Edison's Alley

by Neal Shusterman

  Mitch looked up suddenly. “Vanilla suit? What about a vanilla suit?”

  “It’s what he wears,” Caitlin told him. “The Accelerati all wear these weird pastel suits.”

  “They’re made of Madagascan spider silk,” Nick added.

  “…and in a certain light,” mumbled Mitch, “they seem to shimmer…”

  Then Mitch Murló took a deep dive into himself.

  Humans have the uncanny ability to distance themselves from anything real. Sometimes, for their own protection, they create stories that pass for history because creating meaning is so much easier than searching for it. The stories become symbols on a page, and in the end the page is replaced by electronic strings of ones and zeros floating in a cloud that is not really a cloud at all. The truth is filtered through so many levels of unreality that we can’t remember what transpired over the course of time, or even what we had for breakfast this morning.

  Our relationship with money is much the same, and few people knew this better than the Murló family. Thousands of years ago, money was something tangible—a string of shells or beads at first, then precious metals in the form of coins that everyone agreed were worth a certain amount. The coins gave way to worthless paper, but everyone chose to agree that the bills were worth something, too.

  Then paper was replaced with the same endless string of ones and zeros that had swallowed all of human history. The world’s wealth no longer existed in material form. It was a concept in the cloud that didn’t actually exist…

  …which is why a computer programmer with great skill and the right amount of inspiration could figure out a way to steal unreal pennies from theoretical bank accounts and amass three-quarters of a billion dollars in less than five seconds, by clicking a single button on his laptop.

  Now Mr. Murló was in prison, perhaps for the rest of his life, and the Accelerati had a secret bank account of untold millions that existed only because computers agreed that it existed.

  Throughout his father’s first year of incarceration, Mitch had tried to wrap his head around how something as imaginary as digital money could ruin so many lives—while improving the lives of the monsters who had used his father and then discarded him.

  And so, when Mitch finally connected the dots and realized that those monsters were the very same people they were fighting now, his mind whirled in a feedback loop of fury. It was as if he had left the attic and gone to a faraway place, a place where time and space curved around on itself, allowing Mitch to repeatedly kick his own butt for not realizing it sooner.

  While Mitch traveled in his own head, the others made plans in the attic. It was decided that Nick would keep the fan and Jorgenson’s neural disrupter for his defense. Vince would take the narc-in-the-box that rendered people unconscious, since, by his own admission, it suited his personality. Petula was assigned the torturous clarinet, because the others could easily imagine her playing an instrument of torture. Mitch would get the dust-devil bellows, because most of the video games they had traded for it were his. And Caitlin—the conscientious objector of the group—agreed to hold on to the force-field sifter, since it was truly the most defensive of all the objects.

  Mitch hadn’t heard any of this. When he returned from his unhappy place, there was only one thought on his mind.

  “Where’s the remote?” he said with an uncharacteristic growl.

  They all turned to him, a bit thrown by the snarl.

  “Huh?” said Nick.

  “The remote that freaking Mr. Vanilla Suit tried to kill you with. You said you broke it. Well, I want the pieces. Where are they?”

  The others looked at one another, not sure what to make of this.

  “I…threw it into the fireplace, Mitch,” Nick said. “I burned it up.”

  Mitch stood, his fingers balling into fists so tight he could feel his nails cutting into his palms. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?”

  “Because,” said Caitlin, her voice calm, as if she were trying to talk someone off a ledge, “it was too dangerous.”

  “It wasn’t dangerous enough!” Mitch yelled. “It could only kill one of them at a time. I want to kill them all! I want them all dead! Every last one of them! I want them dead now.” Tears burst from his eyes. He couldn’t control them; he didn’t even try.

  Nick stood up. “Mitch, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing!” he screamed. “Who said anything was wrong?”

  “Mitch, that thing was made by the Accelerati, and we—”

  Then Mitch blurted, “—can never destroy the Accelerati with their own technology.” He covered his mouth with his hands. It had come out like a belch. He hadn’t meant to say it, but then, he never meant to finish the sentences that he did whenever he was angry—the ones that were undeniably true—thanks to the strange power he had absorbed from the Shut Up ’N Listen. Just like the answers that had flown from his mouth when Nick needed to know how to save the world. Or the things Mitch had shouted in the heat of his fight with Steven Gray. It was only when his emotions were running high that these unintended phrases came out.

  Sometimes they were helpful, sometimes they were just annoying, but they were always true, and right now he did not want the answer to be true.

  “Shut up!” he yelled, but not to anyone else in the attic. He was yelling it to himself. And he bounded down the attic ladder, with no clue as to where he wanted to go, except out.

  Nick followed him, not only because he cared about his friend, but also because he saw an opportunity. What they needed more than anything else right now were answers, even if they weren’t the answers Mitch wanted to hear.

  Nick caught up with him in the foyer and grabbed him.

  “We can beat the Accelerati—” Nick prompted.

  “—with a club, a pole, or a stick,” Mitch finished.

  Okay, Nick thought, less than helpful. I’ve got to be more specific. “The Accelerati’s next attack will be—”

  “—entirely underfoot,” Mitch blurted.

