by Lewis Shiner
Under Tesla’s electric lights, the polished façade of the building sparkles. For a moment, looking down the impossibly long line of perfect Corinthian columns, she feels what Tesla feels: the triumph of man over nature, the will to conquer and shape and control. Then the night breeze brings her the scent of roses from across the Basin and the feeling passes.
They enter the Electricity Building together and stand in the center, underneath the great dome. This is the site of the Westinghouse exhibit, a huge curtained archway resting upon a metal platform. Beyond the arch are two huge Tesla coils, the largest ever built. At the peak of the arch is a tablet inscribed with the words: WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC & MANUFACTURING CO./TESLA POLYPHASE SYSTEM.
Tesla’s mood is triumphant. Edison, his chief rival, has been proven wrong. Alternating current will be the choice of the future. The Westinghouse company has this week been awarded the contract to build the first two generators at Niagara Falls. Tesla cannot forgive Edison’s hiring of Menlo Park street urchins to kidnap pets, which he then electrocuted with alternating current—”Westinghoused” them, as he called it. But Edison’s petty, lunatic attempts to discredit the polyphase system have failed, and he stands revealed as an old, bitter, and unimaginative man.
Edison has lost, and history will soon forget him.
George Westinghouse himself, Tesla’s patron, is here tonight. So are J.P. Morgan, Anne’s father, and William K. Vanderbilt and Mayor Harrison. Here also are Tesla’s friends Robert and Katharine Johnson, and Samuel Clemens, who insists everyone call him by his pen name.
It is nearly midnight.
Tesla steps lightly onto the platform. He snaps his fingers and gas-filled tubes burst into pure white light. Tesla has fashioned them to spell out the names of several of the celebrities present, as well as the names of his favorite Serbian poets. He holds up his hands to the awed and expectant crowd. “Gentlemen and Ladies. I have no wish to bore you with speeches. I have asked you here to witness a demonstration of the power of electricity.”
He continues to talk, his voice rising to a high pitch in his excitement. He produces several wireless lamps and places them around the stage. He points out that their illumination is undiminished, despite their distance from the broadcast power source. “Note how the gas at low pressure exhibits extremely high conductivity. This gas is little different from that in the upper reaches of our atmosphere.”
He concludes with a few fireballs and pinwheels of light. As the applause gradually subsides he holds up his hands once again. “These are little more than parlor tricks. Tonight I wish to say thank you, in a dramatic and visible way, to all of you who have supported me through your patronage, through your kindness, through your friendship. This is my gift to you, and to all of mankind.”
He opens a panel in the front of the arch. A massive knife switch is revealed. Tesla makes a short bow and then throws the switch.
The air crackles with ozone. Electricity roars through Tesla’s body. His hair stands on end and flames dance at the tips of his fingers. Electricity is his God, his best friend, his only lover. It is clean, pure, absolute. It arcs through him and invisibly into the sky. Tesla alone can see it. To him it is blinding white, the color he sees when inspiration, fear, or elation strikes him.
The coils draw colossal amounts of power. All across the great hall, all over the White City, lights flicker and dim. Anne Morgan cries out in shock and fear.
Through the vaulted windows overhead the sky itself begins to glow.
Something sparks and hisses and the machine winds down. The air reeks of melted copper and glass and rubber. It makes no difference. The miracle is complete.
Tesla steps down from the platform. His friends edge away from him, involuntarily. Tesla smiles like a wise father. “If you will follow me, I will show you what man has wrought.”
Already there are screams from outside. Tesla walks quickly to the doors and throws them open.
Anne Morgan is one of the first to follow him out. She cannot help but fear him, despite her attraction, despite all her best intentions. All around her she sees fairgoers with their necks craned upward, or their eyes hidden in fear. She turns her own gaze to the heavens and lets out a short, startled cry.
The sky is on fire. Or rather, it burns the way the filaments burn in one of Tesla’s electric lamps. It has become a sheet of glowing white. After a few seconds the glare hurts her eyes and she must look away.
