Would Anyone Care...

[alienmastermind]

To read my segment of a book for NaNoWriMo?

I'm working on two projects concurrent with Dipswitch, so, it's a toss-up as to what gets shelved.

The first story is called 'Tesla's War', and is about a group of people in the future waging war on the past, specifically the battles between ConEdison and Westinghouse.

The second, is 'Stormknights of Everwatch', a fantasy story.

Would you care to read Tesla's War, and tell me what you think?

Let me know, so I don't waste boardspace. :)

AM

[torrefaction]

How does one waste board space? You already created the thread, post that shit!

[Jackel]

At first I thought this was going to be a "thinking about suicide thread"

I was a bit scared that you were looking for a "creative" way to off yourself.

[Thanasimos]

"creative" way to off yourself.

Rube Goldberg, my friend. Rube Goldberg.

[alienmastermind]

Okay...here goes it. I'll split it up for y'all.

Tesla's War
by Daniel Houser

0:
'It seems that I have always been ahead of my time.' - Nikola Tesla
Chicagoland District, Illinois February 8th, 3111 9:6:9:1

1

James Wild sat in the antechamber outside the old man's office, staring at the shifting images on the glam-posters. Historical scenes flickered and weaved into new images in a colorful fluid blur. James had never seen the offices in the corporate side of Shiftcore, having only worked for the company for around eighteen months. A few awards for diligence in attendance and quality aside, James didn't have much reason to meet with executives. Dr. James Wild worked as the head of the behavioral research and testing department of Shiftcore, testing new entertainment products effects on normal folks. Nobody at Shiftcore, especially James, wanted another Sleepaway fiasco, and James took pride and care in his job, preventing the kinds of psychoses and mental traumas a faulty entertainment product could create. James couldn't imagine what the appeal of the glam-posters was, but lots of corporate offices had them.

The woman behind the impressive orange and silver reception desk was dressed in an all-business black suit with a grey and silver blazer, and had the sharp eyes of someone designed to keep out the unworthy and unwashed. The receptionist had the most amazing icy blue eyes Wild had seen in a standard-born human before. Then, with an inward sigh, he noticed the tell-tale signs of the PurBlonde genome, popular with the wealthy and the attendants of the wealthy. James failed to see the need to alter the fundamental building blocks of nature to attain perfection, to grab the unique and throttle it to unconsciousness by offering it at a retail price. There were patents for everything; genes themselves were patented, trademarked, diseases cured and the word 'healthy' copyrighted to mean one thing one today, and something completely other tomorrow.

Over time, people seemed to get used to the idea of an ever-changing future. Most were confused by the constant shifting of the cutting edge. James certainly was, staring again at the glam-poster's irritating frisk and shudder. Some people claimed they could actually see coherent images in the shifting and flickering. The solid images are probably a figment of their imagination or some kind of image completion meme modern psychology doesn't understand. James believed so, even staring at the chaos on that micropanel screen didn't seem to offer any kind of solid proof one way or another.

The shifting of the 'mood' and collective unconscious of the modern era had a lot to do with what Shiftcore as a company was involved in, as well as their biggest and longest standing rivals, Solid State Ventures. Something is conceptual one day, reality the next. Wild knew that somehow Shiftcore was more than just the world's largest entertainment and scientific novelty conglomerate, in his heart he knew they were controlling more than the flow of money from the public into their coffers.

The waiting room was an ornately decorated antechamber with a large wall of plexiglass. The room was appointed with statuary and large climbing vines to give the place a living feel. A strange mesh of organics and steel looking out over the Chicago skyway, the 140 square aerial miles of sky traffic lanes. He watched the aircars lunge by through the air. Outside, the engines would be a calamitous braying buzz, but because of the sound dampening effect of the triple paned windows' baffles, the air cars seemed to speed past with silent effortless purpose. James let his mind wander while he watched the glam-posters reading 'THE FUTURE IS OURS'. The image on the poster flickered and changed elements so often as to be utterly confusing, scrambling the image and staying solid for a few tantalizing moments, showing cities of light with electricity blooming from massive knobbed towers at their apexes, showering bright blue arcs of electricity down like fountains of jagged lightning. Then, the picture squelched showing a modern city of the current age, the skyline replete in its elegant curves and molded impact materials gleaming in the moonlight. The shifting picture's message was one of chaos and confusion. It did manage, however, to convey the feeling of life in the modern age. James wondered about a study on the differences in brain chemistry between those who claimed to see the actual images of the glam-posters and those who just saw brief glimpses amidst the confusing rippling images.

James was a man of the future. Every day, there would be a new skyline to see, a new horizon to explore, a new way to forge, it seemed. Maintaining a grasp on the future's wild vagaries was an everyday odyssey, but one James found himself willing to confront. Wild forced himself to look away from the shifting images back over to the large, blue pebbled glass doors leading to the old man's office. Real glass, James noted, which was in short supply since the Three Continents War. The old man, in this case, was one Huxley Burke, the man in charge of Shiftcore. Burke was a man with a vision of the future, a modern day Edison; Burke having invented just about every damned thing of interest these days to most people. The flat-panel touch consoles that made wireless integration of the OpNet and the old Internet possible were Burke's invention. He invented Dozer on top of the near disastrous Sleepaway dream and subconscious maintenance device, and the world now could sleep without the intervention of disturbing dreams. Wild and his department had done much to remove many of the common psychotic and schizophrenic breaks using only Dozer therapy and mainstream drugs. Dozer was James' first testing project, and he helped guide the device through R&D, and babysat the test subjects through behavioral testing and observation. James made several breakthroughs in the meme dampener sensors before production and was rewarded with a forgettable dinner at the top of the Sears Tower.