  Interesting, thought Nick. But what did it mean?

  “Please,” said Mitch, “don’t make me do this!”

  “Don’t you see, Mitch? You could be the key to everything—if I can come up with the right words. Whatever made you so angry, hold on to it, just until we get the answer.”

  But Mitch’s anger was shooting out in many directions; right then it hurled itself at Nick. He burned Nick a gaze and tried to pull out of his grip, telling him, “No, I won’t do it!”

  “The Accelerati want to kill us, but we can save our lives by—”

  And out of Mitch’s mouth came the words “—shaking hands with Dr. Jorgenson.”

  Once more he covered his mouth. Nick stared at him, like somehow Mitch had betrayed him, and he let go of his friend’s arm. “What?” Nick asked. “What did you say?”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” yelled Mitch. “You made me say it!”

  Mitch turned and stormed out before he could say anything else, and this time Nick didn’t follow him.

  Vince lingered in the attic after the others had left. He glared at the collection of objects before him, all aligning for a single purpose.

  What Nick felt as compulsion, Vince was beginning to feel as repulsion.

  When Nick returned to the attic, he seemed surprised that Vince was still there.

  “Pretty cool how you figured out that it all fits together,” Vince said. “But even if you get every single item back, including the harp, you’re still going to be one item short. You know that, don’t you?” He shifted his backpack on his shoulders. The backpack holding the battery.

  Vince couldn’t read Nick’s expression. He might have been wary, or scared, or sad. Or maybe a little of all three. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Vince.”

  “Yeah,” said Vince. “I guess we will.” And he left without another word.

  Worldwide, lightning usually causes about eighty deaths and three hundred injuries per year. But the steadily increasing numb
er of electrical storms in the past few weeks had laid waste to all previous statistics. Folks on all continents were getting fried like flies in a bug zapper. But of course, unless it happened to you or someone you knew, it registered as little more than distant thunder. Something to be filed away under “Stuff Happens.”

  So far, the only major entity affected by the electromagnetic weirdness was the airline industry, which experienced random navigation and telemetry issues. More than one airplane had landed at the wrong airport. In one instance, vacationers in plaid shorts and mouse ears en route to Orlando found themselves landing, with no explanation, in Honduras, where the resident rodents were more likely to give rabies than rides.

  Meanwhile, the Slate household was dealing with its own electromagnetic woes: a sudden and inexplicable lack of power.

  “Nick, get up! We’re late!”

  It was his dad’s voice. Nick opened his eyes and reflexively looked at his alarm clock. The screen was dark.

  “Power failure!” his father shouted up the ladder to him.

  “How late are we?” he called down.

  “No clue!”

  Nick grabbed his phone, but it was dead, even though he’d left it charging. The power must have been out all night.

  He quickly pulled on some pants and a shirt, hurrying downstairs with his shoes untied.

  Danny ate Cheerios in the unlit kitchen. “I don’t like eating in the dark. I can’t see if there are bugs in my cereal.”

  “It’s not dark,” Nick pointed out. “Just dim.”

  “I don’t like eating in the dim either.”

  As it turned out, no one’s phone was working, so they were forced to consult Great-Aunt Greta’s grandfather clock, which was always off by ten minutes—fast or slow—and thus was only slightly better than nothing.

  “We needed to be in school either three or twenty-three minutes ago,” Danny griped. “Can any of Tesla’s stuff help with that?”

  Nick shrugged. “Not any of the things we have.”

  “Figures.”

  Nick’s father was running up and down the stairs and cursing as he kept remembering things he had to bring to work.

  Apparently their bad luck was nowhere near an end, because when they went out to the car, it didn’t start.

  Mr. Slate pounded the steering wheel in frustration. “I can’t even call to let them know I’ll be late,” he complained.

  “Maybe the whole grid is down,” Nick suggested, “and NORAD is out, too.”

  “NORAD doesn’t lose power,” their dad said flatly. “Even when the world was ending it didn’t.”

  Nick could see, through the dreary, morning haze, that the lights were on in the house across the street. So their father went to use their neighbor’s phone while Nick and Danny rode their bikes to their respective schools, which were in opposite directions.

  Nick was usually observant, but he was so preoccupied with thoughts of the Accelerati that he didn’t notice how cars stalled when he pedaled next to them. He wasn’t aware of the neighborhood lights flickering off as he approached and flickering back on after he had passed, or that traffic lights were winking out, causing near collisions.

  Instead, his mind was filled with the very unpleasant prospect of having to shake Jorgenson’s hand.

  Mitch’s prophetic blurts were never wrong. So did this mean that, to save their lives, they would have to enter a truce with the Accelerati—or worse, join them?

  Nick locked up his bike, and as he walked into school, the hallway light flickered out. Then, when he went to hand his tardy slip to the Attendance Czar, all the lights turned off in the main office.

  “Don’t panic,” he heard one of the secretaries say. And then: “That’s funny, the flashlight on my phone isn’t working.”

  That’s when Nick knew. He quickly left the office. When he was farther down the hall, the lights in the office came back on, but the fluorescents above his head went out.

