Edison's Alley

by Neal Shusterman

  Petula noted that one hundred billion was also the number of stars in the galaxy. This, she knew, was not coincidence. Everything the Accelerati did was by design. She loved that about them.

  To their left, the lone hair-gel man was still practicing his game, and to their right, the young family was still doing whatever it was that almost, but not quite, looked like bowling. None of them seemed to notice that the lane between them had become a passage to some secret hideout.

  “Aren’t you worried someone will see?” Petula asked.

  “The moment I hit that strike,” Ms. Planck explained, “light began to bend around our lane, rendering it invisible. We simply entered everyone’s blind spot.”

  Next to them a boy no older than four stared right at Petula. “Mommy,” he said, “those people over there just disappeared.”

  “That’s nice, honey,” said the mother absently. “Now finish your milk.”

  “You see?” said Ms. Planck. “People don’t miss what they never really noticed in the first place.”

  As they headed down the ramp to the Accelerati Lodge, Petula had to ask the obvious question.

  “Why don’t you just have a door with a lock?”

  Ms. Planck bristled. “If you have to ask that question, then you’re not one of us yet.”

  When it came to the Accelerati, form was far more important than function. They were all about style, elegance, and panache. Their evil designs were truly about design.

  For instance, if they determined that there was a need to end your life, they wouldn’t just end it. They would first have you end the life of someone else who needed ending, who in turn had just ended the life of someone else for them, and so on, like a procession of fishes in which the smaller one is always swallowed by the larger one behind it.

  Thus, the Accelerati member who designed the bowling-pin combination lock had been applauded and received the organization’s highest honors before he was killed—by someone else who needed to be killed.

  Their lodge predated the bowling alley by several years. When a local businessman decided to build the recreation spot directly above their underground lair, the Accelerati saw it as an opportunity. For who would ever imagine that humanity’s greatest minds were hiding underneath a bowling alley? And although it was called Atomic Lanes, the Accelerati’s secret experiments made it only slightly radioactive.

  Petula knew none of this. All she knew was that she was required to take a picture every day, showing what the bowling alley would look like one day in the future. Since the Accelerati had no enemies powerful enough to attack them, the photos weren’t to warn them of outside threats—but rather to let them know if, over the next twenty-four hours, they would accidentally blow themselves up.

  “Welcome to the Great Hall,” Ms. Planck said, throwing open a pair of ornately sculpted bronze doors. The room before them, however, seemed no larger than a closet.

  “That’s some Great Hall,” Petula said, with her familiar flatness.

  “Have you ever heard of Zeno’s paradoxes?”

  Petula did not answer, because admitting that she did not know something was not part of her chosen lifestyle.

  “One of them is the concept on which the Great Hall is based.”

  Petula stepped forward, only to find that with each step the other end of the room seemed twice as far away as before; it expanded until she found herself standing in a cathedral-like library. Huge windows seemed to be looking out on seventeenth-century Venice, with gondolas gliding gracefully by outside.

  “Ah,” said Ms. Planck, “Italian Renaissance Day. Each day of the month a different holographic theme is projected. We’re in negotiations to sell the technology to Apple.”

  On the walls were artworks by great artists, familiar in style if not in composition.

  “Most of the pieces in this room were presumed lost in fires and other natural, and not-so-natural, disasters.”

  Petula didn’t want to think about how they came to be in the Accelerati’s possession.

  Just beyond the Great Hall they reached a rotunda where a larger-than-life-size statue of Thomas Edison held up a lightbulb, his expression grim.

  “Our founder,” Ms. Planck noted as they passed it. “Obviously.”

  Several hallways led to other wings of what seemed to be a sprawling underground complex. It didn’t actually appear to be underground, but instead woven into the infrastructure of Venice. At least for today.

  Ms. Planck led Petula through a door that read RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. “Don’t dawdle, Petula, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  No one had ever accused Petula of dawdling. But there was so much to see, both within the walls and outside the windows of the Accelerati Lodge, that it was hard not to be distracted.

