Edison's Alley

In truth, no one could miss them, from the fabulous aurora to the nuisance of doorknob shocks. The news treated these things as minor curiosities. Even when airplanes began to have compass issues, the only reports that seemed to get aired were the ones where pilots landed at the wrong airport, which turned something potentially serious into a laughing matter.

  It was while Caitlin was helping her mother with the laundry that her vague sense of concern began to congeal into true foreboding.

  When she reached into the dryer and yanked out some bedsheets that had just finished their cycle, she was hit by a shock that knocked her backward into her mother and slammed the two of them against the laundry room wall.

  “My God, are you all right?” her mother asked.

  Caitlin wasn’t quite sure. The shock had hurt more than any of the others she had received over the past few weeks. It was jarring, and for a moment she thought she might black out. In that befuddled moment she was forced to face what she had been refusing to consider.

  This could be bad.

  Danny had dragged the asteroid from the heavens, and then Mr. Slate had knocked it into orbit, turning it into a massive electrical generator, which created beautiful lights in the night sky and annoying static—but what if that static was more than just a nuisance? If the asteroid was a generator, could it be overloading?

  “Caitlin, honey, talk to me! Are you all right?”

  Caitlin took a deep breath, and got her bearings. “I’m fine, Mom. Just a shock is all.” She carefully grabbed the sheets again. Even in the light of the laundry room, the sparks within the sheets could be seen as tiny little flashes, discharging with faint, arrhythmic snaps. “See?” Caitlin said, trying to downplay it. “Just static.”

  Her mother seemed both upset and a little bit frightened, but her own emotional charge passed. “Well,” she said, “maybe we’ll air-dry from now on.”

  Petula was also becoming more and more aware of the strange occurrences brought on by the asteroid in orbit. Most interesting to her was the increasing number of times kamikaze birds would fly into the glass of her living room window. It was as if the disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field had caused the neighborhood bird population to lose all sense of direction.

  Petula could relate—and she wondered whether she was the bird, or the pane. Surely there was the potential to be either. She could be the victim or the agent of forces unseen.

  From the moment Petula became a junior pledge of the Accelerati, she knew that she was playing in a new league, with far higher stakes.

  They had killed Vince. True, he was now connected to a device that made death little more than an inconvenience—but they probably hadn’t known the battery existed when they placed the deadly remote in Nick’s house.

  They had killed an innocent harpist. True, for some reason, the woman didn’t seem to mind the fact that she was being killed, but that didn’t lessen Ms. Planck’s act of murder.

  Could Petula condone and forgive such acts? And if called on to kill with her own hand, could she do it? Petula knew, with absolute certainty, the answer to that question.

  Maybe.

  Petula despised the Great Maybe. She had always valued certainty, but she was coming to understand that “maybe” was a comforting answer to life’s most difficult questions. It allowed one to avoid consulting one’s own moral compass for as long as possible—and with the Earth now so weirdly magnetized, who knew in which direction her moral compass would point? Best to let it spin unchecked for a while.

  The problem was not her indecisiveness, though. Her concern was how coldly decisive the Accelerati were. She suspected—no, she knew—that things would not end well for Nick if Dr. Jorgenson, the Grand Acceleratus, had his way.

  “As long as he’s useful to us, he’ll be fine,” Ms. Planck had assured her—as if that was comforting. For all Petula knew, Ms. Planck would end his life herself once he ceased being “useful,” whatever that meant.

  “The Grand Acceleratus already tried to kill him,” Petula reminded Ms. Planck. “Nick told me so.”

  “Only because Nick was holding a weapon on him—a weapon that froze his arm, and left him without a right pinkie. Dr. Jorgenson can’t be blamed for trying to defend himself, can he?”

  It all sounded so reasonable. Petula was sure that if Nick were killed, the Accelerati would have a reasonable explanation for that, too.

  There was so much for her to weigh. Being part of the Accelerati had already made her special; it could also make her great—not just in her own mind, but in the world outside of it. Is this the price of being great? Petula wondered. Being willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in the pursuit of greatness?

