I ask you something? Do you know what karma is?"

"Pavlusha, of course I know," his mother's voice carried a smile. "What happened?"

"How do you know?"

"How could I not know? All of life is built on it. You do good—you receive good. You do

bad—it comes back. It just works faster now than before."

"Now?"

"Well yes. Five years ago it could still drag on for years. You'd do someone harm, and

payback would only come after ten years. But now—bam, immediately. Very convenient."

"Do you know about the KarmaCoin app?"

Of course, I use it every day. Though my neighbor Vera Petrovna explained it to me. She

says now you can do good deeds through your phone. I photograph kitties, post them,

people give likes, and I get points for it."

"Points?"

"Karmic ones. The more points, the more luck."

Pavel opened his mother's profile in the app. Registration date—three years ago, though

KarmaCoin had existed, in his opinion, for only a week. Activity for the past month: 847 cat

photos, 234 reposts about helping seniors, 156 supportive comments under strangers'

posts.

After talking with his mother, Pavel sat down to write a letter to KarmaCoin technical

support. He started with "Dear colleagues," then deleted it and wrote "Hello," then deleted

that and just wrote: "What's happening?"

The response came in thirty seconds:

"Hello, Pavel Sergeevich! What's happening is routine debugging of reality matrix bugs.

Your mother was a beta tester of our system. It turned out that elderly people have good

intuition for karmic algorithms. By the way, tomorrow at 10 AM there's a scheduled

release of KarmaCoin 2.0. There will be a patch for the human desires module and a new

feature—predictive karma. We recommend updating. Regards, DKAP Support Service."

Pavel looked at the clock. It was 11:47 PM. Tomorrow a new version of reality was

expected, and he realized he wanted to see what it would be like.

Chapter 6

The KarmaCoin 2.0 update began at 10:00 AM Moscow time. Pavel woke up to his phone

vibrating loudly. A loading icon in the form of a dharma wheel was spinning on the screen.

"Updating reality matrix... 23%... 47%... 100%. Welcome to KarmaCoin 2.0! New feature:

predictive karma. Now the system not only tracks your actions but foresees their

consequences three generations ahead."

In the metro all passengers were looking at their phones with identical expressions of

surprise on their faces. Pavel glanced over a neighbor's shoulder—he was studying the

new "Future Karmic Scenarios" menu. The screen read: "If you give your seat to an elderly

woman, your great-grandson will receive a Stanford scholarship in 2087. Probability: 73%."

"Cool," said the neighbor and stood up, freeing his seat for a grandmother with a shopping

bag.

Chaos reigned in the office. Zhenya was rushing between monitors, tracking user

reactions to the update.

"Pavel!" she shouted when she saw him. "We have a problem! Users are complaining that

the system has become too accurate!"

"In what sense?"

"Look: a girl wanted to meet a guy. The system showed a forecast—if they meet, they'll get

married. They'll have three children, but divorce in the twelfth year of marriage. Now she's

afraid to talk to him."

Pavel opened the feedback dashboard. Complaints poured in one after another: "Found out

that if I change jobs, I'll be happier but die two years earlier," "The system predicted my

cat will live 16 years if I buy premium food, and 14 years on regular food. Now I'll go broke

on cat food," "Predictive karma says if I don't call my mother today, she'll be offended, and

it will affect my karma for the next three lives. But I'm not a Buddhist!"

Pavel's phone rang.

"Pavel Sergeevich, we've received a directive from above. We need to roll back the update."

"From above—where's that?"

"From the central office. Tibet, Potala Monastery. Turns out predictive karma violates one

of the system's basic principles—people's right not to know their future."

"Isn't it better to know the consequences of your actions?"

"Theoretically yes. But practically people start getting paranoid and stop acting at all. In

two hours of the new version's operation, the number of karmic transactions dropped 67%.

People are afraid to do anything."

Pavel looked out the window. Pedestrians stood at the intersection, buried in their phones,

studying karmic forecasts for their next step. Cars weren't going anywhere either, as

drivers read predictions about the consequences of their next turn.

"So what now?"

"Now emergency downgrade to version 1.7. That had only basic karma without predictions.

And we'll add a 'Karmic Uncertainty' feature—the system will show only probabilities, not

exact forecasts."

"Oleg, can I ask something? Who actually controls this whole system? DKAP? Tibetan

monks? The universe?"

There was a long pause.

"Pavel Sergeevich, haven't you considered that no one controls it? That the system simply

exists, like gravity or electromagnetism? We, the monks, IT specialists—we're all just

interfaces for interacting with it."

"Then who created the system itself?"

"Who created physics? Who wrote DNA code? Who programmed mathematics? Perhaps

some things exist not because someone created them, but because they can't not exist."

After the conversation Pavel opened the admin panel and initiated rollback to version 1.7.

The process was slow—the system resisted, producing errors like "Cannot forget the

future" and "Predictions already integrated into current reality." But gradually the city

came alive. People started moving again, making decisions, taking actions without

knowing their exact consequences. Karmic transactions resumed.

A notification appeared on screen: "Downgrade successfully completed. KarmaCoin 1.7

with 'Karmic Uncertainty' feature activated. Thanks for your patience. P.S. Some users

may retain residual precognitive abilities. This is normal."

Pavel looked at his phone. A new tab had appeared in the app—"My Role in the System."

And in it, one line: "Reality Debugger. Status: Active."

He smiled and went to lunch. In his pocket the phone gently vibrated, suggesting the

optimal route to a café where a chance meeting with someone who would change his life

awaited him.

Or wouldn't. Now that was a mystery.