The Tesla Legacy

by Rebecca Cantrell

  Joe admired the toy’s clever design, then took a long sip of coffee and braved the surveillance folder. More requests. Hundreds of thousands from computers that he’d traced to the National Security Agency. Someone was fishing, and they’d scooped up all the fish they could find.

  What could he, Joe Tesla, do about it? The National Security Agency had enough lawyers on its payroll that he’d never be able to prove the volume of requests was illegal. He could leak the results to a whistle-blower website like WikiLeaks, but that wouldn’t do more than spark a month of outraged navel-gazing.

  Doing nothing wasn’t an option either.

  He took a shower and got dressed, but when he returned to the parlor, his laptop was still there with its millions of facial recognition match requests next to the stubborn little automaton. Neither was showing him the way forward.

  With a sigh, he sat down and stared into the flames again. Edison inched closer to him, brown eyes watching his every move. That helped Joe make his decision. It was no good to have your every move watched unless you knew the watcher and loved him.

  So, he would have to deal with the NSA. First, he’d have to remove any traces that he’d logged its activities. The government agency shouldn’t know that he had been watching it watch everyone else. That took only a few minutes. He’d written the underlying code, after all, and he knew what to tweak.

  His next actions were straightforward, but the consequences were profound. If caught, he’d go to jail—probably some nasty federal jail where they’d arrange for him to be housed in a glass cell staring out at nature on all sides. Sweat filmed his palms just thinking about it.

  Even worse, he would have to break his greatest creation. He would have to sabotage the facial recognition engine that underpinned everything Pellucid did. And it wouldn’t be enough to just break it. If the software stopped working, they’d roll back to an earlier version. He had to create an algorithm that would slowly decrease the number of possible matches across time. It would have to be so gradual that no one would be able to pinpoint when it started, and so subtle that it would look like a scalability bug that crept in when the system was stressed beyond its original design parameters. And it had to be so pernicious that it could never be fixed.

  He had to create a digital version of Celeste’s ALS—barely recognizable symptoms at first, then incurable creeping paralysis. The system had been his life for years now—the last thing he thought of before he went to bed and the first thing he thought of when he woke up. He dreamed the numbers and colors that made it run. And now he had to turn all the colors to black.

  Edison sensed his mood and dropped his head in Joe’s lap. His tail wagged once.

  “You can’t help me with this one, buddy,” Joe said. “I’ve got to do it.”

  He connected to the darknet to hide his IP address, then logged into Pellucid’s system using the account of an intern who had left the company. With any luck, his actions would never be traced back this far, but if he was, she’d have an alibi—she was trekking in Tibet and completely off the grid.

  Hours ticked by as he skipped through the code, changing tiny pieces here and there, hiding his intent in hundreds of places across thousands of lines of code. Colors flashed through his head as he calculated numbers and percentages, but the colors were muted and dark. He’d never experienced this before, but he knew they had changed their color because they were sad.

  He was crippling something bright and amazing because it was too powerful, too dangerous, and always in the wrong hands. He had created this monster with the best of intentions, but as his father always said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He was going to have to kill his creation, not quickly, but with a thousand tiny cuts, until its colors and numbers had bled out.

  Andres Peterson called in the afternoon. Andres was his dog walker—the man who made sure that Edison got the fresh air and sunshine he deserved. Celeste had recommended the Estonian artist when Joe was looking for someone, but she had warned him that Andres would be very famous someday, and he’d have to get another dog walker.

  Joe’s mind was still connected to the lines of code that he had created as he took Edison up the elevator. He greeted Evaline in a daze, barely spoke to Andres, and went back down to his work.

  By the time Andres’s next text reached him, Joe’s latticework of deceit was complete. But he didn’t have the heart to put in the final line of code, the one that would set it all in motion. It would destroy his creation, and it could destroy his life.

