Syth and Axe - Standalone Story - Song of the Sky Whales

 

I edited out spoilers and left you with the mystery part of the story - imagine an escape room in novel form - enjoy and try to solve puzzles as you go. If you know Tesla's history, you may appreciate it more.

Syth and Axe vol. 30 - Song of the Sky Whales

<<removed intro to not spoil previous volumes, the rest is a stand-alone story in the Syth and Axe universe>>

January, 1976, New York City

Mara leaned up. Something shifted in the darkness, a shadow against the shadows. She fumbled on her bedside table for the lamp. It clicked on with a hum…

Nothing.

Her imagination.

“I need more sleep…” she groaned and fumbled to turn off the light.

Something slipped from the bedside table and slid to the floor with a slight slap. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she sat up and leaned over the bed. A wet bootprint - had to be her imagination. But then a book. An old book.

She blinked against the light and reached down.

“A journal?”

She rolled over onto her back and held the book above her head. “Tesla?”

She sat bolt upright. “No way! These were all lost!”

November, 1976, Speculator, New York

The signal was strong tonight - it was getting stronger. Almost ten months - ten months of research and she’d almost run out of time! Whatever this secret thing she was looking for - she only had a matter of weeks before it sealed again - whatever IT was.

Tesla loved his cyphers… Caesar cyphers galore - rotating numbers by other numbers, swapping letters around. But she’d finally found it - Speculator, New York. This was the radio station where it would all finally end… unless it was just another puzzle.

The secret of secrets - the prison that couldn’t be opened, renewed with the mind of the brilliant star. Whatever that meant. But she was the only one who knew him well enough to discover his trail - and it had led here… to Speculator - a ham radio station out in the middle of nowhere, all but abandoned.

Mara pushed back from her desk, clicking the radio off. Strange signals again… moans and whines and other strange hums. She’d heard the same a few years earlier, and had followed them to here. But nothing…

She sat in the quiet, the distant squeaks and squeals still playing in her mind.

She sighed and kicked her feet up onto the desk, leaning back in her chair. It creaked under her. Something rumbled slightly. She sat up, but it was gone by the time she’d reached the door. She slammed her fist against the jamb, then feverishly glared up at the sky, as if by sheer willpower she’d force the thing to appear. She growled and returned to her radio.

A shock of long black hair hung down across her face. She pushed it aside and leaned over the set. A few dials, a few nobs, and a toggle or two, a fiddle with a makeshift antennae - a few old coat hangars and some bits and bobs from a nearby trash heap and she had it working again.

They had to be real.

They just had to be - there was no other explanation for all the strange rumblings - certainly not some sort of extraterrestrial craft! It was too long in the air, made too much fluctuation with its vocalization. It was alive. It had to be.

Something was out there.

Those strange lights in the sky didn’t generate themselves… something was up there, and it wasn’t aliens - at least not that kind.

A knock at the door.

She turned. “Wh-who is it?”

“Just security, making the rounds. I heard strange noises. Everything okay?”

“Y-yes. Just trying to listen to the radio.”

“Lots of interference tonight.”

“There sure is!” She said with a nervous lilt she hoped would sound agreeable. The footsteps creaked off the front porch and crunched on the gravel outside. He was gone.

She let out a sigh, her mind racing…

Tesla had been here. He’s done so much work up in Niagara, getting those AC generators going. There’s no way he got all that tech on his own. Too much brilliance. Way too much. She pulled out a pencil and began scribbling notes on a yellowed sheet of paper - the only thing she could find around here.

She tuned the radio, trying to find something - anything - that would give her guidance. Clarity.

Something squealed loudly, then went silent.

She winced and pulled her headset off. Her reaction speed was down. She’d have to do better. She stood up, paced across the small room. Coffee. She needed coffee.

She went to the old pot in the corner. It was nearly tar by now, but it’d do the trick. She poured the thick liquid into a cup - it was cold and slow, more molasses than grounds, now.

Something flashed overhead. She gazed out the window and stared up through the trees. The meteor shower! She rushed back to her notebook. It was full! She quickly flattened out the yellowed sheet of paper she’d found and began to jot down notes. “Leonid Shower… Early November… Tesla…”

“Strange things in the sky, strange explosions over the Soviet Union” she’d heard about those! And then the weird rumors of Wardecliffe Tower. It had found something… yes, that’s why it had been destroyed. The government - maybe the Fortean Society - someone was trying to stop the news from getting out!

“Sky whales been drawn in, government won’t be able to keep it under wraps for long…” she scribbled a few notes in the margin of the paper, almost a stream of consciousness now. “1973 over Pascagoula, just a year or so ago over Ohio…” she continued her feverish notes, tearing a small hole in the paper as her pencil’s tip snapped. She quickly nibbled it sharp again, spitting out the pieces of wood, then tried to look over her dates. 

“What’s the pattern? Pascagoula, Ohio, Tunguska - strange sightings and signals…” then she thought of something else. “That weird flash of energy people reported coming out of New Jersey a few years back, and a “government accident” at a hangar - they’d said a plane had misfired on take-off. How could a misfiring plane destroy a whole building!?” She shook her head. She’d heard rumors. She’d seen the pictures someone smuggled out. “NOT a plane. FBI trying to hide the evidence!”

She turned the radio back on. Someone was broadcasting a message in Morse - or at least that’s what it sounded like. Three dots, two dashes. Two dots, three dashes, two dashes, three dots, then a series she recognized - it spelled out the letters “S E E P I S E C O, then message repeats.” She frowned. She didn’t know what that meant. She scribbled them on her page, then looked up. Notes plastered the wall. “Message repeats.” she listened to the sequence, nodding along. She’d heard this before. “Three dots, two dashes,” her ears perked for a moment - a repeat number… what was the next? “Two dots, three dashes; two dashes, three dots, then S E P I S E C O.” There was a pause, and then “message repeats.” 

At the end of listening through a few times to make sure she got it right, she realized she’d heard wrong. The code was as clear as she could make it ...-- ...-- ..--- --... / ... . .  .--. .. ... . -.-. --- /  ..--- ..... ...-- ..--- 

She stared at the sequence, listening one more time to make sure every detail was correct. THe first was a string - probably numbers. She didn’t know those well. The second was a string of letters SEEPISECO - originally, she had thought it was maybe saying to go southeast of a place, wherever Piseco was. But then it was just apparently a sentence. “See Piseco” Then there was another string of numbers.

