The Tesla Legacy (10 page)

Joe sank into his favorite leather chair to see what secrets the great Tesla had entrusted to his pigeon keeper. He laid the suitcase on the marble-topped coffee table in front of him. He set his palm on top of the suitcase, drawing out the anticipation. His father had wanted him to have this. For better or worse, it was the last gift the man would ever give him.

Slowly, he unzipped the suitcase. Resting inside its black interior was a plain cardboard box held closed by four interlocking flaps on top. It was just like any other box. Nikola Tesla’s secret wasn’t even secured with a piece of tape. How important could it be?

Still, his heart beat faster as he lifted the flaps. Soft light fell on the contents—a neat stack of three folders. Joe drew them out slowly, almost afraid to touch their dusty surfaces.

The folders were each labeled in old-fashioned handwriting: Letters, Lists, and Long Term. Joe decided to exclude the most boring-looking papers first.

He opened the Letters folder. It contained about ten pages, all written in the Cyrillic alphabet, although he thought that Tesla’s Croatia had used Latin letters. Still, Nikola Tesla had clearly known Cyrillic, or he’d had letters from someone who had. Joe would need to hire someone to translate these documents into English. He photographed each one carefully before returning it to the folder. He’d back them up somewhere safe, just in case.

Next up: Lists. This folder held sheets of paper in various sizes. He pulled out the first one. In the same careful handwriting: pigeon corn, new handkerchiefs, glass globes that will fit in the hand, copper wire. Joe paged through the others. Also lists of various items, some household and others electrical. He couldn’t see anyone wanting these, but he diligently photographed each one.

He took a deep breath and opened the last folder: Long Term. It held four pieces of paper: three blueprints and a newspaper clipping. The top blueprint had a yellow sticky note on it. His father’s small printing was centered in the middle.
Be afraid. Tread carefully
.

Chapter 13

Ash flicked a bit of dust off his suit. The ribbon cutting was running ridiculously late. The police were working to clear out a crowd of protesters. Usually, protesters came down on his side, but this development was complicated.

He looked across the silvery surface of the Hudson River. The river looked so peaceful and clean that most people couldn’t imagine the toxic soup in the water. It held everything from mercury to PCBs to raw sewage to anything else people had thought to dump into New York’s giant toilet. The hand in his pocket tightened into a fist. Strides had been made—the bottom had been dredged of PCBs, mercury levels in the fish had gone down, mutations were less common—but it was nowhere near enough.

He had taken over the plot of land that protesters now stood on. It still held a ramshackle homeless shelter that had already been condemned. He intended to pull the building down and build a laboratory in its place, one that produced PCB-eating bacteria. The bacteria would be bred here and released into the river, eating away the toxins and excreting harmless waste in return. In fact, one of their byproducts was electricity, and he was working to harness that, too.

His intervention would allow nature to heal herself. The lab was an unquestionable good, but he had spent a fortune battling lawsuits filed by dimwits who thought that beds for a hundred homeless drunkards and addicts were more important than safe water and a clean ecosystem for everyone. How could they care about the comfort of a few people, when the future of the river itself was at stake?

He’d received hate mail and death threats and had been regularly blasted on the Internet. Now they were out there waving signs that said
Feed people, not bacteria
and
Wright is Wrong
. He’d been tempted to use Spooky to fight back, but he hadn’t. His cause was big enough to absorb their vitriol. He was big enough. The Breakers took worse without blinking.

“Any minute, Mr. Wright,” said his harried-looking assistant. She’d been talking to the police, demanding that the crowds be cleared far enough for the camera crew to get a good shot of the river.

His secure phone buzzed, and he took it out of his suit pocket, hoping for a distraction, and saw a message from Quantum:
suitcase not retrieved. in possession of joe tesla crazy millionaire
.

Ash smiled at the telegraphic summary. It was always nice to see Joe belittled. As much as he despised the Breakers, he didn’t loathe them like he did Joe.