James tried to clear his mind, to allow the shifting images of the poster coalesce into a discernable whole, and more of the poster showed a city of brass and iron, electricity flowing between buildings freely, unbound by wires or cables. It was a phantasmagorical image, stark but also breathtaking in its grandeur. The picture showed a man's face in the background; a lean, intense face with arresting eyes and a short-cropped black moustache. Like something out of the propaganda posters from the 19th and 20th centuries. A political poster, perhaps, a Brave New World. The message was clear; a vision of a possible future culled from the shifting and scrambled images of the whole; he was giddy as the Zen feeling of satori plunged into his heart, but awkwardly, the picture then scrambled again and Wild blinked.

"You like the poster?" a man's voice said. James looked up with a start, and
then grinned.

"Uh, yeah--eh, yes sir. You must be Huxley Burke." James began, standing up and smiling easily at the old man. They shook hands.

Huxley Burke looked good for an octogenarian, but when you think about it, the man was richer than God's landlord, and could afford all of the latest genome therapies. Age defiance was out, age cancellation was the wave of the future. Huxley was old, but looked to be in about his mid-forties, and he had a steel-worker's grip.

"Of course. And you're Jim Wild, no? I'm very happy you're here, son. Come on into my office, Jim. Because, in sixteen and a half minutes you're going to make a decision that is going to change the world."

James Wild, man of the future, had little to say to that.

[alienmastermind]

2

The office of Huxley Burke was simple, and James found himself once more surprised. Burke was not the man James expected him to be. Huxley's desk was big, impressive, but not in the way most executives preferred their workspaces. It was not a wooden behemoth, with an acre's worth of eye space and only used up by a blotter or a phone. It didn't have the austere looming of a boardroom, it was decorated with a long, modern silver table with orange and nectarine colored walls. There was the standard flatpanels for OpNet usage along one wall, as well as a strange series of rectangular panels along another wall, each with a series of digital numbers underneath that seemed to tick off in uneven measure as the panels lit up with soft white light in random patterns. The numbers flickered and changed in a manner that reminded James in a sideways sort of way of clocks, and the rectangular panels lit in pairs. The panels were blinking occasionally, sometimes would go out as the numbers beneath reached certain coordinates. James watched the series of panels and numbers and could glean no meaning from them; frustrating, like the glam-posters.

"Please, have a seat, Jim." Huxley said, smiling at James with an appraising look. Burke grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey from the shelves, and poured a pair of three fingered shots. Jim looked down with a sort of bashful grin, and shook his head.

"No thanks."

"I guarantee that you're going to need it here in...fourteen minutes and thirteen seconds." Huxley Burke sat down, smiling at James. "So, Mr. Wild, what do you know about Thomas Edison?"

The question struck James as odd.

"I'm sorry?"

"Mr. Thomas Alva Edison...What do you know about Edison, James?" Burke gulped down his shot with a wince, teeth bared for a moment. Grinning again, but the expression seemed disingenuous.

James' mind searched for information about Edison, and his mind dredged up all of his schoolboy facts about the 'Father of Invention'. Vague images flit around in his mind, and James felt disoriented, like he was looking at a glam-poster behind his eyelids. Huxley poured another shot for himself.

"Take your time, Wild."

"Well, he invented the lightbulb. I know that much, he was responsible for the widespread use of electricity in the United States way back in oh...I can't really remember."

"1880 was the year Edison formed his investor-owned electric utility. The first of its kind. They called him the 'Wizard of Menlo Park'. Probably the most famous citizen of New Jersey, next to Frank Sinatra." Burke's voice was low, and seemed wistful as he continued "Edison was a giant. Edison was, truth be told, electricity, Jim. The man was a dynamo...pardon the pun."

"Sure." James said. He was a little taken aback by Burke calling him 'Jim', but was completely at ease with the owner of the company, which, he imagined, was this line of questioning's purpose.

James was wrong.

"Edison wasn't the only man in America working on a solution to the problem of electric power. But imagine what kind of world would have evolved if someone other than an American controlled electricity or developed electricity first. You know, historians focus on the big things like nuclear weaponry, fusion power and the impact of one ideology controlling the ability to destroy the world. But without electricity, James, we'd have none of that. So, you can see that Edison is responsible for an entire epoch, delivering that epoch into the hands of the West."

"Yes." was all James managed to say.

"Now, what do you know about Nikola Tesla?" and James could hear the expectation in his employer's voice, but nothing came to mind readily.

"Uh...He was a crazed inventor, right? He was a man with inventions, and did something with electricity. Sorry, I can't remember." James said.

"Crazy?" Burke's voice carried an edge as he stared at James Wild. "No. Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man. An inventor, a theoretician, a real renaissance man in just those terms. He invented lightbulbs, perfected the transmission of electricity without wires, and more if you believe the man's own writings and predictions."

"You believe them." James said, not a question.

"Of course I do, Jim." Burke said, his genuine smile returning again. "And you're
going to, no doubt."

Something in that turn of phrase was edged in glare ice, a hidden hazard. The moment passed, and James didn't have anything to say. Burke grinned wider, and chuckled.

"Most guys react this way, Jim, don't get worried that we're playing games with you, son. Fact is, we're promoting you."

"Promotion? But I'm already the head of testing in novelties, Mr. Burke."

"Novelties, yes. Well, your promotion is going to make you a Field Operator in 'Acquisitions', Jim. And please, call me Huxley, everyone in our office does."