  Deep in his head Nick could hear Dr. Alan Jorgenson’s mocking laughter.

  For the entire day it felt like there was a storm cloud over his head. Wherever he went, anything nearby lost power. The calculators in his math class, the SMART Board in English, all laptops and tablets and phones were entirely drained of juice.

  “I don’t know what they did to me,” he told Caitlin during lunch, in a dim half of the cafeteria, sounding more desperate than he meant to. Here he could see exactly how far the nullifying field extended. It had a twenty-foot radius all around him.

  “Don’t panic,” Caitlin said. “It’s not like it’s going to kill you.”

  “No,” Nick admitted. “But once people figure out I’m the one causing their hardware to crash, they might kill me.”

  “The Accelerati are trying to keep you off balance, that’s all.”

  “Well, it’s working.”

  Caitlin took a deep breath. “You have to figure out what’s doing it. There must be some sort of device or…ray or…something.”

  Nick looked down at his clothes. He’d already checked his pockets. He’d even gone so far as to brush his hair, on the off chance the mechanism was disguised as a fleck of dandruff.

  “For all I know,” Nick said, “they could have replaced my deodorant with energy-suck spray.”

  Caitlin smirked. “Well, it’s good to know you use deodorant.” Which made Nick blush only slightly.

  Then she reached over and gently took Nick’s hand. She didn’t even hide the gesture—it was in full view of everyone. The fact that no one was looking didn’t matter; it was daring in that anyone could have seen it.

  “Well,” she said, “whatever it is, it doesn’t wipe out all electricity.”

  And although Nick blushed a little bit more, he didn’t mind at all.

  Rumors about Nick’s involvement in the strange energy drain began to circulate, and before lunch was over, he was summoned by the principal. Suspicions were further verified when he entered the main office and the lights went out again.

  When he opened the door to Principal Watt’s office, the man looked up, smiled at Nick, and then his head promptly flopped down into the plate of Chinese food he was eating.

  Having seen Vince die on multiple occasions, Nick quickly put two and two together and realized that the man must have a pacemaker. So he promptly left the way he came in.

  Principal Watt soon regained consciousness, only slightly suffocated by the egg foo yung in his nostrils, but no worse for the wear.

  Nick decided it was time for him to make an early exit from school.

  Fortunately, Vince stayed home from school that day, so he did not have to face a lethal failure of his electrical life-support system. He was still reeling from the revelation that Nick would eventually need the battery back, and the fact that Nick had known this for weeks and hadn’t told him.

  To date, Vince had collected several items for Nick, never knowing that each one was bringing Vince closer to his own doom. And now there was one item in particular he had to find out about, in spite of himself; one that occupied all of his thoughts—but he couldn’t share that with his mother.

  “You can’t stay home from school without a reason,” his mom said that morning.

  “How about death?” he said flatly as he ate his raw vegan breakfast consisting of freshly juiced vegetables and seed cheese, a diet that delighted his mother. He had found, to his absolute horror, that his undead intestinal tract digested animal protein far too slowly. Although he still had intense cravings for hamburgers and pepperoni pizza, he had to admit it could have been worse. If he had been embalmed, he would have been left with an insatiable desire for iron-rich foods, such as liver and human brains. Knowing his mother, she would’ve made him eat spinach instead.

  “You can’t use the ‘D-word’ as an excuse for everything,” his mother said. She crossed her arms defiantly. “If you’re not feeling well enough for school, you should see a doctor.”

  Vince exhaled a long, heavy sigh. “There is no
doctor for this, Mom. There’s only one cure, and I’m plugged into it.”

  “We don’t even know what it is,” she pointed out.

  “Which is why,” Vince whispered to her, “we don’t want anyone else to know, do we?”

  Though she was frustrated, she couldn’t disagree. So she picked up her purse and went off to work in a huff.

  “I have houses to show, but I’ll be back by five,” she said on her way out the door. “Please don’t leave me any messes.”

  Vince knew there was one house his mother could never show, however, for the simple reason that it was no longer there. And that particular missing house was the real reason Vince stayed home.

  After downing what could have been a life-threatening dose of carrot/beet/kale juice, he left to visit the curiously vacant lot upon which had once stood an unremarkable residence. Unbeknownst to Nick, Vince had seen a picture of what could very well be the missing house. That’s what had caught his attention in the tabloid newspaper during his and Nick’s botched break-in—just before he was rendered inconveniently dead.

  The house in question was an ordinary two-story tract home, perhaps with the same floor plan as Vince’s, since it was in the same development. Its absence was hard to miss in the middle of a street of identical homes. There had been police tape around the property for a while, but the police had never arrived to investigate. The only investigation was conducted by a group of men and women in vaguely luminescent pastel-colored suits.

  In the few weeks since the house had vanished into thin air, nothing much about the property had changed. Vince walked up the front path, which ended abruptly at a pit that went down about ten feet. The remains of electrical conduits, pipes, and a sewer line poked out of the ground, sheared off cleanly. Even the foundation was gone, as if the house was a tooth that had been extracted, roots and all.