The Tesla Legacy (3 page)

He’d turned his back on the light as he fled, but he faced it again now. The entrance was an empty mouth that mocked him. The light and wind and trees might be forever out of his reach. But he had gone nearly a yard farther than yesterday. Not enough, but progress.

A train came through, again on a different track, and he covered the dog’s ears. The simple act of protecting Edison brought him all the way back to himself. After the train passed, he pulled a dog treat out of his pocket and gave it to Edison. “You earned this, buddy.”

The dog swallowed it in a single gulp.

Joe headed toward the tunnels that led to Grand Central Terminal. Today, his brain had betrayed him—something he’d grown to expect. Once, he’d prized his brain. It understood things that other brains didn’t. His brain had led him out of a difficult childhood into early entrance to Massachusetts Institute of Technology—on a full scholarship—while other boys his age were freshmen in high school. His brain had let him coast through his classes, earn his degrees, found his own company, and retire a multimillionaire before most people bought their first house. It had been a good brain, but now it wouldn’t even let him sit in the sunlight.

But he had to cut his brain some slack—it wasn’t at fault. Someone had poisoned it, and he had blood tests to prove that poison had caused his crippling agoraphobia. Since he’d found that out, he’d spent a great deal of time and money trying to discover who had poisoned him and why. He’d investigated everyone who had access to his food and drink on his last days outside, but all his inquiries had led nowhere.

A large key ring at his belt jangled when he stumbled over a train tie. The keys came with the house—they provided access to all the doors in the tunnel system. With these keys, he, and he alone, could open each door in his subterranean world and see what lay behind it. Too bad his brain wasn’t so straightforward.

Edison bumped Joe’s knee with his nose, as if to remind him he was OK. That his life still had good things. That he was safe.

If only it were that easy.

Chapter 2

Vivian Torres hung on to the rock wall with every bit of strength in her chalk-dusted fingertips. She’d been mixing and matching holds all the way up, always trying to find something more difficult, and now she’d climbed herself into a spot she wouldn’t be able to get out of without falling off the wall. Her fingertips were screaming, but she wasn’t going to give up.

She ought to be safe. Her teenage sister, Lucy, stood below, belaying her. Lucy didn’t like to climb, but had taken and passed a belaying class because Vivian paid her twenty dollars for each visit to Brooklyn Boulders—an indoor climbing gym where she’d had to sign more waivers to touch the walls than she had to enter the military.

Easy money, but Lucy wasn’t earning it. Instead, she fiddled with her phone one-handed. If Vivian fell off the wall, Lucy would let her hit the mat like Humpty Dumpty. So, dropping wasn’t an option.

Vivian had to get out of this on her own. She hadn’t survived two tours in Afghanistan to kill herself falling off a fake climbing wall in New York City. No dignity there.

She blew a strand of black hair off her face and reached for a yellow handhold. She had to let one foot leave the wall, and her shoulders told her they were tired of her shenanigans. Her left hand slipped off the handhold, and the momentum knocked her off the one good foothold she’d been using. Pain shot down her right arm as it took her full weight.

Dangling by one arm, she had a good view of Lucy. The rope was slack in her brown hands, and Lucy studied the graffiti-covered front windows as if trying to read them from the inside.

“Yo!” Vivian shouted.

Lucy didn’t even flinch. White wires trailed out of her ears and down to the phone in her hand. She was wearing earbuds! Vivian had forbidden her to listen to music while belaying her. Back in the service, she had trusted her fellow soldiers with her life. Civilian life wasn’t like that.

She looked down at the wall below her, but she was just over a curve, and she couldn’t see far enough to find a safe place to put her legs or her arm. She blocked out the panic in her stomach and the pain in her hand. That was just her body. She could rise above that. She had scars on her back and a medal in her closet that would testify to it.

If she couldn’t use her eyes, she’d have to use her memory. She closed her eyes and visualized the wall below, replaying each potential handhold and foothold in her memory.

