Before Tomorrowland (19 page)

When Mr. Hughes set down his glass, one of his three personal robot butlers topped it off. Lee and his mom couldn’t keep their eyes off the robots whenever they did the slightest thing.
“Tesla’s pretty excited about you, Clara. I can’t blame him.”

Lee saw Ms. Earhart roll her eyes at that. His mom shifted in her seat, embarrassed. “Well, thank you, Mr. Hughes, but I sure don’t know why.” She gave Lee a nervous smile.
“We’re just country mice.”

Mr. Hughes patted his mouth with another tissue and threw it in a trash bin at his feet, full to the brim with them. “They tell me you’re quite an artist. We’d love to help you
get your career off the ground. My organization has great contacts within the magazine publishing industry, you know.”

“I do now,” said Clara.

“I’m also staffing a department to design packaging for a whole line of Plus Ultra products we’ll soon be releasing.” He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a
thin black case the size of a compact mirror. Hughes flipped it open and showed Lee and Clara the keypad and a small screen. “We call it a Multifunctional Data Device around here, though we
should probably come up with a better name for consumers. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. We’ve been using them around these parts for years, but we felt it was high time
the paying public had a crack at them, too. I think they’re going to love them. What do you say? Think you can put those pens to work for me?”

Lee’s mom stumbled over her words, trying to keep up with their host. “Well, that, ah, it sounds—”

He brushed her response aside. “It’s nothing. I’ll set it up. After what you and your boy went through, it’s the least I can do.” Lee couldn’t believe how
long it had taken Mr. Hughes to even reference their near-death experience. Now, all of a sudden, it visibly weighed on him. “You know, tragedies happen every day in this world and you
can’t head them all off. Sometimes all you can do is take care of anyone that gets hurt.” He snapped his fingers, and one of the robot butlers scuttled to his side and handed him a
white envelope. He slid it across the table to Clara. “This is our welcoming packet, plus thirty thousand dollars’ compensation for any damages to your personal property or mental
affairs.”

Lee couldn’t help but gasp. Sure, that amount of money might have been nothing to someone like their host, but it was probably more than his father had made in his entire career. They
could do almost
anything
Lee could think of with those funds. His dad could stay put, they could afford better care for his mom, maybe even get a new radio. Heck, five new radios.

Clara touched the corner of the envelope, but she didn’t pick it up. Mr. Hughes dug through his peas and continued: “Go ahead and open it. The first page is pure formality,
non-disclosure agreements and such. Just needs a signature and we can get on with the fun parts.” The butler held out a pen to Clara, and Mr. Hughes popped another pea in his mouth and
scrutinized her as he chewed with small, mincing movements.

Lee grinned at his mom as she held up the envelope, turning it in her hands, but instead of opening it, she set it down and slid it back across the table to Mr. Hughes.

“Mr. Hughes, that is such a generous offer,” she said, “but—”

“But what?” said Mr. Hughes, clamping his teeth down on the little green pea skin. He sat forward, tall in his chair, with his fist clenched on the tabletop. Lee was about to
chastise his mom when he saw her whole countenance change, and in an instant, she wasn’t acting like a scared country mouse. When she answered Mr. Hughes, she brought out her low, commanding
register, and it took the air right out of the room. Even Ms. Earhart sat up straight in the window.

“Mr. Hughes? Let’s talk about my future career and all the money you want to give me some other time, please. Sometime when I’m not still processing a building being
split
in half
by a robot man with laser eyes. Because if
that’s
the secret you want me to keep for you, I’m not sure I’m up for it.”

Mr. Hughes didn’t move a muscle.

Ms. Earhart snorted, loud. They all turned to her, and she stood, wiping the grin off her face as she pulled her flight jacket back on. “Why don’t I move the Bracketts along, Mr.
Hughes?” she said. “Tesla’s expecting them.” Clara had already pushed her chair away from the table and stood before Ms. Earhart finished. Mr. Hughes was glowering at them
as they walked away, and the stare unnerved Lee more than any of the wild technology around him.