She pulled up her notes, trying to find her reference for Morse. She had the alphabet down, but numbers… she wasn’t quite as comfortable with those.

“Let’s see… three dots, two dashes, repeated twice… 3… and 3… so the first two numbers are 33.” Static buzzed on the radio, with a garbled “message repeats.” She frowned. She’d been on this station before. She’d never heard anything come across this one.

“Okay, the next… two dots, three dashes… that’s a two. And the last… two dashes, three dots… seven. Then…” she looked at the word, “See Piseco? Or maybe Seep Is Eco? See Pice Co - a company name? Misspelled Spice Co? I don’t know what that word is.” She listened through the message once more, made sure she had the right information, then turned back to the paper.

“3327? Why? What was significant about that number?”

She turned down the radio all the way, then gazed up and around. The shower was still glowing outside, flames of light streaking across the atmosphere - a truly once-in-a-lifetime event, and she was pouring over old notes in a shack with an old radio set.

She doodled on the edge of her paper - a small portrait of Tesla - handsome, dark hair - not how he was at the end of his life… no, the attractive young brilliant scientists - the one who had made Patent #568,177 - atmospheric electricity devices - he was trying to reach out to them. He’d mused about “electric waves” coming from outside of earth - and the only reason no one had found them in the last sixty years was because the government didn’t want to risk it…

“Atmospheric electricity… like Morse? Like these beams running through the sky…” She tapped her pencil on the desk, then turned the yellowed mess over and began to sketch out the major dates again.

“1896 - theories,  1917 - articles on it, then to the rumors in the 1930s… FBI had seized the deathray in 1943 after his death…” she ran her fingers along the numbers. Nothing significant she could find. She jotted down a sequence of numbers 01071943 - a representation of the month, day, and year of his death. She’d never understood why people in the states didn’t do 07011943 - day, month, year. She flipped her paper over and gazed at the number she’d jotted down from the code - 3327. Why did that number stick out to her?

He’d died in 1943, New York Hotel…

She’d heard his papers had been taken and brought up here, smuggled north - maybe to his secret facility - the one Wardeclyffe was meant to be a distraction FROM. That was it! He’d allowed them to target Wardeclyffe - it was never finished because he never MEANT to finish it.

She scrawled these notes, underlined “FBI” a few times for good measure, then turned back to the radio. If the secret facility was still broadcasting, then it would be here. It would be drawing those sky whales HERE!

She leaned back away from the paper, then folded it up and stuffed it in her pocket. 3327… the room he was in when he died! 3327… he had been found dead in 3327, and his papers had been smuggled north! Had he known he was about to die? Could he have tailored this signal so only the person with the right knowledge could retrieve it?

She tuned the dials across the bands - nothing.

Strange static, distortion, a distant radio station, broadcasting some garbled news report.

She turned up the radio, listening to the beep and hum and whir of the broadcasts.

Mara yanked the USGS map from her bag, flattening it across the desk with a slap. The radio’s last sputter of dots and dashes still buzzed in her skull. "3327 SEEPISECO 2532," she muttered, pencil tapping a frantic rhythm. "Okay, 3327—Tesla’s room, his death, his key.” she let out a sigh, the radio buzzing and whirring with static as the atmosphere around her hummed. “SEEPISECO… maybe SE Piseco? Southeast Piseco? No, wait—" She squinted at her scribbled notes, smudged from coffee tar. "S-E-E. See. See Piseco. Oh, you idiot, it’s the lake!"

She traced the map’s edges, fingers trembling over the latitude ticks—43° something, 74° something. "Piseco Lake… there!" Her nail landed on the blue blob, labeled Piseco Lake, sprawled across the Adirondacks. "Hamilton County, middle of nowhere—perfect for you, Nikola, I gotcha." 

She grinned, then frowned. "But where? ‘See Piseco’ isn’t enough—it’s a whole dang lake!" She chewed the pencil, eyes darting to "2532." "Twenty-five thirty-two… 25 and 32. Minutes? Degrees? No, degrees would be—43 plus 25 is 68, that’s Canada or something. Minutes, then. Latitude and longitude—25 minutes North, 32 minutes West… from where?" 

Her pen tapped frantically against the map as she scanned it again, her mind a whir. "Town of Piseco? No, too obvious. Tesla wouldn’t broadcast from a post office. The lake, then—but where on it?" She hovered over the lake’s outline, muttering.

"He’d need trees—height for his towers, his atmospheric gizmos, right? Patent #568,177—electricity from the sky.” her fingers danced across the coordinates. “Pines to hide it, but water nearby—cooling coils, grounding, all that juice he loved." She tapped the lake’s center—43° 26' N, 74° 32' W, give or take. "Center’s too wet, though. He liked building alongside water, not in it. So, if I’m looking for a building… it’s not in the lake… near it.”

She paused. The radio rattled off the code, beeping constantly. “Let’s see… Forested, close to shore? ‘2532’!" 

“Argh!” she growled, flipping the pencil to erase a wild scribble. Her mumbling continued as the Morse whined in and out, as if encouraging her to keep going, pushing her in the right direction. She heard a slight warble in the code, dropping off one of the “E’s,” again, too coincidental - but either way, it confirmed her manic suspicion. 

"From the lake’s edge? No—too vague. What’s a starting point Tesla’d use? Something he’d know…" She paused, then gasped. "The map! These old USGS grids—round numbers - nothing too precise, but precise enough!" She checked the corners: 43° N, 74° W stared back. "Base coordinates—43 degrees North, 74 degrees West. Let’s see… if I add 25 minutes to the North, 32 minutes to the West—43° 25' N, 74° 32' W!"

She plotted it, ruler scraping the paper. "43° 25'—down a bit from 26'. 74° 32'—eh, close enough!" Her finger landed southeast of Piseco Lake, just off the shore. "Forest… contours tight, hilly… near water but not in it. Shack territory if I ever saw it!" She leaned back, chair creaking. "Tesla, you sly dog—hiding in the trees, cooling by the lake, beaming your whale-calling waves where no one’d look."

She grabbed her compass, muttering, "Speculator’s at—what, 43° 30' N, 74° 22' W? Ten miles off. Piseco village is closer—43° 27' N, 74° 31' W. Two minutes south, one west… southwest, 200° or so -  not a surveyor - couple miles. It’s a beautiful night for a hike, anyway." She nodded happily, folding the map. "So that’s my spot—43° 25' N, 74° 32' W. If there’s a shack, it’s there—trees, water, and Tesla’s ghost laughing at the FBI!"