  “He, who?” Petula asked.

  “Dr. Alan Jorgenson, the Grand Acceleratus.”

  “You’re not serious—he’s not actually called that, is he?”

  “Don’t mock him, Petula,” Ms. Planck told her quietly. “He’s not a man who suffers mockery lightly.”

  The R&D wing, which overlooked the pigeon-filled holographic expanse of St. Mark’s Square, was bustling with activity. In the middle of it all stood a tall man in a silk suit that almost seemed to glow with vanilla-toned pearlescence.

  “Evangeline!” he said, taking Ms. Planck’s hand and kissing it. “So good to see you!”

  Until that moment, Petula had never considered that Ms. Planck had a first name other than “Ms.”

  Then the Grand Acceleratus looked down at Petula. His smile was difficult to read. She couldn’t tell if he was pleased to meet her, or if he was considering whether she would taste better chewed or swallowed whole.

  “And you must be the new fledgling I’ve been hearing so much about.”

  Petula held out her hand for him to shake. “Petula Grabowski-Jones,” she announced, then added, “future Grand Acceleratus.”

  It was a calculated move that paid off just as she’d hoped. Jorgenson did not hold out his hand—because it was bandaged—but his smile changed from predatory to genuine. “We appreciate ambition here,” he said. “I suspect you’ll do well.”

  “What happened to your hand?” Petula asked.

  The Grand Acceleratus sighed. “An accident while out in the field. One of my associates was frozen, along with my arm. I lost my pinkie in the process.”

  Although Petula found the very idea funny, she kept herself from laughing.

  “Poor Helga,” Ms. Planck said. “How is she doing?”

  “Recovering nicely, thanks to our pressure-defroster,” Dr. Jorgenson told her. “And on the bright side, it proves the viability of human hibernation. Once we have the device that caused it, we can sell the technology to NASA for a fortune.” Then he gestured to a large window that looked in on one of the research rooms. “You’re just in time—I think you’ll enjoy this.”

  In the center of the room was none other than the cosmic string harp that Petula had helped snag for them. Workers placed watermelons on three low platforms around the harp, and then left the room.

  Once they were gone and the room was sealed, a pair of mechanical hands descended from the ceiling and began to play the harp. Petula expected to feel the same soul-searing vibration she had experienced in the harpist’s house, but she felt nothing.

  “That can’t be right,” Petula wondered out loud, and Jorgenson, guessing what she meant, rapped on the window that was between them and the harp.

  “High-density leaded glass,” he told her. “We’re perfectly safe out here.”

  The mechanical hands played the invisible strings with increasing intensity. All at once the three melons exploded, splattering the room and window with fleshy shrapnel.

  “Remarkable!” said Ms. Planck. “Absolutely remarkable!”

  “Wait till you see this next test,” Jorgenson said.

  Petula found herself raising her hand, as she never actually did in school. Questions, she be
lieved, should never await permission. But in the presence of the Grand Acceleratus, she couldn’t help herself.

  “Uh, excuse me,” she said, “but I don’t think that’s what the harp is for.”

  Jorgenson put his unbandaged hand on her shoulder. “Creators never understand the potential of their creations,” he said. “It’s left to us to complete their vision.”

  The workers went back into the room, this time with a single melon, and set it down. Then they carried in what looked like a huge metallic tortoise shell about the size of an overturned bathtub. They placed it over the melon, and exited.

  The mechanical hands played with the same intensity for over a minute. When they stopped, the workers went in and removed the shell, revealing that the melon had not been damaged at all.

  “Splendid!” said Jorgenson. “Not only is the tortoiseshell material resistant to impact and radiation, it also deflects cosmic string dissonance. Whenever we create a weapon, we strive to also create the perfect defense against it—for ourselves.”

  Then he took a long look at Petula, as if pondering a major purchase. “What are your views on vengeance, Ms. Grabowski-Jones?”