  He scrolled through the surveillance reports one last time. He thought of the millions of dollars that he and his colleagues would lose when his changes reached full effect and Pellucid’s stock tanked. They’d all sold enough to be comfortable for the rest of their lives, but that didn’t mean they wanted to lose the rest.

  He thought of the millions of people who had lost their privacy to his machine. He weighed their rights against the people who might be harmed if the NSA could no longer use the software. The innocents who might die because his software didn’t identify those intent on doing harm.

  And he didn’t write that final line.

  Instead, he went up to collect Edison. The dog panted happily next to the information booth. When Joe bent to pet him, he smelled like grass and dog. He’d been soaking up summer, just as Joe’s father would have wanted. What if Joe had tried to forgive the man, and they’d spent one last summer together? Would that have been so wrong?

  Andres wore ripped jeans and a rust-tinged cotton shirt. His curly hair was disheveled from the wind, and he was sporting the beginning of a tan. Joe suspected the only time he spent outside was with Edison and otherwise spent his days in his studio crafting his giant metal sculptures. They were gloomy, but Joe liked them. Celeste adored them.

  “Edison runs like a champion,” Andres said. “Even in the heat he could not be stopped. We went to Central Park so he could roll in grass. He loves grass.”

  “Were you a good boy?” Joe asked Edison. Somebody ought to be.

  “He is always good,” Andres said. “You are lucky to have such a fine animal.”

  Joe nodded and handed Andres his money. He always paid Andres in cash. Andres was one person he interacted with for whom there was no paper trail. He even had Andres text and call him using an app that kept his location secret and deleted the texts every twenty-four (blue, green) hours. Anyone who hung around Grand Central would know of their connection, but they weren’t linked online. That anonymity had saved Edison’s life once when Joe was under electronic surveillance and the dog was wounded. It was worth preserving.

  Andres crumpled the bill and pushed it into his front pants pocket. “In my country I had such a dog once, a fine, brave fellow, but the neighbor said he ate her chicken, and he had to be destroyed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “He did not eat the chicken, of course.” Andres’s pale blue eyes flashed. “But everyone knew that this neighbor was an informer for the government, and we could do nothing. Her husband shot the dog in front of my house. I was seven years old.”

  Joe dropped his hand to Edison’s shoulder, touching the scar where Edison had been shot a few months before. He imagined a seven-year-old watching his dog get shot and die in front of him.

  “I’m sorry.” It seemed so inadequate.

  Andres shrugged. “It is over now, and I can play with your Edison every day, even get money for that. In this country that is so free. Those are good things.”

  Andres patted Edison one last time and slouched off toward the giant front doors.

  Joe watched him go, out into a country that he thought was free, but wasn’t.

  Chapter 24

  Quantum liked his borrowed apartment. After being confronted by that woman, he didn’t feel safe going home. Who knew how long she’d been following him before he noticed her?

  So he’d done what he usually did when he went to ground. He found an apartment marked as empty on Airbnb
, using an algorithm he’d invented to search the database for unrented temporary apartments. Once he found one that he liked, he’d hack the owner’s email account and find out how he had tenants pick up keys. Then it was an easy matter to show up at a convenience store with fake ID and pretend to be a renter or to retrieve the key from under a mat or a coded mailbox.

  This apartment was particularly nice. It had a widescreen TV and Wi-Fi, and the last tenant had left the fridge partially stocked. Quantum was settling in when his phone buzzed. Ash. It had been hours since Quantum told him that he’d lost Joe, and he knew Ash was furious. He was going to have to take his lumps and smile. If he could manage it.

  ash: details

  quantum: he jumped off train in tunnels

  ash: u didn’t pursue?

  quantum: train moving before i could

  ash: device worth risk

  Said by a man who was not down in the tunnels on a speeding train, knowing that if he jumped he might get his legs cut off or he might land against the third rail and get electrocuted. Not on Quantum’s list of ways to spend the day. He gritted his teeth.

  quantum: sorry

  ash: more risk, more reward

  That sounded promising. It was the first mention of reward. He’d been doing this as a freebie, even blowing off his regular freelance IT work, just for karma points. But cash would be better.

  quantum: ??

  ash: get what i want any means necessary i’ll make it worth ur while

  That sounded pretty vague, but it was a start. Quantum rested his feet on a blocky coffee table that looked as if it came from IKEA.

  quantum: any means necessary?

  ash: don’t want to know just want results

  That meant he didn’t care whether Joe Tesla lived or died.