Near Lake Piseco, a few hours later

The strange hum still running in her mind, the last whispers of the meteor shower still flashing overhead, she made it to the side of Lake Piseco. “Okay… let’s see… that way!”

Compass and map, and a bit of luck…

The numbers were a bit off, but with a little bit of probing and prodding, and a little bit of thinking outside the box, she found it. A strange, ramshackle building that looked altogether way too shambled to actually stand on its own. She rapped a knuckle on the punky wood. “Something solid in there.”

Then she found it.

Behind a shattered old panel of half-rotten wood, she saw a large sheet of concrete, or something similar. A large metal bolt ran from top to bottom, securely fastening whatever this was - thoroughly shut and sealed. She gave a slight whistle of respect and began pulling aside other bits of old wood, revealing more and more of the slab.

She paused, looking around. The FBI would be on her any moment. She placed a few of the boards back up, hoping not to draw too much attention to herself. This was the find of a lifetime!

She calmed her breathing and pulled out a pencil, using the tip to probe at some moss that had grown inside various bits and grooves.

Those weren’t grooves… they were words! And arrows!

She pried loose the moss, ran her fingers along the trenches, and then stepped back. There were words there, but she couldn’t quite make them out. She tapped her pencil against the wall. It held clues - something to do with 3327 - the room where he died… it had to. The other message wouldn’t have led him here of all places if it didn’t.

Then an idea burst into her mind. A rubbing! Like a gravestone.

She pulled out her paper and laid it across the page, then turned her pencil sideways and began to run it along the grooves. It was crude and primitive and less-than-ideal, but she was able to make out three messages and an arrow pointing to each side of the door.

The top message read “BASE ROOT” with an arrow pointing straight up at some sort of number-covered wheel. 

“Let’s see… zero through nine. This shouldn’t be too hard. Just spin until it does something.”

She did, running through from zero all the way up. Each time the wheel clicked into place, she expected a resounding boom, or a hum, or something. Nothing at all.

“Hmmm…” she muttered. “Maybe the power’s off?”

“No, of course not, you moron. He invented power plants, of course he wouldn’t let his own facility go powerless!”

She left the wheel and turned to the other messages. “ADD ROOM” with an arrow off to the right, and “SUM LEVEL” with an arrow to the left. Each arrow pointed to another wheel, each wheel was carefully numbered zero through nine.

“What does this have to do with 3327?” She mused aloud, walking away from the door. She turned back, holding up her pencil like she was some sort of artist getting proper proportions, “three numbers… how does that translate to four? Red herring? Am I missing something? No…”

She stepped back to the door. With the rubbing finished, her mind could fill in the gaps and actually see the words now. The arrow pointing up lined up with the wheel, so whatever number she chose would have to fall right at the wheel.

“But what’s he mean… BASE ROOT?”

She gazed around, seeing if maybe there was something strange in the trees - a wire? Maybe these trees were hooked up to something. She counted the trees. Too many. There were at least twenty just here, and plenty reached sky high. Base Root…

She tapped her pencil against her own teeth, then chewed slightly on the end. “Base… what would he consider the base… well, he did like to do everything in sets of three…”

“Wait…”

She turned to the wall again. “Zero through Nine - which number would Tesla choose as his most basic number - the root of all numbers - the root of … him!?” 

She grabbed the metal disk with the numbers emblazoned on it and turned it so that three was facing the arrow.

Nothing happened.

“Of course, two more puzzles.” She laughed at herself, then looked at the next two hints. One said “ADD ROOM” and the other “SUM LEVEL.”

3327… that number 3327.

Both seemed two ways of saying to add the numbers together. So she did. 3+3+2+7 was… 18, and… that was too large. She could add 1+8, but which got set to 9? That was a sum of three, so that pattern fit, but…

ADD ROOM…

“What room?” she asked aloud. All she had was the whole number…

Then…

“SUM LEVEL!” She triumphed, “he died on the 33 floor, so SUM LEVEL would be 6!” She adjusted that dial accordingly. “And if he died on the 33 floor, then he also died in room 27 - so ADD ROOM - that one’s 9!”

She cranked the dial accordingly and stepped back. Something clicked and a whirring moan rumbled through a series of what sounded like solenoids. 

There was a hum, as if something were charging, then another click, a hiss, a click, a hiss, a thunk, and the door slowly swung open. A single bulb buzzed to life just beyond, welcoming her into the dark hallway. Her heart pounding in her chest, she placed the pencil in her mouth, bit down, and stepped over the threshold into the strange new room.

Concrete - all around. Grey concrete formed the strange entry hallway - it stretched maybe twice the length of the shack’s facade down into the ground, maybe a fifteen or twenty degree slide down into the darkness. She stepped forward, nearly quivering with barely contained delight. Her teeth bit into the wood of the pencil, her mouth splitting into a manic smile. She turned with almost apathy as the door swung shut - seamlessly, silently - and sealed behind her, leaving the only light the single bulb.

She paused and took a deep breath of the stale air.

No one had been in here for probably thirty years. Almost thirty years - and she was … what? She was… in one of Tesla’s secret labs? Was she?

A single cable ran up from the floor and vanished above her. Did it really run up into a nearby tree? Was this … could this be?

She saw a strange brass thing on the wall.

She could barely make it out in the dim light - “Piseco Relay - 1942. Harmonic waves rooted in my triad’s sum. Seek the third power’s dance to wake the ether.”

She read it through again. “Harmonic waves… ether… what’s he mean by that?”

The triad’s sum… and the third’s power? “What’s the ether?” She asked. She’d heard of Einstein trying to refute the existence of ether, theorizing relativity to do away with the need for the stuff. Was Tesla convinced of its existence? What did he mean?

She stepped further down into the tunnel.

A metal door.

She sighed. “Of course it can’t be easy. Gotta earn every inch. Tesla was paranoid.” She placed a hand against the metal. It was warm. “That’s odd,” she muttered to herself, running her fingers along the should-be-cold steel.

The light behind her crackled, fading ever-so-slightly.