  Petula considered how she might best answer. “Well,” she said, “some people believe vengeance is a dish best served cold. But I believe it shouldn’t be served at all—it’s better as an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

  Jorgenson grinned once more and nodded his satisfaction. Then he presented her with a small glass vial. It had a tiny computer chip inside.

  “I would like you to use this to make Nick Slate’s life miserable.”

  Petula took the vial and sighed. “According to him, that’s what I do best.”

  With the pieces back in place, Nick finally allowed himself to relax a little. But when he ventured close enough to touch the incomplete machine, he could still feel the presence of all of the other wayward objects out there.

  Not enough to know where they were, only that they were.

  This is how he knew that the harp was still intact and hadn’t been consumed in some sort of localized disaster in the harpist’s home. He could sense it resonating with all of the objects in the machine, as well as the ones still to be recovered.

  He looked up at the window in his ceiling, the glass pinnacle of the attic pyramid, and wondered whether it was there to bring light in, or to channel energy out. Perhaps both.

  Of course, all of this was just intuition. The farther Nick got from his attic, the less he trusted these feelings. He often wondered if he was just deluding himself—until he stood in the presence of Tesla’s great creation again, and found that absolute, undeniable sense of interconnectedness. It was so comforting, so overwhelming that, were he a weaker kid, he might never leave his attic.

  But he wasn’t weak. And now that he had faced the Accelerati head-on and fought them off, he felt more confident than ever.

  “Confidence can be dangerous,” Caitlin had told him. “You might have scared them away, but they’ll be back—and when they come back, they’ll hit hard.”

  “Then we’ll hit back harder,” Nick had responded. But he knew they needed a plan.

  And so, on Monday evening, Nick gathered his friends under the guise of a school project. Caitlin, Vince, Mitch, and Petula climbed the steep steps into the attic for a meeting of the minds.

  Nick’s dad allowed them their space, and if he had any suspicions about their activities, he kept them to himself. Just to be on the safe side, though, Vince wore a hoodie so Mr. Slate couldn’t really see his face—and if he did, and trapped Vince in a conversation, Nick told Vince to pretend he was his own twin brother.

  “The gravity’s getting stronger,” Nick said to the others in his attic. To prove it, he took off his shoes and set them on the floor next to him. “My bed and desk are nailed down, but everything else migrates to the center.”

  The shoes did not appear to move.

  “Fail,” said Vince.

  “It’s like the hour hand of a clock,” Nick told him. “Look again in five minutes.” Then he noticed that Vince’s body odor was ranker than usual.

  Petula, of course, was the one who had to comment. “Ew, did something die in here?”

  “That would be me,” said Vince. “Thanks to you.”

  Vince didn’t seem bitter, just resigned, which was the way he had lived his pre-undead life. Today he wore a shirt proclaiming YOLO on the front, with the second o crossed out and replaced with a hand-scrawled t. Nick noticed he was looking a little green under the neckline. Vince noticed him noticing.

  “I think I’m growing moss,” Vince casually announced. “I really should do a science project on myself.”

  “If the Accelerati nab you,” Caitlin said, “I’m sure they’ll do it for you.”

  “Which is why,” Nick said, getting back to business, “we have to make sure they don’t. We can’t just wait until they take the next swing. We need a strategy.”

  “Why don’t we hide everything?” suggested Mitch. “It doesn’t all have to be here in your attic—we can put the stuff in different places.”

  Nick threw Caitlin a look that she threw back at him.

  “We can’t,” Nick told them.

  “Why not?” challenged Petula. “Seems like the logical thing to do.”

  Nick had considered that idea himself, but every time he thought about taking the machine apart, he felt like something was being torn from his insides. That feeling had to mean something, It couldn’t be ignored.

  “Because we just can’t,” Nick said, a little more forcefully.

  He stood up, walked over to the machine, and touched it. The static shock it gave him was a taste of something far greater. Something he couldn’t yet explain.

