The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “Son of a bitch,” Matilda muttered under her breath as she stood beside Tim’s desk. “This is incredible. And you saw this happen? This is the big thing you couldn’t talk about yet?”

  “This is it,” said Tim, still frowning pensively at the screen. “And so far the wolf pack is keeping to the script.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He waved a lazy hand towards the television set. “They’re all asking about the girl. They want to know where she came from, how she came back.”

  “So do I!” replied Matilda. She sounded mildly affronted that he shouldn’t agree with the obvious.

  “But no one’s asking about him.”

  “Him who?”

  “Nickelbaum,” answered Tim. “They’re not bothering to ask what happened to him.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Where did he go?” he prompted, not really expecting an answer.

  He waited, knowing it would sink in after a second. He watched her expression and saw exactly what was going through her mind. It would be the same if he asked a dozen of his students or people on the street. Nickelbaum had been dismissed, ignored, forgotten, because he had always been scheduled to die, to be extinguished. Of course, the return of Mary Ash was more interesting; it was downright fascinating and compelling. And Tim had no more pity for Nickelbaum than others, but—

  “He’s the other half of the equation,” he pointed out, as Matilda looked vaguely embarrassed at forgetting this detail.

  “When he went,” she started tentatively, “she came back. So there must be…” She trailed off with a shrug.

  “A connection? Sure, but what kind? People are working on a couple of very tenuous assumptions.”

  “But he’s gone now, and the girl came back from the dead!”

  “Which means what exactly?” asked Tim. “Where is ‘dead’? How the hell do we even define ‘dead’ anymore? How did his execution bring her back? There’s no logic to it, not at all, because we don’t have sufficient information yet. And if Nickelbaum went to the same place his victim was in, then Weintraub’s right, and a court decision and our standard morality might play no factor at all in the actual process. Chew on that one for a while! But okay, sure, suppose he went somewhere else. Suppose he went down there. That’s if you want to get biblical about it. We’re still left with a whole mess of problems.”

  Matilda frowned, trying to think it through, looking at him innocently as she ventured, “I don’t see why. Should make the Christians ecstatic.”

  Tim let the air out of his lungs, lacing his fingers in front of his chin. “Don’t bet on it. Again, you’re assuming our Miss Ash was busy with the angels. We now have a technology that rudely—perhaps even cruelly—yanked her out of Heaven, presuming that exists, and you’re presuming she came from there. That means we’re messing around with the grand plan. No, Matty, I don’t think they’re going to be happy about this one at all. This is going to get worse.”

  After a moment, Matilda crossed her arms and said with a faint note of mischief, knowing her employer’s views, “You don’t think she came from Heaven.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “She was dead,” said Matilda gently.

  “Yes, she was. And then she wasn’t. Which is another thing that troubles me.”

  Her eyes widened, already guessing his fresh point.

  “If she can be dead and then suddenly not dead, who says Nickelbaum will stay where he is?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Weintraub sent him an email with an attachment—his preliminary report for the government on how the equipment was thought to work. In the body of the email itself, Gary had informed him in his usual rushed, sloppy typing style: “WE DON’T DARE TAKE THING APART BE A DISASTER.”

  Okay, thought Tim. They’re afraid if they dismantle it, they won’t be able to get it to work again. They choose, instead, to learn all they can from experimental use. And they wonder why I’m concerned.

  There was a schematic diagram that showed the two chambers, but a picture wasn’t worth a thousand words here. Instead, the report had several thousand words, almost all of it conjecture. But there was just enough, Tim realized as he flipped the pages, to suggest Gary Weintraub and his staff had made some brilliant guesses. The white light tinged with blue when Emmett Nickelbaum was executed was perhaps a unique form of Cerenkov radiation—the electromagnetic radiation that’s generated when charged particles pass through an insulator at the speed of light. It was why nuclear reactors had their blue glow. This much Tim could follow, and though he had barely passed physics in high school, it intuitively made sense to him. There was, however, no easy explanation for the bizarre light effects and patterns that flashed in the chamber when Nickelbaum was torn apart—nor for the ones preceding Mary Ash’s arrival.

  But Weintraub and his fellow scientists would have had plenty to talk about even if Nickelbaum had not vanished, screaming, or if Mary Ash had not come back into their plane of existence. As they videotaped and measured the transposition equipment, they discovered it had the equivalent of about seven times the power—all of it contained within the two chambers—that was needed for the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

  Within seconds, the booths had proved the Higgs boson was real.

  Weintraub and his team had measured other particles that were once only hypothesized in university papers and research: sleptons, photinos, squarks, the so-called “sparticles” that winked quickly out of existence in a ten trillionth of a nanosecond after the Big Bang. The booths proved they could exist. They did exist.

  The booths proved something else. They proved the existence of a particle that had been the wet dream of physicists for decades, the one first proposed by Gerald Feinberg in 1967, a crutch for science fiction movie plots ever since: tachyons.

  These particles had flashed and disappeared in the booths. They were tantalizingly there for slices of infinite time, then gone. And the fact that they blinked in and out as part of the riddle of human existence itself made these proofs somehow irrelevant and small and yet desperately essential at the same time.