“Great…” she muttered, turning back to the door, then toward the now-sealed entrance. Then she saw it - something written there. She approached, her eyebrows furrowing slightly. Scratched against the concrete was a message. She read it aloud. “‘My final rest powers the ether - name it, shift it, run it. The end marks the beginning.’”

She turned back to the steel door. “What does that mean?” She examined the surface. “There has to be something here… something…”

Then she saw it - a massive grid - 5x5. Each letter of the alphabet was written across the blocks - each about a foot across. She gazed at it. Each letter and one blank. “Spelling? Is this a word game?”

She gazed at the clue. “My final rest…” surely he didn’t mean “graveyard.” That would be too obvious. She tried to figure out where perhaps his final resting place would be. “‘Name it’? So it was a place?” She gazed around the room. No other hints. Nothing scrawled anywhere. She sniffed. The air was stale and still. The single cable running up through the ceiling was perfectly secured and sealed.

“Final rest?”

She stared at the grid on the wall. “What could he mean?”

“Final Rest…” 

Then it hit her - the hotel! He died in the hotel. He’d been living there for a bit, and perhaps he knew when constructing this bunker that he would die there!  She rushed to the wall. The tiles wouldn’t move, but maybe… she pressed one. It sank in, about an inch. There was a satisfying click. What letter was that? “H,” She rushed to the next, pressing in “O,” then “T,” “E,” then “L.” Nothing.

Each letter stayed depressed. Five letters…

She decided to experiment, and pressed another letter at random, then another, then another. Nothing. All eight letters remained pressed into the wall. Was she on the right track, or did she only have one chance?

She pressed another button. There was a click from somewhere on the other side of the wall, and each letter released and returned to its original state.

“Not that…”

She turned back and investigated the clue. “Final rest… ‘name it,’ ‘shift it,’ ‘run it.’”

“Name it…” she thought for a moment. “It’s not something generic like ‘hotel,’ and it’s apparently nine letters - unless that was a fluke… which doesn’t make sense given his obsessions…” Nine letters… name for final rest… not vague…

Where had he died - the New York Hotel - that was only seven letters… twelve if she included the name “hotel.” No, this answer was nine letters long…

“New York…” she thought, her fingers tracing the letters. Not New York…

“New Yorker Hotel.” She rushed up and was about to press the buttons, but paused. “Too easy…”

Her eyes scanned the hint again. “‘Name it,’ okay I have that. I’ve named the New Yorker Hotel - nine letters if I don’t include the ‘Hotel’ label. That fits him. What’s next… ‘shift it.’ Shift it how?”

Her finger traced the grid. ABCDE formed the top row, then FGHIJ, KLMNO, PQRST, then finishing with UVWXY. “No Z… interesting. I wonder why?” She had to shift each letter… but by how many?

She read the plaque again, thinking back over what she’d learned…

He died in 3327

“Sum Level… numbers… You idiot!”

She jotted down the word “New Yorker” on her paper, then looked at the alphabet. “Okay, N shifted three letters becomes Q or R… depending on whether the third or three letters… I’ll just go with third. So… Q, then H…Z…B…R…U…N…H…U. Gibberish… Let’s see the other way. RIACSVOIV. Still gibberish. But it’s got to be one of those.”

She moved to the wall and pressed the first sequence, leaving out the Z, then replacing it with A just in case. Nothing. Each letter released and clicked back out. “So the second sequence.” Same result. Anticipation built, then CLICK… and everything reset. She double-checked her work. “Name it - New Yorker. It can’t be anything else. Shift it - move three… okay… run it. How did you run something that’s just gibberish?”

She gazed across the string. Nothing stuck out to her. There was no Z in the grid, so the first set of letters couldn’t be perfectly pressed… maybe… she tried the second string of numbers again. Nothing. Her fingers twirled the pencil, tapping it against the hint again. “Run it.” Then she gazed closer. There was something strange in the letters she hadn’t noticed. The “r” was a bit bigger - not by much, but just enough to be noticeable.

Her brows pursed in confusion. She gazed across the “Shift it” and “Name it” - all perfectly uniform, written in almost computer-perfect script, though she could tell each had been meticulously carved.

She looked back at her series of letters. The first had an “R” in it. Right behind the letters “UNHU,” which spelled nothing. The second started with and “R,” but promptly ran into “IACS…,” again, meaningless.

What was his pattern? Was it a mistake, or was it a hint.

“Sequences and numbers… rotate by three - that’s got to be right…”

Then it hit her.

She gazed at the R in the first sequence. “Run it,” was hinting to look at the “R” and then take a…

“Run.”

She turned to the wall and pressed the letters RUN. “Nothing.” 

Nine letter string.

“‘R’ is where it starts, then I do the full string… but there’s no Z…”

She pressed the sequence, substituting “A” for “Z.”

As she pressed the final letter - the “B,” the remaining letters sank into the wall, which slowly slid open, revealing a hallway beyond. “Z is A… ‘the end marks the beginning,’” she muttered. “I guess that makes sense.”

Something crackled beyond.

“Ah, a Tesla coil, that’s appropriate.” The electricity hummed around her.

“So, this is why the door was warm…” she trailed off, hearing and seeing the crackle as electricity filled the hallway. A wave of hesitation - definitely not fear - rolled over her as she gazed at it. She thought of an old photo she’d seen of Tesla sitting in his lab, surrounded by so much electricity that she’d marveled he hadn’t died.

“Well, I’ve come this far.”

And she stepped forward. Electricity crackled around her, sparking harmlessly. She took a deep breath and continued. Then she paused.

There, on a pedestal in the middle of all this electricity and bursts of energy exploding around her, was another plaque, implanted just beneath three dials each with a series of numbers - again, 0-9. It was professionally done, and read “Run the triad’s roots - ether wakes at their sum.”

“Ether, triad, what are you getting on about, Tesla?” She mused. She turned, looking at each of the coils - electricity sparking and zapping in the room. “What is the triad?” She thought through what she had done already. The door to enter had been sealed with 3-6-9… was that the “triad”?

“Well, let’s try. Triad’s sum would be… eighteen? Too large… and all values of those add to nine anyway.” She turned the dial to “nine.” Nothing. “Well, we could try ‘3,’ ‘6,’ ‘9,’ again.”

The lights flickered slightly, but nothing else happened.