Acquisitions. It was called the Department of No Return, because there was nowhere in the company to go after someone was assigned there. In fact no one from Acquisitions ever communicated via intra-office OpNet or even socially with anyone else in Shiftcore. James swallowed, his throat feeling dry for a moment, and looked at Huxley Burke again, who leaned back in his chair and nodded.

"In," Huxley looked over at the blinking numbers and flashing lights, "nine minutes and some seconds you're going to have to make your decision. Not before. So, let me tell you a few facts about Shiftcore you might not know."

"I hate to say this, Mr. Bur--Huxley. I know an awful lot about this company. More than most, I'd imagine."

"Yeah." Burke said, smile fading. "Do you know what we build here?"

"Dozer, uh the OpNet decks that the kids are frantic over, amusements of the nanotech age, that kind of thing."

"That's the thing. We don't build those. We don't build any damned thing in this company. The prototypes? The inventors come up with those, and we buy the patents. I happen to have a talent for seeing where things are going."

"But you're credited with the OpNet flatpanel interface, hell, I know you invented the code structure for Dozer's mental interface, I saw your reference documents, handwritten."

Burke nodded. James understood the reference to Edison now.

"Right, Jim. But the actual invention was based on technologies that already existed, like Sleepaway. With the interfaces, I took things that I already knew that were coming, inside information. My only real inventions were the three equations that helped to develop the Glam-Posters. I invented those."

James looked at the old man and could see in Burke's smile something ageless.

"Shiftcore isn't about gaining money over trinkets and scientific novelties. Our company is about owning the paradigms that shape our everyday lives. And Shiftcore fights every single day for the right to exist, to handle the future for the greatest possible good for mankind."

James got up, shaking his head and laughing. Burke said nothing, simply looked down at the bottle of Wild Turkey. Looking at his own glass, James spoke.

"So, it's war? You're telling me there's a war going on between Shiftcore and some other company. This sounds an awful lot like paranoid delusions, Mr. Burke." James voice automatically dropped a gear, into his soothing therapeutic drone.

"Oh, come now, it's better than that...and worse. See, Jim, we control the future because we control the technology. You'll understand more once you get down into Acquisitions."

"You act as if I'm going to take this job, Mr. Burke."

"You act as if you're not, Jim. And in three and a half minutes time, we'll both find out."

"What happens in three minutes?"

"Something that takes more money and time than you can possibly count."

"Such as? I'm interested now, Mr. Burke--"

"Stop trying to treat me, Jim. I'm not psychotic or schizophrenic, it's just what you need to know will change the way you look at everything, and I can't stop what's about to happen now."

James considered what the old man could be talking about. The man was impenetrable. There was nothing in his eyes.

"What's going to happen?"

"Something wondrous, I assure you." Burke said with a grin, "And expensive"

"What is going to happen?" James' face went pale for a moment. Would it hurt? What worried James more was showing weakness in front of Burke, something in the old man's eyes wouldn't countenance something as banal as pain in his presence. James was growing cold.

"Look at the palm of your hand, Jim, and please try not to scream."

James succeeded at one but not the other.

[alienmastermind]

3
James looked at his hand during the next hour, in disbelief. Utter horror riddled with a strange acceptance crept over him as well during that hour, because he also believed with one hundred percent certainty everything Burke had said during their short meeting. All of the craziness Burke spewed, James ate with a spoon. He also suspected that somehow Burke had poisoned him or given him some narcotic, because on his right palm was a small scar where his life and fate lines crossed with the sun line. A triangular scar, and the memory of the scar was troubling. Because there on his palm was proof of everything that Huxley Burke had said in their meeting following James' screaming fit.

James boarded the elevator to the Acquisitions department. The small scar was white, where his palm was a light pink, and stood out in contrast. James remembered how and when he got the scar. And he remembered seeing the boy in the Shiftcore t-shirt, who ran into him with his bike, and apologized. The kid told him that his name was Hux, and he said something then that seemed very odd to James.

'Take the job.'

But that never happened. The memory of James Wild was organized, rigid. It was now remembering two sets of facts. One, that he walked into the office without a scar on his hand, and now, he had one. And suddenly, had a memory of a boy who did not exist before today. The rest of the meeting was the most surreal forty minutes of his life.

After the panic was over, James grabbed the glass on the table with a trembling hand, and downed the fiery liquor in a single gulp, and he nodded for another. Huxley Burke had run him over with a bike, cutting a huge gash into James' hand when he was a kid. Seven or eight years old, James was, but he could not remember exactly when. However, James remembered the moment his palm was sliced open with vivid clarity.

"It's not coincidence, Jim. We actually had that interaction. That accident was planned. Now, the kid that hit you wasn't me. His name is William Burton Hall. He was--"

"He killed the president." James said, feeling ill. "He killed...years ago--"

"Roberts. Yeah, first Socialist President after the Three Continents War. William Burton Hall was an important person, Jim, and that made it easy to ride him. Some people are easier to ride than others. Crazies, mainly, have a built in receptors for what we do."

"I don't --"

"You don't understand. I know, Jim. But you're going to, pal. We'll talk on the way down to Acquisitions."

From the executive suites to Acquisitions, the trip took the better part of thirty minutes. Huxley kept talking, idle chit-chat that seemed to vary from topic to topic. James' head was buzzing a little from the bourbon. Staring at the cut, and listening to Burke, it all began to coalesce into understanding.

"Acquisitions." Burke said as they rounded the corner from the largest, most secure doors James Wild had ever seen, and into a massive underground engineering bay, with hundreds of banks of servers, and three massive bulkheads erupting with tubes in every direction, thick ropes made of braided industrial electrical cabling, and coaxial diamond tipped fiber-optic runs spiderwebbed around the ceiling. These rippled with a confetti scramble of glowing color, colored LEDs shifting the light around the room in a way reminiscent of water in a submerged cave. There was a team of young men and women manning several OpNet stations, talking amongst themselves, and dressed very casually, save their white laboratory coats. One, a tallish half-Japanese girl turned and laughed as she approached.

