Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  It was a gift of the Accelerati.

  When Nick hit the power button, it shut down Vince’s heart, just as it had done to poor Mr. Svedberg. There was never any hope.

  Vince was dead before he hit the ground.

  “Noooo!”

  Nick realized a moment too late what had happened. He felt the strange invisible pulse leave the “remote” when he pressed the OFF button, and he instinctively knew this was no ordinary device.

  Vince had been at the TV, trying to lower the volume manually. He was directly in the line of the bioelectric pulse. Nick dropped the device and ran to him. He did not know CPR, he had only seen it on TV. Still, he desperately tried chest compressions until his father arrived. Mr. Slate didn’t know CPR either, but had the benefit of seeing it on TV for many more years. He tried while Caitlin, who watched in horror from the stairs, pulled out her phone to dial 911.

  When it was clear there was nothing they could do for Vince, Nick felt his rage turn from the device to the one person who had known that death was coming to Nick’s door.

  Petula was still nursing her own wound when Nick stormed toward her. It had only just registered with her that Vince was the one who died, not her—but she found her relief to be short lived.

  “You knew!” Nick yelled at her. “You knew, and you did nothing to stop it!”

  “I didn’t know what would happen,” she tried to explain. “I just knew something would. And I couldn’t have stopped it even if I tried!”

  “That doesn’t matter!” he screamed. “Even if there’s nothing you can do! Even if it’s hopeless, you try! You try, and you don’t stop trying! YOU’RE the one responsible for his death!”

  She attempted to reason with him—to explain to him that you can’t change a picture of the future. The best you can hope to do is frame it. But no matter what she said, Nick blamed her.

  This was not the turn of events Petula was expecting. When death’s scythe came swinging down, she thought Nick would finally understand and be grateful. That he would see how deeply she cared—for she risked her own life to come here and save him. But instead—

  “Get out of here!” Nick growled. “Get out, or I swear to you, there’ll be two bodies to be hauled away!”

  And although Petula knew from her photograph that such an outcome was impossible, she said, “Well, all right, then. I guess I’ll be going.”

  Then she turned and left quickly before anyone could see her tears.

  After Petula left, Nick turned back to the terrible scene. Only once before had he experienced the all-consuming revelation that something unthinkable and irreversible had happened. Something that would change him and his life forever.

  Immediately he was brought back to the aftermath of the fire—standing there helplessly on the lawn as his father raced toward the porch after his mother, the porch exploding before he could get there, the flames like the gates of hell themselves had opened up to consume everything Nick knew. And here again was a shell shock that didn’t numb him but made him hyperaware of everything going on around him.

  The sound of his father’s grunts as he tried hopeless chest compressions on Vince’s limp form…the sound of Caitlin’s sobs as she spoke to the 911 dispatcher…Mitch standing just a few feet away, having pulled the string on his stupid machine but too afraid to let go or even to start a sentence…and the back door slamming as Theo slipped out to avoid any blame that might be caught.

  Danny picked up the remote and looked to Nick for an explanation. Nick just slapped it out of his hand. The remote hadn’t worked for Danny, and Nick instinctively knew that it was designed for Nick’s use and Nick’s use alone. No, the Accelerati wouldn’t kill him, but their warning was to kill someone close to him—anyone close to him—by his own hand.

  Something told Nick, just as it had when his mother had died, that this was the end of the world. But this time it was more than just a voice inside him.

  Raging above this living room tragedy was a television that could not be silenced. And the newscaster, looking far more serious than newscasters usually do, spoke of something that made the death of Nick’s friend seem insignificant when compared to the big picture.

  The world was, indeed, about to end—at the cold, stony hands of Felicity Bonk.

  One might expect that the announcement of the end of the world would bring about widespread panic and the looting of electronics stores—but such wholesale chaos takes time to come to a boil. Celestial Object Felicity Bonk was like that unexpected relative who calls to announce she’s coming for a visit just as her car pulls into the driveway, leaving you no time to so much as clean house.