“Run the triad’s roots…”

“Roots…”

She thought of the forest overhead - maybe? “No, too sealed.” Indeed, the concrete of the bunker was flawless. There were no roots to be seen or interacted with, not to mention how unpredictable their growth would have been. It would have been too risky to depend on the fractal growth of plants… even Tesla couldn’t have predicted their pattern, mathematical genius though he was.

“Root…” she mused again.

Then she shook her head and pointed up toward the ceiling, gesturing with her pencil in the cloud of popping electricity. “You almost got me. You hear? Almost… root? Really?”

She did some quick calculations on the scrap sheet of paper.

“Let’s see… the root of three… is… about 1.7…ish. The root of six… 2.4. The root of 9… 3. The sum… 1.7 plus 2.4 plus 3… 7.1, round… seven.”

She set the first dial to seven. Nothing…

Triad… three numbers… Triad’s roots.

“What are you thinking?” She asked… triad…

“Sum of the numbers is seven… but that’s not right… three in a triad… sum…” she tapped the podium with her pencil, eyeing the arcing electricity around her. The triad was clearly the 3-6-9 from the entrance, from his place of death, from each of the puzzles she had solved. All of it had hinged back to those numbers in some form or another.

“So…” she looked across the three numbers. “If the root of nine is three… that fits…” she walked over to the final dial and adjusted it to “three.”

A light blinked on on the far wall. “Okay… that tracks… what about 1.7 and 2.4?”

She leaned down on the middle dial, trying to carefully position it to as close to 2.5 as she could. “Nothing…”

The root of the sums… the third “sum” was nine, the root being three… the second sum was six, the root being 2.4… “Unless…”

She adjusted it down to “two.”

The middle light illuminated. “Okay, so I’m rounding. 2.4 turns down to 2. That works well enough.”

Then she gazed at the first number in the sequence.

“Well, I have two guesses.”

She chose “one.” It seemed cleaner.

The third light sprang to life, the coils faded, and the next door slowly swung open with a strange whining sound, whatever had been sealing it disengaging silently.

Beyond the door was a spiral staircase leading down into the darkness. A single bulb hung above her, illuminating a plaque that read. “Remember where you’ve been and it will give you the strength to forge ahead.”

She gazed down into the gloom.

“Remember where I’ve been?”

She gazed back down the hallway, known that up to this point, Tesla had been overly literal with his instructions. Where had she been? Piseco…

She strolled back up the hallway, up the ramp and back to the entrance. There was the cable running up into the ceiling. She gave it a light tug. It shifted slightly. She didn’t want to break it, so she let it stay. “Was there anything else in here?” She asked. “Some talk about ether… of running… already used that…” she turned to the plaque. “Piseco Relay - 1942. Harmonic waves rooted in my triad’s sum. Seek the third power’s dance to wake the ether.”

“Okay… used the ‘rooted,’ the ‘triad’s sum.’” She jotted down the information just in case and looked around again. She’d used pretty much everything she could imagine. She stepped back into the room with the now-dormant Tesla coils. The air was still warm.

She stepped up to the first, running her hands along it.

A loose wire.

Curious.

She gave it a light pull. It came free. It had never been connected. She scouted the others. Each one contained a single wire. “Okay, four wires, something about ‘seek the third power’s dance,’ and more language about waking the ether.” 

She strolled back to the staircase.

It spiraled down into stygian gloom, and she followed. The darkness surrounded her, the only sound the strange moaning hum - was that the ether? The harmonic whatever-it-was-called? Or was it just the other tech powering this strange facility? She couldn’t tell, and now, with the faint light glinting in from high above, she was otherwise unable to detect anything but the faintest shadows and the same, all-present, overbearing hum from high overhead…

Endless humming…

She stepped off the final step and nearly crashed into a door. As her eyes adjusted, she saw a small window. She fumbled for some sort of handle and found one. Expecting the worst, she was pleasantly surprised to find it was unlocked. It swung open on silent hinges, and she entered a dark room.

In the middle, sitting on a dusty old desk, slowly powering up as she strolled toward it, was an oscilloscope. Its face was white, with a large circle that dominated most of its front, an alternating waveform spinning and pulsing across it.

She approached the desk “Count the years to power the void—triad’s dance spirals down.”

“Years? Count the years? Years from what?”

She thought through the various discoveries and inventions. Nothing significant…

“Triad.”

She gazed at the device, humming more and more with energy as she watched. What year was it now? She’d been so crazy with trying to discover as much as she could she often lost track of time. “1976, right?”

She examined the scope. No dates on it. It must have been designed and built by Tesla before his death. She gazed around the room. A large switchboard-like structure spread across one wall. Across the bottom were a series of numbered sockets. They were numbered 1-5. Across the top were probably dozens of numbers, all in seemingly random setups. She examined the cables in her hand. So, there were at least five cables she needed to connect.

Five sockets… four cables.

She slotted each in, then stretched them as far as they could go. Some reached numbers, some didn’t. Some reached multiple points.

“Okay, so no brute-forcing this one either…”

“Let’s see,” she mused. “‘Power the void…’ I’m not sure if I like that, and ‘triad’s dance spirals down.’ That’s a little obvious given the staircase. ‘Count the years…’ What does that one mean?”

She examined the rest of the room. Short of a cable running up through the ceiling - maybe into the entry room, she couldn’t find anything else amiss.

She gave the cable a slight pull. It gave - just a wiggle - but enough to spark a thought.

“I wonder?”

She bent and examined where the cable entered the floor. A cylindrical valve-like mechanism secured it there. She gazed up in the dim light. It passed neatly up through a hole. 

She darted up the spiral staircase, headed back down the hallway to the entrance room, and pulled. The cable slid up through the floor. She gave it a slight tug from above, and it snagged slightly. She pulled a bit harder. It fell free, dropping down to her.

She bundled up the cable, then gazed at the sign again. “1942.” So, this place was built a year before Tesla’s death, and if he knew he was about to die… he…

She rushed back down the stairs and examined the hint once more. Count the years… so if he died in 1943, then the years since his death were…

She examined the wall. The cable plugged into “1” couldn’t quite reach. She unplugged it, found a longer one, and then stretched it from “1” to “33.” She paused, waiting for a hum, a click, a bulb - something…

The oscilloscope pulsed.

Something was happening. Electricity was flowing from here… to somewhere!

“Okay, five cables… five numbers. The first is the number of years. ‘Triad’s dance…’”

She grabbed the second cable and plugged it into “three,” the third into “six,” and the fourth into “nine.” Nothing.

