Born at midnight in a lightning storm, the story goes. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove the timing wasn't a coincidence.
This time, his choices are yours. There are three futures. Find them all.
Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 with almost nothing and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison. He left within the year — and spent the rest of the decade proving Edison's direct current was the wrong kind of electricity to bet a country on.
Down in the gaslit streets, Edison's lamps flickered on direct current that died within a mile of the dynamo. Tesla's alternating current could cross a state.
"When you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke." The raise never comes either. You are 28, broke, and certain that his direct current is the wrong bet for a whole civilisation. The next thing you say decides which one of you history remembers kindly.
Direct current dies within a mile of its dynamo — so the dynamos multiplied. One every mile, in every direction, forever. Powerhouses shoulder the tenements, coal smoke sits on the streets like weather, and the copper bill never, ever ends.
Nothing crosses a state. Nothing reaches a farm. Electricity stayed a city luxury, sold by the block — and you drew a good wage, in an office lit by a lamp that flickers every time the works two streets over changes load.
A world wired street by street and billed block by block. Warm, close, profitable — and small. No Niagara. No tower. Nobody ever asks what the sky could carry, because the answer is already on the invoice.
The future didn't need you to be comfortable. It needed you to be right.
Tesla's alternating current, paired with George Westinghouse's money, carried electricity further than direct current ever could. Niagara Falls lit Buffalo, twenty-six miles away. The war of currents had a winner, and it wasn't Edison's.
At an experimental station outside town, Tesla built the largest coil ever made and used it to throw bolts of artificial lightning over a hundred feet. The locals said the ground hummed. He said he'd picked up a signal from somewhere that wasn't Earth — history remembers it as static. He never took it back.
J.P. Morgan put up $150,000 to build a wireless telegraph tower. Tesla built something much bigger — a machine to broadcast electricity itself, free, to anyone on Earth. He never told Morgan that part.
187 feet of timber and steel, capped with a dome sixty-eight feet across. For a few years it was the tallest, strangest, most hopeful thing on Long Island.
Marconi has just thrown a single letter across the Atlantic on kit costing a fraction of your tower. Morgan wants to know why he should keep paying. You could talk patents and telegrams and buy another year. Or you could tell him what the tower is actually for — and bet the whole future on a banker's better nature.
Nobody is quite sure why Morgan kept writing cheques. Perhaps "free power for everyone" sounded, in the right light, like a monopoly on everything. The night the tower first sang, lightning poured up into the clouds and every compass needle on Long Island leaned toward Shoreham.
It never went dark again.
A Wardenclyffe on every horizon. Energy is broadcast, not billed — ships pull it from the sky mid-ocean, a farm in the dark of nowhere runs its cold-stores off an antenna, and no child alive has ever seen a power line.
Somewhere in every city there is a statue of the man who gave the grid away. The plaque says what he said to Morgan: the earth itself will carry it.
This is the future he was actually building, the one he never told the banker about. Boundless, unmetered, humming quietly overhead. It only ever needed one man with money to blink.
When Morgan's final refusal arrived, Tesla fired the tower. That July, people along the Sound watched lightning pour off the dome into the night sky, and the New York papers wrote it up as a mystery. It wasn't a mystery. It was a man spending the last of the money on proof.
Then the tower went dark. It never fired again.
Once he understood Tesla intended to give electricity away, the money stopped arriving. The tower stood unfinished, a monument to a plan nobody but Tesla still believed in.
In 1917, the government decided an idle tower on the coast was a liability — maybe a spy tower, they said. It came down for scrap. Tesla was not there to watch.
He lived his last decades in hotel rooms, feeding pigeons, filing patents nobody built, still certain the world would eventually need what he'd already invented twice. He died alone in the Hotel New Yorker in January 1943, owing rent.
Nobody ever picked up his signal from Wardenclyffe. That's not really the point of sending one.
This is the one that happened. Pylons and meters and monthly bills — his alternating current in every one of them, under someone else's name for a century. The tower came down; the idea didn't.
Two other futures are still hiding at the forks.