Ash had met Joe at a computer-security conference a few years before. Joe had worn jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt with a mushroom cloud on the front like any other paranoid techy. But while he’d looked like everyone else at the conference, he’d been sitting on a company that was soon valued at a billion dollars. A company, ironically, that was working to help law enforcement at the expense of privacy and security. How Joe reconciled that with his own staunch ideas on privacy, Ash never understood. Ash hated Pellucid. It put unprecedented power in the hands of the government and made it even harder for disruptive forces, forces that were not necessarily even illegal, to move unchecked. But Joe seemed not to have such qualms about the few repressing the rights of the many.

Ash had been at the beginning of his divorce then. He’d hoped the marriage would simply end, like a flopped business, and they would move on. But the divorce had drawn out over months as they battled for custody of Mariella, their profoundly autistic daughter. He lost his bid for full joint custody and instead was granted visitation every other weekend. She paid less and less attention to him every time he saw her.

After she’d been diagnosed, he’d funded research into the causes of her condition. Genetics loads the gun and the environment pulls the trigger, he’d been told. What a terrible metaphor to use for a parent whose child had been shot in the brain by an incurable condition.

One of the triggers was PCBs. That was why he was standing here today taking them out of the environment—for her. And she would never even notice.

The protesters’ angry chanting reminded him of his ex-wife, Rosa, and their arguments, more about angry tones than real content. In the midst of that strife, he’d met Joe Tesla at a bar near San Francisco’s Moscone Center. After a few drinks, Joe called him a “sad sack,” and Ash saw pity in those intelligent eyes. That was when he started to truly hate him.

Joe took him to the Golden Gate Bridge. Not, it turned out, to throw the pitiful Ash over the side, but to distract him with a climb to the top of the north tower in the middle of the night. Joe had climbing gear for both of them and a key to the tower.

He never learned how Joe got the key, or how he’d managed to get them up without being caught, but he would never forget staring down at the orange span glowing in the fog below him. The sight gave him a moment of peace and clarity, and a reminder that the rules didn’t apply to him. On the bridge, and in life, he had a perspective on the world that no one else did, and that gave him the right to bring his visions to reality. Just as Joe did. In fact, more of a right, because Ash’s vision would heal the world.

When he heard Joe had moved to New York, he expected a call. Ash had learned how they could get to the top of the Empire State Building and touch the antenna there. It was a simple matter of money. To show off, he had sent Joe a coded invitation to join him on his adventure, but the man never responded.

All Ash’s emails and calls went unanswered. When he saw the
Forbes
article about Joe’s agoraphobia, he knew why. Shame had driven his old acquaintance into a deep, dark, and lonely hole, and he didn’t want company. Joe deserved pity now, not Ash.

But even a trapped Joe was clever. Maybe they could work on Nikola Tesla’s device together. But what then? Joe wasn’t interested in disrupting the system, and he cared about human life.

He wouldn’t put people in danger. He didn’t share Ash’s big picture. That was why Joe had never turned up on Spooky. He wouldn’t be part of that kind of game. He would have left the homeless shelter there, left the PCBs in the water, let them eat away at the brains of toddlers.

Ironically, only the Breakers would understand his actions. Even if they were on the other side of the spectrum, they had a global perspective. They, too, were above the law.

No, Joe wouldn’t give him unfettered access to the plans for the Oscillator, so he would have to get them from him. If Joe came to grief over it, all the better.

He would track him, and he would take the device from him. Because of his illness, Joe was easier to track in the physical world than most. Since he lived near Grand Central Terminal and never went outside, he’d be easy to find. It would be like the proverb—like taking candy from a baby.

Ash tapped his thumb against the phone’s tiny screen, the grand view from the riverbank forgotten. He could hire surveillance teams, but that was too obvious. He’d tried to track Joe online over the years, just for fun, but the man was practically a ghost. Even his cell phone popped on and off the grid sporadically, showing up at Grand Central Terminal but nowhere else. He’d taken paranoia to a whole new level.

