The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  Tim turned away and began trudging back to the lab compound and the bungalows, Braithewaite walking along beside him. “You knew,” he said with a faint note of accusation.

  “No, I didn’t,” answered the CEO.

  “But you said it—you said the bird got inspired.”

  “I was making a joke, young man, that’s all. I’m sure we both must have been seeing things. The light can play tricks on you in the rainforest. We saw two birds, not one. No big mystery about that.”

  Tim was irritable all of a sudden. “I know what I saw. It watched the robot thing and then it came up with an idea—it made that other bird somehow! You say it’s a trick of the light or whatever, but it made the same sound, too. It—it imitated it.”

  Braithewaite smiled. “You ever hear of the lyrebird of Australia? It can actually mimic all kinds of machine sounds. A car alarm, a chain saw—it’s amazing.”

  “I know what I saw,” Tim insisted.

  The businessman stopped, putting a hand on Tim’s shoulder. “I saw it, too.”

  Braithewaite seemed to read what was in his face, as if Tim waited to be told it had all been an elaborate joke, or that the billionaire’s other engineers had improbably perfected a more convincing animatronic creature. He looked down at Tim as if the two shared a unique new perspective on reality.

  “No, I’m not humoring you. And yes, I saw it. I threw out other ideas just now because I was curious to see how strong you are in accepting the evidence in front of your eyes. Not what other people will tell you. You know that we can fool ourselves, can’t we?”

  “Well… sure.”

  “But not this time,” said Braithewaite, again flashing a smile that assured Tim they were in it together. “Are you any good at math and science, Tim?”

  “No, sir,” answered Tim, slightly embarrassed. He knew his dad was brilliant, and there were times when he genuinely did wish he was better at these subjects. But he just didn’t seem to have the knack for them.

  “It’s okay,” said Braithewaite, putting an arm around the boy’s shoulder and leading him back to the compound. “Neither am I really. But you can take a scientific approach to things even if you never pick up a test-tube. They give you some poetry in school, don’t they?”

  “Some,” said Tim, and they were close enough to the settlement now to hear the scientists and engineers talking, some sharing a smoke with the Thai staff.

  “Look up a fellow called Blake,” urged Braithewaite. “To see a world in a grain of sand…”

  Tim went off to get a snack from his bungalow’s Thai housekeeper, and for the rest of the day, he sifted over in his mind the bizarre thing he had seen in the jungle with the eccentric businessman. He hadn’t learned the word sentience yet. He couldn’t even articulate for himself how the bird, a simple bird, could possibly have the higher intelligence to do what it did, let alone the physical impossibility of what it had accomplished. He only knew that Orlando Braithewaite must have had something to do with it.

  He did not speak to Braithewaite again during the rest of his stay in Thailand. There were occasional nods and polite smiles as the important man went to this building or that, always in the company of assistants or his management team, but Tim Cale would never share another one-on-one moment with one of the richest men on the planet.

  So he was quite surprised when, four months after Tim and his father got back to the States, he learned that Orlando Braithewaite had arranged for him to get a full college scholarship. That was how Tim could afford to go to Yale. Word leaked out from the registrar’s office about who was paying the bill, and so a minor legend evolved that the CEO had been so charmed by young Timothy Cale that he wanted to fund the boy’s education. No one ever heard about weird animal behavior in the tropics or cryptic conversations walking back to a remote lab facility. It was enough that a billionaire had briefly been impressed with him.

  Driven by conscience and good manners, Tim’s father had tried through company channels, and then through his own personal efforts, to reach the CEO so he could thank him. But it was around this time that Orlando Braithewaite moved out of the public eye, staying more and more outside the United States.

  Tim spent the next three days poring over court documents and forensic case files, looking for commonalities between Mary Ash and Geoff Shackleton, between their murders, between their lives… He hoped to find some clue, some distinguishing factor, to explain why the Karma Booth did what it did to Mary Ash and then what it did to Shackleton. He discovered nothing. Three days of fruitless research, but then something occurred to him. Maybe there was a common element. Maybe—

  His musings were interrupted by a phone call from Gary Weintraub.