  Sometimes Quantum wondered if Ash was a CEO or a Mafia don. He wanted things done, and he wanted plausible deniability if they were. Would he have businessman loyalty, which was to say none at all, or would he reward loyalty like a Mafia don?

  quantum: how much?

  ash: bottom 6, u know how and where

  Quantum did. Bottom six meant bottom six figures, or $100,000. How and where were easy too—Bitcoins from Spooky’s petty-cash account, simple and untrackable. But he didn’t trust Ash.

  quantum: i’m a hacker. i can snatch something, but i don’t do any means necessary

  ash: not true

  Quantum’s stomach did a backflip.

  quantum: ??

  ash: i’ve seen ur record, mike pham. i know it’s not complete

  Quantum’s stomach went straight from backflip to full-on spinning. Ash knew who he was. He knew about the identity Quantum had abandoned years ago. Nobody in his new world knew his real name. Except Ash.

  ash: do this for me and u get the carrot not the stick

  He took a deep breath. He didn’t owe Joe Tesla anything. Best plan was to get the device, get paid, and then dive down so deep that Ash would never find him. He sat up straight on the anonymous couch and decided how to play it. Matter of fact.

  quantum: i like carrots

  Ash would know that was a yes.

  ash: then earn them

  Quantum looked around the comfortable apartment and sighed. He’d have to be up early. Grand Central opened at 5:30 a.m., and he’d have to stake it out again, but he needed a disguise. He decided to go for beggar. He’d need to skip shaving, buy a filthy jacket off one of the homeless who haunted the terminal, smash up a fedora so he had a battered hat to shield his face from the cameras, and make himself a cardboard sign. If he put a mirror on his begging cup, he’d be able to sit with his back to the clock and still watch it. Hopefully, a clever position and the disguise would be enough to conceal him if that hot Hispanic woman from last night had been sent by Tesla.

  If not, he’d have his gun.

  Chapter 25

  Joe paced around his house—front hall, parlor, billiards room, kitchen, and library. Edison trotted along at his heels. But the yellow dog didn’t have the solution to Joe’s problems.

  He made a round of the parlor. The automaton’s metal surface gleamed enticingly in the firelight. The little creation had answers to something, even if it wasn’t his current dilemma. Maybe what he needed was a distraction. He picked up the automaton. “Why was my father scared of you, little fellow?”

  The toy didn’t answer.

  “And why does it feel like somebody else wants you? Somebody scary.”

  Predictably, the toy didn’t answer again.

  It couldn’t, being only a toy that didn’t even have a voice box.

  Deciding to talk to someone who did, he called Vivian.

  “Torres.” The name was clipped and economical, a military greeting.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Is my mother all right?”

  “Fine,” she said. “I just checked in with Dirk. He’s on shift right now.”

  “Do you have some time today?”

  “I can make some,” she said.

  “Could you meet with those professors from the funeral?”

  “Egger and Patel?” Trust her to remember the names.

  “Them. Find out if they know who might have wanted to take that suitcase. It had papers that my father left me in it.”

  “What kind of papers?”

  Joe tightened his grip on Tik-Tok. “Just papers.”

  “I’ll get right on it, sir.” Vivian hung up.

  Joe looked at the automaton in his hands. Maybe he’d missed something last night in the concourse. Maybe Tik-Tok was trying to tell him something, and he hadn’t seen it. He tucked his feet up in the leather armchair and went over the surveillance footage of the previous night’s adventure under the constellations. A tiny Joe Tesla walked onscreen with an even tinier man and a cheerful-looking dog.