  When put that way, the answer became clear:

  Maybe.

  On Saturday, Petula was called before the Grand Acceleratus again. Ms. Planck bowled their way in, and once more they crossed through the Great Hall overlooking a glorious vista. Today it wasn’t Venice; it was a rain forest canopy.

  “Try not to irritate him,” Ms. Planck warned. “He’s had a rough week.”

  As Petula and Ms. Planck strode through headquarters, the few Accelerati present noticed the heavy, gunmetal clarinet in her hands and whispered to one another, clearly knowing what it was, if not what it did. She fought the urge to show them.

  She had brought the clarinet at Ms. Planck’s insistence.

  “Jorgenson asked for it, and he’s a man who gets what he wants,” Ms. Planck had told her.

  She led Petula past the scowling statue of Edison and the research department, down a flight of stairs to an impressive wooden door with a brass knocker that seemed entirely out of place. But what was she thinking? Everything down there was entirely out of place.

  Jorgenson opened the door.

  “Miss Grabowski-Jones,” he said. “A pleasure to see you again.”

  She reflexively held out her hand to shake, but he displayed his bandaged right hand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot.” She and Ms. Planck stepped inside.

  “Welcome to my private residence.”

  The well-appointed living room was decorated with minimalistic modern furniture, and it had large windows on three sides. Through the magic of high-definition holographics, the room appeared to be suspended ten stories above New York’s Times Square.

  Ms. Planck smirked. “Not following the rain forest theme? I would have thought you’d go for something more pastoral.”

  “That shows how little you know me, Evangeline,” Jorgenson said, and then he quickly returned his attention to Petula. “Some like the tranquillity of nature outside their window; I prefer to exist at the very crossroads of humanity.” He took out his phone and tapped the screen several times. With each tap the scene beyond the windows changed to another hub of civilization. The Champs-Élysées in Paris. Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

  “I can be in all these places with the touch of my finger.”

  Petula would have been impressed by the display if Jorgenson hadn’t been so impressed with himself. Yes, he was the Grand Acceleratus, but his self-importance rubbed her natural contrariness the wrong way, and she found herself saying, “Yeah, but they’re just pictures.”

  Ms. Planck put a firm hand on her shoulder to remind her to watch herself. Jorgenson didn’t seem offended, though. He took her comment in stride.

  “Reality is subjective,” he told her. “It can be whatever we choose it to be.”

  “Yeah, but they’re still just pictures,” Petula said again. And she reached out and brazenly tapped the CLEAR button on his phone interface. They were left in a room with a lot of windows looking at nothing but huge black plasma screens a foot beyond the glass. “It’s not reality if I can turn it off,” she said.

  Ms. Planck squeezed her shoulder until it hurt and said, “Dr. Jorgenson, I’m sorry, she didn’t mean—”

  Jorgenson put up his pinkieless hand for silence, then waved to dismiss her. Ms. Planck threw Petula a di
sciplinary glare before she left the residence, closing the door behind her.

  Once Ms. Planck was gone, Jorgenson smiled at Petula—that same moray-eel kind of smile she had seen before. “You pride yourself on being an irritation in the lining of the world,” he said, his voice soft. “But we irritations eventually become the pearls. I see the pearl you could be, Petula.”

  It was the kindest thing that anyone had ever said to her. Was it crazy for her to think that the man might be sincere?

  “I’m sorry if I insulted you,” she said. “But I think pictures shouldn’t just show us what we want to see—they should show the truth.”

  Jorgenson nodded. “Like the pictures your camera takes.”

  “Which are always true.”

  Jorgenson finally got to the business at hand. “But I see you’ve brought me a gift.”

  Petula had almost forgotten the clarinet she held by her side. “Well, it’s not really a gift, since you asked me to bring it, and especially since I can’t leave it with you.”

  His countenance took a turn toward stormy. “And why can’t you?”