  The world was ending on Monday. Period. The end.

  As soon as the announcement went public, places of worship were packed with souls seeking salvation, but movie theaters were also packed by people who wanted one last escape into someone else’s reality. When it comes to facing the end of the world, there is no wrong way to do it. Except, perhaps, for the guy who, in fine Archimedes fashion, ran naked through the Colorado Springs Museum’s cactus garden. It wasn’t “Eureka!” he was shouting, however.

  The weekend airwaves were full of blameful pundits accusing world governments of either (a) hiding the truth, or (b) being too inept to know the truth before it was too late. But in the end, blame didn’t matter. This was going down. No amount of warning could have stopped it or changed the outcome. Felicity Bonk was huge and fast and, regardless of where on the globe you stood, would be putting your lights out at 5:19 p.m. Mountain time, give or take a minute.

  Monday morning found Colorado Springs in an odd state of heightened normality.

  School buses ran, paperboys biked their routes, patrons of the new Starbucks downtown lamented all the TV shows that they would never see the conclusions of. When faced with the end of all things, it was much easier to nibble at it than take it in large, indigestible bites.

  By and large, people went about their Monday-morning business as usual, because what else could they do? Surprisingly, about half of the students showed up at Nick’s school, because their parents claimed they needed time to prepare—as if the end of the world required careful planning and well-packed luggage.

  “Under the circumstances,” Nick’s math teacher announced first period, “Friday’s test has been canceled.” Several kids reflexively cheered, not quite getting that the test wasn’t canceled, Friday was. To his credit, the math teacher was devoted to his subject, and they spent the hour calculating the speed and trajectory of the asteroid while the more advanced students tried to project how many pieces the earth would split into. The general consensus was sixteen.

  Nick’s English teacher chose to read them Goodnight Moon, then have them ponder its profundity in silence. And Nick’s social studies teacher, Mr. Brown, drank Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle, laughed a lot, and kept saying, “What are they gonna do, fire me?”

  To Nick’s chagrin, Caitlin wasn’t in school. She was at home at her parents’ request, and she had also turned off her phone at her parents’ request, because they did not want their daughter to spend her last day on earth engaged in “inane conversation,” as they called it. And so instead Caitlin busied herself with her own form of coping. She frantically scanned and uploaded artwork, photos, and other bits and pieces of her life to the Cloud, fixed on the irrational belief that even after the earth was gone, the Cloud would remain.

  Mitch wasn’t in school, either. He chose to spend the day in bed, and his mother let him. He didn’t sleep, however. Instead he tried to live his entire life in a single day. He closed his eyes and imagined everything. He would graduate from Yale (why not?), get a law degree from Harvard (why not?), he would prosecute the creeps who put his father in jail, and get them the death penalty (why not?). He would also marry Petula Grabowski-Jones, who, once she grew out of her awkward phase, would become a top supermodel (admittedly, he was pushing it). In his fantasy, Mitch found and returned all those stolen virtual pennies
—and the banks were so grateful they let him keep half of the money. With that $375 million he bought his own island, from which he launched spacecraft for fun and profit.

  He could have died a very old, very happy man that day, except for one thing. The Shut Up ’n Listen, which he had brought back home with him from Nick’s house, had begun acting weirder than usual.…

  As for Vince, his quick and painless death had allowed him to avoid all the unpleasantness. Which was a shame really, because more than anyone, Vince would have enjoyed watching the world end.

  His mother, no longer as cheerful as her house, yet still incapable of being as somber as her son had been, clipped every last award-winning flower from her garden and filled her home with wreaths of living color, saving a single rose, which she brought to the mortuary to lay on Vince’s chest.

  She chose the one with the most thorns, because she knew that’s what he would have wanted.

