Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 28

JEM BLINKED DUMBLY FOR a moment.

"Your dad's name is Nikola Tesla?" he asked. "Like the..."

"Not 'like' the. The scientist. The one you've probably learned about in school."

"You're joking."

"I wish. Trust me."

"Yeah, but...there's no way. He died in like the forties."

"Let me tell you a story," said Petar, "about another world. Before I start, though, I just want to warn you that it's not complete. Some of it is what my father told me, some what I learned reading his journals." Petar paused for a second, trying to figure out where to start. Might as well tell it all, he figured.

"You wouldn't know it to look at me," he began, "but I was born in 1899. In Colorado. Well, I say Colorado because that's where my father's lab was, but that's not entirely true. The truth is, I wasn't really born anywhere. My father discovered a gateway that led between this world and another place. It took him a few years, but eventually he stabilized the gateway and used it to pass back and forth between worlds. A day, a week, a month at a time, whatever he needed to complete a new experiment. He called it Volos. Volos the split world. Most of his inventions in the early 1900s were either built entirely or perfected there. Many of them wouldn't have been possible without Volos.

"By the mid-1890s, he'd created his own depraved paradise on the other side. A lab, a workshop, all small-scale, and all built with materials he brought from over here. A lot of it came with stories from this world. For example, in 1895, a fire burned down his New York lab, including all the work he'd done on X-rays, which were still unknown at the time. Only it wasn't lost. He'd moved everything to Volos before burning down the building himself. Brushed it off, saying, 'I'm in too much grief to talk.' It wasn't for another decade that he began mining Volos's resources, and that's when everything changed. You following so far?"

Jem nodded slowly. His face had the look of a opossum caught in bright headlights.

"Alright, well before I get too ahead of myself, let me tell you about my mom. She was a chambermaid at the New Yorker Hotel, where he had begun living while in New York. I never knew her name. My father came back through the portal after a long trip to Volos in March 1899. I don't know what went on during that trip, but it was especially dark. He'd done something to himself, something that altered him forever. And unsure what the feelings were, he'd been weak.

"Normally, my father was celibate. Lived his whole life for work. Nothing else was important. But that night, he gave in to the chambermaid's advances. See, it wasn't the first time she'd tried to connect with him. But where he'd always refused, this time, his guard was down.

"Six months later, when she started getting big, my father had her taken by train out to his lab in Colorado Springs. She lived there for three months. Never wanted for anything." Jem was surprised to see Petar's chin tremble. "Not for anything. She wasn't a prisoner, and my father didn't hurt people. She was happy to be there. With him. She loved him.

"My father never wanted a son. Never had the time or the desire. But once it became inevitable, he looked at it the way he does everything: What could he do with it. I think it was then that he decided to make Volos a permanent home. It wouldn't happen completely for another few decades, but the seed was there, and so preparations began.

"He didn't want me to be born there, not completely, because he didn't want my mother to enter Volos. It had become sort of a sacred place to him. His world. Nobody else's. But at the same time, his long stretches on the scorched planet had become lonely. Before I was even born, I'd taken a place in my father's mind as the medium between the two. As part of him, I was allowed. And as one of his ongoing experiments, he wanted me to live my entire life on Volos. Just to see what became of me. I was the control.

"So what did he do? He created a halfway place. He built it in his Colorado laboratory. Right in his own living chambers. Somewhere in between this realm and that one. Once I was born, he ushered my mom and the two doctors out of my room and shut down the portal. Barely alive ten minutes, and I was wholly broken off from this world, from my mother. The firstborn of Volos. Ha." There was no mirth in Petar's laugh. "That's what he called me. Like it was some kind of honor."

Petar's face grew sad. "I never knew my mom. Just what I could learn from the scaps and references in my father's notebooks. And there was the photo, tucked away between two pages. She was radiant, Jem. Absolutely breathtaking. He never talked about her. All but forgot about her, and the photo, I'm pretty sure. And when I brought her up, when I was young, he'd get angry. Hurtful. I learned not to talk about her, but I never forgot.

"I saw her once. Really saw her, in person. Not on the stata-feed. When I was about nine, I hid in the corridor outside my father's lab. Waited for him to leave and snuck through the interstatic breach. He was furious. Told me never to touch his work again. But I'd seen her. Just for a moment, I actually saw her. She was old by then, this must have been," Petar paused, "sometime in the early 1940s over here. Time flows differently on the other side, so it's hard to get it straight sometimes. But I looked through the window and saw this old woman in a rocking chair, singing to her grandson. Even after all that time, she was older than she should have been. I think she caught something from my father's experiments. Some radiation. I think she had cancer. She was so tired-looking, so frail. Wrinkled and drawn into herself. But I recognized the young woman from the photo underneath the frailty. It was her. I never saw her again." Petar trailed off.

"I'm sorry," Jem breathed in the ensuing quiet. He could commiscerate. He'd lost a parent, too. All the torture in the world couldn't inflict that much pain.

Petar struggled to keep a quiver off his lip, and after a moment he went on.

"Like I said, father was furious. Out of his mind with anger. He came after me himself, that time. He wouldn't warp the Koschei for another fifteen years, and his earlier attempts to make servants were, well, unreliable, you could say.

"I told him I didn't want to go back. Told him I hated it on Volos. Hated him. He wouldn't listen. Why would he? I was nine, and he was the greatest mind the world would see until Einstein. Of course he knew best.

"So I tried something else: I tried to go back alone, leave him here. I tried to trap him out of his world. Only I did something wrong. Instead of coming back out in his lab, I opened the door on Volos half a mile in the sky." Petar shuddered.

"I should have died that day. People have fallen from farther and survived, but those are rare events, freak accidents that come along once for every ten thousand people who don't make it. I think the heat saved my life. As soon as I came through, I passed out. Volos isn't like here; the higher you go in the atmosphere, the hotter the air gets. It's too close to its sun.

"So I came through above the protective atmosphere, got blasted into unconsciousness, and plummeted like a rag doll. It was a blessing in disguise. If I'd been awake, I would have tensed and probably died. As it was, my limp body sort of folded into the impact. It broke me, but I didn't die.

"My father of course understood immediately what I'd done wrong, and he came through at ground level. He was already there when I landed, running to meet me as my body plunged through the orange sky. Before the dust even settled, he had me in his arms in a dead sprint to his complex. Luckily, I only got the vertical axis wrong. I could have landed halfway across the planet, or even in the planet. A million things could have gone wrong, and it was only dumb, pitiful luck that I came across a few hundred feet away from his lab.

"He stayed by my side for a week while I recovered. It's weird, you know. He can go months barely acknowledging my existence, but in those rare moments, he surprises me. You said he looked like a monster; you're not wrong. But under there somewhere, that old human spark is still flickering."

Jem had been following Petar's story avidly. As crazy and extreme as it sounded, he actually believed Petar. It was a fantastic tale, but it tugged at his sense of adventure. He wanted to believe it, and that was good enough. But Petar hadn't answered the one question that glued him to the fairy tale.

"Why do you need me so bad?"

Petar smiled.

"You're going to help me stop Nikola Tesla from coming back."

Thanks for reading my story! Please VOTE and let me know what you think of it so far, then check out Chapter 29!