Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  He didn’t understand it any more than he understood how the machine could do what it did. All he knew was that he, Nick, Caitlin, Vince, and everyone else who had been affected by the weird crap from Nick’s attic were part of some invisible clockwork that was activated by the garage sale and was churning its gears toward some dark, mysterious end.

  “Or maybe I’m just nuts,” he said out loud. Hearing himself say it made him feel a whole lot better. How weird, he thought, that I’d rather be nuts than right.

  Mitch’s mother walked into the kitchen, her ear glued to her phone, as usual. “Honestly, Maria, the weather’s been so unpredictable like the sudden downpour last week and my tires are bald and I don’t have the money to replace them so one of these days we’ll just fly off the road and land dead in a ditch and no one will find us for months and you know what else…?”

  Mitch found it amazing that she could talk without stopping for breath. The only way to get a word in edgewise was to talk on top of her at an increasingly louder volume. It was like merging onto a non-yielding freeway.

  “Mom, I got too much homework and a major project due on Monday and I can’t work in the car you know I get carsick so if I go today I’ll fail and—”

  “—the ‘check engine’ light keeps coming on what does that mean anyway ‘check engine’ why doesn’t it just tell me what’s wrong because if it did—”

  “—and you and Dad will have no one to blame but yourselves for keeping me from doing my work which is due on Monday AND I’LL END UP GETTING SENT TO THE ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL ALL BECAUSE OF YOU!”

  “Hold on, Maria.” And finally she took the phone away from her face. “What are you going on about?”

  “My homework, which is—”

  “Very easy if you don’t wait until the last minute,” his mother said, subverting his thought. Then she returned to the phone, still without taking a breath.

  The alternative school, thought Mitch, which was named after none other than Nikola Tesla, the man behind the machine that lately seemed to be controlling his life.

  He picked up the Shut Up ’n Listen and headed for the door, pulling the string as he did.

  “I’ll be back,” he called to his mom. “I’m going…”

  “…to see Nick,” finished the machine.

  For once, the machine said exactly what he was going to say.

  At that very moment, however, Nick was considering an unexpected proposition.

  “So, you wanna come over?” Caitlin asked him over the phone, after about nine seconds of small talk. He didn’t even know how she’d gotten his number.

  “Huh?” he said like an imbecile. Then he fumbled the phone but caught it before it hit the floor.

  “I need some help with my new art project,” Caitlin said. “It involves blowing up paint cans with M-80s, and none of my other friends are willing to take any more shrapnel for the cause.”

  At that moment he would have dived on a paint grenade for Caitlin, but he wasn’t about to admit it out loud. “Sure, I guess,” he said.

  “Do you have insurance?” Caitlin asked.

  “Uh, yeah?” Nick said, which was better than saying, “Let me consult my portfolio of things I am clueless about.”

  “Good,” Caitlin said brightly. “See you in half an hour?”

  “Okay. And if you don’t like my contribution to your project, you can always blow me up.” But unfortunately the call dropped somewhere before he finished his sentence, leaving Nick to agonize for many years over exactly which words Caitlin had missed.

  After dressing himself in clothes that were nice, but not too nice, and putting on cologne and then washing it off, Nick left the house for his explosionist-art encounter with Caitlin.

  Nick was so caught up in his own thoughts that by the time he saw Mitch riding up on his bicycle, it was too late to hide.

  “Hey,” said Mitch, “goin’ somewhere?”

  “Yeah,” said Nick, determined not to go into the details, because then he’d never be able to get rid of Mitch. “What’s with the shirt and tie? Is it a religious thing? Are you going to knock on my door and leave a pamphlet?”

  He’d meant it as a joke, but there was a certain sadness in Mitch when he answered, “Nah. Nothin’ like that.”

  Mitch seemed awkward. It wasn’t like him. Usually he would just barrel into conversation, oblivious to whether the other person wanted him to or not.

