The Tesla Legacy Read online

  “On a Saturday?” she said, head flicking up.

  The tension in his jaw relaxed into a tired smile. “No rest for the wicked.”

  “Victor, why don’t we get you a beer?” Lucy’s mom suggested. He nodded, adjusting his rimless glasses; dark circles shadowed his brown eyes, making his pale skin almost vampiric. To Lucy, her mom said, “Leave the files. I’ll take care of them.”

  Her mother couldn’t stand disorder. If she noticed even the smallest speck of brown discoloring a single petal, she would discard an entire flower arrangement. Narrowing her eyes at the picture frame, she said, “You didn’t cut yourself, did you?”

  “Nope. Got all my digits.” Lucy stretched out her hands and wiggled her fingers as proof.

  Her mom’s lips thinned into a patient smile. “How about some tea? To help you sleep?”

  Sleep deprivation was another potential trigger.

  “No, thanks.” Lucy forced up one corner of her mouth. Now didn’t seem like the right moment to ask her parents about the Latin quotation.

  Once they’d gone through to the kitchen, she gingerly picked up the broken frame and slid the photo out, examining the scratch across the swath of blue sky. She bet she could repair the scratch on her computer and replace the photo before her parents even knew it’d been damaged.

  Lucy also took the Coke on her way out. As rebellions went, it was pretty pathetic—but it was hers.

  Schrödinger was curled at the foot of the staircase, eyes mournful.

  “Nice try,” she said. “No catnip for you.”

  He swished his tail.

  A mixture of frustration and curiosity swirled through Lucy as she retreated upstairs to her bedroom.

  She pulled out her phone again.

  Her great textpectations were for naught. Fine.

  Lucy might not be able to fix herself—or her love life—but she would fix this damn photo. Liber Librum Aperit, indeed.

  Let’s see what book this opens.

  CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

  Lucy swung open her bedroom door too fast and a framed poster of the periodic table of elements rattled over her bed, which was still unmade. It had been unmade since Wednesday. But really, what was the point of doing and undoing the same thing every day? Lucy reasoned that, like Schrödinger’s cat, her bed could be both concurrently made and unmade.

  Her mom wasn’t buying it.

  Lucy picked up a bra from where she’d flung it on her desk chair, tossed it onto the bed, and sat down at her computer. Okay, she was a slob. Everywhere except in the laboratory. She felt most free there, and most in control. Science thrilled Lucy like nothing else. Not even Cole.

  She drained the last of the sugary goodness from the aluminum can as she scanned in the picture and launched the math software that Santa had brought her at Christmas. Only Lucy would ask the man in the red suit for a better way to model pendulums. She’d also produced some pretty cool animations of cannonball trajectories to simulate the laws of motion—if she did say so herself.

  Toothless Lucy materialized on the screen. The photo must have been taken around the same time she experienced her first seizure. How differently would her parents have treated her if she’d never been diagnosed with epilepsy?

  She wiggled the Coke can—empty—and pushed it to one side.

  Tilting closer to the monitor, Lucy determined that since the scratch was mostly on the blue of the sky, the best method for repairing it would be to separate the image into layers. Lucy had been taking things apart to see how they worked since before she could talk. Toasters. Toy helicopters. Nothing was safe.

  She loved anything to do with stripping a machine down to its basic components and building it back up again. She could build the perfect computer brain, an operating system that would never malfunction like hers.

  Her fingers flew over the keyboard and the image divided into four channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—the standard for most printers.

  Lucy squinted at the cyan channel. She’d already been using the software to distort images from the web, creating formulas to make them bigger or smaller, Alice in Wonderland–style. All Lucy needed to do was determine the right equation to repeat the colored pixels over the scratched area.

  She gave the image a horizontal x-axis and a vertical y-axis, like she would to solve a geometry problem on graph paper, and as she moved the four windows of the color channels side by side on the screen, her eyes caught on something odd in the yellow window.

  Nearly three-quarters of the image was covered in irregularly spaced dots.