"Hey! Huxley's back, guys!"

Most of them just nodded in the direction of the most powerful man in the world, none seemed impressed. James was left without words. The girl hugged Burke, and smiled at Wild with genuine warmth.

"You took the job." she said, and held up a palm with a scar that looked like it was inflicted long ago.

"Her name's Ana One-Zero, James. Don't be shy, she's going to be closer to you than any family you've ever had."

"Jeez, Hux. So, you're the Chosen One?"

James sputtered for a second. "Yeah, I guess."

"Well, don't worry, we're all pretty much nice around here. What's his story?" Ana's
eyes looked over James and Huxley chuckled.

"Remember the Sleepaway issues?" Huxley said, "This guy solved them all."

"James Wild!" Ana said, and James nodded, smiling. "Well, you'd be another PhD around here, for once."

"Don't sell yourself short One-Zero, no one has a measured retention and pat-rec higher than you on the Oolong-Baxter Series."

"Oolong-Baxter is overrated. It's like a Ouija board crossed with a Rorschach test." Ana said, demurring and glancing at her feet under her sharp black bangs.

"I'd know a little about that. Oolong is quite useful in determining long-term potential of intelligence. I wrote about that a few years ago." James said, feeling a little more solid.

"I read it. Something like 'pattern recognition is the basis of all evolution, and when we isolate the genome for pat-rec and recall, mankind will become--'"

"Gods." James said, grinning. "Wow. Not 'something like', Ana, You remembered every word. Well, I was a little naive at the time. I had no idea that humankind had more interest in changing their nail and hair color at whim, than becoming perfect information processing machines."

"You know, we use your theories on pat-rec and use it in our process of determining future events, Wild. We use a lot of that theory to do what we do down here in the Catacombs."

"I'll leave you to it, then." Huxley said. "We'll let James here get acquainted with the team, and tomorrow, we'll brief about the preliminary insertion."

James turned to Ana, who grinned amiably, and nodded up to the massive rigging and bulwarks of machinery nestled into the high ceiling.

"That's the Trinity." Ana said, "They make insertion possible."

[alienmastermind]

4
James Wild was introduced to the Acquisitions team; 'Doc Magic', a child prodigy all grown up. His hair was a neatly combed slick and his clothes were anachronistic, sweaters and thin pants, loafers. He looked like an old movie character from the origin era. Alexander Hobbes, the youngest team member, was a programmer, and theoretician in the field of AI, but simulating environments rather than single entities. There was Marco State, the son of Lucian State, the owner of Solid State Ventures, the competition. Wild just stared at him, the man was identical to Lucian State, in a younger mode. The last member of the team was Simon Satori, a middle-aged Japanese man with a soft demeanor who wore t-shirts and slack jeans with scuffed ankles. The guy was laid back, but with a very grim expression on his face.

Wild sat in his new office, which had a glam-poster hanging over his desk, and had a massive connected OpNet deck with a micropanel monitor dominating the southern wall. The poster was labeled 'Local Observation Model: DO NOT REMOVE'.

Now, that's drawback to the job, thought James.

The office was crammed with all kinds of wall mounted data cabling, leading to the deck, and he tapped a few buttons on it, bringing it to life. A vidmessage came to life, covering the entirety of the screen.

The face was Huxley Burke, from a day when the man was young, practically a boy. Sitting in his then sparse office, with technicians assembling the strange panel-based monitors that now stand in his office.

His face became grave, and he cleared his throat. The slight Southern accent was much thicker back then, James immediately noticed.

"Time travel. Those two words were the dreams of mankind in the late 22nd century, to rewrite the wrongs of the past, and to possibly shape the future for all humankind. We at Shiftcore have brought that dream to life. And that brings with it a sickening surety; that we will misuse the technology for our own gains. We already have. This message proves that much. What man can make the determination as to what past events were good, and which were evil? And, once we've changed one thing, everything else is placed into jeopardy. Is time travel ethical?"

The question hung for a moment on the air. James felt surprise that no answer came. He felt as though morality and ethics were as mutable as time around here, and Burke's younger self was ambivalent, tensing and untensing his jaw in a slow rhythm.

"We're not the only ones who have this technology. At this moment, Solid State Ventures, a new corporation created by my one-time colleague and friend, Lucian State, are assembling their own insertion method. This message is for you who will be doing the hard work of defending our corporation from destruction, and moreover, the whole of reality."

"You are now a part of our collective duty. To maintain the future by protecting the past, and in some cases, altering it. Our mission statement is simple: 'Shiftcore will exist.' Ethical bias cannot sway our missions, however, and without Shiftcore, reality bends to the will of men who thirst only for power. Shiftcore must exist."

Huxley was earnest, his eyes bleary, looking as if he'd been awake for a very long time prior to the recording of this message.

James Wild had seen too much already to disbelieve this statement out of hand. This was either a specific form of insanity, or it was true. Which, to James' reckoning amounted to the same thing. James began processing his transfer on the IntraOp, and received thirty or so vidmessages from well-wishers, but as he looked to open them, they were deleted, with a red message appearing on the screen, 'INSERTION BIAS REMOVED'.

There were portions of the OpNet that weren't blocked, per se, but were redacted to a point of non-use. It was strange to view the vast information source through a pair of non-biased goggles. There was surprisingly little to view at that point.

