The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  The researchers and scientists assured visitors that it was growing into a structure. It would take almost two centuries to slowly complete its matrix, but Orlando Braithewaite had announced through a media release years ago that it had been developed as another secret project he was bequeathing to the world. Environmentally sound, a possible construction material with limitless potential, etcetera, etcetera. Children on school field trips giggled through this sunny atrium and touched the lichen, smiling and soon losing interest.

  Braithewaite had arranged for a brass plaque to be mounted near the biomaterial, and it was a quote from Buckminster Fuller. Tim found the billionaire’s selection oddly cryptic, given how he had put up these lines next to the organism without any explanation for context. Fuller had once said: “Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.”

  Tim came here, suspecting the organism wasn’t a building material at all, not even perhaps a research project. Not really. Braithewaite had arranged for it to be placed here as another canvas, waiting like the one that Emily Derosier had given him. A message that waited for a time when people might discover they could taste music, and when a sad and lonely German girl could escape into the daydreams of those on the other side of the world.

  He touched it as the innocent children touched it.

  And through his fingers, like Braille read by a blind person, in a chlorophyll language all its own, it delivered its sponsor’s location.

  He’s waited for you to figure it out. Braithewaite.

  For years, the biomaterial had been here, a mesh of sentient ivy and stone and preserved memory that the enigmatic billionaire had planted as a legacy for him. For Timothy Cale and other protégés and allies. It humbled him. He couldn’t understand why he deserved such access, except that the answer might lie in more words from Emily Derosier, what she had said to him back in Au Dauphin when she had cradled his face in her hand.

  “You are so gifted, you have no idea. Haven’t you guessed? The others went away and came back with empathy. But you…”

  Orlando Braithewaite had waited all this time, ever since the seemingly chance meeting in a rainforest in Thailand. As the Cessna roamed lazily over the savannah of the game reserve, approaching a white adobe complex, he wondered if the monks were not the only ones who might have planned to recruit him.

  Braithewaite insisted on seeing Tim alone. In the bungalow where they were temporarily housed, Tim listened patiently as Andrew Miller complained about being shut out. The neurologist was having a tantrum. He was a teenager again who couldn’t borrow the keys to Dad’s car. It had been a goddamn long flight, and this was a fucking clear snub to his credentials, and for Christ’s sake, why couldn’t he meet one of the greatest entrepreneurial and scientific minds of their age?

  It didn’t matter how long or loud Miller vented. They needed Braithewaite. They would have to honor his terms.

  Crystal, for once, lost patience with Miller and with a surprising edge in her voice, she reminded him, “We wouldn’t bloody well be here unless the man allowed us this far! It’s Tim he wants to see. He waited for Tim to figure out where he is. And it’s always been Tim they wanted in their game.”

  Tim didn’t comment over this. He was mildly embarrassed at the truth of her analysis. She was a crack analyst and his equal and superior in so many ways. She had every right to resent being barred from the audience with Braithewaite as much as Miller.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she stood on her toes to kiss him and said with concern, “Whatever Braithewaite tells you, whatever role Limonov and the monks think you play or ought to play, I believe Emily Derosier told you something useful.”

  “Which is?” he asked.

  “Be here. You’re part of this world—it should have your allegiance. Forget all the implications they keep throwing at you over these other planes of reality. She gave you good advice.”

  “I didn’t realize you two had become friends.”

  “Shut up,” she said, kissing him again. “Go see what you can get out of the old man.”

  He had expected to be ushered into a white and sterile vault of a high-ceilinged room where the billionaire would be sitting behind a desk, monitoring news reports on a widescreen computer. There had always been something about Braithewaite’s image that suggested the lab rat was still playing within the corporate giant. And if not a lab, a greenhouse could have been the perfect setting, calling Tim back to the jungle where he had first met his host.

  Instead, a spectacled receptionist led him into a vast room of wooden paneling and high teak shelves filled with curios and souvenirs. There was a nineteenth-century hand-cranked pump for surgical operations. An oscilloscope sat lonely on a shelf, as if packed away, only it was switched on, its signal line jumping and bouncing away. And there was a chromatophoric painting hanging on the wall—similar to the one Emily Derosier had given Tim. Its scene depicted a market in ancient Ulan Bator. The figures in it moved, like those in old silent movie footage hand-tinted with color. The whole place had the atmosphere of permanence, and yet for so many years, the rumors went that Braithewaite was constantly changing locations, seeking out different countries where he could avoid legal wrangles over his patents and controversial corporate decisions.

  The billionaire sat behind a scratched, wooden table under a green shade lamp, studying, of all things, a cracked and yellowed newspaper. His head had the same shock-white frosting of hair, but the doughy face had more lines in it, reminding Tim of the fallen soufflé features of the poet W.H. Auden.

  Braithewaite stood up and greeted Tim with avuncular gusto. “Look at you! Very good for your forties. Lean and trim. You’ve done well.”

  “Thank you,” said Tim evenly. “Not bad for someone who’s supposed to be dead. I suppose I have you to thank for bringing me back. I would like to know how you did that. No one that we know was executed in a Booth.”