Ms. Earhart led them down a long air lock decorated with pictures. Lee recognized a lot of the imagery from the Plus Ultra comic book, but here, the pictures weren’t drawings. They were
photographs. Lee struggled to take it all in. Plants and animals he’d never seen before. Otherworldly landscapes, the same landscapes with the vibrant colors they had seen in the stereoscope
Faustus had given his mother at Penn Station. A series of portraits of Plus Ultra members, past and present, formed a Plus Ultra pictorial history: Verne, Eiffel, Edison, Tesla, Bell, Lumiere,
Curie, Gillette, Einstein, Godard, and more. One picture stood out to him, in particular, of an enormous explosion high above a desolated forest. Lee caught one word on the picture’s plaque
as they walked by:
SIBERIA
.

“It’s all true,” he said to Ms. Earhart, then wished he hadn’t. She seemed to want to help them, but she still terrified Lee. “The comic book, I mean.”

“Oh, who knows,” said Earhart. “Plus Ultra’s founders didn’t keep the best records, and the old timers either don’t like talking about the early days, or want
to remember them, however it works best for their personal interests. Even second- and third-generation members like myself don’t know the whole story.”

When they came to a large steel hatch, Earhart stopped and put her hand on a glass plate embedded in the wall. A pulsing light strobed her palm. “Truth,” she said, “is a pretty
relative thing around here. I’ll tell you what works best for me: trust your gut. Or your mom. Seems like she’s got it pretty well figured out, judging by how she dealt with Mr.
Hughes.”

She swung the hatch open and they stepped into a dim room with tinted windows as long as the belly of the zeppelin. Flickering screens and consoles ran along either side of a central path, all
operated by dozens of men in silver suits, each wearing enormous glasses. It took a second for Lee to register the fact they were all the same man: Faustus. He didn’t know whether to be
amazed or terrified, but it seemed his mom sure did.

“Fantastic!” his mom murmured. “They’re all robots or clones or something.”

“It’s something all right,” Lee replied.

In the heart of the room stood a tall, elderly man on an elevated platform. He had a thin gray-flecked moustache and sallow cheeks. A natty charcoal suit hung a bit saggy on his thin frame.
Earhart bounded to him and touched his one of his spindly arms. His worried complexion lit up with warmth and it flattered him; his eighty-something visage suddenly lost thirty years. She whispered
a lengthy report in his ear, and when she finished, Nikola Tesla raised his eyes to them. As he moved carefully down the steps the platform, gripping a handrail, Earhart kept a hand near his back,
as if ready to catch him if he should fall.

“Stop crowding me,” he muttered.

“I’m not crowding you, I’m helping you,” she muttered back.

Lee recognized this dance. He played Earhart’s part every day, every waking hour with his mom.

Tesla opened his long arms to them. “Welcome, my friends! I cannot begin to express my regret for the dangers in which we placed you.” The words weren’t that dissimilar to the
consolation offered by Mr. Hughes, but Lee thought Mr. Tesla sounded wholly sincere. The old man gave him a polite half bow, then took Clara’s hand in both of his. “Mrs. Brackett. It is
an honor and a pleasure.”

Maybe his mom was getting used to that sort of attention from famous people, because she only nodded her head and said a polite, “Mr. Tesla.”

“Please, come take a look.”

Lee watched Tesla take his mom by the hand and walk her to the largest screens. It was divided into panels like a comic book page. One of them showed a picture of his mom snapped at Penn
Station. Another played like a movie reel depicting her tour of midtown Manhattan from the perspective of her glasses. For the first time, Lee saw what she’d been talking about, the enhanced
buildings, the skyway, and the portals to other places. There wasn’t much of Lee himself on the screen. He was about to feel jealous and even a little ashamed when he saw the other windows,
all of them crammed with personal information about his entire family, from his birth certificate to his father’s bank records to his mom’s medical records. How had they acquired all of
that data? And so quickly? And without their permission!

“Mr. Tesla,” he asked, “what exactly is all of this?”