  “Listen, Mitch, I’m kind of busy right now, so…”

  “I’m gonna go see my dad today. I was hoping you might come with. I bet he’d really like to meet you.”

  Let’s see, thought Nick. Quality artistic time with Caitlin, or hanging out with Mitch and his father? It was like comparing apples and no freaking way.

  “Maybe some other time,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I understand.” Again that uncharacteristic look on Mitch’s face. Something between nausea and puppy-dog eyes. “It’s just that my dad thinks I have no friends. I want to show him he’s wrong, y’know?”

  Nick took a deep breath to steel himself against Mitch’s desperation. Let’s see, he thought. Quality artistic time with Caitlin, or my conscience? The decision was a little bit harder this time, but Nick’s mental scale still tipped toward Caitlin. “Another time,” he said again, and added, “I promise.” And the fact that he really meant it was enough to satisfy his conscience.

  To Nick’s absolute surprise, Mitch didn’t put up a fight. He just caved.

  “Right,” he said. “Okay, then, see ya.”

  He turned around and began to pedal away. It was as if knew he was defeated even before he began.

  It was clear that Mitch needed this, and needed it now, not “some other time.” So the question was, how on earth could Nick shift the balance to Mitch, when Caitlin sat so firmly on the other side?

  To Nick’s surprise, the answer came easily.

  “Mitch, wait up!” He trotted out to Mitch in the middle of the street. “Tell you what. I’ll go with you today on one condition.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When we get home, you give me back the Shut Up ’n Listen.”

  For a moment Mitch looked like he had been stabbed through the heart. But then he looked Nick in the eye, held out his hand, and said, “Deal.”

  It is well known that the microwave oven was invented by accident, when a scientist walking near a huge microwave array discovered that a candy bar in his pocket had melted.

  The first artificial sweetener was discovered when a researcher sat down for dinner and found his bread so unexpectedly sweet he was compelled to retrace his steps, touching every chemical his hands had come in contact with that day, until he found the ones that combined into something that tasted like sugar.

  And the Slinky? It was invented when a naval engineer knocked a spring off a counter and watched it climb its way down to the floor.

  Of course these all could just as easily have gone awry. The microwave guy could have fried his heart instead of the chocolate in his shirt pocket. The sweet genius could have had the good sense to wash his hands before eating, never discovering anything. And the Slinky sailor could have abandoned his wife and kids to join a Bolivian religious cult, never to be heard from again. (Well, actually, he did—but not until after inventing that which walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, thus changing childhood forever.)

  Happy accidents and unexpected revelations are the rule rather than the exception in the world of science. For example, Petula Grabowski-Jones made a shocking discovery when she developed a photo she had snapped of her Chihuahua, Hemorrhoid, sitting on the corner table in the living room in broad daylight. Instead of getting an image of her dog, she got an image of her mother—taking money from her father’s wallet in that very same location, in the middle of the night. This accidental find provided Petula with much-needed insight into her “malfunctioning” box camera—and a great income opportunity through blackmail.

  The last thing Caitlin Westfield expect
ed to discover was that blowing up paint cans was really no fun at all without Nick’s help, which in turn gave her the unexpected revelation of her own secret motivation. She suddenly realized that she had concocted the whole art project as a means of spending the afternoon with Nick.

  And as for Nick, the last thing that he expected to discover was that, much like the asteroid that had killed off the dinosaurs, thereby clearing the way for the evolution of mammals, there was more to Mitch than his overbearing, tactless surface might suggest.

  “My dad lives in a gated community,” Mitch told Nick as they made the long drive to wherever they were going.

  They were in the backseat of Mitch’s family car, his mom driving with her cell phone pressed quite illegally to her ear as she talked nonstop. Mitch’s little sister was in the passenger seat next to her mom, kicking her feet against the plastic dash like she wanted to kill the glove compartment.

  “What does your dad do?” Nick asked.

  “Well, he was into computers,” Mitch answered, “but now he works for the state.”

