The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  His father was an electronics engineer, a man who believed in the firmly tangible and who spent the decades of his life at a workbench in front of an oscilloscope and a spot welder over circuit boards. His work was unfathomable to his son. It wasn’t until his twenties that Tim realized his father’s world view was almost entirely shaped by the evening news. Maybe that was what drove Tim to learn French and to grapple with Hindi, to pursue a career in exotic locales.

  His father had died of pancreatic cancer last year, refusing to see his son in his final emaciated stages, and Tim had never told him about India. It was not something they could talk about: intrusive concepts of otherworldly realities or of life after death. His father was an intelligent man, but not an intellectual. He had been one of that last generation of superman dads; the kind who kept three saws in the basement and who could fix his own car, a man who could easily sail Lake Michigan when they took the family’s tiny boat out. Tim wouldn’t be able to find the carburetor in his BMW if he tried.

  Tim’s mother had died ten years before from multiple sclerosis. Frightened and confused near the end, she had asked for a minister. Dad refused to get her one. Tim wasn’t religious and didn’t even consider himself spiritual—he was no seeker. But he had hated the old man for a long time over that denial of comfort for his mom. More than that, he hated how his father had easily accepted the doctors’ diagnosis of his own fate—that cruel sentence of three months left—and just obediently, quietly, died by their schedule.

  He didn’t think about his father much afterwards. Theirs had been a distant relationship once Tim had grown up. The Karma Booth stirred up all this old business.

  On the stereo, the Davis album ended and he heard Dexter Gordon play “Cry Me a River.” Serves you right, thought Tim, smiling at the irony. It was fitting on this drive for another reason. The music had come from Gary Weintraub; his friend had found a rare live performance by Gordon in a Berlin jazz club and had the old vinyl converted to digital for Tim. A wonderful Christmas present three years ago.

  Tim parked across the street from the federal building and held his valise over his head, trying not to get soaked as the security man in the navy blazer held the door open for him. After his postings in Asia, rain was always a time-travel mechanism for him, making him recall the monsoon seasons in Delhi and Mumbai and the way drops hit the tin roofs of squalid huts and formed instant lakes out of the cracked alleys.

  He thought fleetingly of the night in the remote village, pushed it from his mind.

  “It’s really coming down,” said the security guard.

  “Yeah.”

  “Everything quiet here?”

  The security guard nodded, knowing what he meant. He had been staffed to the project even before the Booth had been shipped out for its first use at the prison, and he had watched the mushrooming of publicity, protests and curiosity seekers since Mary Ash’s resurrection. He had also become Tim’s first antenna for when Weintraub and his scientists were excited over a development. Today he gave Tim another stoical nod. All was quiet.

  Tim went up to the seventh floor and discovered the guard was right. He walked into the test center’s infirmary room, and an ordinary middle-aged man looked up from his hospital bed at him with the curiosity you give any visitor. Geoff Shackleton had been prescribed mild anti-depressants—that was after Gary Weintraub felt he ought to explain the background of the shooting and what had happened to Shackleton’s wife.

  Tim wondered if he had “guilted” Gary into breaking the news personally. It didn’t matter. Shackleton deserved to know the truth, and he would have learned in time. At least the guy was in a controlled environment where he could get counseling and any medical follow-up. He was affable towards Tim, though he looked a bit subdued, even drained, by the mood drugs he was on. That was probably to be expected. Tim began to relax, figuring the teacher’s responses must be very much those of a coma patient on waking up.

  “They’ll probably keep you in this facility for a couple more weeks,” Tim informed him.

  Shackleton pulled the food tray on its swing arm and brought a bottle of water within reach. “That’s okay,” he answered with his mild Texan drawl. “I mean, it’s not like I have anywhere really to go. They let me call my insurance company, and that’s… What a mess! They said technically I’m not injured even though I was pronounced dead, and since I’m back alive, they invalidated my life insurance policy. Thieves. Goddamn thieves. Just as well—my wife was the beneficiary.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, I’m… Hey, I shouldn’t bitch like this, should I? I ought to stay grateful. I’m alive. What they did, it’s amazing. And I’m only the second person to go through this? They told me there’s a girl from Manhattan who got killed by some psycho, and she was the first, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My God. Incredible. How’s she doing?”