It is midnight, and the Court of Honor is lit as if by the noonday sun. She is close enough to hear Tesla speak a single, whispered word: “Magnificent.”
Westinghouse comes forward nervously. “This is quite spectacular,” he says, “but hadn’t you best, er, turn it off?”
Tesla shakes his head. Pride shines from his face. “You do not seem to understand. The atmosphere itself, some 35,000 feet up, has become an electrical conductor. I call it my ‘terrestrial night light.’ The charge is permanent. I have banished night from the world for all time.”
“For all time?” Westinghouse stammers.
Anne Morgan slumps against a column, feels the cold marble against her back. Night, banished? The stars, gone forever? “You’re mad,” she says to Tesla. “What have you done?”
Tesla turns away. The reaction is not what he expected. Where is their gratitude? He has turned their entire world into a White City, a city in which crime and fear and nightmares are no longer possible. Yet men point at him, shouting curses, and women weep openly.
He pushes past them, toward the train station. Meat machines, he thinks. They are so used to their inefficient cycles of night and day. But they will learn.
He boards a train for New York and secures a private compartment. As he drives on into the white night, his window remains brilliantly lighted.
In the light there is truth. In the light there is peace. In the light he will be able, at last, to sleep.
Primes
1. For nearly an hour Nick had been stuck on Interstate 40, surrounded by the worst traffic he’d ever seen. He’d watched the last heat of the sun set fire to the horizon and burn out, and now the first stars were tunneling through the haze. He had one arm out the open window in the unnatural 60-degree heat of the desiccated January evening. In the better parts of his brain, to keep himself amused, he was revising the code for his new graphics driver project.
Once past the Durham Freeway, I-40 had narrowed to a two-lane bottleneck. Traffic seemed to have doubled since that morning, with two cars trying to squeeze onto the road for every one that crawled off in defeat.
He was wearing a black T-shirt from the 544 club in New Orleans, where he and Angela had danced on their honeymoon two years before. A huge diesel rig inched past him on the right. The trailer was stark white except for the rear panel, where the number 544 stood out in stark black numerals. Nick glanced down at the dashboard clock. It was 5:44. For an instant he felt an abyss of inexplicability open under him, and then he shook it off. It was a bizarre coincidence, nothing more, something to tell Angela about, if he ever made it home.
By six he was close enough to the Lake Jordan exit that he could pull onto the shoulder and ease around the motionless right hand lane. It took fifteen minutes more to cover the remaining mile and a half to his driveway, and by then he was too tired to think much about the Cadillac parked where Angela’s gold Acura should have been. Her battery had been acting up, he knew, and she’d probably gotten a ride home with somebody from Duke Hospital, where she was on the faculty.
In truth, for most of that particular day, Nick had been consciously happy. Despite the endless commute, despite approaching deadlines on his driver, the components of his life were laid out in what seemed a comfortable and sustainable order. He and Angela had no debts except the house, and they’d nearly paid that off. They’d both weathered the latest flu epidemic and were back to full health. And Thursday was Nick’s night to cook. His attention was already shifting from traffic and programming to the free-range chicken and sou
r cream and tortillas waiting in the refrigerator to be transformed into enchiladas suizas.
The fear didn’t fully hit him until he climbed out of the truck and saw the color of the door that he was about to slam shut.
His beautiful white pickup truck was bright red, red as a stoplight, red as blood.
He’d been driving that pickup for four years, from the time before he’d moved to North Carolina and met and married Angela. He’d bought it back in Austin, where a white paint job could make the difference of a few crucial degrees in the inside temperature under the Texas sun. It had been white when he’d gotten into it in the office parking lot at a quarter to five. He knew himself to be sober, drug-free, and possessed of a clean bill of psychiatric health. It was simply not possible that the truck was red.