  “I think we need to talk.”

  “We certainly do. Why don’t we talk about Orlando Braithewaite?”

  “Tim, I—”

  “Then I need to know what you’re doing about Geoff Shackleton, if there’s any new phenomena shown by Mary Ash—”

  “Tim.” He heard Weintraub made a sharp intake of breath, and then his old friend said tightly, “Look, I have some idea of the things you’re going to say about Braithewaite. I imagine some shouting will be in order. But you need to get back here ASAP.”

  “Why?”

  “To meet the newest returned victim—if it is a returned victim.”

  Tim didn’t understand, and he didn’t expect an explanation over the phone. He hung up, and as he reached for his black valise, Matilda put through another call, this time from Benson. He was trying to warn Tim about what was already breaking on CNN, Fox and NBC. The US Attorney General was “stepping down” to be with his family; the truth, according to Benson, was that the President had pushed him out for not being hawkish enough over the Karma Booth.

  The new man stepping in—not yet grilled by the Senate but his confirmation all but a rubber stamp—had made it clear the Karma Booth executions should go ahead as planned. He was a former Kentucky prosecutor and one of the most conservative law professors to ever teach at Harvard. But in a careful maneuver of “cover your ass,” the President was willing to keep the more cautious Health Secretary in the cabinet, which meant that Tim’s contract and his investigation would still go forward.

  As Tim turned his car onto the highway, he knew that Gary Weintraub would probably push hard to stay in his place, researching the Karma Booth. If executions were to go ahead using it, someone had to be the gatekeeper of Pandora’s Box. Damn it, thought Tim. The Karma Booth’s potential could be felt by the whole world, and it was forcing the politicians’ hands.

  When he got to White Plains, Weintraub insisted on giving him a short briefing first on the latest reports of Booth usage in other countries. “You need to see what’s happened in context,” he pleaded gently.

  “What context?” asked Tim. He didn’t know what his old friend was building up to.

  According to the papers in Weintraub’s hand—which detailed both US intelligence efforts and direct reports from other countries—the Karma Booth had presented a unique problem no matter where it was used. One of the first natural motivations with the Booth was to execute child murderers and bring back their small victims. Those whose lives had ended alone—tortured, pitifully crying, with no one responding and coming in time to save them.

  In France, three years ago, a mother in Avignon had gained international sympathy by pleading on television for the safe return of her twin girls—it was later proved she had drowned them both in the Rhône. They sent her through the Booth, and her girls didn’t return.

  Nor did the seven toddler victims of pedophile murderer Avi Schacter in Jaffa.

  In Tokyo, a nisei girl pushed onto subway tracks by a nineteen-year-old member of a bosozoku biker gang also failed to come back through the Booth.

  A scientific consensus was slowly emerging. The Karma Booth couldn’t (or wouldn’t) resurrect any murder victim younger than twelve years old. The age appeared to be fixed, yet like so many other things, could
not be explained.

  Thirteen-year-old Sunil Ghosh, molested and strangled by his uncle in Mumbai, had stumbled out of the Karma Booth in New Delhi, more coherent than the usual arrivals and asking for his parents.

  Fourteen-year-old Ali Khal, killed on the spot with a dagger when he burst unsuspectingly on his family’s store being burglarized in Riyadh, had emerged from the Booth, his eyes haunted and wide. He was able to whisper after two days, “Are we poor now?” He had assumed the burglar had got away with it.

  The Booth would not bring back eleven-year-old Bobby Tyler, beaten to death in Little Rock.

  It would not bring back Maria Cobos in São Paulo, who had just turned nine before she died in a fire started by arson.

  “Twelve,” said Weintraub. “The arbitrary age of resurrection seems to be twelve. Any victim younger than this doesn’t come back.”

  “Okay, understood,” said Tim.

  Then Weintraub moved on to a lengthy explanation about the latest execution using the Booth. He rattled off the background details, his voice betraying the strain of nerves and a new emotion: genuine regret.