  Tim decided to be neutral. “She’s fine. Have you spoken with your wife at all?”

  “Not much point in that, is there?” Shackleton stared at the beads of water pattering on the room’s windowpane, withdrawing into himself for a brief second. Tim waited patiently.

  “My bank accounts have been closed,” the teacher said slowly. “They tell me my house was foreclosed on when Nicole went to jail. I can’t afford a lawyer—not yet. The only word I want her to get from me is in divorce papers.”

  “I can make a couple of phone calls,” Tim offered. “Your situation is unique, but there are already victim services in place, and I imagine if they keep using the Karma Booth, they’ll have to set up a whole new extension of those programs for people who come back. Help them make a transition back into their old life.”

  “Or a brand new one,” said Shackleton.

  “If that’s what you want. I’m sure it’ll take time, but you’ll find your way.”

  Tim rose to go, muttering about how he wanted to beat the traffic into the city. As much as he felt sorry for the teacher, he felt oddly reassured by this meeting. This man seemed fine. Then what had happened with Mary Ash?

  Shackleton was talking to him.

  “Mr. Cale?”

  “I’m sorry, my mind was elsewhere.”

  “That’s okay. Umm… You said you were hired to assess the impact of this thing, didn’t you? What do you plan to recommend?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tim honestly. “I’ve barely begun to examine all the issues involved and learn about the Booth. It’s early days. How do you feel about it?”

  Shackleton made a small, self-deprecating chuckle. “I don’t know. I’m kind of the lab rat in the maze, aren’t I? But it’s bigger than me. You know I actually used to be against capital punishment.”

  “You still can be, Mr. Shackleton. Your beliefs haven’t been compromised—you were never given a choice about being brought back.”

  “Yes, but who would say no?” asked the teacher.

  “There are bound to be those who will,” replied Tim. “Maybe we’ll all have to carry around little cards like they do for organ donation, ticking off whether we want the procedure. Maybe we’ll see ‘wrongful life’ suits in the courts. Are you upset by the fact that they executed Cody James?”

  Shackleton sat in silence for a moment, mulling over the issue. Tim could hear a distant thunder roll through the window.

  “Are you a God-fearing man, Mr. Cale?”

  “No, I’m an agnostic.”

  Shackleton nodded. “Yeah. New Yorker, a professor, a diplomat—didn’t peg you as a church-going fellah. Honest truth is I don’t know how I feel about Cody. Or God anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “Men resurrected me, Mr. Cale. Not God. That’s clear.”

  As Tim left, he marveled at how it was the last thing he expected a Christian schoolteacher from Texas to say. Well, he had warned Matilda the Booth was guaranteed to upset the whole range of belief systems. He punched the button for the elevator, and still distracted by the conversation, bre
ezed through the sliding doors—

  He felt the rain first, drops pelting the shoulders of his coat and wetting his forehead, jolting him back to attention to his surroundings.

  He had been in the elevator.

  Now he was on the street.

  No, he couldn’t have just sleepwalked his way out of the building. There were security checks and sign-out sheets before he was ever allowed to hit the pavement. But when he whirled around, he was facing the eastern wall of the block, the front entrance around the corner. There was a kra-koom of loud thunder, and a fork of lightning hit the ground behind the skyline of shiny boxes of office buildings.

  Blink, and you’re standing outside.

  You’ve been moved. Plucked out of a point in space and a linear direction in time. Shifted elsewhere. What the hell…?

  As he walked briskly back in, the security guard matched his confusion over how he could have got past him. Tim flashed his ID and snapped, “Forget it, it doesn’t matter.”

  “But you were inside. How did—”

  “Look, I’m here now, just let me through.” Then he was back on the elevator, heading for the infirmary.