“Yeah, that would’ve been too easy.”

What was she missing? She thought through the hints… years since death was accounted for, and was obviously (at least to her) the first hint - and it had worked. Now, she had something to do with the triad… what was she missing?

She examined the hint. “Triad’s dance spiraling down…” she looked back to the staircase. “Well, yeah, like I said… it’s at the base of a spiral staircase. A little obvious… but…”

She stopped herself. This hint was given after the staircase, so obviously it didn’t involve the staircase… unless it did. She rushed back up it, finding that single bulb hanging, illuminating a single clue at the top of the stairs. “Remember where you’ve been…”

“Of course… and I found the cables and the date…”

Only she hadn’t found the date. The date had said 1942… there was something more… something else she hadn’t used. She fumbled in her pocket for the paper.

“What haven’t I used? Where have I been…”

“Seek third power’s dance…”

She chuckled and rushed back down the stairs. She unplugged the cables. “Okay, third power - three to the third power… that’s twenty-seven.” She eyed the wall. A single cable could stretch from the two slot to the twenty-seven.

The oscilloscope hummed again, spiraling with power.

“Brilliant,” she said with a bit of wonder to her voice. “Three more… has to be the triad.”

She plugged in three into three, four into six, and five into nine, then stood back triumphantly.

The oscilloscope only hummed slightly.

“So… one of you is correct. I don’t know which.”

She unplugged them all and stepped back again.

“Triad is 3-6-9. Triad’s dance spirals down… so it’s here at the end of the spiral, and I was being directed back up to catch that hint… so what am I missing.”

She held the three cables in her hand.

“Triad’s dance… so the 3-6-9 combination I’ve been using in all it’s various forms… it spirals down… spirals down…”

Then she frowned as realization dawned.

She hadn’t seen the forest for the trees. She crouched and slotted three into nine - and was rewarded with a pleasant whir. Then four into six. Again, whir. Then five into three.

“Spiraling down…” she said with a touch of awe.

And the lights flashed on, brilliantly eliminating any shadows in the room. Then everything went black.

“Ah… the void…”

Then a single red light glowed directly above her. The oscilloscope was gone, and in its place, an opening dropped down into a lighted room of some kind. She crept to the ledge and gazed into the new chamber.

A single ladder granted access.

Step by careful step, her shoes clanking loudly in the now-silence of the bunker, she clambered down into whatever new challenge awaited her. She dropped off the final rung, stepping onto the floor. She tapped it with her foot. Wood.

Someone had created a wood floor, wood paneling on the walls, even some carpets here and there. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought herself in some fancy office building in downtown New York.

But she wasn’t… she was in a secret bunker christened in the final days of Tesla’s life - his final steps to research what he’d dedicated his life to theorizing about. She stepped reverently into the space, barely able to breathe.

In the center of the room, sitting atop a plush carpet, was some sort of computing device - long spools of tape and some sort of spinning device belying a technology she couldn’t quite understand - some long-hidden project from Tesla’s part? She ran her fingers along a simple wooden chair, then traced them along the edge of a boxy wooden desk, unadorned save for a single lamp, its bulb long since burnt out. She pulled the chair back and sat, easing into it, feeling its unforgiving contours refusing to comfort her.

She pulled on one of the drawers.

Locked.

Pursing her lips, she ran her fingers along the surface, feeling for a button, a keyhole, a depression of any kind. Something dipped slightly - just a dent. Not secret access. She pulled open an empty drawer and fumbled about inside. Nothing.

She scowled. This was unlike him… if he had expected her to solve all these puzzles - warning her cryptically about “something being released” and “the void sings” and whatever all this talk about the “ether” was… what did he expect her to do now that she’d arrived?

The strange spinning wheel machine hummed, slowly spinning as if recording or reading something. She rose from the desk, passed the strange mechanism, and eyed the far wall, where a ring of four crystalline pylons, each faintly glowing with a bluish pulse. She approached, her breath catching as she read: “The void whispers freedom—bind it with the triad’s song, lest it unravels all.”

She turned back. The desk sat in the middle of the room, and beyond it the ladder she’d used to enter. The wood-paneled walls whispered of small snippets of luxury, the ladder of fear or paranoia… of desperation. Whatever was down here was meant to be restrained, hidden, forgotten until the right time.

“What do you want of me?” She asked.

This was the final puzzle - somehow, on the 33rd anniversary of his death, Tesla had reached out to her specifically - a dark shadow in the room, a wet footprint left behind as the only evidence that it hadn’t been a dream. She’d spent months deciphering that hint, leading her along what seemed to be a wild goose chase.

And now she was here… deep underground. She’d broken through at least three seals…

Seals…

Tesla had sealed something down here…

A hum grew, not from the machinery but from within her skull. Shadows coalesced between the pylons, forming a shimmering, amorphous shape—less a creature than a feeling given form. A name sprang unbidden to her mind. Aetheric Canticle.

She didn’t know what the word meant or how it had come to her. Had she read it at some point? Was this a subliminal confirmation of something she’d discovered over months of study, or was this shadowy being speaking to her?

It didn’t move, didn’t make any effort to coalesce further. It stayed, a shadow of a shadow, hovering just outside the range of her thoughts, but just within the boundary that she considered the idea of thinking about it. She looked again. It was gone, then there once more.

Eternity is within reach. These inventions reach to the stars…

She stepped away from the pylons, their shadowy essence blurring in and out.

Her hands hovered over the console, trembling. The dials blurred, their labels shifting—Release, Power, Ascend. Visions flashed: her standing atop Wardenclyffe, sky whales circling, the world bowing to her genius. She blinked hard. “No… this isn’t right.” The Veil’s whisper grew insistent, a siren call tugging at her exhaustion. “You’re so close. Why stop now?”

Something ticked in the corner - she hadn’t noticed it before.

A clock.

She knelt beside it, gazing into its sprockets and gears… fifteen minutes.

What did that mean?

Was it a stopwatch? Had it started the moment she entered the bunker?

Yes…

She turned back to the pylons. They pulsed slightly, seemingly dimming as the clock ticked down, its small pendulum swaying with a rhythm almost enchanting. Her gaze popped back and forth between the two - the clock and the shadow. Fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. She watched the pylons visibly dim.

Her journal, her notes.