  “Armed robbery five years ago in, uh… in San Francisco.” Like Nickelbaum, the latest death row inmate had been especially sadistic, which fueled the justice system’s drive to put a lethal injection in his arm.

  Tim nodded, impatient to see the new arrival and get the rest of the facts later. Wasn’t it enough that the victim had returned? No, insisted Weintraub. “Just listen to me, please, Tim. You must realize—you have to know—we never expected anything like this.”

  And on he went with his background description. The story went that in a wild machine-gun rampage with accomplices, the convicted bank robber had taken a thirty-five-year-old Asian police officer captive, shooting off Constable Daniel Chen’s right kneecap and beating him half-senseless with the butt of his rifle. Then the man shoved the barrel into his victim’s mouth in front of witnesses. Daniel Chen had been on the force ten years. No commendations, just a responsible, regular cop. His young wife, May, had come over from Hong Kong through the arrangement of Daniel’s parents and in-laws, and his two daughters were aged three and five.

  The inmate was torn apart by the white light of the Karma Booth, his body ripped into the blue and violet whorls of the mysterious equipment.

  Gary Weintraub showed him the videotaped execution, but only the footage of the first booth. “Now let me show you ‘Daniel Chen.’ We have him waiting in the prison infirmary.”

  When the professor drew back a curtain on an observation window, Tim saw a boy of about three years old with sunshine-blond hair and bright blue eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The boy stared curiously around the room, dressed in a hospital gown, his small feet dangling over the side of the examination table. Weintraub’s team had electrodes on the boy’s head hooked up to an EEG monitor. They were watching for any unusual activity, something like what Tim had seen from Mary Ash and Geoff Shackleton. The boy’s eyes were certainly haunted, like those of Mary Ash, and like the first returned victim on her emergence, there were moments when the face went blank with disorientation, the lips trying to summon speech.

  Tim stared at Gary. “Oh, my God…”

  Weintraub ran a hand over his perspiring bald dome and clicked a button pen nervously. He swallowed hard and grunted, yanking back the curtain to obscure the observation window. He was partly responsible for bringing this child here, and he clearly didn’t want to look at the boy anymore.

  “I am imagining right now how some public relations flak in DC will panic over the ‘message’ from this.”

  “What the hell has the machine done? Did it yank Chen out of the middle of…of… what?”

  There had had to be a reason for this, thought Tim. There had to be.“Mary Ash was dead less than a year, wasn’t she? But Chen’s killer…”

  Gary Weintraub nodded. “The time elapsed, yes, I see your point. The Booth must have pulled Daniel Chen out of his next… incarnation, I guess, for lack of a more precise term. Or maybe it is the right word. We’re standing here, accepting the actual assumption on a scientific basis that reincarnation is real. I feel a fool just for saying it.”

  “Your evidence is sitting in there,” Tim reminded him, suppressing a shudder.

  “But it’s not instantaneous,” said Weintraub. “Something else happens before… I mean, the process has an interval. And the equipment pulled him from wherever he was supposed to be. The ramifications of this thing! It’s got to stop.”

  “It won’t stop,” said Tim. “Benson called me so your higher-ups must have called you, didn’t they? We’ve got a new Attorney General, and he wants this thing to be used. There’s an election year coming up.”

  “I know, I know,” answered Weintraub, still staring at the curtain as if he could see through it to the child. “But surely the man has to face the truth. If we showed him that little boy…”

  Tim let the air out of his lungs in a long sigh. “He’ll make the same conclusion. That we’ve stumbled onto our ‘first rule,’ and the Booth should be used only on murderers whose victims are deceased less than a year. As if that’ll save us from more chaos. Gary, listen. Please tell me you haven’t notified Daniel Chen’s family.”

  Weintraub looked mortified. “Are you joking? The idea alone is grotesque! And from what I understand, Daniel Chen and his wife have children of their own.”

  “It’s going to leak out,” said Tim. “It’s inevitable.”

  “I’m making arrangements to have the boy placed with special needs personnel in a different city,” offered Weintraub. “For now.”

