The EGE woman certainly had his number. Sullivan sighed and trailed along.
“Have you ever heard of Edison’s spirit phone?”
“Who hasn’t? He said something in passing once, some reporter took it out of context, so a bunch of spirit mediums and frauds started claiming to have one so they could swindle suckers into thinking they were talking to their dead relatives.”
She just smiled and shook her head. “That’s what we want the public to think.” Hammer stopped at the back wall and opened an innocuous fuse box. “Now which one were you? Ahh, there you are.” She played with a few switches and there was a loud click. She placed her hand on the wall and pushed. A secret door hinged smoothly open. “After you.”
There was a flight of steep metal stairs disappearing into the floor. Sullivan climbed down until he found himself at the end of a plain concrete hallway. Two more men were stationed there, and they just nodded politely. Apparently the first guards had called ahead. He noted that these were only armed with wooden truncheons instead of firearms.
Hammer grabbed the rails, slid down like a sailor, and landed lightly.
“Lots of security around here.”
“And you’re only seeing the first layer. People would kill to get their hands on the things behind these doors.” Hammer led the way down the hall. “Mr. Edison was a skeptical man, you know. It started as a lark, an experiment to silence the quacks and charlatans. The reasoning was that if he built a machine sensitive enough that a ghost could talk through it, then surely, if ghosts were real they’d make themselves known. Then that Cog magic got fired up while he was working on it, and he ended up fiddling with it for three straight weeks, hardly stopping for food, sleep, even water. When he finally dropped from exhaustion, it had nearly killed him, and his Power was burned out for a year afterward, but it worked.”
“How?”
“Science isn’t my area of expertise. The thing is, it worked, and we could call out, but nobody ever called in. It was a one-way street. EGE’s best minds don’t know why. We could make a call and occasionally get… something from the other side, but it usually didn’t make any sense. Edison had done it. He’d found a way to contact ghosts.”
“Ghosts? Not demons, like from a Finder? They’re bringing in spirits from another dimension all the time.”
“Nope. These were actual dead people from Earth. Many of them didn’t even know they were dead and couldn’t figure out who they were talking to. Edison brought in teams of interpreters and even a Babel, because obviously, just from pure statistics, most of the ghosts who picked up the other end of the line didn’t speak English.”
This was a lot of information to take in. Hammer kept talking as she took him down the hallway. They passed many heavy steel doors, each with a black Roman numeral painted on it. Uniformed security, workers in coveralls, and lab-coated staff passed them, all of them glancing suspiciously at Sullivan. The secret underground lab had far more workers than its outside appearance indicated. The tunnels went off in directions that showed that this facility was much bigger than the building above it.
“Lots of money and work went into running the spirit phone, but they never met George Washington or Julius Caesar or anyone interesting. It’s not like there are switchboard operators in the afterlife. We were spending a million dollars a pop to make a call to some random somewhere, and most of the time nobody answered.”
“Must be busy in heaven.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t think we got heaven. When it did occasionally work, we weren’t getting happy people, and there sure weren’t any choirs of angels singing. After a bit, most people thought that Edison had built a phone line to hell.”
“Oh…” Sullivan scowled. “That could be awkward.”
“Try explaining that to the shareholders. We don’t know where we connected to, just that the spirits of some dead people end up there. The conversations were usually screaming gibberish, angry ranting in Chinese, that kind of thing. It didn’t help that a couple of researchers went crazy and there was a rash of suicides on the EGE team. Plus, it was sucking up too much of EGE’s capital to keep it running and it wasn’t like Edison could tell the board that calling hell was a sound investment. The Coolidge administration decided that it should be kept secret because news of the spirit phone could cause-what did he call it? — anxiety among the public.”
The theological implications of such a device were… troubling. “I can see how people might get a little upset. Might get some folks to behave nicer though, if they thought they really would go to hell.”
“Or have the public go ape-shit and bananas… Pardon my French. Coolidge played it safe. He asked that the project be shut down, so EGE powered down, quit making calls, and just gave it enough juice to keep the connection live in case we ever decided to fire it up again. They were worried that if we shut it down completely, we might not ever be able to reconnect.” She stopped at a large steel door labeled XIII and removed a ring of keys from her coat pocket. Another guard stepped aside so she could unlock it. “Three weeks of Power-fueled Cog madness from the greatest mind of our time and”- the heavy door swung open-“we got this.”
Sullivan stepped inside a room that was nearly as large as the warehouse above. A dozen men in laboratory coats were wandering about, checking panels of gauges and flashing lights, while in the very center of the room, cordoned off by protective railings and metal safety cages was a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot glass box filled with crackling lines of electricity and another, slower, blue energy that could only be the visible manifestation of raw magic. It was a thousand lightning strikes imprisoned in a big fish tank. The air hummed with violence as fat power cables fed the hungry box.
It was frankly awe-inspiring.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Hammer asked, already knowing the answer. “A one-minute conversation uses more electricity than Newark does in a week. The big partition was left over from the elephant electrocuting days back when he was trying to prove that direct current was safer than alternating current. The room is reinforced, because if that containment was to break, it could flash-fry Menlo Park.”
The last time he’d had anything to do with Cog superscience he’d nearly been vaporized by a Tesla weapon. He wasn’t exactly fond of this sort of thing. “You know, the way you were talking, I was kind of expecting”-Sullivan held his hands out about a foot apart-“a telephone.”
“The original hypothesis was that it needed to be sensitive. Turns out it just needed to be bigger. And it is like a phone; look closer.” Hammer pointed at the base of the massive, flashing death-box, where there was an older two-piece telephone unit, with separated microphone and earphone, sitting on a small metal cradle next to a folding chair.
“Somebody has to sit next to that thing?” The amount of energy running through the machine was staggering. “What’s in there?”
“All sorts of stuff.” Hammer waved her hand dismissively. “Half the periodic table, including some things that are theoretically supposed to annihilate each other on contact. I don’t know. It’s way over my head.”
“I thought you said that they’d barely kept it running?”
“It was on standby mode for years. This is not standby mode. After what happened a few days ago they restarted the project.”
“What happened?”
“The phone rang.”
Before Sullivan could digest that the crowd had seen them enter and was swarming. A man armed with a large clipboard reached them first. “Mr. Sullivan?”
“Yeah.” He could hardly take his eyes away from the spirit phone. “That’s me.”
“Oh, thank goodness. We’ve been looking all over for you. Come right this way. He should be calling very soon. The check-ins have been exactly every seven hundred and seventy-four minutes. I have no idea how he can tell such precise time without any physical instrumentation.”