  When she leaned back, Lucy realized they formed a gridlike pattern. It resembled braille or Morse code, but not quite. Strange.

  One book opens another. It couldn’t be a message, could it?

  A knock came on the open door, and Lucy jumped.

  “Mom!”

  “Didn’t mean to startle you.” Her mom extended a mug in Lucy’s direction. Peppermint tea was her mom’s cure-all. Lucy had far too many memories of waking up from a seizure to the fresh, wintry smell. “Here, I thought you might change your mind,” she said.

  Professor Phelps wasn’t accustomed to taking no for an answer. Like mother, like daughter, Lucy supposed.

  Relenting, she leapt up to accept the mug and block her mom’s view of the computer screen. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Everything okay? I thought you’d be out with Cole or Claudia.”

  “You want me to go out partying?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “I know, Mom.” Grinning, Lucy took a sip of tea. “Everything’s okay. Swear.” She certainly couldn’t tell her mother that Cole had gotten her caught up in a cheating scam. “I just wanted to veg out tonight.”

  Her mom nodded. “We’re heading to bed now. Need anything else?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Good,” she repeated. “Don’t stay up too late.”

  “I won’t. Would you mind closing the door?”

  Her mom hesitated a moment, lips pursed. “Sleep well, honey.”

  “You too.” She took a big gulp of tea as guilt swirled in her chest. Lucy’s mom wasn’t effusive as a rule, but honey was the term of endearment she reserved for Lucy. Sure, her mom was overprotective and controlling, but it was only because she cared.

  As soon as the door clicked shut, however, Lucy abandoned the tea on a bookshelf to go cold. She interlocked her fingers, stretching out her arms. Her knuckles cracked. Sitting back down, Lucy enlarged the yellow-channel window.

  Could the dots be some kind of binary code?

  Her eyes zigzagged across the screen. She needed a working hypothesis. Hmm. She drummed her fingers against the mouse pad.

  If Lucy gave the dots a value of 1 and the blank spaces a value of 0, what did that give her? She opened up another text window and began transcribing the sequence of 1s and 0s. An hour ticked by but Lucy hardly noticed.

  She pulled up a binary-to-text converter and input the string of numbers and … strikeout. Gobbledygook.

  Maybe she needed to reverse the values?

  Biting her tongue between her teeth, Lucy pasted the reversed text into the translator.

  More gibberish.

  Lucy rolled back in her desk chair, then rose to standing. Treading back and forth in the space between her desk and her bed, she nearly burned a hole in the carpet.

  What was she missing?

  She swiped the mug from the bookshelf and chugged the tepid tea. She rubbed her eyes, glancing at the clock. It was after midnight. Maybe she should give it a rest. No. A scientist didn’t quit in the middle of an experiment.

  Lucy’s eyelids fluttered. Focusing on the screen once more, she noticed something about the dots she hadn’t seen before.

  Some of the dots were a darker shade of yellow than the others.

  Could that have any significance?

  Lucy parked herself back in the desk chair and logged into a computer builder and programmer forum where she often
whiled away the hours.

  Starbuck01: hey night owls, anyone know about encrypting data into images?

  Less than a minute passed before Lucy got a response.

  phlebas: what kind of encryption?

  Starbuck01: in the yellow channel of a photo—lighter and darker dots

  phlebas: you’re looking at the metadata?

  Starbuck01: no. not a digital photo. a scanned photo

  phlebas: sounds like standard steganography but I’ve only seen it in digital images. sorry

  Starbuck01: no problem

  Lucy stood, pulling her shirt over her head to change for bed. The dots were just a red herring—something to distract her from Cole’s lack of communication. She didn’t need a psychologist to tell her that. Had he forgotten their fight already? Had he forgotten her? Lucy swallowed a lump in her throat.

  Suddenly a new message appeared on the board.

  Lovelace: human eyes are least sensitive to yellow

  Starbuck01: huh?

  Lovelace: don’t mind if I butt in?

  Starbuck01: no! be my guest!

  Lovelace: ;-) thanks. so if you wanted to send a message that no one would notice, you’d use the yellow channel in a photo

  Unless you pull the image apart, Lucy thought.

