The Karma Booth. Jeff Pearce

okay,” said Miller. Then with less confidence: “He looks okay. He’ll be okay…”

      He ruffled his hair again and kicked the floor with a sneaker, jubilant that the Karma Booth had demonstrated it would consistently work. Weintraub merely peered through his spectacles, quietly absorbed as if he were watching fruit flies eating a plate of grapes.

      They were already wheeling Geoff Shackleton out to the new emergency ward set up for arrivals down the hall.

      Tim turned once more to Weintraub and Miller. “You do realize the life you’ve given back is in complete tatters! From what I’ve read, the poor bastard had no idea his wife was fucking students. He wasn’t gay or cruising bus stations as she claimed, but his rep at his workplace—and oh, keep in mind the guy worked down in Texas as a teacher—is ruined!”

      Miller was indifferent. “Come on! All that stuff would have come out if he had lived. She would have said the same shit.”

      “You don’t know that!” countered Tim. “And he would have been there to defend himself against her accusations. He tried to stop Cody James at the school, and he probably would have been treated like a hero, which would have mitigated her bullshit. The guy’s going to be devastated when he learns his wife is partly responsible for the whole nightmare!”

      “And again,” said Weintraub patiently, “the man still would have had to face those unpleasant facts had he simply been wounded. What would you have me say, Tim? Do I personally believe Nicole Shackleton and that young man, Cavanaugh, share responsibility? Without question, of course. But the wife and that boy didn’t go collect firearms and shoot them in a crowded school—Cody James did.” “Gary, you’re missing the point,” said Tim. “I don’t have sympathy for that boy. The shrinks called him disturbed and unbalanced, and my heart doesn’t weep for him at all. The girl he shot in the lunchroom never did a damn thing to him, and the witnesses say the little monster laughed. He got a kick out of causing destruction and pain. I don’t know what your Karma Booth is but I don’t think it’s justice! That girl, what’s her name, Amber… Amber Janssen. She’ll never walk again. What does the Booth do for her?”

      Miller stopped tapping his sneaker and folded his arms. In a calm and reasonable voice, he answered, “Nothing—you’re right. So you want to ignore what we can do for this guy? Shackleton is alive, and he will think, he’ll feel, he’ll go on with his existence despite the time gap.”

      “But we’re not talking about minutes, we’re talking about months, and he could be different,” said Tim. Again, he appealed to Weintraub. “I went and saw Mary Ash, Gary. She’s not the same person.”

      “Jesus, you know this after meeting her for the first time?” scoffed Miller.

      “Her own mother is afraid of her.”

      Tim broke off, realizing there was no point. The neurologist wasn’t in the mood to listen. Besides, he was learning nothing from this argument and something new had occurred to him—something he had almost forgotten in the light show of the Booth chambers.

      “Hold on. Cody James hadn’t exhausted all his death row appeals.”

      Weintraub and Miller exchanged a look, but both were curiously silent.

      “How did you speed up the legal process?” asked Tim. He realized as he finished the question, he had his answer already. “You didn’t, did you? You didn’t have to. Did they just give you carte blanche to go ahead and use it for convictions?”

      Still, the two scientists said nothing. At last, Weintraub shook his stubby fingers in a gesturing circle, confessing, “They’ve sanctioned the Booth for cases where the murders are beyond any factual mitigation or doubt, and yes, I know, Tim, you’ll ask who decides that, but we get authorization from the Attorney General. Look, given that you remember so much about the Cody James case, you must know that students at the school caught the shooting on their phone cams. He did it. He was clearly guilty. The appeals were nothing but a formality.”

      “Oh God, Gary, is that why you did it?”

      Weintraub sighed. “We needed to know.”

      Tim understood: to know if the Karma Booth worked on its own laws, not on the laws of Man. And now they had their answer.

      The Karma Booth remained a constant source of news, near-news and speculation. You couldn’t turn on the TV anymore without hearing discussion about it. It filled blogs and sold magazines. It inspired sick jokes on late night talk show monologues.

      Two weeks after the lights flashed and dazzled in the test room in White Plains, Tim walked down Sixth Avenue in New York with Michael Benson, the under-secretary of Homeland Security who had got him involved. Benson was five years older than him, with a tuft of lank black hair at the front of his scalp while the rest had long since retreated. The man’s vanity was focused on his body, and he often bragged about four games of racquetball a week and his morning jogs.

      “Little shit from the Congressional page staff beat me,” laughed Benson, rubbing the hair on the back of his head, still wet from his sports club’s shower. “Better play a couple more times a week.”

      “What’s surprising is that you think you can still slaughter seventeen-year-olds on the court,” replied Tim.

      “You go ahead and grow old gracefully, pal. I’m going to fight it every step of the way.”

      Tim had known the exec as an ambitious player who had moved up through the management ranks of the CIA and then saw the potential in Homeland’s growing new department. It didn’t surprise him at all that Benson was taking point over something as controversial and explosive as the Karma Booth. The man had always liked keeping a hand in plots to hurt the credibility of the latest Saddam or Osama, and his ego loved a consult from State over how to flatter the newest French prime minister. The Karma Booth offered power over life and death—impossible for a political addict to resist.

      “Enough chit-chat about your impending mid-life crisis,” said Tim. “Let’s talk about this rush you and your pals in the corridors of power have to set off a bomb.”

      “What can I say, Tim? The Republicans had the Senate seats to pass the bill. It was rushed right through committee.”

      “Then I’m even happier you couldn’t persuade me to move to Washington.”

      It was a regular friendly and not-so friendly duel between them whenever he was summoned to the Beltway. He had no desire whatsoever to live in the capital. Benson always argued it would make life easier… for him. Tim always reminded him that he charged enough that his clients could, and should, damn well come to New York.

      “So they’ve decided to use it, even though they still don’t know how it works.”

      Benson was philosophical. “Nobody is ever sure how the biggest scientific breakthroughs—”

      “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.” Tim sighed wearily, knowing Benson was about to drag out the penicillin defense again. He was getting so tired of that one. “So I take it my services are no longer needed. You certainly don’t need an ethics assessment.”

      Benson pursed his lips, surprised. “On the contrary. We need your assessment more than ever now.”

      “What on earth for?” Tim asked gently. And Benson’s face told him it was just as he feared. The final decider was politics. The technology had to be used because they did have it. He struggled for another tack. If they wanted him to do his job, they could at least clear a path for him.

      “Look, if you don’t know how it works then tell me where you got the technology from. And I’m not going to buy that it’s the latest tech toy from the NSA or CIA.”

      “It’s not,” said Benson, looking mildly embarrassed. “I suppose the best way to categorize it is… It was a gift.”

      “A gift? A gift from who?”

      “Does