Wild left the office that day wondering what tomorrow would bring, and laughed out loud, when he realized that he had more control over that than was previously possible.

[alienmastermind]

5
Ana's smile was cute. James smiled back as he settled down in a very comfortable leather recliner. His hands rubbed the surface, and James was surprised to notice the leather was actual cowhide.

"So, it's policy to answer one Operator question in the opening preliminary briefing, Wild. I'm sure you have many."

"How often do we change reality?" James asked with sudden seriousness.

"Well, not as much as we used to. When Hux created the monitors, it was easier to map the changes, and when we identified the specific waveform that broke Feinberg's model, that made insertion possible. And it's not easy to change reality. So we don't try to do it that often anymore. But--times being what they are, it's becoming more of an imperative in certain circumstances."

"You didn't answer my question."

"Because the answer changes. You and your linear perception, James. That will change, you'll soon see. Once you've been inserted, you'll understand why asking that question is impressive for a new team member, but knowing an answer is virtually impossible."

James opened his mouth, and Ana smiled again.

"When we broke the speed of light barrier to information transfer, it unlocked some pretty amazing doors, James."

"There you both are." Satori said, standing with an OpPad, and entering data with deft fingers into a small touchscreen. "Huxley will be here soon for briefing. What did he ask?" Clicking of fingers touching the pressure and heat sensitive padscreen. The sound of response notes was all that filled the air for a minute. Ana seemed to consider not telling Simon anything, but if this was out of pique or just playfulness, James couldn't tell.

"He asked about how much we muck about." Ana said.

"Not as much as you'd think, Mr. Wild." Satori said. His soft voice was accented by sharp inquisitive eyes that peered at James through gold framed glasses. The three stood and walked to an area that was recessed into the floor, a large sofa ran around the circumference. Ana plopped down onto the plush sofa, and rested her arms across the back. James sat down on an edge, and Satori remained standing as Huxley Burke appeared among them on a projection into the center of the circle. The light illusion was quite effective in the shadow of the Trinity.

"Team, first insertion will take place today. Time code is Position 9:1:2:4/November 12th 1888." Huxley said. "The location is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Subject is Nikola Tesla."

"This is post-first strike for Solid State, who have given the lightbulb to Edison. They now own filament, they own current, and phase-light OpBoards as of our position. We're going to patent AC power and solidify the ownership of ionospheric power supply in 2099. In this insertion, number twelve, Jim, you're going to keep Tesla alive."

"What?" James said, starting a little. Most of the jargon was getting processed at a slow rate, but this part caught his full attention.

"Tesla's marked for death, we've been marking the tachyons going to the condensation point marked at 2:4. Well, the markers aren't specific. It reads as either death or birth. The man doesn't have children. James, the attack is supposed to have been a mugging gone wrong, an anti-foreigner psychotic named Michael Bakersfield. You’re going to change that.”

“Insertion, Wild.” Satori said. “We’ll put you into Nikola Tesla, beginning in the morning of the 12th. You are going to observe until 2:4. Then you’re going to drive him to avoid the alley, and head across the street. This is all you will do.”

James Wild got the feeling that Satori didn’t like him very much.

“I get the feeling you don’t like me very much, Satori. Why is that?”

Satori smirked.

“You have the job I wanted, and didn’t do anything more than show up on time for the scant eighteen months you've been here.”

“Sounds like that makes perfect sense.” James said. “Seems like having a sense of punctuality might be pertine--”

“Both of you, shut up.” Huxley said, “Satori, you’ll get your shot. Just not now. Let’s get to work.”

Huxley’s image was replaced by a set of the strange squarish monitor panels glowing pale white, hovering in the air. Wild was then handed a slim data storage device, filled with theoreticians’ reportage on the devices involved, and was sat in front of a secure OpNet terminal, and began reading.

[alienmastermind]

1: ‘Forecasting is perilous. No man can look very far into the future. Progress and invention evolve in directions other than those anticipated.’ - Nikola Tesla

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania November 12th 1888, 9:1:1:3

1
The mind of Tesla worked like this: Reality and perception were converging on a pair of ever narrowing arcs becoming one solid arc with each innovation, but no measure of prediction could gauge where an invention would end its evolution on the arc. Sleep was a blessed relief, no arc, no logic, only dreams.

Just darkness and tales told in the idiot tongue of fantasy.

Tesla’s eyes opened, and he saw the ceiling of his small billet. The smell of food wafting in from the window across the broad alley got him moving.

“Zeit zum Frühstück.” Nikola Tesla said, voice gruff with early morning. “No, no, Nikola, in English. Dream in German, speak in English.”

Nikola stared at the small clock on the table, listening to the steady tick, and he paid attention to what happened inside of him as he felt the rhythms of the morning aligning themselves. Tesla felt himself slowing down in time with the ticking of the clock, and moving along with its measure. Gaining a symmetry with the flow of time and events as they passed. He felt the beats and counted them off.

“Two, three...Mr. Tesla--”

“MR. TESLA! BREAKFAST!” The voice of Mrs. Pillsbury rang out across the alley. Pillsbury was widowed two years ago, and was a kind woman. She would not allow Nikola to oversleep, and always had breakfast in her home ready for him during the work week. Tesla dressed with sure, slow speed. He descended the half landing of stairs from his room, and crossed the small alley. “Two, three...Mr.--” Tesla said just as Mrs. Pillsbury stepped through her door.

“Mr. -- Well! Took you long enough, now. Come inside, Mr. Tesla, the last thing I need is the neighbors getting a good long gawk at our repast.”

“It is only breakfast, Mrs. Pillsbury. Surely they could not say more than that.”