A red foothold scrolled by. She stopped the picture and studied it. If she swung toward it, her foot might reach. If she misjudged the hold’s position, she’d fall. But she’d fall in a couple seconds anyway, when her right hand lost its last bit of desperate strength.

She swung toward a foothold she couldn’t see, caught it with her toe, and pulled herself onto the wall. Her left hand found a new grip. She let go with her right hand and clenched and unclenched it, sending blood to her angry muscles. She hauled in a few deep breaths.

That wasn’t a mistake she could make on a real wall. That’d kill her. Next weekend she was going out to The Gunks with Dirk and a couple of friends, and she’d better get her head in the game by then. Outdoor walls were unforgiving.

But careful climbing wasn’t what the indoor wall was about. On the indoor wall, she didn’t allow herself to plan in advance. She went from one handhold to the hardest one she could see, training herself to react to the unexpected, getting stuck on purpose. Something that was a lot easier when she thought she had Lucy to back her up.

She reached for another handhold and pushed herself up with her legs. She wasn’t going to climb down before she reached the roof. Below her, Lucy started tapping her foot to the music.

Damn little sister. Vivian was taking back those twenty dollars as soon as her feet were on the ground.

Lucy looked up. “Your phone just beeped! It says you have a funeral to go to.”

Vivian touched the roof. “You’re damn lucky that it isn’t mine.”

Chapter 3

Ash gazed out the window of his eighty-fifth floor office. The surrounding skyscrapers faded into pollution-browned clouds. From his perch high in the Empire State Building, he was constantly reminded how humans had sullied even the clouds. Mankind was fast turning this beautiful blue and green ball into a waste dump. A few more generations and the planet would collapse. He could cope with the idea of losing a few billion people here or there, but the mass extinction of the innocent plants and animals troubled him deeply.

He cracked a window, and warm air flowed into the room. Another reason he loved the building—the windows actually opened. He’d spent so much time sealed off from nature at their last location that he’d vowed never to move into another building that didn’t have windows that could open into the world.

A few quick breaths of the outside air—he could taste the metallic tang of pollution in it—and he went back to work. On his sleek bamboo desk sat the current quarterly report for his company, Wright, which played at the boundaries of ecology and commerce—snapping up money right and left by making a cleaner world profitable. On top of the report rested a
Forbes
article that described Alan Wright as “the man who has singlehandedly done more for the planet than anyone before him.”

Most men would have been content with that, but not Ash. Repairing the planet one tiny piece at a time was pitiful. People had to learn to consume less and reproduce less, and it drove him crazy to see how sleepy and stupid they were, even when their self-interest was concerned. It didn’t matter how often or how clearly the message went out—most people weren’t listening.

So he had created the hacktivist network Spooky. Spooky’s name came from Einstein’s quote about quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” The world was entangled whether policymakers recognized it or not, and each tiny human was a force with a spooky amount of power that could stretch around the world.

In the beginning, he had secretly played all the parts—creating bots and identities that interacted with each other and pulled off brilliant hacks. Once, Spooky sent pictures of oil-soaked pelicans, open-mouthed dead fish, and fires burning on the surface of the ocean to every employee of the oil company responsible for a giant spill. A few examined their consciences and talked to the media.

Then, he hacked the senior executives’ emails and posted their ass-covering, contemptuous correspondence about the spill on the Internet. In the media firestorm that followed, he’d lunched with some of those very same executives as a peer, commiserating over the violations to their privacy, as if their privacy were more sacred than the ecosystems they destroyed for profit.

That action launched Spooky. He’d built it, and they finally came—young, eager hackers willing to risk everything to change the world. Powerless kids who suddenly felt as if they might have a chance to expose the powerful, to use their brains to even the odds of survival for the planet had poured into Spooky’s secret chat rooms to plan and execute their own actions.