  “For now?” prompted Tim. “What, so we’ll have a whole generation of foster children brought into our existence by that thing?” Something occurred to him, prompting a fresh chill down his back. “Gary. Suppose the Booth didn’t pluck him out of the ‘other side,’ the hereafter, wherever—suppose it scooped him up from here? This plane of existence. Suppose this kid is destined to be on a milk carton in New Jersey if we don’t find out who he belongs to?”

  “He’s not talking yet,” Weintraub protested.

  “What’s he said so far?”

  “Nothing. We tried speaking to him in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, you name it we’ve tried it just on the off chance that some piece of Daniel Chen is still in there, will react - and yes before you say it, I know Chen grew up in San Francisco, and that’s all counter-intuitive, but we didn’t know what else to try… But the boy doesn’t engage with anyone who walks into the room, doesn’t make eye contact. We’re not sure if there’s a mild form of autism at work here, but it’s still too early to be making assumptions. If the boy did disappear from Norway or whatever, well, for all we know, it could take months to discover his parents—if he ever did have parents. Good gracious, listen to what we’re saying.”

  “Terrific, you’ve invented a whole new category of orphan.”

  “Come on, Tim, what else would you have us do?” demanded Weintraub. “Every new technology causes upheaval in the world, and in ways mankind can’t begin to predict.”

  Tim waved away the rationalizing. Outrage would get him nowhere.

  “Okay, let’s try something else for the moment. What did Orlando Braithewaite tell you when he showed you the Booth? I mean, didn’t he give any kind of understanding of its limits, what it could do?”

  Weintraub collapsed into a metal chair in the hallway. “It wasn’t that straightforward.”

  He rubbed his eyes, and Tim could see his friend’s exasperation growing again. “Braithewaite flew me out at his own expense to Sierra Leone. I had no idea why he chose that particular country—last I heard, he was living on the other side of the continent in Ethiopia. He had the transposition booths set up, and he never introduced me to his technicians. He just went ahead with his… demonstration.”

  “Demonstration?”

  Weintraub’s round face lost its color, his eyes glaring a
t the floor tile. For a moment, he was back in Africa, reliving the experience of the first time the Booth was used.

  “Braithewaite claimed the Booth had undergone trials with animals: wild pigs in Kenya slaughtered by lions on the wildlife preserve and brought back to life. I never saw them. I did hear things from an animal pen nearby that squealed and snorted—it was a peculiar, warped sound, as if it had gone through some kind of electronic mixing equipment. Looking back on it now, the poor things sounded terrified. But I merely assumed they were bleating away because one of them was being taken away for dissection or something else. Animals know. They always know somehow. Then they hauled in this wreck of an African convict in rags… They dragged him in cuffs right to the first booth. Braithewaite said the man had been a henchman of one of the warlords years ago, during the blood diamond era. He shot an army soldier in his last escape attempt.

  “And I watched Braithewaite manipulate the controls himself. The soldier had only been one month dead, and I examined photos of the crime scene, Tim. They even showed me where the man was buried. They had a Portuguese doctor who had worked as a medical examiner in Lisbon—he checked the DNA from bone marrow to confirm it was the right person. And then I watched the lights in that second chamber, and this pitiful, mumbling victim shuffle naked as an infant back into our world! I swear I don’t remember what questions I asked Braithewaite. I certainly can’t recall his answers, but I do know this soldier after sixteen hours was lucid. He was absolutely awake and coherent—he was alive. He asked for a friend in his unit, and he wanted to know about his family.”

  Tim didn’t say anything. He simply stood and listened, knowing Weintraub wasn’t finished.

  “Before you ask, the poor man couldn’t tell us anything about where he had gone. He might as well have just woken up from an anesthetic after surgery. No white light beckoning him forward, no coma dreams, nothing. He was just… back. If you had seen the evidence of his death, pictures of his actual corpse, and then to look into the eyes of this fellow! Not like Mary Ash, Tim. I didn’t conceive of a Mary Ash, coming back so strange, so affected…”