  “No one had to be,” replied Braithewaite. “The woman who crushed you with her car wasn’t responsible. It was an accident. What I did was merely—oh, what shall we call it? A fancier version of a doctor bringing you back on the operating table. Your life ended, your sentience moved on, and I simply turned you around and pushed you back through a convenient door, the one in Paris.” Watching Tim absorb this, he smiled puckishly and said, “The hows. All the hows on your mind, as well as the whys. We’ll get to those.”

  “Fair enough,” said Tim, trying to relax, knowing questions were bubbling and waiting to pour out of him. “I never did get the chance to thank you for the scholarship.”

  “I didn’t need thanks.”

  “You come from the same place as she does, don’t you? Emily Derosier.”

  Braithewaite smiled. “It’s been many years. I should have anticipated you would be this quick. We’re both quite human, Tim. It’s just as Emily and even Limonov told you. If the past is a foreign country, so is the future.”

  “Then you sent her?”

  “No, no, no,” said Braithewaite, shaking his head and waving him to where a silver tray with port waited. The offer was so quaint in its antique civility that Tim couldn’t resist pouring for both of them. “Emily came on her own. I realize that it’s a human tendency of here to think in terms of alliances, but you have to get past all that. Let’s just say what I’ve done is greatly disapproved of back where…” He laughed as he carefully added, “Where you might say I get my mail.”

  “But those at home can’t mind that much. They didn’t come after you, did they? Like the monks?”

  “No.”

  “Even after the mess you’ve caused? All the ethical tangles and human fallout? You’re a genius—at least you’re considered one here. How could you not think it through?”

  “I did think it through,” replied Braithewaite, sipping his port and slumping into a leather chair. “I was hoping for the ‘ethical tangles and human fallout’ as you call them. Call it good returns on my invest
ment.”

  “My God,” said Tim. “You couldn’t have built it for profit! You don’t need it.”

  Braithewaite laughed. “No, of course not! I didn’t mean it like that. To make the Booth for profit would be ludicrous. I made it simply to push Man to the next step. Period.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, I suppose you don’t—my fault for not explaining. You know, if you study the history of the sciences—go ahead and pick one, biology, astronomy, whatever discipline you choose—there will be religious zealots who will fight the plain facts right before their eyes. Any reasonable, open-minded person, even one who believes in a god, has to be demoralized by the homicidal ignorance and spiteful violence unleashed on the world, all tracing its way back to a fear of the unknown. And death.”

  “So you built this technology to slay God,” said Tim. He perched himself on top of the table, carefully setting his glass down.

  “You’re missing the point, young man. And by the way, I’m no gleeful atheist. To kill God or anyone else for that matter, you have to acknowledge their existence. I can’t disprove he exists, but I’ve never been persuaded he does.”

  “Then you’re right,” said Tim. “I am missing your point.”

  Braithewaite shrugged. “At least you admit it candidly. As you grew up and I followed your career, I used to wonder if you’re a seeker, Tim, but now I’m sure that you’re something much more interesting. Most seekers—religious tourists, if you like, all those belief shoppers—they want certainty. That means they abdicate their own responsibility to think, to stay curious. I believe you like being curious. But I also think you’re searching for scientific and guiding principles. You inherited a few that have let you down.”

  Tim knew he was defensive, but he couldn’t help himself. “Not all.”

  “Admit it to yourself if you won’t be honest with me,” said Braithewaite, his wrinkled hand waving away this minor quibble. “But to answer your question, I manufactured the Karma Booth to spread doubt. The world is drowning in certainty, and it needs more doubt—a hell of a lot more! It’s the only thing that’ll save the human race. And I need your assistance with that.”

  “What could I possibly do?”

  “Oh, just a bit of intellectual vandalism! You can use the old-fashioned kind if that works. But I suspect your profile is too big now, so you’ll have to rely on public relations, negotiation and the ever-reliable lubricant of money. You need to take them back, take them away.”

  “Take what?”

  “The Karma Booths, Tim. Tell the world they’re defective, say they’re dangerous—whatever gets the job done. I can give you the financing and means to have them stolen or sabotaged, but they must be taken away.”

  “But—but why? We have the technology now to—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t, Tim. You have the technology, but you didn’t create it. What I gave the world has turned into a crutch. I expected that to happen, but now I must take the crutch away, and the world can walk on its own two feet, if you please. What’s left will be a lasting impression of potential, of doubt in every belief system and a hunger to replicate and improve the process. The focus will turn from trying to imitate my machine to moving up to these states of existence without one.”

  Tim stared at him. “How can you be so naïve? They’ll never allow the machines to be destroyed or shut down! They’ll save one. Hell, they’ll save ten or more! They’ll take one apart and maybe they still won’t be able to figure it out, but they’ll keep at it until they do!”

  “And they’ll get the same results,” laughed Braithewaite. “After all, the power source never emanated from the machines.”

  Tim was staggered. It took him a moment to fully comprehend what Braithewaite was telling him.