  “Forget something?” asked Shackleton, looking genuinely surprised to see him.

  “We’re seven flights up,” said Tim. “I stepped out of the elevator onto the street. You did it.”

  Shackleton’s features went blank, as if he were a foreign tourist trying to decipher the words of a hotel desk clerk. “You said your mind was elsewhere.”Tim stared at the schoolteacher, hearing the words but no sense in them. Shackleton repeated it as if now it might sink in. “You said your mind was elsewhere.”

  “So you helped me? To get there…? Into that moment when I wanted to be outside…?”Shackleton’s expression was still innocent. “It’s so simple, if only people would pay attention.”

  Tim nodded a silent goodbye and walked out again.

  Benson’s words came back to him in the car on the way back into the city. We need you to figure out how this damn thing works, Tim. What the long-term effects are, what kind of trouble we could get into, what our billionaire’s real agenda may be.

  Oh, is that all? Surely they had to know themselves that to understand the Karma Booth meant finally learning the nature of existence itself. Maybe they did.

  We need you to figure it out, Tim. Everything, everything.

  He felt he was back on familiar ground, conducting an investigation that was international in scope yet had clear “suspects” to find and interrogate. This specter of a woman who had slipped from the 1920s into their own century—she must know things. Mary Ash did but either couldn’t or didn’t want to communicate them with him and the rest of the world, at least not yet. Without a doubt Orlando Braithewaite knew things, if only Tim could find him to ask his questions.

  That’s right, they say you met him once.

  Braithewaite.

  Had some kind of enlightening special meeting with him and your dad.

  He had lied to Benson. A small lie, but a lie nonetheless. It had indeed been a special meeting, back when he was a boy. But his father hadn’t been present at the time.

  Tim had been nine years old. Old enough to know who the Great Man was, and the touchstone of that experience prompted him to follow the billionaire’s career in the news ever since. It was almost as if he felt a vague curiosity or obligation to keep track of a notable relative. The software developments of Braithewaite’s computer corporation. The acquisition of rare works of Leonardo da Vinci by one of his foundations, to be donated to a modest school for girls in Pakistan. The astounding development of yet another Braithewaite foundation, setting up a research facility in Norfolk, England, where a lichen-like biomaterial organism would grow into a livable structure decades and decades into the future.

  And now here Braithewaite was again, back on the world’s radar. Tim couldn’t help but feel that Braithewaite had unleashed on the world an alchemist’s trick, what looked like blindingly bright gold but was, in fact, a lead anvil of new responsibilities and new horrors.

  He got into town, checked his messages and emails with Matilda, and it didn’t surprise him at all when the office receptionist for Orlando Braithewaite told him she would pass on his message, but that he shouldn’t expect to get an appointment. Mr. Braithewaite wouldn’t care that Timothy Cale was calling on behalf of the White House. Mr. Braithewaite didn’t have to care because he was in Africa. It afforded him the luxury of keeping the arrogant, developed world at a distance, the same way the developed West had ignored the continent for decades.

  Tim decided the only thing he could do was besiege the man’s personal assistant in New York with messages and more and more requests. But of course, eventually, he would have to go to Africa. A trip there would be such a small thing. Especially to find out what waited beyond the whole world.

  He had been nine. Though his father didn’t like to travel and he absolutely hated flying, one of Braithewaite’s companies had thrown enough money at his dad to lure him out to Thailand, of all places. Tim had begged to go with him, his imagination so easily fired by exotic locales, and since it was summer and the boy was already fairly independent, Henry Cale had caved in, while Tim’s mom had stayed at home. Thailand was lush and green and humid, and there was plenty to dazzle an impressionable nine-year-old boy.

  The project his father was working on had to do with robotics—mimicry of animal movement to get machines to be more graceful. Most people would have accepted that purpose, but even then, Tim was suspicious. “But Dad, what’s it all for?”

  “What do you mean, kiddo?”

  “Well, does this Braithewaite guy want ’em for weapons to sell to the Pentagon or give everybody a robo-butler or what?”