  Starbuck01: even in a scanned photo?

  Lovelace: could be. like a QR code. if you took a picture of the photo with a digital camera—or scanned it in—the coded message would become visible

  Starbuck01: sounds like spy stuff

  And who would go to so much trouble?

  Lovelace: or clever marketing lol. to get people to enter a competition or something

  Starbuck01: huh. wouldn’t have thought of that.

  Lucy’s dad was the least likely person she knew to get sucked in by an advertising campaign. And, anyway, this was a photo of her, not a billboard.

  Starbuck01: what’s with the darker and lighter dots?

  She tapped her foot on the caster of the rolling chair at an increasingly frenetic rate.

  Lovelace: it looks like a grid, yes?

  Starbuck01: yeah

  Lovelace: ok, so if the square to the right has a higher level of yellow than the one to the left, it’s = 0. if the square to the left has a lesser level of yellow = 1

  Oh! Lucy hammered her fist onto the desk in excitement. The mug bounced. Crap. The last thing she needed was to wake her parents.

  Starbuck01: how do you know about this?

  Lovelace: i could tell you but then I’d have to kill you …

  LULZ, Lucy typed back as she took several steadying breaths. Cole wasn’t wrong about stress, annoyingly. It could bring on a seizure.

  But it hadn’t for two years, Lucy reminded herself.

  Lovelace: pro tip: check the center of the squares for the level of yellow. that’s where the data will be

  Starbuck01: thanks

  Lovelace: someone sent you a coded picture?

  Lucy stiffened. My boyfriend, she wrote, unsure why she felt the need to lie to a total stranger she would never meet.

  Lovelace: sounds like a keeper.

  Starbuck01: yeah. thanks. night

  Lucy logged off, a knot forming in her stomach. Cole wouldn’t have the slightest inkling how to encode a message. Was he a “keeper”? She’d thought so until this afternoon.

  With a shake of her head, Lucy pushed thoughts of him from her mind and zoomed in even farther on the yellow color channel. She opened a new window and transcribed the dots according to Lovelace’s advice.

  Tap, tap, tap went her foot.

  When she was finished, Lucy exhaled, her shoulders curling inward, and plugged the binary sequence into the converter with nervous fingers.

  01010100 01101111 00111010 00100000 01010011 01100001 01110000 01101001 01100101 01101110 01110100 01101001 01100001 00100000 01000111 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110000 00001101 00001010 01010011 01110101 01100010 01101010 00111010 00100000 01001110 01101001 01101011 01101111 01101100 01100001 00001101 00001010 00110011 00110100 01110100 01101000 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 00111000 01110100 01101000 00101100 00100000 01110010 01101111 01101111 01101101 00100000 00110011 00110011 00110010 00110111 00001101 00001010

  Holding her breath, she pressed Enter, and closed her eyes. Just for a moment.

  When Lucy peeked at the screen again, her jaw fell open. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been this.

  To: Sapientia Group

  Subj: Nikola

  34th and 8th, room 3327

  A shiver raced down her spine.

  The Sapientia Group was the name of her dad’s venture capital firm. But Lucy’s name definitely wasn’t Nikola.

  Who had sent this photo to her dad? And, why?

  Thirty-fourth and Eighth must be an address. Eaton wasn’t big enough to have streets or avenues ordered with numerals. She typed it into Google. Bingo.

  The New Yorker Hotel, smack-dab in the middle of Manhattan.

  Was it the location where the photo was taken? Lucy had no recollection of ever visiting that hotel. But why would she? She’d only been two or three years old at most.

  Nikola.

  Why would anyone call her Nikola? Unless she had an evil twin … Stop, Lucy. That made no sense. Although it also made no sense that her dad would have been sent a photo of Lucy encoded with a message that called her by a different name.

  Why had he kept it?

  Questions whizzed around her brain.

  She let out a monumental yawn as the clock in the corner of the screen blinked 12:59 A.M. Sleep. Lucy should sleep. She would need all her wits about her tomorrow.