  “You control the machines from here…? You control them all from here. You always did.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘control’ them. I control the power source.” He chuckled as if over a practical joke, adding, “I’m Con-Ed. The power company. They decide what they do with the current I provide. The authorities of each individual nation utilize the Booths as they see fit. I’ve only ever intervened once, when I felt I absolutely had to.”

  Tim followed his meaning. “Dieter Wildman and Desmond Leary.”

  “Correct,” said Braithewaite. “Very good. Leary was a despicable human being. One could argue, however, that in a way, I gave him what he wanted.”

  “And you did it all from here.”

  “Well, to say I control the power from here is incorrect as well.”

  “But then how… how does it work? Gary Weintraub, all of them—they’ve searched for a power source, any kind of satellite signal or—”

  “I can’t explain it to you,” said Braithewaite with a shrug. “Well, I could, but it wouldn’t help you very much.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It will have to do for now,” answered Braithewaite patiently. “Tim, do you remember when Weintraub was on television, telling the world how the Karma Booth uses about seven times the power that’s needed for the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva? Oh, he was full of juice, announcing how they had confirmed the existence of tachyons, sleptons, photinos, squarks! And yet the lovely fellow completely missed the obvious.”

  Understanding dawned on Tim. “All those atomic particles winking in and out of existence… Because the power source you’re using isn’t on our plane of existence at all… We can’t trace it because it doesn’t come from anywhere in this universe.”

  “Very good,” said Braithewaite. “So you see, if I want to explain the functioning of a Karma Booth to you, I might as well sit you down and explain all the new physics that work on completely different principles somewhere else.” He added slyly, “And you’ll have plenty of time for that later.”

  “Why can’t you simply shut them all down to serve your purpose then?” asked Tim.

  Braithewaite groaned. “Ugh! The world will still want to rely on this crutch after the power is off. You’re right—I can make them silent and still, and I intend to do so, but to really get on with the job, the Booths must be destroyed by Man so the world can learn to walk again. Their removal will be that big push.”

  “Braithewaite, you know this isn’t right! The lives you’ve disrupted—outright shattered! The turmoil and chaos! All of that might have had some justification if we learned something, and now you’re just going to take it away—”

  “So that something will be learned! The unfortunate problem with Man is he doesn’t like to jump to his next level. He often has to be pushed or dragged, kicking and screaming. Many years ago, before I advanced into… Let’s say where I am confident you and Miss Anyanike will go… Way back when I was living one of my old lives, I became disillusioned with things. People told me well, that’s reality. Fine, I thought. I’ll change reality.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  From Tanzania, Tim flew to London and then on to Washington, DC, where he had to brief the President and warn her over what was coming. How Orlando Braithewaite planned to turn out the lights of the Karma Booth, hoping Man would eventually stumble out of his ignorant, supernatural darkness. When the cabinet secretaries in the Oval Office grumbled and complained about Braithewaite’s imperious attitude, some even wanting a Navy SEAL strike on the game reserve property in Tanzania, it was the President who snapped for them to stop being ridiculous.

  “This was never our scientific breakthrough,” said the President, wagging a finger. “And if you want to think of it as a gift then I’d say we’ve done a terrible job of using it. I think Braithewaite always expected we would. How can any of you say keeping these things around is a good thing, given all that’s happened? He’s offering us a chance to put the genie back in the bottle. Let’s take it.”

  Karma Booths stopped working in Iran and China, in Germany and Greece and Australia. Victims no longer came back. Murderers did not disappear in flashes of light. As the news leaked out and
received official confirmations, the media took their usual man-on-the-street polls. People reacted with all the expected variations of spiteful disappointment, suspicion of cover-up and tearful exasperation that loved ones could not be returned.

  The resurrected victims—ones whom Viktor Limonov had not hunted down because he had no need for them or no interest—were very good at avoiding media attention. When a victim was tracked down, an enterprising reporter and his cameraman found themselves experiencing anxiety attacks. Or simply mistaking an address. Or feeling the weight of a voice in their heads that told them firmly: Don’t. Just don’t. We have no answers for you. Leave us alone.

  The President of the United States announced at a media conference in the White House that the Karma Booth in New York State had stopped functioning and would be dismantled. Scientific experts now believed the energy that powered them was proving unstable, and if something went wrong, it would be akin to ten atomic bombs going off on the Eastern Seaboard. Tim didn’t think this was too much of a lie.

  He heard from Miller that Weintraub refused to stay in White Plains when army personnel showed up to dismantle and confiscate the Booth equipment. Tim at last tracked down his old friend in a cave of a basement jazz bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. Jazz had always been a bond between them, and at four o’clock in the afternoon in the empty bar, the famous scientist and documentary host looked less like a Nobel Prize nominee than a portly, spectacled accountant fleeing his family to knock out tunes behind a keyboard. As he peered through his thick glasses at Tim, he went from playing Oscar Peterson’s slow and pensive “Hymn to Freedom” to Chopin’s Funeral March.

  “That’s very droll,” said Tim, signaling the bartender. He saw Gary was drinking Scotch so he ordered one for himself and another for his friend.

  Weintraub was bitter. “It wasn’t an attempt at humor, Tim. Single-handed, you’ve set scientific discovery back maybe thirty years. You and Braithewaite.”