  For the first time in this encounter, Petula became uncomfortable. “Nick gave it to me—and he’ll know I don’t have it anymore. He’s…connected to this stuff somehow.”

  Jorgenson waved his hand again. “Nonsense. Why would he know? He doesn’t know you gave us the camera lens, after all.”

  “Only because he has the camera it came from,” Petula insisted.

  “Come, come,” said Jorgenson. “He’s not any more connected to these objects than your mother is connected to your clothes dryer.”

  “Actually,” said Petula, “my father does the laundry, and he always seems to know when the load is done, even before it buzzes.” Jorgenson said nothing, so she pressed on. “You want Nick to trust me, don’t you? I can’t do anything that will make him suspicious.”

  Jorgenson sighed and put out his hand. “At least let me see the instrument.”

  Reluctantly, she gave it to him.

  He examined the clarinet’s many buttons and valves. “I used to play, you know.”

  “Marching band?”

  Jorgenson’s cold eyes flicked to hers. “Hardly. The Harvard Symphony Orchestra.”

  More self-importance. If it were anyone other than the Grand Acceleratus, she would not have tolerated it.

  He positioned his good hand and his wounded one on the instrument, put the mouthpiece to his lips, and blew.

  What came out of the other end was not music. It was the most horrific and distressing series of sounds Petula had ever heard. Pain could not adequately describe the experience. It made her want to rip her ears off and stomp them like cockroaches. She had played the clarinet only once herself, out of curiosity—but there must have been a sonic buffer zone for the player, because what had sounded to her like nothing more than bad music had left her parents screaming and scrambling to call 911. Now she understood why.

  Jorgenson played for the better part of ten seconds, and each second seemed to stretch toward an infinity of anguish. When he was done, Petula found herself on the floor, her ringing ears still not ready to trust that it was finally over.

  Jorgenson took the clarinet from his lips and looked curiously at Petula, who was struggling to recover. “Remarkable,” he said. “Those were supposed to be the opening strains of Rhapsody in Blue, but apparently that’s not what came out.”

  “Not even close,” she said, glaring up at him. “I think Gershwin should rise out of his grave just to smack you.”

  Jorgenson regarded the clarinet for another moment. “Yes, this will weaponize nicely,” he said, satisfied. Then he held it out toward Petula. “In the meantime, I leave it in your capable hands.”

  Petula stood up and took it, wondering what the catch was. In her experience, gestures of goodwill were just camouflaged favors that would one day need to be repaid. It couldn’t be that he genuinely trusted her. Nobody genuinely trusted her—not even the members of her own family. Not even her Chihuahua, Hemorrhoid, who would always sniff the food she set out for him and look up at her as if weighing the possibility that she might be poisoning him again.

  No—she knew Jorgenson’s gesture came with a price. And she suspected what that price might be.

  “Tell me, Dr. Jorgenson…what happens to Nick when you have all the things he sold in his garage sale?”

  “Then we’ll be done with him.” He quickly added, “And you will advance heartily up the ladder here.”

  “Done with him how?”

  He didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “Miss Grabowski-Jones, there comes a time in each of our lives when we must decide whose side we are on. Whether we are we going to serve the great cause of humanity, or wallow with the swine. You don’t appear to be the wallowing type.”

  “I’m not,” Petula said, indignant at the suggestion, but also torn, because she knew that swine are eventually slaughtered to put bacon on the Accelerati’s plates.

  Jorgenson, sensing her pensiveness, changed the subject. “By the way, you’ll be pleased to know what we have in store for the time lens you gave us,” he said. “We plan to build a telescope that we will train on the windows of world leaders. Imagine if we knew, twenty-four hours in advance, what the most powerful people in the world will be doing tomorrow!”

  “It would make us the most powerful people in the world,” she said.

  “Precisely. But in the meantime, I’ve found another use for it.” He reached up and pulled down what Petula, until now, had thought was just a weird ceiling lamp. It descended as Jorgenson tugged on it, revealing it to be the lower end of a periscope.