  His father had laughed. “I actually don’t know, son. If you got enough money, you can pay guys like me to tinker around and figure out what you want to do after.”

  Fair enough. A long flight to London then their connecting flight to Bangkok and then a trip by car to a remote spot in the vast green expanse of jungle and rainforest. There was the lab complex, a neat row of bungalows for senior staff like his dad, and a village about a mile up the dusty road. It wasn’t long before his father had to leave him to amuse himself. It was fun for a couple of days to watch the whrrring and screeching steel beetles and animatronic dogs scuttle around a gravel and sand courtyard for a while. But the novelty soon wore off, and Tim turned to his packed books and to exploring the village. When he had got his fill of the strange looks of the local people, he trudged and crunched his way through the magnificent vegetation.

  After a while, he learned to pick his way quietly and more carefully because he realized if he did, he would take more in; fabulous insects and animals that wouldn’t start at his approach. On the fourteenth day of his trip, he gasped in surprise as he spotted a great hornbill on a low tree branch. Wow. The most stunningly vivid yellow, white and black bill, reminding him a lot of a toucan, and according to his travel guide, the bird not only ate figs and insects, but it would even hunt small squirrels and birds. It looked to be hunting a gecko right at that moment.

  Then Tim heard a buzzing drone. It would have been comical if it weren’t so inconvenient and irritating. One of the robotics models from the R and D team back at the facility had somehow strayed into this jungle. This kind of thing happened when a command pathway got stuck in its programming, and the engineers and assistants had to go forage for their escapees. Now Tim was sure this fluttering metal thing, designed to look like a bird, but flying more like a drunken bumblebee, would spook both the hornbill and its prey.

  “Not to worry,” whispered a voice behind him. “It sees it, but it’s not scared.”

  Tim looked over his shoulder. Just behind him stood Orlando Braithewaite. Tim would remember that even then the billionaire seemed ancient, though he could only have been about fifty that year. A man in an open-necked white dress shirt and tan khaki pants, his doughy face topped with a frostin
g of white hair, he smiled at Tim as if they were both partners in this casual expedition, and Tim felt himself smiling back, grateful for the company.

  Every so often, Tim had spotted the CEO strolling the compound and knew he was supposed to be polite to this important man. Now Braithewaite gave him the impression that he was fleeing the tedium of the engineers and scientists just as much as he was.

  “You’re Henry Cale’s son, aren’t you?” The tone of his voice suggested he already knew.

  “Yes, sir.” Distracted by the bird, Tim burst into a happy laugh. The hornbill seemed to be studying the lazy, droning model. Tim thought perhaps he should go back to whispering, but the hornbill didn’t seem to care anymore that he and Braithewaite were here. “Huh! Look at that! It doesn’t know what that thing is!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said the CEO gently. “Maybe it’s getting inspired.”

  That was when things turned strange. The gecko padded nimbly away up the branch, along the thick, knotted trunk and to a neighboring limb of another tree. The hornbill lighted to another branch, stalking it. Tim and Braithewaite stepped cautiously, slowly, forward to watch, and then the impossible happened. Another hornbill was suddenly there on the branch, close to the gecko, only it couldn’t be real. It “ghosted” in its movements, and if laptops and computers had been as advanced back then as they were today, Tim would have compared it to a screen icon shaded by the arrow. And stranger still, the “ghost hornbill” made the same buzzing drone as the robot model.

  The robot model. No, he wasn’t confusing the two. The drone was on the jungle floor, seeming to have run out of juice.

  The hornbill—the real hornbill—fluttered its wings slightly and hopped a little further on the branch. Tim grasped what was going on—the impossible copy was herding the tiny lizard toward the genuine bird.

  “How… how can it do that?” whispered Tim. “No bird can do that!”

  Braithewaite said nothing.

  They watched as the hornbill caught the gecko, tossed it in the air and caught it, gobbling it down. The ghost version of it was suddenly gone, abruptly vanished, dispensed with.