“Rumors fly swift as pigeons in this neighborhood.” said Mrs. Pillsbury, closing the door behind the both of them.

Mrs. Martha Jane Pillsbury had moved to Pittsburgh with her husband, a butcher named John Micah Pillsbury, in 1870 from Philadelphia. She lost John to an accident, and their modest money in the bank kept her going. Mrs. Pillsbury rented their second home, and former shop, to boarders. When Mr. Tesla moved in, she was completely enthralled with his way of behaving. He was Croatian, whatever that was, he sounded German. Spoke German, and a handful of other languages.

Were she younger, she might have attempted to woo Mr. Tesla away from all of those books, though she would never admitted that to anyone, even her priest.

“Mr. Tesla, have a seat anywhere, we’ll have you fed soon enough.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Pillsbury. You should invest in a lightning rod, there is going to be electric activity following tonight’s storm.”

“You haven’t been wrong so far, Mr. Tesla, but the skies are clear now.”

“Understand me, Mrs. Pillsbury. Lightning is sure to come, and would reduce this house to ash.”, and as if to punctuate his sentence, Nikola ate a slice of crisp bacon, and chewed it thoughtfully. “Yes, a lightning rod, I think.”

His voice was steady, low, and Tesla’s English was flat and unaccented.

It was a point of pride that Nikola had rid himself of the regional accents to his English. Most people could tell without his speech that he was foreign to this land, though he was not sure how that could be. Eliminating an accent gave most no reason to hate him at the outset. Americans, unfortunately, were adept at finding ways to hate foreigners eventually, and seemed to simply know beforehand that Nikola was not American.

Perhaps it was his name.

“But, if you will purchase a rod, perhaps you will not be able to ascend to the rear of this building with a ladder. I’ll send someone from Westinghouse. A prototype design I have been working on. I shall call it a test, and save you some money, Mrs. Pillsbury.” Nikola said, sipping a glass of water.

More of the time passed in silence, as Tesla and Mrs. Pillsbury ate together. Mrs. Pillsbury thanked Nikola for his considerate gift, and Nikola assured her someone from his company would come and install a lightning rod. Tesla walked out of the doorway, and stood on the corner, watching the buggies rattle past. Each thing Nikola saw, was improved on the arc of possibilities he could envision. Perhaps not by Tesla himself, the world was always in motion, and most things were improving without the help of Nikola Tesla. Nikola did not pity people who did not understand the arc. Tesla did not feel as though he were better or worse than someone who could not conceptualize the future in the same way. Some had called him a genius. Tesla had lost respect for that word, as well as 'wizard' when Edison had been called such things. There was no intelligence, no psychodynamics beyond sensing the rhythm of the waking world, simply observing events and recognizing the patterns within.

Thinking of Edison perturbed Tesla, and he shunted the image of the grinning jackal from his mind, that eminent greed that most American industrialists shared in their flint hearts and garnet eyes. Boiling anger simmered down as Tesla felt the tick-tick of human traffic, and became calm.

It was finding the rhythm, the beat, the pattern, and following the pattern. Tesla began walking toward a cab, hailing it, to go to work. Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company's office for Nikola Tesla was located near the river. The ride was a jostling and shuddering trek across a thickly populated area of Pittsburgh. The people went about their business with little regard to each other. Tesla watched, hand tapping his jaw like an invisible pocket watch, predicting each nudge of a laborer, each nod of a hat to a lady in the street.

Tesla's reverie ended.

"We've arrived, sir." the man at the fore said, thumping on the cab lightly.

Tesla left the cab, and passed money to the driver, along with a larger than customary tip.

"Thank you sir", the driver said.

Tesla's work day was uneventful.

[alienmastermind]

2
Evening crept around the buildings, avoiding the gas lamps, and Tesla was staring at a schematic for a solid-state power supply in the glow of an electric light bulb. Time had passed as he tried to see the solutions involved in creating a power supply without outside power. Something was missing, but Tesla was certain that once that element was identified, he could generate electricity without machine motion. Simple reactive elements working to produce energy. This process, and theory, was essential to his Wardenclyffe project. The world around him had surged forward, and he began tidying up his desk, looking out of the window. The sun was passing below the horizon, the air was cold. Getting a cab would be difficult at this hour.

"Perhaps a walk, Nikola." he mused without humor as he walked to the entrance.

Making as little conversation as possible with the other men in his office, he walked toward his home, many blocks to the south. Once he reached Reedy Street, six blocks away, he would be able to find a coach to take him back to Shadyside. The night was cold, the air pressing around Tesla, even as rumbling in the sky intimated a storm's approach. It was not yet cold enough to snow, but rain was coming, and with a cough of thunder, he saw the first flashes of lightning toward the north end of town.

"Sooner than expected, but rain has come." Tesla said, and smiled to himself. Walking through the city was always something of an adventure. The crowds made perambulation difficult during the day, but when Tesla could observe the motions for a few minutes, passing through the natural gaps in the clutches of merchants and their patrons was simple. Nikola was alone on the street now, most people either retired to their homes, or to the pubs and restaurants on the banks of the Allegheny.

Nikola Tesla's workdays were spent at Westinghouse, and attempting to raise the critical funds to bring Wardenclyffe back online in Long Island by throwing in with the rival of the Jackal of Menlo Park. Pittsburgh was like purgatory, an interminable repose, with little hope of rescue without his own will and effort. Tesla's mother was religious, but Nikola was only mildly curious in his Creator's interaction with mortals. Somehow, Nikola could not imagine a being of infinite knowledge being satisfied with the primal urges of something as simple as humanity. A roar of laughter from the warm glow of Hunter's House, a small salon, was not in the least inviting. People were no mystery to Nikola, either. Some thought that he was aloof, or perhaps mentally deficient, or socially maladjusted, and Tesla agreed. He could not see himself wanting to adjust to the kind of society that pervaded throughout America. This could have been a real mental deficiency, a symptom of a greater problem further down the road, a disassociation with his fellow man, though Tesla doubted this. Of course, Nikola's dreams for free electricity from the ionosphere were stunted by shortsighted men who could not see the benefit in providing power to all for nothing.

