The Karma Booth

“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 frosting 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.”