  “Really?” Petula couldn’t help but smirk. “What, are we in a submarine?”

  Jorgenson grinned and tapped his phone once more, turning the vista beyond the large windows into a seascape full of circling sharks.

  “Reality is what we make it,” he said, gesturing to the periscope.

  “Still just pictures,” she said, but she moved closer to take a gander.

  The periscope must have been able to pass through some undetectable spatial void in the bowling alley, because its head—which contained the time-leaping lens—was mounted on the building’s roof.

  Most periscopes turn, giving a 360-degree view, but this one was fixed and focused on a single magnified spot, some miles away, zeroing in on tomorrow.

  Petula gasped, recognizing it right away. “It’s Nick’s house.”

  “It behooves us to know what he’ll be up to, before he’s up to it,” Jorgenson said.

  And so Petula gazed once more into Nick Slate’s future, just as she had when she developed the picture that had predicted Vince’s untimely death…

  …and just like then, what she saw changed absolutely everything.

  This time, however, she knew exactly what she had to do.

  On the day Nick Slate retrieved the twentieth object, and added the “stain remover” to Tesla’s Far Range Energy Emitter, two hundred and thirty-one verifiable instances of ball lightning were reported to the National Weather Service.

  Bizarre pictures were being posted by people on every social media platform, which was not unusual—except these bizarre pictures featured throbbing blobs of atmospheric energy.

  Ball lightning is extremely rare. So rare that for many years science refused to accept that it existed. It’s no surprise that Nikola Tesla was the only scientist ever able to produce it in his laboratory.

  When ball lightning does appear naturally, it can take many forms. It can be a pulsating, sparking orb of light in the night sky. It can seem to be a blinding halo atop a flagpole or lightning rod. It can look like an ethereal jellyfish with deadly high-voltage tentacles. Or it can shoot across the sky like a fireball. Small wonder, then, that its appearance has often been interpreted by some as divine. And who’s to say it’s not?

  Perhaps, as some thought in the wake of Armageddon’s near miss, a heavenly host had descended to observe
these unprecedented happenings on planet Earth, and Gabriel the archangel was, at that very moment, breathing deep so he could at long last blow into his horn, heralding the arrival of Judgment Day.

  Or maybe it was just a whole lot of weird lightning.

  Mitch Murló could not have cared less about the massive static charge that was building in Earth’s atmosphere. He did know that judgment was coming, though. It was coming for the Accelerati, and he was the one passing judgment.

  Mitch had been spending his time plotting. This was a curious thing, because Mitch never plotted. He usually just went with the flow of life. He was comfortable being a follower, especially when it came to Nick, who always seemed to know exactly what he was doing, even when he didn’t. As furious as Mitch had been the day he stormed away from the summit meeting in the attic, deep down he knew that Nick’s choice to use Mitch’s anger to get some answers was the right one.

  The day that Nick was facing power-failure issues, Mitch, like Vince, stayed home sick, and he really was. He hadn’t slept, and he had a splitting headache from hating too hard—when your mind is overwhelmed with the kind of caustic, concentrated contempt he felt for the Accelerati, your head begins to throb. His mom, who had to go to work, left him with Tylenol, canned chicken soup, a game controller, and a kiss on the forehead. Once she was gone, Mitch called his father.

  Getting through to a prison inmate was always an ordeal, and it was especially difficult when the call was not prearranged. In the end all he could do was leave a message, and then play the latest version of Grand Theft Psycho to pass the time, running down pedestrians indiscriminately. No matter how many people he killed and maimed with his monster truck, though, he felt no better.

  Finally, at noon, a call came in with the familiar recorded voice announcing that “a prisoner at Colorado State Penitentiary is calling collect.”

  “Dad, I found them,” he said once his father was connected. As calls from inmates were monitored and timed, he had to get to the point right away.

  “Found who? Mitch, are you okay? You don’t sound right.”