  No, Weintraub and the other lab coats definitely did not want to take the equipment apart.

  They don’t know, thought Tim.

  They don’t know how it works. They don’t know all that it can do.

  They simply don’t know.

  It was unfathomable to him, too, that the research and development of such a machine could be done and then production carried out with complete secrecy—all benchmarks, findings, assigned personnel, initial test trials hermetically sealed. With not one word of publicity or a single media leak. Tim could hardly believe it. How had they pulled that off?

  If the machinery had been a government project, leaks were inevitable. Impossible to prevent. If a private corporation had developed the equipment, yes, of course, staff could be required to sign gag orders as part of their contracts. But you would think at each stage of development the company’s PR department would want to herald its sensational discoveries from CNN to Scientific American to Nature magazine. If you didn’t want to make a noise for the sheer benefit of branding prestige, fine, then how about the more immediate concern of attracting capital for future development?

  But nothing, Tim realized. No story about the booths had appeared until after the Nickelbaum execution.

  The booths had seemingly come out of nowhere.

  Gary’s report indicated that his team couldn’t even identify yet what parts were actually included in each of the chambers.

  Inside both of them, mounted on the inside roof of the booths, could be seen astonishing equipment that looked “as if someone had miraculously miniaturized a Tevatron.” Tim read this line in Gary’s report and had to look up what the hell a Tevatron was—turned out it was a huge circular particle accelerator.

  Only the guts of the machinery were incredibly more sophisticated. Weintraub’s t
eam spotted something akin to a Cockcroft–Walton voltage multiplier—what an accelerator would need first (Tim figured he would have to take that one on faith). But there was no ladder-network of capacitors and diodes. It was more like an insect eye pattern of capacitors, and the whole mechanism had no leads or cords or hook-up to an external power source.

  To measure voltage, after all, you need current. But the baffling mechanism suggested the thing didn’t run with regular electrical current at all but on something else.

  Weintraub and his colleagues had to switch on the control panel to start the procedure, and the panel, at least, had to be plugged into an ordinary, humble wall socket.

  But they couldn’t detect any radio beam or satellite signal linking the panel to the booths.

  Yes, there were indicator lights and narrow screens to measure the pulse, blood pressure and EEG of booth occupants, but no one understood either how this data was relayed back.

  And that was the sum of their knowledge without disassembling the equipment. They could turn the machinery on and off and start a sequence. That was it.

  After turning a switch, they knew nothing about the exchange of a murderer for his or her slain victim.

  Not encouraging, thought Tim. Well, he couldn’t help his friend Gary Weintraub find technical answers from the booths. But he could speak to the world’s first booth arrival.

  The Ash family home stood in a distinctly rich, white-dominated part of greater Lancaster, southern Pennsylvania. The house at the end of the tree-lined block was distinctive enough that you didn’t need to check the rising address numbers. Mary Ash’s father was a retired architect, and the long structure with the sloping roof and overhangs resembled one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie Houses.”

  The mother came to the door and showed no surprise over finding Timothy Cale on her porch step. Obviously someone in Washington or New York had thought the decent thing to do was to call ahead, whether Tim wanted the Ashes to be warned or not. He could hardly fault the polite gesture.

  Mrs. Ash, an older version of Mary in a sleeveless dark sweater and green slacks, seemed to carry a resignation towards the infinite. The resurrection of her daughter was something she would have to cope with long after this stranger imposed on her. Tim took in the dark gray rings under the woman’s eyes, her mouth pinched in a line, and he wondered himself how he could have the nerve. He had it, he knew, because he had no choice. He needed answers. They all did.

  “Mrs. Ash, I’m not a journal—”

  “I know you’re not, Mr. Cale,” she replied, her words coming out in a tired breath.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” he asked, trying to make it sound less of a challenge.

  “They gave me some idea,” she said. Turning with her shoulders slightly sagged, she walked back into the house before she realized he was still waiting on the porch, needing an invitation. “Come in, Mr. Cale, come in.”

  The décor was what he expected. Tasteful, coordinated, like a layout in a home furnishings magazine, right down to the wooden curios the Ash father and mother probably bought on holiday in Peru. Mrs. Ash waved him to a cream white couch and asked him if he wanted tea or coffee. He didn’t want either, thank you. Then Mrs. Ash confirmed that yes, her daughter was home—in fact, she was upstairs in the room she had grown up in, but “you’ll want to ask me some questions first.”

  “I will?”

  “They all do,” said Mrs. Ash. “Everyone who comes to see her. The doctors, the government men—I think they’re afraid of her.” Her face looked pinched again for a moment, as if on the verge of either tears or a strained smile that seemed to tell him: I’m afraid, too.

  She was past the exuberant joy of the miracle, of a reunion with her daughter that involved grateful hugs and tears, of excited confusion over how she could possibly be back. Now there was living with the miracle; with the knowledge that her child was still a victim, even if revived.

  “I’m supposed to know her. I’m her mother. Do you have children, Mr. Cale?” But she didn’t wait for the answer. “I’m supposed to know her,” she said again with more emphasis.