  “Nick,” said Mitch, “you’re acting really weird. I mean, weirder than usual.”

  Nick turned to him. If they were to be a part of this, they needed to know everything. He pointed at the objects. “Take a closer look,” he said. “I mean, really look.”

  Mitch was the first to catch on. “It’s a single machine,” he said.

  Nick nodded. “Exactly.”

  Petula let out a soft whistle. Vince drew his knees up to his chest.

  “Caitlin and I figured it out just before the asteroid was bonked into orbit.”

  “You could have told us,” said Vince.

  “It was the end of the world,” Nick reminded him. “And you had just died. At the time, it didn’t seem all that important.”

  “So what does it do?”

  “Tesla dreamed of bringing free wireless energy to the world. This is how he was going to do it,” Nick explained. “This machine needs to be here. It needs to be completed. And we’re the ones who have to complete it.”

  There was a moment of silence so loud it seemed to echo.

  Then Mitch said, “Nick, your shoes.”

  They all looked; in the five minutes they had been talking, Nick’s shoes had migrated about two feet closer to the machine. Now they all could see the gravity of the situation.

  “How can you be sure we’re the ones who have to complete it?” asked Vince. “I mean, it’s just a feeling, right?”

  Nick nodded. “That’s true, but it’s a pretty strong one.”

  “I don’t know about any of you,” said Vince, “but I’m not much of a believer in feelings. My mother is all about feelings. They lead to nothing but motivational greeting cards and designated ‘happy places’ all over our house. I’d rather have cold hard facts in my cold dead hands.”

  Caitlin turned to Nick. “What do you think we should do?”

  “All the garage-sale stuff stays here,” said Nick, in spite of Vince’s reservations. “And we continue to build the machine. The Accelerati might have the harp, but they haven’t gotten their hands on anything else yet, as far as we know.”

  “How are we supposed to protect all this stuff from them if we keep it here?” asked Mitch. “And, for that matter, how do we protect ourselves?”

/>   “I don’t know!” Nick said, exasperated. “That why I brought you all here—I thought maybe together we could figure it out.” He looked toward the machine again. “If this thing could just tell us what to do…”

  His voice trailed off. The machine couldn’t talk, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t communicating with him on some deeper level, where words couldn’t reach. “You know,” he said slowly, “I think the answer is right in front of us.”

  They all followed his gaze. Caitlin was the first to understand. “You want to use Tesla’s devices as weapons against the Accelerati?”

  “I don’t want to…but I think we have to.”

  “Then we’re no better than them!” Caitlin said.

  “Yes we are,” Mitch said, “because we’re gonna weaponize them for the sake of good!”

  “There’s a difference between using the inventions as weapons,” Nick explained, “and using them to defend ourselves.”

  “Is there?” Caitlin asked. “That sounds like the argument for every war in history.”

  “They already killed Vince,” Nick told her. “And Jorgenson tried to kill me the other day. Sorry to tell you this, Caitlin, but we’re already at war.”

  Caitlin stood up, crossing her arms. “I have no intention of killing anyone. Do you?”

  Nick turned his gaze away. “I think I already have.”

  Caitlin gasped and the others looked equally shocked. Nick’s shoulders sagged with the weight of his confession. He hadn’t told his friends about this part of his encounter with the Accelerati. “I froze one of them with the fan. I—I might have killed her.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Petula blurted, and when everyone turned to look at her, she giggled nervously and said, “I mean, they’re the Accelerati, right? I’m sure they figured out a way to defrost her.”

  And since that was what Nick wanted to believe, he didn’t question it. “Thanks,” he said. “I hope you’re right.”

  “So you have a plan?” Vince asked. “Or are you going to keep that from us, too?”

  “We’ll each take one object to protect us,” Nick said. “The rest stay here, in the attic. And if Jorgenson comes after us with his braniac flunkies and his fake smile and his stupid vanilla suit, we’ll smack him down so hard he’ll have to crawl away.”