TITLE: Electric Dreams
Genesis
In the hush of his Colorado Springs laboratory, there was a night where Nikola Tesla believed he had pierced the veil of the cosmos. Large coils throbbed, the rafters shuddered, and through the crackle of static a voice came; not from Earth, it was measured, grave, and inhuman.
The Martians told him their truth: they had unlocked Time itself, walking its corridors as easily as men crossed a room. They had mapped the rise and fall of countless civilizations, seen empires emerge, expand, and ultimately crumble. To them, Time was no longer mystery.
But humanity was.
“Why do you endure?” they asked.
“What force has kept your kind alive, when others fell?”
Tesla’s pulse quickened. Then came the wager:
“Answer truly, and we will share the current that feeds suns, the secret of limitless energy. Answer falsely, and the fire will consume not only you, but your species entire. The spark of man will be extinguished. This is no gift, Nikola Tesla. This is a gamble. You wager with the fate of your kind.”
Language
Tesla placed his hand on the transmitter. The coils spat blue fire, arcs flickering like fragile wings before dissolving into the dark.
“Not power,” he said into the static. “Language. That is what keeps us alive. Out of silence, we shaped meaning. Out of noise, we wove sense. Fragile, yes, but enduring. Language leaps across the void and binds us together.”
On the bench beside him, the Tesla Globe gave off the faintest emerald glimmer, a spark refusing to vanish into the silence.
He shifted tongue to tongue: French, German, Italian, Serbian, each syllable another spark flung into the dark.
The coils hissed across the table. Then the Martian voice returned, grave but softened:
“From silence, meaning. From sparks, the bridge that binds you.”
The first hand was won.
Stories
“But sparks alone are not enough,” Tesla said.
The coils steadied. Shadows flickered along the walls, folding and unfolding like wings in the dark.
“Stories are currents. They carry memory through time. In Eden, greed brought exile, exile became story, and story became lesson. Humanity endures because we shape our sins into myths that teach us how to live.”
The Tesla Globe’s green light thickened, its surface glowing with a deeper lustre, as if it remembered exile and that insatiable first bite.
“I know this, for my own story began with loss. My brother’s death was sudden, senseless, a strike of chaos without reason. Fear, rage, and hatred consumed me, and for years I mistook nature’s blows for chance. But I came to see that randomness is its greatest trick. God does not play dice; even our sins urge us to search for meaning even where none seems to exist.
…One night, in the depths of despair, I lifted my eyes to the heavens, begging the sky for answers. A flash of green light tore through the dark, and in it I heard my brother’s voice. He was at rest — in paradise.”
The coils flared brightly, arcs dancing like brushstrokes across the rafters.
The Martian voice returned, hushed:
“From sin, story. From exile, lesson. From loss, the myth that carries you.”
Again Tesla had played true. Again the game advanced.
Dreams
Tesla bowed his head. “But even currents have a source. There is a deeper secret still.”
The sparks bent upward, gravity itself loosening its grip. In the glare of the machine, a fleeting pattern shimmered in the smoke, a butterfly traced in fire, gone in an instant.
“Dreams are lightning. They are infinite, chaotic; a storm of fragments without measure. Yet out of that storm, one vision arrives lucid, whole, and sublime: a single idea. That is how I create. Every invention: the motor, the oscillator, the coils and even the Tesla Globe, came first to me in a dream.”
He then gestured to the Tesla Globe, no larger than a man’s hand. It was shimmering emerald green, its surface catching the fire with a gorgeous lustre, as if it had been cut from dream-stone.
“In my vision it gave energy to the whole world, freely, drawn from thought alone. I saw it shining before I ever touched it with my hands. A thief may steal my papers, but not the vision that birthed them. All my ideas are born this way, chaos tempered into order, the dream made visible.
However dreams are not mine alone. Humanity dreams in its sleep, and it dreams awake. We conjure images so vivid they rival reality; we build worlds within worlds more solid than the one we stand in. At times, the altered world feels truer than the actual, and from that illusion we summon art, invention, and faith itself. Our power is not only to live — but to imagine beyond it.”
From the bench, his notebook burst open, its pages shuddering in the current. Sketches and equations tore free: poems, stories, fragments of thought, whirling upward into the storm. Inked diagrams twisted in the arcs of electricity, reshaping into luminous forms: engines, towers, impossible machines, whole worlds built of light, rising and collapsing as quickly as they appeared.
The Tesla Globe shone its brightest yet, an emerald fire burning against the shadows of the lab.
The coils convulsed, arcs spiralling into diamond constellations that hung midair. Symbols flared like living script, then dissolved into rivers of light.
The Martian voice whispered, reverent as prayer:
“From chaos, vision. From lightning, invention. From the dream, the world remade.”
Tesla exhaled. He had won again. But the wager was not over.
Consciousness
“Light is Consciousness” Tesla said. “Every spark, every current, every flash of lightning gathers into one vast awareness. It is humanity’s burden as much as its gift — for light reveals, but it can also expose.
It unmasks cruelty and it lays bare wounds we would rather forget. But it also grants us wonder. We can taste the sweetness of fruit, feel the texture of silk, breathe the scent of lavender and watch a mountain blaze with colour at dawn.
Consciousness gives us these riches, yet in giving them, it also makes us privy to pain, to grief, to suffering.
And through the darkness, we feel more than our own. Our minds are entangled in the collective. I sense the fields of Europe torn apart by war, the trenches swallowing lives in silence. I can feel the soul of cities drained from its streets, the weight of entire nations staggering beneath the horrid loss of life.
Consciousness forces us to bear both; the soul of the one, and the spirit of the many.
And yet, even in that pain and suffering, there is one thing that carries us forward: we can create. In that weight we find not only creation, but transformation; resilience forged in suffering, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. This is humanity’s secret: to transform our own ruin into something greater, something radiant, something beautiful.
Perhaps that is the true thrill of the chase: even as we fall, exposed, we carry within us the potential to rise again; to emerge stronger, and to summon beauty from the very places that once destroyed us. To bear this truth in our souls is to become immortal.”
The coils suddenly spat pure white fire, their arcs clawing at the dark like hands that grasped at nothing. Yet the Tesla Globe, fractured but not yet broken, now bloomed, burning alive with the scars of humanity. In that trembling light, for a brief moment, even the Martians vast wisdom faltered, quivering with pure envy.
The storm outside cracked with lightning, flooding the lab with a searing flash. The air shook. The coils screamed. Tesla’s voice rose above the thunder:
“From grief, awareness. From atrocity, burden. From destruction, creation.”
Omniscience
The machine collapsed in a scream of metal and fire. Glass shattered, beams groaned, smoke poured until the air was a choking fog. Tesla staggered to his feet, his laboratory reduced to ruin: charred rafters, blackened floorboards, instruments twisted into silence.
Amid the ash he found his notebook, its cover scorched, its pages half-burnt but alive with ink. The book crackled faintly, a pulse of electricity threading through it, veins of brightness clinging to the ruin.
The indestructible Tesla Globe had surrendered at last, bursting into countless emerald stars — shards of an electric dream scattering light across the rubble.
And from the whirling dust of the green blaze, a butterfly emerged, its wings shimmering with the glow of the fallen, patterned like living crystal. It rose out of fracture into flight, drifting past Tesla’s shoulder and out through a shattered window vanishing into the night sky.
Tesla pressed the book to his chest, trembling but unbroken.
The Martian’s words still rang in his mind.
He whispered into the silence:
“Why do you endure?”