He’d intended to turn over control of Spooky and let the young ones bear it forward. But he loved the freedom his online anonymity gave him and, in the end, he couldn’t give it up. In real life, Alan Wright was always deferred to for his billions, his brilliance, and his meteoric success.

In Spooky’s world, he was merely Ash—either the wood used to stake a vampire or what remained after a fire. Both meanings were about transformation.

Ash tapped a button to open a secure window on his monitor. He’d finally hacked one of his favorite hacktivists—Geezer. Geezer was the oldest of the fluid consortium of troublemakers that swirled around Spooky. Geezer had helped build the Internet infrastructure they hacked, and he knew secrets that went deeper than the youngsters, but he sometimes missed obvious intrusions into his own space. Ash had finally nailed down his real IP address and accessed Geezer’s camera. He liked to put a face to the name.

A man in front of a computer in an untidy room showed on Ash’s screen. He hadn’t expected Geezer to be bald as an egg. He had expected the long, unkempt beard and the tie-dyed shirt. The man’s bloodshot eyes bulged, like Marty Feldman’s, and he looked too thin to be healthy.

Geezer’s long fingers were typing away, logging into a dark chat room often frequented by members of Spooky. Ash took a long sip of coffee and eavesdropped. This was better than television.

quantum: u don’t have the courage of ur convictions, old man. spooky would be better off without u

geezer: I don’t answer to you

quantum: i don’t ask u questions, because u don’t know anything. maybe u used to, before ur Alzheimer days

geezer: Wisdom is earned

quantum: courage is born, and u didn’t get any. u’ll never do anything great, old man.

Quantum could be cruel, but his tactics ensured that only the strongest and most committed members stayed with Spooky.

geezer: I have access to something great

quantum: viagra? old news, old dude

Quantum was trouble. Ash had researched him when his importance within Spooky grew. He knew his real name, Michael Pham; his current location, also New York City; and that Quantum had been in and out of prison for hacking, stalking, and assault. He was brilliant, but unpredictable, violent, and more radical than the others. At some point, Spooky might have to cut ties with him and disavow that he had ever been part of their group. But not yet. He might still be useful.

So far as Ash could tell, Quantum and Geezer didn’t know each other off-line, or even know they both lived in New York. Good. Ash liked having an overview that others didn’t. Information was power.

geezer: Any Nikola Tesla fans out there?

quantum: who isn’t?

Ash sat up straighter. He had been obsessed with Nikola Tesla since he was a boy.

geezer: I know a guy with a box of Tesla’s original designs.

quantum: sure u do

geezer: Including the Oscillator.

Ash leaned forward. Plans for the fabled Earthquake Machine? Nikola Tesla had said he had once used the Oscillator to create an earthquake in Manhattan, frightening local police. But those words came from an elderly Tesla, one whose lucidity was often disputed. Tesla had said a lot of kooky things, but he’d also said enough brilliant ones that you never knew what to take seriously. The Oscillator was one of his more intriguing claims.

quantum: the one he said could ‘knock down the empire state building with 5 lbs of pressure?’

geezer: That one.

Ash looked around at the steel and glass that encased him. He’d headquartered his company here because of everything the building represented, including reaching for the sky using green technology.

He certainly hadn’t come here for the neighborhood. He shared a floor with the third-largest privately owned corporation in the United States. The Bakers, although he called them the Breakers because all they did was break things, were a brother-and-sister team. Their oil-drilling empire perpetuated legendary environmental destruction, and they were well-known for spending huge sums to finance the right-wing agenda. They were destroying the world faster than Ash could save it, and he had to be reminded of them every time he got out of the elevator.

They had moved into fracking, and were drilling deeper than had ever been possible. Their actions were causing earthquakes and widespread water contamination. They were set to expand their fracking activities into national parks in six months. No place on Earth would be safe from their depredations. Ash had his lobbyists working against theirs, of course, but he’d run out of time.