He tried to remember if he’d noticed the hood of the truck while he was driving home. It had been dark and he hadn’t been paying attention. He looked at the key in his hand. It was the wrong size and shape and there were no other keys with it. His hand lunged reflexively for his pocket and found nothing there. All of his pockets were empty: no wallet, no checkbook, no change.
He searched the red truck. It too was empty except for a jack behind the seat and an owner’s manual in the glove compartment. It could be a rental, he thought. Maybe he’d been in an accident that damaged his short term memory, and nobody had realized it. Maybe he’d absentmindedly left his wallet somewhere.
He started to run for the house, his shoes slapping awkwardly at the sidewalk. The front door was locked and he pounded on it with the flat of his hand until he heard the lock click and felt the door swing inward.
The man who opened it was in his thirties, tall and fit looking, with an angular face and fair receding hair. He wore a long-sleeved blue oxford-cloth shirt, crisply pressed khakis, tasseled loafers. He had a drink in his left hand. He looked Nick over and stepped aside to let him in. “Angela?” the man said, looking behind him, “I believe Nick has arrived.”
The accent, as Nick knew it would be, was cultivated British. Nick had seen the man’s photo in one of Angela’s albums that dated back to before Nick’s time with her. His name, Nick knew, was David. He was Angela’s first husband, and he’d died in 1995.
2. “David Graham,” David said, extending his hand. “I expect you’re a little surprised to see me here.”
“I thought you were dead,” Nick told him, looking down to find he’d gripped David’s hand by sheer reflex.
“Ah. Angela said much the same thing.”
Nick backed into the living room and sat on the couch to ease the trembling in his legs. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m afraid I live here, actually.”
Angela appeared in the doorway that led into the kitchen and leaned against the jamb, arms folded. She was still in her hospital scrubs and Nick couldn’t help noticing, as he always did, how that shade of green set off the red-gold in her hair. A little mascara and eyebrow pencil would have made her conventionally beautiful, but she disdained makeup and so instead her appeal was more subtle. It had taken Nick all of a minute and a half—the interval between the first time he met her and the first time he managed to make her laugh—to be overwhelmed by it.
Nick tried and failed to read her mood through the barricade of her posture. David, on the other hand, was as transparent as glass. He looked at Angela with wonder, longing, and a fading glow of residual despair.
“Is anybody going to tell me what the hell is going on here?” Nick heard his voice go shrill in the particular way that inspired him to self-loathing.
“It’s not just here,” Angela said. “It’s all over the news.”
“So you just, what, came home, saw David, and turned on CNN for an explanation?” In fact it wouldn’t have surprised him. She found her stability in the calm urgency of the newscasters, in the way they stood between mere mortals and the avalanche of information that threatened to bury all of civilization.
“I got home at four-thirty. About an hour later I went out to get something from my car and it was gone, and there was some strange car in the driveway instead. I got freaked and came in and tried to call the police, but all the lines were tied up. That’s when David walked in on me.” She stopped for a second, and Nick could see her fast-forward through her emotions. “At that point we knew something big was happening.” She turned away. “Come on in and see.”
Nick followed them meekly into the den and sat on the sofa between them. He was just in time for a recap of the day’s top story.
Between five and six in the afternoon, eastern time, the population of the east coast of North America had doubled, as had the population of the western bulge of South America, which lay along the same longitude. The phenomenon seemed to be spreading westward at the same rate the Earth revolved.
Nick understood that what he was hearing was true, believed it on a cellular level, but he couldn’t find a handle for his emotions. The scale of the disaster seemed to overshadow his own confusion and panic.
“I’ve checked the other stations,” Angela said, answering a question he hadn’t needed to ask. “If it’s a hoax, they’re all in on it.”
“It’s not a hoax,” Nick said. He glanced at David. “You know it’s not a hoax.”
