The text below is from a novel in progress. First draft so there's still plenty of editing that will need to be done before it's "ready."
Nicola Tesla loathed the nickname “Tessie” but he put up with it from the most astute and clever clerk he’d ever employed. Mind you, the idea Tesla has employing the clerk was slightly misleading. Tesla was flat broke and all of his funding was courtesy of J.P. Morgan. If anything, Michael Silver was in the employ of Morgan. The thought temporarily infuriated Tesla but was assuaged by the thought of these secret experiments being carried out on Morgan’s financial generosity without the financier’s knowledge.
Employees, both of us of that drooling imbecile J.P. Morgan. I have the barest of authority here at what is to be my crowning achievement. Wireless is but a shortsighted goal. The horizon brings limitless power!
“Tessie, shouldn’t we make all haste to complete this run prior to arrival of the inclement weather?”
The Wardenclyffe Tower dominated the horizon, it’s massive base extending nearly 200 feet upward and the squat mushroom-like (and barely finished) dome on top. Tesla turned to face the south. The inclement weather was a hurricane remnant flushing across the Eastern Seaboard. It was expected to arrive at nightfall.
“Quite,” Tesla said, turning back toward the tower and increasing his pace. He felt light-headed. He must have forgotten to eat. For two days, at least, he thought.
The pair soon arrived at a small door, which lead down into the earth under the main building where the heavy equipment sat waiting activation. Silver and Telsa removed their wet overcoats and donned white jackets that is the hallmark of scientist the world over (and even some other worlds). Knobs were turned, switches moved, gauge needles jiggled and jolted, equipment began to hum with potential, as the two scientist rechecked calculations, occasionally leaping across the room to make an adjustment.
In no time, the small room was stifling and the smell of ozone was practically a stench. Silver’s lab coat was drenched with sweat; Telsa barely prespired, even under the most difficult and demanding experiments.
“The weather may already be upon us,” Telsa noted. The storm shouldn’t affect the outcome, he thought. He looked at the barometer. He could see the needle plunging. If only I could control the weather. “I would not expect any discernable effect on the equipment or this test but stay lively on the shut-off out of necessity.”
Tesla pushed a bright red button, no larger than something one might find on a waistcoat. Not one for dramatic gestures, at least in private, Tesla felt a dramatic button press should cap this historical endeavour. No historical turning point ever happened with a switch or a whimper. He raised his left hand and slapped it down on the button. “It’s away!”
Every light and piece of equipment in the lab dimmed as the current was pulled away, rocketing into the superstructure above. A hum began to build. A clipboard vibrated off the main workbench along the west side of the room.
A few moments into the experiment and Tesla knew, could feel it in the air, that something had been miscalculated or thrown from alignment.
Quite frankly, “thrown from alignment” was a vast understatement but Tesla couldn’t know -- or at least wouldn’t know until sometime after the fact -- that the tower superstructure had been jolted with bolts of lightning. It was as if Zeus himself had directed the lighting, all 37 of them. The reverberations were felt for miles across Long Island Sound and could be heard as far away as New York, but it also stretched across space and time like no other event before it. The “Big Bang” is a big deal for those in this dimension -- the dimension where most of this story occurs -- but the experiment at Wardenclyffe was to have a far greater implication on the multiverse than even that piddling event.
Oh, the Big Bang, so many problems with that particular theory, that it hardly warrants a comment at this point in the story. It’s so three dimensional!
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