Men were no mystery. They fulfilled the basic needs of any creature walking the Earth, only adapting to new surroundings and social dynamics with higher brain capacity. In this case, capitalism had overtaken the rhythm of American existence, which would very well breed its opposite somewhere else no doubt. The hearts and minds of men are focused on themselves, and little else. Capitalism was efficient when greed itself did not capture its reins. All of these things were cyclical.

Nikola Tesla saw a brighter future for all mankind. Is this better or worse than the men he was surrounded by? These questions were moot, as Nikola could not change the men.

All of this was --

"I can hear you." Tesla said. "Breathing, behind me. If you intend to rob me, I assure you, you will come away with nothing. I have no money."

Tesla's voice was low, cool. His unaccented English was strange to his own ears. He could feel his heart rate rising with each moment that passed and fear dumped cold water into the pit of his stomach. The sublime rhythm was being lost.

Nothing but a light breeze, thick with ozone responded. Tesla could feel a presence, could hear breathing, and turned.

No one stood behind him. No one ahead, or lurking in the shadows. Something rattled in a doorway, across the street, on the north side of Burkhart and Cliff. Tesla attempted to slow himself, to catch a pattern, but all he could sense was that someone was waiting for him across the street. Someone whispered 'over here, Tesla' to him. This was completely separate from his ears, it was as if his skull had begun speaking to him. Tesla walked across the street, into the wan puddle of gaslight from a streetlamp. The flickering light gave a better view of the doorway, and there was nothing there. No man or woman, no one to give voice to the urge to stand in the doorway, and Tesla was given a long pause. Considering if this were a precursor to madness.

"Watch yourself!" a voice called, and three broad backed men carrying casks for the restaurant pushed past him from behind, and nudging a strangely dressed man back into the darkness of the alley.

"Wait!" called Nikola to the man, bolting over to the alleyway. "Wait!"

The man ran away from the gaslight, arms pumping, and legs scrambling. One
glance back, and Tesla saw a feral kind of madness in the strange man's face. The man kicked an ashcan over and something clattered to the ground.

A small knife.

So, thought Tesla, a robber after all. Tesla picked up the knife, a small paring knife with a battered wooden handle. The blade was flecked with rust or something else. He pocketed the knife, and walked back to the more well lit Simons Avenue, and stuck to the lit streets for his night's walk, considering the mystery of how the sublime rhythm of the waking world had given him such precognition.

[alienmastermind]

2:

'I arrived, as has been stated, at the idea through entirely abstract speculations on the human organism, which I conceived to be a self-propelling machine, the motions of which are governed by impressions received through the eye. Endeavoring to construct a mechanical model resembling in its essential, material features the human body, I was led to combine a controlling device, or organ sensitive to certain waves, with a body provided with propelling and directing mechanism, and the rest naturally followed.' - Nikola Tesla

Chicagoland District, Illinois February 9th, 3111 0:5:9:3

1
The lights came up suddenly, and the hissing of water leaving the tank brought James Wild to consciousness. James' eyes adjusted as light began filling the clamshell isolation tank, the polymaterial environment suit cooling from the strange warmth of the salt water. Sensation began flooding in, his mind felt as though it was immersed completely into a panoramic glam-poster as the shell opened to the Operator Isolation room. The room to the right of the Trinity, called Operator Isolation, was now filled with the team, at the fore was Huxley Burke, looking furious. Marco State was whispering to Ana One-Zero in a rattled buzz.

"You spoke, you asshole." Huxley said. "Why did you speak?"

"Wha--"

"Get your ass out of that tank, Jim." Huxley's face was relaxing, "I'm sorry. It's not your fault. There's no rule against speaking, it's just that you've caused some harm."

"I don't understand, I thought I was supposed to keep him alive."

"Yeah, you're right. You did." Huxley said as Satori just entered data from the recording devices into the small pad he was carrying. The deft tapping sound was irritating to James, and the air of self-satisfaction around Simon Satori did not help matters.

"Look, Mr. Burke. You put me on this team for a reason. Why didn't you tell me Tesla was such a high pat-rec? His intelligence was one thing, but his pattern recognition skills were next-step evolutionary. Theoretical levels we don't even dream of without gene therapies now!" James said, hearing the irritated tone of his voice, shrill and animated.

"Information on Tesla is on a need to know, Wild." Huxley said.

"And I guess you needed to know that.", Ana spoke up, chuckling with irony, and Huxley stopped himself from speaking, turning instead to the monitors that had textual representations of the events that James Wild had witnessed, and the strange glam posters above the machines that only shifted in panels. One was a very basic image of a small dynamo spinning in quick turns. Representing Tesla's early work, and his dominance of that location of space-time's epoch. And the other was an unfair, comical representation of Edison's trolley basket, from which he sold sundries to the passengers on the train between Newark and Menlo Park.

"Jim, look, I'm a little pissed off, and it's really not your fault. We didn't expect you to attempt verbal conversation on your first insertion. But you've put some strange hitches into the life of Mr. Tesla. Things we did not anticipate. As a first effort, it was a bigger splash than we wanted to make." Huxley patted James on the shoulder, comforting him.