  The Joe Tesla of last night had known he was being filmed, but he hadn’t bothered to hide from the camera, even though he was doing unusual things. He carried the toy around, placing it in various locations, watching the little arm paint with light on the walls. Again, the arm never pointed at anything that seemed significant.

  Still, something looked familiar in the movements of the arm. They weren’t random. Too much time and care had gone into those movements for them to be random. Nikola Tesla had an extraordinary visual memory. He built all his machines in his head first, not bothering with blueprints, and watched them turn and move, studying them for inefficiencies and improper wear patterns. He spent hours on the models in his head before he built them in the real world.

  A man like that would think it child’s play to watch the motions of the arm and remember where the arm had pointed moments before. Joe slowed the footage down until the light from the laser inched slowly across the concourse wall, leaving trails behind it.

  He sat up. “I got it, Edison!”

  The dog cocked his head and raised his ears.

  “Tik-Tok isn’t pointing to anything at all. He’s writing.”

  A few minutes later he had transcribed Tik-Tok’s gestures. They were numbers and letters, each separated by a short pause:

  40 45 10 73 59 38 južni podrum 3

  He’d start with the numbers. A dozen colors flashed through his head in a long ribbon. Over four billion (green with a long stretch of black). A huge number. But they weren’t one number. The pauses made them six (orange) numbers, plus the one at the end.

  Joe wound the ribbons of colors around in his head, combining and recombining them. But he didn’t find any patterns. He tried entering them into a couple of pattern finders online and came up empty there, too.

  Then he sequenced the numbers in order:

  10 38 40 45 59 73

  He tried everything again, but came up with nothing again.

  The numbers weren’t in any mathematical sequence that he could readily find. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t a method to them that Nikola Tesla had known, but it did mean he should broaden his search parameters.

  If they we
ren’t mathematical, maybe they were something physical. They might be the combination of a safe. That was a discouraging thought, because he had no idea where he might find Nikola Tesla’s safe. He’d read up on him recently and knew that he had kept a safe in his hotel room, but it had been emptied after his death. Surely his father wouldn’t have given him a completely impossible task. He pursed his lips. His father was capable of that—he’d given Joe plenty of impossible tasks when he was a kid.

  Maybe he was wrong about the numbers. He wound up the automaton and pointed his light at a piece of paper hanging on the wall. He traced each ray of light. The numbers were the same, but, in addition to the pause after every second digit, he noticed a longer pause after the sixth digit and the twelfth one. Maybe it was two separate numbers:

  40 45 10

  73 59 38

  No patterns there, but 40 45 10 looked familiar (green, black; green, brown; cyan, black). Where had he seen those colors before? Somewhere in Grand Central Terminal, he was certain of it. He ran through combinations of tracks, of train schedules, and addresses. Again, nothing.

  He closed his eyes and let the ribbon of color float free in his head, figuring out where the numbers needed to attach. A feeling of elation came over him. He knew: 40 degrees, 45 minutes 10 seconds. If you put north on the end, that was the latitude for Grand Central.

  A quick check of the GPS app on his phone told him that the latitude for Grand Central was 40°45′10.08″ N, and its longitude was 73°58′35.48″ W. So, whatever he was looking at was close, but not in the terminal.

  He entered the numbers that Tik-Tok had drawn and immediately hit a match. New Yorker Hotel, at 481 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York. A quick online search told him that Nikola Tesla had spent the last few years of his life there. He had died, alone, in Room 3327 (red, red, blue, slate) on January 7, 1943. The hotel had changed ownership several times since then and been completely refurbished, but the building still stood.

  His heart raced. The automaton had a message for him. It was leading him exactly where Nikola Tesla wanted—his old hotel. His father must have figured that out and been able to find those numbers before the days of the Internet and portable GPS. It had been a much harder task in Nikola Tesla’s time, and in his father’s. Joe almost felt like he was cheating.