  Tomorrow, her father was going to have some serious explaining to do.

  TO BOLDLY GO

  Lucy looked up at the turquoise expanse of star-washed sky. Only these constellations were backward. The Vanderbilt family, who commissioned the mural on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, would never admit their painter had confused the plans. They pronounced the mural depicted the heavens as seen by the gods, and that suited New Yorkers just fine, since they considered themselves their equals. Or that was how Lucy’s mom put it anyway.

  She dismissed a twinge of remorse. She’d left a note on the kitchen counter saying she was hanging out with Claudia (texted Claudia to cover for her), disabled the GPS tracker app her parents had installed on her cell (in case of emergencies, they said), and pedaled Marie Curie to the Eaton train station.

  Lucy’s dad had headed into the office before she woke up—schoolgirl error—and Lucy was determined to confront him about the photograph before she worried her mother.

  Forty minutes south on the Metro-North, and here she was in the center of it all, looking down at the stars.

  Adrenaline coursed through her. Lucy had never been so daring before.

  Her favorite part of the station was the Whispering Gallery. On one of her childhood trips to see yet another specialist at New York Hospital, her dad showed Lucy its secrets. Standing at one corner, you could whisper a secret that was telegraphed across the surface of the two-thousand-square-foot chamber, landing in a faraway nook of the vault. Her dad said nobody knew whether it had been built that way on purpose.

  Lucy’s heart cramped. Her father always shared secrets with Lucy—he didn’t keep them from her. He would have a reasonable explanation for the message encoded in the photograph. He had to. The alternative was … Lucy wouldn’t think about that. A scientist dealt in facts, not fictions.

  Double-checking her phone, Lucy proceeded through the Main Concourse in all of its Art Deco glory, exiting on Forty-second Street and was immediately greeted by the wail of a police siren. She rubbed her temples as they started to throb.

  “You can do this,” she said aloud, setting her shoulders. A pigeon cocked a disapproving head at her. Jeez, even the birds in this city were critics. “Stop talking to yourself.” Gah! She’d done it again. Not a sophisticated New York thing to do.

&n
bsp; Compressing her lips, Lucy headed uptown. The Sapientia Group was located in an office building nine blocks north on Lexington Avenue.

  Bzzz. The phone in her hand vibrated.

  U went to the city? Why?

  If Lucy told Claudia she was braving all of the sights and sounds of the Bad Apple (as her mom called it) to chase down a string of numbers, her bestie might think Lucy’s last remaining screw had finally come loose.

  Needed space. Planetarium, she texted back instead.

  Claudia would believe that. Lucy had been talking about visiting the Dark Matter exhibition for ages. Still, the lie made Lucy squirm.

  OK … Cole was asking for U at the party. Seemed sad. What’s up?

  If Cole was so broken up, he could call her, text her, DM her. Evidently he hadn’t broken each and every one of his fingers, so he had no excuse. Not that Lucy wasn’t tempted to break them for him.

  Nothing important. Will explain later.

  Another lie. Claudia wouldn’t make a beeline for the principal, but Lucy thought the fewer people who knew about the cheating, the better. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead, and all that. Lucy also felt foolish. Renewed fury gripped her that she was now lying to her best friend for her boyfriend.

  She stormed through gaggles of out-of-town shoppers carrying Big Brown Bags and arrived at the entrance of her father’s office building in no time. She craned her neck as her eyes drifted up the fifty stories to the top of the forbidding tower. Its thorny crown was meant to resemble medieval stonework and it was almost enough to make Lucy believe the city really was Gotham.

  She threw her shoulders back.

  Carpe diem. Wasn’t that the wisdom that’d been disseminated by guidance counselors and valedictorians since the dawn of time?

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Lucy seized the day, striding into the elegant, marble lobby, and approached the reception desk.

  “H-hi. My father works here. At the Sapientia Group. I need to see him.”

  A fortysomething man wearing a navy suit looked up from the sports pages of the newspaper. His skin was a deep brown and he had a friendly smile.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.