"Big splash? You're being kind, Hux." Satori said, the ice in his voice barely concealed. "Now, Tesla died with people thinking of him as a madman. Tesla swore he could hear voices to his dying day, drawing schematics in the air, claiming to speak to angels."

"But-- I merely whispered to the man. We can't take physical control--"

"I know, Jim. Tesla has a higher level of perception than we had aligned for. He is damned receptive to our insertion nanocasting. It's like he knows you're there even if his conscious mind won't accept that fact."

"He said that." Ana said, nodding over to Doc Magic. Doc looked over his shoulder, smirking.

"I have the transcript. Do you think he was having one off with that Mrs. Pillsbury?"

"I have no idea, Magic." James said. "Why would you ask that?"

"Infantile sense of humor blended with an anarchistic streak, Wild. You should read up on our psych profiles, for crying out loud." Doc Magic said with humor, and Satori interrupted.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd stay away from mine." Satori said, and Wild noticed the nervous tension in Satori's voice. A giddy fear that was kept in check by sheer willpower.

"Sure. Fine." James said, his voice dropping into his soothing tone. "Mr. Burke. If I've ruined the man's life or hurt our chances--"

Huxley waved him off, shaking his head.

"No, no. Tesla was a little delicate in the braincase anyway, Jim. All you did was fulfill causality. You're no more responsible for madness as his genetic predisposition for greatness. What you have done, Jim, is close off that node in 1888. Which closes it off for SSI as well.", Huxley's voice was back to its jovial tone. "Jim, let's go over the debriefing."

[alienmastermind]

2
"Interesting." James said.

James slid on the skintight sensor-filled suit.

"Interesting? What's it feel like, Jim?" Doc Magic said, his voice altered by the speakers that lined the ready room.

"This feels like, I don't know, Lycra or something?" James asked. "Is that what this is?"

"It's a microfiber polymer with isolated nanorobotic sensors creating a sensor array that takes in every electromagnetic, radioactive, or measurable field your body can emit."

"That's what I meant to say. It feels like that, Doc." James smiled. Doc Magic often spoke in specificities when he felt uncomfortable. Wild could tell Magic had socializing issues, like many genius level pat-rec men, and used his knowledge to keep himself in an alpha role. It wasn't necessary, James would have told him, he was likeable without the pretense.

"Sure, Jim." Magic said, laughing into the microphone.

James had been in this chamber about six hours, and he'd come to know Doc Magic by observation, and they had shared a few jokes before the very uncomfortable operation for the nanocast bundle that had to be inserted into his corpus callosum. James had to remain conscious during the operation, and was a singular experience that he would be happy to never have to repeat.

The device was a suspension of nanites that would transform the nerve bundle in the center of his brain to receive external signals on a personalized band. 'Unique as a fingerprint' said Doc Magic.

The technology was magic, as far as James Wild was concerned, since he couldn't understand half of the things happening on a quantum informative level in the suit, so they could have said 'James, this is a magic suit that lets you talk to dead people' and at this point he'd take their word for it.

Being put into an isolation chamber was new for James, and the images that fluttered into his subconscious were unnerving during the insertion. Nothing he'd ever experienced could have prepared James for witnessing the past, and riding along inside of Nikola Tesla's mind. It was like being seated on the deck of a ship riding waves of information.

Nikola Tesla's mind was a very ordered place, and he could see the parsing of peripheral events into usable data in realtime as he 'drove'. It was more like subtle herding of a consciousness than driving, and the entire time witnessing breakfast between Mr. Tesla and Mrs. Pillsbury, he was astounded to feel the texture of the crisp bacon, and its savory flavor as if he himself were eating there in the cramped kitchen of the former butcher's wife.

James knew this information about Mrs. Pillsbury instantly, knowing what Nikola Tesla knew. This was only useful as long as he were driving Tesla's consciousness and he were part of Tesla. James could remember events that took place as if he were there, but he could not access information that Tesla had while outside of the insertion tank. The sensation of omniscience of someone else's mind was unnatural, as if a sensory organ had been awakened in his mind while a passenger inside the mind of this astounding man.

Doc Magic had explained it in the briefing before they inserted the receiver into his prefrontal lobe as 'nanocasting'. A method of broadcasting quantum information into the information receptor neurons of a person in a past event's space-time, and recording the effects through data mining while this took place.

There were many experiments, of many different kinds, in the latter half of the 21st century dealing with the predictive abilities of random data. Accumulation of data on an exponentially expanding scale meant the sample size of the data would not have to be gigantic. A small sample of all kinds of information could yield trends in what was going to happen.

The science behind this kind of counterintuitive information dowsing came in 3090, and the Korean Emirate scientist who developed the algorithms won the Nobel for that year. Predicting famines, crime, earthquakes, and trends in clothing were possible. The algorithms were sold to the holding companies of Shiftcore, which until that point
was a video game designer from the origin era of console based home games.

This purchase made Shiftcore a new world power, and altered the landscape between corporations and sovereign nations, without firing shots or redrawing borders. Acquisitions was always at work, even in their own development. But the smile faded as he then understood why Burke's mission statement was 'Shiftcore will exist'. The company was ever reaching to close off the condensation points in the past that could alter the history of the company.

Being put into the tank, virtually nude, James was self-conscious. Ana was respectful enough to giggle only once behind her hand, when he turned away to slide into the slightly viscous, warm brine. The close darkness, the warmth, and the strange sensation of weightlessness brought back primal correlations in his head, and then he was riding alongside of the consciousness of Nikola Tesla.

The urge to speak to Tesla, to verify the reality of his mind being connected in this way was overwhelming.


....and that's as far as I got...what do you think?