  One might argue the importance of the large, earth-shattering moments in history. Few people realize that destiny turns not on the large moments, but on the tiny ones that go unnoticed. The moment Captain E. J. Smith chose to leave the Titanic’s engines at full speed ahead before retiring for the night. The moment Albert Einstein decided enough was enough and quit his dead-end job at the patent office. The moment Sir Isaac Newton, tired of the sun in his eyes, said, “What the heck, I’ll sit under this apple tree.”

  The small unobserved moment, which led to a final and literally earth-shattering event, was the moment Nick Slate decided to have a garage sale. It was obvious to Nick that the asteroid had been pulled here by his brother’s mitt—because in spite of the revolution and rotation of the earth, its impact point was calculated to be the very same sports complex where Danny had wished upon stars. Had Nick left the attic alone, his brother would never have used that mitt.

  Throughout the day, Nick couldn’t keep himself from looking around and beating himself silly with the inescapable fact that all this would be gone…because of him. Could things have been any worse if the Accelerati possessed all of Tesla’s inventions?

  Long before the end of the school day, most parents had gotten over their initial denial and came to pick their kids up. Nick’s father was no exception. He, Danny, and Nick spent the afternoon together.

  At four thirty—less than an hour before the end—Mr. Slate was barbecuing steaks he had been saving for next weekend. Inside, the TV was tuned to an impromptu Twilight Zone marathon, rather than the news, which seemed preoccupied with various celebrity end-of-the-world parties.

  Nick considered his brother, who sat at the patio table looking somewhat bored by this whole end-of-the-world business.

  Does he know? wondered Nick. Has he figured out that his mitt brought all this about?

  “Danny?” he asked.

  His brother lifted his head. Nick opened his mouth to say something, but then he realized there was nothing he could say. If his brother knew, there was no way to comfort him, and if he didn’t know, there was no reason to burden him.

  “What? Are you going to tell me you love me, like Dad’s been doing all day?”

  When Nick didn’t answer, Danny looked down and made a fist. “You know what? I’m glad,” he said. “Because it means we get to see Mom sooner.”

  Nick couldn’t help going over to Danny to give him perhaps the biggest hug he’d ever given him.

  “You got it right, Danny.”

  Danny shrugged. “If it was just me, I’d be afraid of dying. But since it’s everybody, I’m not. Isn’t that weird?”

  Nick just grinned at him. “Why don’t you help Dad with the steaks?”

  Danny got up to join his father at the grill, and Nick went up to his bedroom to try to find at least some of the perspective that his little brother had. But he couldn’t lie down in his happy place anymore, because there in the center of the attic were all the objects that he and Caitlin had collected. They were still arranged to form a partially completed contraption. Whatever it was, whatever it did, didn’t matter now. Nick would never find out.

  As he stared at it, a sense of anger built up inside of him. All that had happened, all that he had been through, everything he had sought to solve, was now meaningless. How could Tesla have been so foolish to leave these things for an unsuspecting world to find? Or perhaps that was his intention. A last cruel joke on a world that had refused to recognize and reward his brilliance.

  Nick should have burned these things when he had the chance—but it wasn’t too late to destroy them. Not with the force of an asteroid, but with the force of his own two hands.

  He scanned the room and in the corner he spotted the baseball bat—the only object that he and Caitlin couldn’t find a place for in the cluster of curious objects. He hefted the bat and looked at the stack in the center of room. Here’s for all the teams I’ll never play on. Here’s for the girl I’ll never kiss. Here’s for the man I’ll never get to be. Here’s for the stinking Accelerati. And here’s for Vince.

  Then, with all the fury he could muster, he raised the bat, tensed his arms, and leaned back, ready to swing away.

  When word made it through Petula’s Nick-related misery that all human history was about to be history, she took it personally. How dare the universe end her existence at this most awful of moments?

  Once she learned the precise day and time of the doomsday clock, she went out to her backyard exactly twenty-four hours before to snap a picture of the end of the world. Then she went to Ms. Planck’s house to develop it. Ms. Planck was not home, so Petula had to force her way in through a basement window.