She rushed over, spreading her pages out on the desk, running her fingers along the scratchings. 3-6-9, 3327, a few map coordinates. Her trail from the city all the way up here. A caesar cypher offset by three.

She gazed up at the shadow again.

Four pylons…

Four pylons…

Tick… tick… tick… tick…

The clock beat out its time, filling the silence with an insufferable count.

She gazed over at the pylons, wanting to go near but also dreading the thought of getting any closer to that shadow.  The void… the ether…

Tick… tick… tick… tick…

Fourteen minutes. Whatever timer she’d started… whatever it all meant… she had fourteen minutes before…

Before what?

What was at stake.

Release me or his secrets die with me…

It wasn’t a voice as much as… knowledge. An almost perfect understanding flowed through her brain, a realization so crisp, so clear, it broached no disagreement. It was an indisputable fact of life. If she didn’t act, that being would vanish, the knowledge kept up in this lab going with it. That was her purpose here - free this thing before the power wore down, killing this being with it.

This entire failsafe was Tesla preserving his knowledge for the next generation - for a time when someone would understand it.

That was her quest! She needed to prove that there was someone with the knowledge and understanding required to take up the mantle… to forge the path from where he had left off.

“Thirteen minutes…” she muttered.

“How to free you?” She mused. She slid the chair back and stepped up to the four pylons, her nerve wavering as she watched the strange black shape - smoke like, inklike, a spot in the fabric of the world - there, yet not there…

It danced like a drop of dye in a bottle of water, slowly diffusing through the air before drawing back in on itself…

Four pylons… a strange recording device, its massive spinning tapes… a locked desk… a ticking clock… twelve minutes and thirty seconds. She inhaled a calming breath.

“Okay, what information do I have?”

She looked across her notes again… numbers and dates and cyphers - sequences and words that had a purpose earlier.

“I have a new clue… ‘The void whispers freedom—bind it with the triad’s song, lest it unravels all.’” 

A moment of doubt.

A deception.

Perhaps the hint itself was a distraction, a deception by Tesla to keep his discoveries hidden, locked away. This… aetheric canticle… she paused… the void… a gap in knowledge… ignorance is bliss… 

She splayed her hands out on the desk, tapping the note with her pencil. “One last puzzle. To give up now is to invite ignorance - to plunge us into a world without his secrets. I can’t allow that. I need to use the triad again… one last time…” she gazed up at this… aetheric canticle… Tesla’s last song. And she’d sing it.

She calmed her breathing one last time and returned to the pillars, eyeing the strange black mass flitting in midair between them. She had just a few minutes to shut each down… each was fading… and with it the hope for the future…

It had taken her too long to find this place. If she’d only been faster! If she’d only deciphered those codes…

No. She worked as best she could… she’d pushed through each of the puzzles. She was Tesla’s heir… she could beat this.

A single message was scrawled in the middle of the four pylons, shadowed by the aetheric canticle swirling above.

“Four challenges unlock the truth.” She paused. There was a speck of dirt there. She went to brush it away, but realized it wasn’t dirt, it was a comma. “Four challenges, unlock the truth” was the actual reading.

What had been the four challenges? She felt as if there had been far more than four leading up to this point.

Twelve minutes.The pylons dimmed - would they kill the canticle if the power faded with it still inside? She didn’t want to risk that. She had to free this being - she couldn’t risk the light of its knowledge fading with the power of this place.

She returned to the desk, pencil tapping against her teeth.

“Okay… think… four puzzles… four challenges… let’s see… door #1, the outside, door #2, the grid…” she thought for a moment, “Then the trap door leading down here would be door #3. What’s the fourth?” She thought through what she’d had to do. “Maybe finding the cables was one? That required looking back over old information, turning it over in a new light, finding answers in plain sight once I had new information.”

She scribbled the #3 and replaced it with #4, drawing a scrawled line with an arrow between 2 and 4 that said #3: the wires. She wasn’t sure.

“Four challenges… unlock the truth.” She had to learn from four challenges to unlock the canticle’s prison. Prison. Why’d she think prison?

“Why prison?”

Maybe Tesla imprisoned it here? Maybe it was just being energized so it could be released in due time… maybe… maybe Tesla never wanted it free… maybe he wanted it destroyed, and lacked the ability…

Prison…

Container…

Her thoughts flitted unbidden from one concept to the next.

“Four challenges, unlock the truth.”

“Okay, what did I learn? What are the challenges I faced?”

She thought to the entry door. She’d been tempted to give up even then, but had been spurred on by the precision of his words - the very care with which he placed specific phrases, knowing those “in the know” would understand…

And she had… it had been precision… it hadn’t even been a guess. Sure, she had guessed at times… but there… the confidence… the precision…

She gazed at the fading pylons, then at the clock. Ten minutes…

This was precise. This was clockwork… this was specific… 

This wasn’t… this wasn’t guesswork. He wasn’t playing on a whim. Every bit of this had been specific. Precise.

“So… something here is precisely as he wanted it…”

She jotted it down. “Precision” and underlined the word, then circled it for good measure.

The grid was next… the strange pattern of seeing and testing and shifting, pushing buttons until the wall itself seemed to react. A deception masked under layers of false leads… shortened words, easy-ways-out… and then… “Run…”

She gazed at the paper… “Run…”

Her eyes slowly gazed up at the pylons again. They pulsed again and faded a little more. The clock ticked in the corner. She felt a strange freezing clench in her gut. The miasmic darkness swirled, growing larger as she watched.

“Run…”

She’d seen through the deception. She’d found the right pattern… she’d tested… she’d prodded… she’d outsmarted him.

Then the cables, her new puzzle #3… what was she to learn from that?

This was a distraction. This was a confusion - a pointless, mindless exercise. She’d solved the puzzles. She had just to break the pylons and set the canticle free - the triad’s song. That comma had been a scratch - four challenges unlocked the truth - this truth. She had but to destroy those pylons and it was hers.

Four challenges… 

Cables in plain sight, distracted by the wonder of the electricity… fear… 

She considered the plunge into the darkness.

No, distraction… no, she’d seen it. She’d known from that first tug that there was something unique about the cable. She gazed up at the pylons. What was she missing?

Ten minutes… tick… tick… tick…

Her pencil clattered against the desk… the desk… solid… with no way in…

Unless… 

She sat, running her fingers across the surface.

Distraction…

False leads…

Information in plain sight.