“Have you heard of the term ‘market research,’ young man?”

Lee shook his head.

“I wasn’t familiar with the practice myself until Mr. Hughes introduced me to it, although I suspect his approach to ‘market research’ is outside the norm for even his
own industry,” said Mr. Tesla. “This gross invasion of privacy, which I do hope you will forgive, is our attempt to understand how you are responding to the experience of your day, and
more, why you might be responding to it the way you are.”

Tesla leaned back against one of the consoles, regarding them like a proud father. “Mrs. Brackett, you and your son were chosen to be among the first civilians to be privy to a staggering
secret, one, which, to be honest, should have been shared with the world a long time ago. Regardless, the time is upon us. We want to tell the world the full story, but in a unique, visceral,
interactive fashion. We didn’t think people would be believe us if we simply took out an ad in a newspaper. So we decided we would have to show it to them, and more, bring them to it. The
comic book, the augmented reality tour, the showroom at the New Yorker—these were all steps of an elaborate reveal we planned to stage in every major city around the world. This weekend was a
sort of a soft launch, if you will. We wanted to start with a small sample, gauge its effectiveness, use the data to adjust the program as we took it wider. There were to have been hundreds of you.
Dreamers who could appreciate our vision. Seekers who perhaps could benefit from seeing it. Even skeptics and cynics who might resist it. I must say, all things considered, the results you’ve
produced have been most encouraging.”

“By ‘all things considered,’” said Lee, “you mean, except for the part where we were almost killed by Nazis and a killer robot disguised like a tour guide,
right?”

“He’s
not
a robot,” said Earhart sharply. She heard her tone and blushed. “Sorry. It’s not your fault for not knowing that. But he’s not, technically
speaking, a robot.”

“If he’s not a robot, than what is he?”

“He’s a boy, actually. Not much older than you. Warped into something gross by an experiment that never should have happened.”

“I stand corrected then! He’s not a killer robot. He’s a boy who thinks he’s a killer robot!” Lee threw his hands into the air. “This is insane!”

“Mr. Tesla,” said Clara, with a carefully calibrated tone of warm gentility clearly intended to change the mood of the room, “what exactly are you people trying to
reveal?”

“Our greatest discovery, and the greatest treasure: another world.”

Tesla flipped a switch on the console next to him. Clara’s face disappeared from the screen, replaced by a glorious landscape like one of the pictures they’d passed in the hall, but
moving, thriving with life. A succession of images followed, settling on a field of golden wheat so radiant it looked electrified. “This is near real-time video of what we are calling
‘The New Frontier.’ These images are being beamed wirelessly from—”

“I thought this place didn’t have a name yet,” said Lee.

“Ah. The contest. I do not know how to say this…”

“Publicity stunt,” said Earhart. “Hughes picked the name he wanted for it years ago.”

“For the record, I dislike it, too,” said Mr. Tesla.

“Where exactly is this place?” asked Clara.

“My honest answer is that I do not know how to answer that question. We could be looking at a place far across the universe. We could be looking inside a pocket dimension of reality. What
I do know for certain is that it is the ultimate playground for the imagination. It is a world of infinite possibilities and undreamed-of materials, with its own physical laws opening up entirely
new branches of science. It is mankind’s greatest hope for an abundant future, a future without threat of war or poverty, a future of incredible invention and creativity.”

“Someone I once knew liked to call this place ‘Tomorrowland,’” said Earhart. “I rather liked that name.”

“What about the robot…boy…whatever…that almost killed us? Does it come from there?”

Lee just blurted it out, and his mom didn’t even scold him. Maybe she was thinking the same thing.

“That tragedy, my boy, is the work of a madman, and part of a past that needs to be put down. A sad waste of life and resources.” He turned his attention back to Lee’s mom.
“Since you are new on your journey with us, Mrs. Brackett, let me encourage you: what happened to Henry Stevens represents nothing of Plus Ultra’s vision for the future.” The old
man smiled at Clara. “The world of tomorrow does not belong to things like that, Mrs. Brackett. It belongs to you.”