  Nick nodded, but that was already more information than he needed when he was still cursing himself for choosing the Murló family’s Pontiac of Pain over a day with Caitlin.

  Mitch fidgeted with the Shut Up ’n Listen but didn’t pull the string. Nick wondered if his restraint was due to having sworn on Vince’s Damnation Bible, or if there was a thought he didn’t want finished.

  “You know it’s best if it goes back into my attic, right?” Nick said.

  Mitch didn’t look at him. “It doesn’t matter what I think. I made a deal, didn’t I?” Still, he ran his hand along its cold metallic shell. “Lately I’ve been feeling like it knows what I’m going to say before I even say it. That’s crazy, right?”

  “Yeah, crazy,” Nick said. But he knew better.

  Mitch’s father’s exclusive gated community had an extensive guard gate. In fact, it had two. It also had an electrified fence. And towers with armed guards. All things considered, few gated communities could be more exclusive than the Colorado State Penitentiary.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Nick asked Mitch as they waited in line to pass through the metal detector.

  “I did,” said Mitch. “You just failed to read between the lines.”

  Nick didn’t want to ask the nature of the crime that had landed Mitch’s father in a maximum security prison—although the term serial killer did cross his mind precisely twenty-three times between the gate and the metal detector.

  “My father’s a computer genius,” Mitch finally said. “He designed electronic fund-transfer protocols for international banks. Somewhere along the line he discovered that the banking web was even more tightly connected than the Internet, so he created an untraceable program that could go into any random account and take a single penny. He tried it out, and it landed him here. Guess it wasn’t quite as untraceable as he thought.”

  “He got thrown in prison for stealing a penny?”

  “Sort of,” said Mitch. “He stole one penny from every bank account in the world.”

  “No way,” said Nick. “That’s got to be—

  Mitch pulled the string on the Shut Up ’n Listen. “—$725,452,344,” said the device. “And thirty-nine cents.”

  Nick was speechless.

  “I never liked my dad’s business partners,” Mitch said, unloading junk from his pockets into a plastic bin on the security station’s conveyer belt. “They were mega-creepy.”

  The Shut Up ’n Listen was not the usual sort of personal effect that prison security came across in their routine checks, and Mitch had the hardest time getting it through. Nick was troubled that Mitch had brought it in at all, but with the whole prison experience, he hadn’t noticed until they were already inside under armed surveillance. The X-ray machine didn’t reveal anything of obvious criminal intent inside the device, but it was too unusual for the officer on duty to let pass.

  “It’s my shop project,” Mitch told him. “I promised my dad I’d show it to him.”

  “Mitch, why don’t you just put it back in the car,” his mom said, collecting her cell phone and jewelry from the plastic bin. “And next time make something plastic.”

  Obviously, Nick’s mother had no clue as to what the thing really was. But Mitch’s sister had figured it out, even if Mitch hadn’t told her—because she pulled the string just as the guard said, “I’m afraid I can’t—”

  “—get a date without lying about myself.”

  The officer was flabbergasted, but Mitch’s little sister laughed in delight.

  “That’s funny,” she said.

  The officer clearly did not know what to make of this. “Is that so?” he said as Madison pulled the string again. “Well, I don’t think—”

  “—anyone needs to know that I still live with my mother.”

  Madison laughed again. “You want to hear what else it says?”

  “No!” The guard, his face reddening, handed the thing back to Mitch. “Just move along.”

  Nick thought there’d be bulletproof glass between the prisoners and visitors, but there wasn’t. It was just a room with tables and a whole lot of guards. The room smelled like old gym equipment—slightly metallic and slightly foul—and the only way you could tell the prisoners from the visitors was by who wore bright orange uniforms.

  “We’re hoping we don’t have to come here much longer,” Mitch said as he scanned the room for his father, who had not yet arrived. “My dad goes before the parole board next month. His lawyers are asking for time off for good behavior, and my dad is really well behaved.”