“With some significant exceptions,” said CNN anchor Judy Woodruff, “every human being in the affected area—which now includes Chicago, Memphis, and eastern edge of New Orleans—now seems to have an exact double.” The camera panned to a duplicate Judy Woodruff in a canvas chair at the edge of the set, patting nervously at her shoulder-length blonde hair.
The scene shifted to Bernard Shaw interviewing his double on a Washington DC street corner that was sliding into chaos. In the background, abandoned cars stood with their doors open as pedestrians swarmed without apparent purpose between them. Half of the people in the crowd had twins standing somewhere near them. What struck Nick was that not all the pairs wore the same clothes, and some had radically different outfits or hair styles. The picture jumped periodically as someone from the alarmed, but not yet hysterical, mob collided with the camera operator.
“So what are these ‘significant exceptions’ she was talking about?” Nick asked Angela. “Is that us? And where did David come from?”
“David lives here,” David said.
“They don’t know yet,” Angela said. “Shhhhh.”
The street scene ended abruptly, and during a second or so of on-screen darkness Nick heard the ambient noise of an impending press conference: chairs shifting, throats clearing. “We’re live,” somebody said, and then the screen cleared to show a generic wood-grain folding table under harsh fluorescent lights. Two identical men sat at the table, each with long dark hair and a single diamond stud in his left ear. A young woman reporter Nick didn’t recognize said, “We’re here at MIT with the Doctors Jason Berlin of the theoretical physics department. Gentlemen, I understand you have a theory to explain the bizarre events we’ve seen tonight.”
“Merely a hypothesis,” said the Dr. Berlin on Nick’s left. “Have you ever heard of something called the ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics?”
“I’m not sure,” the reporter said. “Was it ever on Star Trek?”
“Frequently, as a matter of fact,” said the Dr. Berlin on the right. “It’s a sort of thought experiment that postulates an infinite number of universes parallel to our own, in which all possibilities are real.”
The other Dr. Berlin nodded. “Exactly. And every possibility splits off a new world. For instance, you might have a world where the Axis Powers won the Second World War. Or where Fidel Castro played major league baseball.”
The reporter said, “What does that have to do with what we’re seeing tonight?”
The first doctor leaned forward. “Picture our Earth, and then a second Earth that’s almost identical, but not quite. Call it, I don’t know, call it Earth Prime. In one of them Bill Clinton is President, in the other it’s Dan Quayle.�
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“Dan Quayle?” Nick asked. “Is he kidding?”
Angela shushed him again.
“There’ll be other differences,” the second doctor said. “Some people will have died in one world and not in the other. Two otherwise identical people will have different jobs, different spouses. Now suppose these two universes, that had split off at some point in the past, merged together again.”
“How could that happen?” the reporter asked.
“I have no idea. Maybe the universe is downsizing.” The crowd, which had been buzzing with low conversation, now erupted in nervous laughter. “But you’d see what we’re seeing—most people would be duplicated, though with all kinds of subtle variations.”
“Why isn’t it happening all at once?” the reporter asked. “Why only people? Why no trees or cats or skyscrapers?”
The first doctor shrugged and the second said, “Frankly, we’re at a bit of a loss to explain that just yet.”
“Back to you, Judy,” the reporter said. “Or is that Judy Prime?”
Angela hit the mute button and sat for a moment, as if gathering herself. Then she looked past Nick to David and said, “Tell me. How did I die?”
3. David got up and refilled his glass from the liquor cabinet under the TV. Then he sat down again and said, “Car crash. The brakes were bad on the Mazda, and you insisted on going out in the rain to rent a film. We had a bit of a row about it, actually, and I only gave in because I felt like I was coming down with something and I wasn’t up to getting wet. You...you slid through a stop sign.” He took a drink. “A sixteen-year-old girl hit you broadside. They pronounced you dead at the scene.”
“In my world,” Angela said, “you went out for the movie. A movie you didn’t even want.”
The rising tide of emotion threatened to wash Nick out to sea. “Excuse me,” he said, and went to the kitchen.