Glancing up to make sure that the event wasn’t ready to start, Ash returned his secure phone to his left pocket and took his regular phone out of his right. He typed up an email explaining he had heard about Joe’s father’s death “through the grapevine” and suggesting they meet for drinks at The Campbell Apartment. The bar was inside Grand Central Terminal, so that shouldn’t be a problem for Joe, although he didn’t mention that.

What would Ash do once he had the Oscillator? Maybe the device could be sent into space, attached to an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and deployed to save the world. Maybe it could destroy the Breakers’ fracking equipment, collapse their boreholes with what looked like fracking-induced earthquakes. That was a good start. Come to think of it, targeted earthquakes could also shake loose enough people to let the planet truly heal, since seven billion was not a sustainable population. He’d save his grandest ambitions for later and start small—with the Empire State Building.

His office there was overinsured anyway, but not by enough to be suspicious. He might start there, but he wouldn’t stop there. He realized he was smiling. The Oscillator was a powerful destructive force. He looked at the crumbling homeless shelter that would be leveled soon. The seeds of its destruction would grow into newer, better creations.

Who knew what the Oscillator might create in the world? It would have to be found. It would have to be tested. But the potential was there.

He must have it.

Only he would dare to use it properly, and to its full potential.

Chapter 14

Joe stood at the billiard table with pages spread out across the green baize. The blueprint with the sticky note on it was for an unnamed device. There was no picture of it fully assembled, but it didn’t look as if it would turn into anything sinister. It looked like a tiny articulated figure run by gears and racks.

Nowadays it would be called a robot, but Nikola Tesla would have called it an automaton. Whatever it was called, it didn’t look worth all the trouble. Its harmless looks must be deceiving.

He read the newspaper clipping, learning about the collapse of a bridge in Connecticut a few months before he was born. Three (red) people had died. The article speculated that metal fatigue was responsible for the disaster. His father had stuck another yellow note on the picture of the broken bridge. On that one he wrote:
I was responsible for this. May God forgive me. Show the wisdom I did not and have the courage to destroy it
.

Joe had no idea what his father wanted him to destroy. He was hoping that the automaton would give him a clue, because he knew that he would follow his father on one last, crazy adventure and try to do as he asked.

Maybe it would help him to make sense of the man. Maybe it would help him to make sense of himself. Or maybe it was another wild-goose chase. Whatever it was, it was the last thing he had from a father he’d ignored too long.

He studied the newspaper clipping. How like his father to give him this as his final gift—guilt and a confusing request to show wisdom without an explanation as to how or why. Could his father have knocked down the bridge? If so, what did that action have to do with the plans for a tiny automaton?

Joe pored over the plans, making a list of items he would need to build the tiny creature. By the time he finished, his list looked a lot like the lists in Nikola’s folder.

His neck cracked when he straightened up. Too long bending over the billiard table. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. Time for bed, but he still had stuff to do.

First, he gathered the original plans and put them in the old cardboard box his father had saved for him. Even though he’d photographed every scrap of paper in the box and backed up the photos, he felt as if he ought to lock the box in a safe, just in case.

But he didn’t have a safe. He didn’t need one, because his entire house was more secure than most banks. He took the box upstairs to his office and stashed it in a closet behind boxes of turn-of-the-century Christmas decorations. It seemed like the last place anyone would look.

He stuck his parts list in his pocket and went down to the kitchen to make a cup of chamomile tea. Some previous inhabitant of the house had purchased an electric kettle made out of copper. Based on the wiring, he thought the device had been created in the 1930s. So far, it had always worked, and it had never threatened to set the house on fire, but he reminded himself, again, that it might be a good idea to take it apart and replace the electronics. He had no intention of parting with the dinged kettle itself. It belonged to the house.

Tea in hand, he headed to the parlor. His upstairs office was fine during the day, but he preferred to spend his evenings working on his laptop in the parlor. He liked the warmth of the fireplace. Edison did, too. The dog was stretched out in front of the artificial flames, snoring away.