  He stopped himself before he offered the clichéd answer, the obvious answer: that even if Nickelbaum hadn’t murdered Mary Ash, she had been tortured and repeatedly raped, sometimes with foreign objects. There was no way the girl would have woken up from this horror in a hospital bed without being a different person, forever changed. But he was sure Mrs. Ash already knew this.

  She must know it, he thought, because she had made a family impact statement at Nickelbaum’s sentencing. She had given a five-minute speech that didn’t curse her daughter’s murderer or talk about the robbed life of a sweet young girl, only how someone capable of such depraved acts must have so little human empathy that he merited extermination. She had got her wish. And she had got more.

  Tim watched her go to the sideboard and pour what looked like a rye for herself. She lifted the bottle to him in afterthought. He shook his head.

  “Her fingers are back,” said Mrs. Ash, sipping her drink. “The ones that monster cut off. They were just—suddenly—back. I noticed them on her fifth day with us. The doctors told us on the second day that all the… damage to her insides was gone, no scar tissue. They chalked it up to some reviving effect of this … this booth thing. All right, I can accept that. I’m not a religious person, but I can accept that my daughter’s privates are healed after the things he did to her and the way he violated her. But people don’t grow back digits like salamanders.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “You think I’m ungrateful.” She took another long pull of her drink. Through the French windows to the back yard, Tim saw the shadows growing longer on the grass.

  “No, I don’t,” he said carefully. “It sounds like you were doing your best with your grief, and now a stranger has been foisted on you.”

  “Please don’t patronize me, Mr. Cale.”

  “I’m not, Mrs. Ash. Quite the contrary. I imagine you have all sorts of people looking to you to help explain what’s happened or worse. They pretend they actually know what’s going on.”

  “Yes, they do. But they don’t know at all, do they?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  She deserved the truth.

  Her fingers drummed on her glass tumbler for a moment as she looked out the window to the garden. The shadows were still lengthening, as if darkness could acquire weight. Then she said, “You can go up and see her now if you want to.”

  He muttered a thanks and went up.

  It was quiet in the hall.

  He knocked softly on the door to the girl’s room, and the light voice that answered adopted a formal tone: “Yes?” No grown-up child that’s come home ever answers Yes to a knock at the door like that. You call out Mom or Dad or say Come in or say Hey. Maybe Mary Ash had heard the doorbell about half an hour ago or was getting used to the parade of visitors.

  When he pushed the door open, he found her sitting on her bed with a large charcoal sketchpad. The pad was propped up against the improvised drafting table of her knees. She smiled at him pleasantly but with no effort to rise or to interrupt her drawing. It was the smile of a self-absorbed toddler greeting a polite friend of her daddy’s. A pleasant enough smile. The eyes, however, weren’t young. They were a wise and vivid green, so striking that he almost took them for another color, one that belonged on a flower from the family garden or on a bright, newly born grasshopper chewing its leaves, knowing what its singular purpose and arrival was for.

  “Mary, my name is Tim Cale.”

  She nodded and smiled again expectantly, reaching out her hand to shake his without a word.

  The hand with the re-grown fingers.

  Her touch was cool, with a limpness thanks to a tutored grace. And then her eyes were down, back to the drawing.

  The room itself told him very little, relentlessly neat and clean like the lounge below. Whatever she was now, Mary Ash had once favored pastel colors
, and the acrylic paintings on the wall owed a lot to the European Fauvists. There was a framed computer store ad on the wall—obviously one of her first compositions as a professional graphic artist.

  With the high angle she had for the sketchpad on her knees, he couldn’t see what her composition was. Not yet.

  “Mary,” he tried again. “Mary, I know you’ve had a lot of visitors, and I’ll probably have the same questions…”

  Her eyes flicked up from the sketchpad and down again as she let out a soft giggle. “I doubt it.”

  “You do?”

  She hadn’t invited him to sit, but he sat down anyway in the white wicker chair, making it crunch. I doubt it. He could infer a lot from those three little words, and he was instinctively certain he didn’t have to explain what his job was or why he was here.

  Okay, he thought. If she expects you to ask different questions, go ahead and ask them. You planned to anyway.

  He wouldn’t ask her what she remembered of Nickelbaum’s attack. He wouldn’t ask if she had any consciousness of the… transition to wherever she went. He wouldn’t ask where she had been all this time before her return. Others had inquired, and the girl had shaken her head dully or told them she couldn’t remember. She was just… back.

  “Mary, what are you going to do now? I mean, after you’ve rested. Will you go back to your old job? The design firm will probably be glad to have you.”

  Her eyes lifted off the paper with new interest.

  “What did you feel like doing after Paris?” she asked.

  After Paris…?

  Don’t show it, he thought. Don’t show surprise. Don’t show you’ve been rattled. It was possible someone had filled in the girl about details of his career.

  Her voice remained soft, almost ethereal. The charcoal pencil scratched the page.

  “Well, it’s not like I was ever murdered and brought back from the dead,” he answered reasonably.

  “No. But you felt like Europe was ruined for you after she died, and you needed to get away for a while.”