  Nick didn’t know if he should sit or stand or run for his life. This was not the kind of white-collar Club Fed where one would expect to find a computer hacker. This place was the real deal. The men here were grizzled by hard time and harder crimes. Most of them had extreme tattoos that seemed to cover more space than they actually had flesh to put them on.

  A guard finally escorted Mitch’s father in, and Madison jumped up and down excitedly. Mr. Murló was slimmer than Mitch, but he had the same curly hair and gruff voice. He also had a deerish look of bewildered innocence, as if, after all this time, he still couldn’t comprehend his circumstances. The man seemed overjoyed to see his family, but with every breath Nick sensed an abiding melancholy—perhaps the only thing he had in common with his fellow inmates.

  They sat at one of the few vacant tables in the room, Nick pulling up a chair with the others, feeling more than awkward. Mitch introduced him as “my best friend, Nick,” which seemed to please Mr. Murló a great deal. Madison spoke about her class play and her crucial role as a dental filling.

  Mitch’s father regarded the Shut Up ’n Listen curiously. “Whatcha got there?”

  But since his mom was sitting right there, Mitch put it beneath the table and changed the subject, asking about the quality of food and his father’s chances of parole. It was only when his mother left to take Madison to the bathroom that Mitch pulled out the Shut Up ’n Listen.

  “Mitch,” said Nick, “I don’t think—”

  “That I should use it,” Mitch finished. “I know you don’t, and I know I swore. But it’s still mine as long as we’re here, and I have to do this.”

  Nick looked to Mitch, then to Mr. Murló. Whatever Mitch was about to do, Nick couldn’t stop him.

  “I used to have one of these when I was a kid,” Mr. Murló said nostalgically.

  Mitch shook his head. “Not like this one.”

  “Your mom said you made it in shop class.”

  “Not exactly.”

  Mitch didn’t try to explain. Instead, he looked around to make sure no one else was close enough to hear, then gave his father a crash course in unfinished thoughts. “The Colorado Rockies…” he began.

  “…will go 83 and 79 this year,” the machine finished.

  “The unemployment rate…”

  “…will drop by 3.2 percent.”

  “Your favorite restau
rant…”

  “…is going out of business next month.”

  “Tomorrow’s winning Lotto numbers…”

  “…will all be divisible by three.”

  Mitch looked away for a moment, trying to wipe his eyes without being obvious about it. Mitch’s father gave him an awkward grin. “That’s cute,” he said. “You programmed the responses yourself?”

  “You try it,” Mitch told him.

  Nick wanted to say something to stop this before it could go any further, but the scene unfolding before him had the momentum of a bullet train with Mitch at the controls. Mitch, who had always been two parts nuisance, one part screwup, was now pure steel intensity. He had full command of the moment. He knew exactly what he was doing.

  When Mitch’s father didn’t reach for the string, Mitch pulled it again and again, a little more forcefully each time.

  “Your business partners…”

  “…used you.”

  “You deserve…”

  “…better than this.”

  “You need this machine…”

  “…to give you a crucial answer.”

  And then Mitch pushed the machine closer to his father. “Ask it where they hid the money, Dad. Because once you can prove those creeps have it, and you don’t, it will prove that you’re innocent, and they were the thieves, not you. Ask it, Dad. Please.”

  Mr. Murló, skeptical and yet a little scared, touched the ring, toying with it, but still not ready to pull it.

  “There are stranger things in heaven and earth…” he said.

  “Let’s just stick with earth,” said Mitch.

  Mitch’s dad took a deep breath and looked around to make sure the other inmates weren’t watching. Then, with electric anticipation, he pulled the string and let it go. “My parole…”

  And the machine said, “…will be denied for the rest of your life.”

  The last little bit of the string pulled in, and the machine whirred itself silent. Mitch looked down, unable to meet his father’s eyes. “That wasn’t what you were supposed to ask,” he said very quietly.

  His father said nothing. He just seemed to be lost in himself. Then Mitch’s mother came back with Madison, in the middle of a one-sided conversation about the proper sanitary use of a public restroom.