She stared up at the pylons, dimming ever so slightly… the void growing larger… the clock ticking… 

Precision. Seeing the deception. Answer in plain sight…

And then the final - #4… it had been based on the triad, but more. How… what had she learned?

Eight minutes… no more time! No more waste!

The room was darkening around her.

An inversion. A revisiting of the past. Reversal…

“Count the years to power the void…” she read on her note. That wasn’t his only reference to that. She ran her finger along the paper, thinking out loud. “Ether… void… ether…” She found another line “ether wakes at their sum… their sum… what was their sum? Seven?”

Something flared, then the room went even darker. “So… the void… the ether… it’s awaking…”

“Seek the third power’s sum to wake the ether…”

Third power… what was the third power?

Were the void and ether different? How could she know.

Distractions!

She stepped back again, taking in the scene before her.

The clock ticked away in the corner, the pylons slowly fading, the void expanding in the midst… The desk, locked tight, covered in papers… secrets in plain sight… secrets…

Prison.

She’d thought of this thing as being in prison. Why had she thought that? What… she tapped her pencil against her teeth and returned to the uncomfortable chair. It creaked under her. She rested her feet on the carpet - thick, luxurious, fancy…

Final puzzle. Final puzzle… the wires… power the void…

She gazed at the void - the black swirling mass hovering in the distance. The pylons faded. Power the ether… power the void… 

Choice.

She’d been given a choice, and an option.

Five minutes.

She stood and calmly walked to the pylons. Dials… dials again…

Numbers…

She had a choice. She had a way to enter… something… but what? “Seek the third power’s sum to wake the ether - so… seven?”

Knowledge will be lost.

And… the final puzzle… inversion. Inversion to power… “what does it mean?” she muttered aloud, tapping her pencil. “Triad’s song…”

“Bind it with the triad’s song… void whispers freedom…”

Her eyes snapped to the pylons again.

She reached out and set the first number to six. The pylon began to fade. She was about to have the knowledge she needed. She had to just enter the final ones and it would be hers. She set the second - six. Darkness… the void grew.

She felt a thrill in her heart.

One more six.

“Power the void…”

Then the fourth puzzle flashed in her mind. Inversion. Taking what she knew and turning it upside down… date since his death…

It had been thirty-three years…

Two minutes.

No way she was only two minutes away. If she had lingered two more minutes outside, would this have all been for not?

She didn’t think so.

She turned to the clock.

She was about to lose everything. If she lingered, this knowledge would be lost for good. She’d lose everything - everything she’d sought for would vanish… all for nothing…

Just over a minute.

Inversion.

Something in plain sight.

She stepped over to the clock, feeling a tension rising in her chest. She was running out of time. She didn’t have time to waste on this! She had to free the void - now!

Fighting her urges, she knelt at the clock.

One minute remained.

She lifted the clock. It wasn’t wired. A small key fell out - she could rewind the clock. She did, inserting it into the slow at the front of the clock’s face. With a few careful twists of the key, the clock clicked back into place. Fifteen minutes remained.

The time was a distraction - the fake deadline. She’d been hurried for no reason.

She turned back to the pylons.

“I don’t appreciate being tricked,” she said to no one in particular, but the voice seemed to respond, pulsing angrily.

Power the void…

She climbed the ladder and gazed at the wall of cables.

“Only way to refuse to power the void is to undo what powered it in the first place.”

And she wrenched them free. Then she clambered back down the ladder and stared smugly at the void. “And for my final trick.” She reached out and turned the first dial from “six” to “seven.” She felt a halt of hesitation at the thought of all she was surrendering. All that would be lost. The black abyss swirled hypnotically. She blinked, her heart racing, hand quivering. “Th-the next…”

And the next.

A swirl of black threatened to block out reality. Her vision faded, her mind screamed. She felt her heart about to surrender. She fumbled in the black until she felt the last one. It had stayed on zero - she hadn’t adjusted this one at all. Click - one. Click - two. She counted it out in her head, trying to close her eyes and mind to the pain… the pain of loss. Click - three. Then four. Five. Six was next… that number that would have released it. She could still turn. She could still save all of this…

“No.” She whispered - to herself, to the void. “Seven.”

Click.

“Power up the ether…”

She smiled, a feeling of smug satisfaction rolling over her in place of the pain, the loss - it was a feeling of unfathomable relief, as if a weight had been cut from her core. She turned to the angry coil of black. “Gain by losing, inversion. Information in plain sight.” She breathed calmly, acknowledging her opponent and its valiant attempt to claim her mind. “Good try, though.”

There was a final chonk behind her. Something had unlocked, or reset, or whatever… but she had passed the test. At this point, she was just reveling in her win. The pylons whirred and a warm glow filled the room, their lights slowly fading up, getting brighter and brighter, driving the writhing voidform back into a small pinprick, hovering angrily in the middle - its prison.

She heaved a sigh of relief and took her seat at the desk.

Her papers were scattered, frantically scribbled on, hints to puzzles upon puzzles. She smiled and sat back, accidentally kneeing the drawer as she did. It shifted - unlocked now.

She slowly drew it open. Inside, wrapped in leather, was a journal.

Entry: Piseco Relay, November 12, 1942

The Aetheric Canticle, that gloomy specter of the void’s abyss, did assail my faculties with a deception most insidious. I fear Lovecraft may have been right… there are darker things in the blackness of space - though I doubt as many come from beyond our atmosphere as some from beyond our realities. This void’s vibrations, attuned as they were to the ether’s subtle currents, normally so harmonic, sang of ultimate revelation—my towers aloft, the celestial chorus of the sky whales resounding in harmonic unity. 

For a span, madness was my companion, its siren frequencies oscillated within, threatening to shatter the equilibrium of my mind’s delicate coils. Yet, through the sacred triad—3, 6, 9—I reversed its polarity, ensnaring it within crystalline resonators tuned to 369 cycles per second. This was no mere containment; it was a trap forged to test the unwary, for only a mind resonant with reason’s clarity could renew these locks against such seductive dissonance. If you, reader, hold this record, your intellect has pierced my labyrinth of proofs. To you I bequeath this charge: devise a containment absolute, a circuit unbroken, that this fragment never reunites with its shattered brethren. Their convergence would unleash a resonance to rend the fabric of all I have electrified—nay, of existence itself. Let not the past’s shadowed waves surge forth; hold fast the ether’s silence.

Nikola Tesla