  Upon developing the picture, it proved the truth of the inevitable. The image, taken in her own backyard, did not show a backyard. It showed flames and chunks of semimolten stone flying in all directions.

  The camera did not lie. This was indeed the end of planet Earth. Until she saw the picture, it hadn’t been real for Petula, but the truth drove through her heart in a way the golden spike had not.

  At home, her parents were satisfied to yell at each other, trying to squeeze a life’s worth of bickering into what little time they had left.

  Now she would die without ever having Nick’s affection. Her only consolation was that Nick would be dead, too.

  To cheer herself up, Petula spent the rest of the evening making a list of all of the people she’d be happy were dead, from despicable dictators to all those annoying people who ride side by side in the bike lane like they own the road. Sequestered in her room, she had no way of knowing that Ms. Planck had come across her negative of the end of the world, and she had her own thoughts on the matter.

  Petula did not attend school on Monday morning, because there was no one in particular she wanted to see or say a fond farewell to. The house was fairly quiet, since her parents were not talking to each other. Hemorrhoid, blissfully ignorant, was satisfied to gnaw on a rubber bone, which is probably what he would do in doggy heaven for all eternity.

  Petula asked herself the question “If I had one day left to live, what would I do?” She had asked herself the question as a hypothetical many times before, and her hypothetical answers were always lofty and self-sacrificing, like feeding orphans or comforting the elderly. In reality, however, all she really wanted to do before the world ended was watch the original three Star Wars movies. She calculated that the asteroid would be merciful and end Life on Earth before she ever had to deal with Jar Jar Binks.

  It was late afternoon, just before the second Death Star was blown to smithereens, and a few minutes until the earth would suffer the same fate, when Ms. Planck showed up at her door.…

  Nick, in his attic, held the bat poised, his eyes fixed on Tesla’s mysterious inventions stacked before him, and he stepped in to swing—

  —then a voice behind him said, “Nick?”

  He turned to see Mitch standing behind him, as always clinging to the Shut Up ’n Listen. He looked troubled, for obvious reasons.

  “What are you doing here
, Mitch?” Nick asked. “You should be home with your mom and sister.”

  “I was, but this thing—there’s something wrong with it.”

  Nick found his frustration turning to Mitch. “Why should that matter now?”

  Mitch shrugged awkwardly. He couldn’t look Nick in the eye, and Nick realized that Mitch’s presence here had little to do with the object in his hands.

  “Why are you really here, Mitch?”

  “Well…I was thinking. You know that Bonk thing is made mostly of copper ore. And my father stole three hundred and fifty truckloads of pennies. I mean, sure, they were virtual pennies—but don’t you see the connection?”

  Nick shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Both our lives were ruined by a whole bunch of copper. There’s got to be something to that. It’s like…I don’t know…God is winking at us.”

  Finally Nick smiled. “I get it, Mitch,” he said. In these last minutes, Mitch didn’t need his mom or sister—he needed a friend. Someone to connect with—identify with. “Pennies from heaven,” Nick said.

  “Yeah. Weird, huh?”

  Nick glanced at the Shut Up ’n Listen. “So what’s wrong with it?”

  “Watch.” Mitch pulled the string, and held it. “The asteroid headed to earth will—”

  He let the string go, and the device said, “Moooo!”

  He tried again. “The planet Earth is about to—”

  “Oink! Oink!”

  And a third time. “In less than twenty minutes, everyone on earth will—”

  “Gobble gobble gobble!”

  “See?” said Mitch. “It’s broken. And at the worst possible time.”

  Nick considered it, and something tickled the back of his thoughts. Something he couldn’t quite get at yet.

  “Mitch…” he said uncertainly, “…what would happen if you let the machine speak first?”

  Mitch shrugged and gave it a try. He pulled the string, and the machine said, “The cow goes—”

  “Mooo!” said Mitch. He covered his mouth as if he had unexpectedly burped. “Sorry, he said, “that just came out.”