• The Jitterbug Frequency
    The year was 1919 and the world had just finished killing itself on an industrial scale, and in the aftermath, a young woman in a Geneva hotel room was staring at a whiteboard covered in equations that made no sense to anyone but her. Eleanor Whitfield had not planned to be at the Solvay Conference. She had planned to write a thesis on thermodynamic efficiency at MIT and then, presumably, to...
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  • The corner of seventh
    The thing about Brooklyn is that nobody notices when it ends. Not because it ends loudly. Because it ends the way a neighborhood ends when the rent goes up too high and the bodega becomes a boutique and the bodega guy moves to Queens and the street where you grew up has a new name that nobody uses. Quietly. Systematically. Without anyone throwing a punch. Eliot Rosenberg lived on the corner of...
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  • THE DARK CIRCUIT
    The radio in the break room had been broken for three weeks and Jack Murdock kept meaning to fix it and kept not meaning to fix it, which was typical of Jack Murdock—he kept meaning to do things and kept not doing them, which was how you ended up thirty-four years old, drafted into a war you didn't understand, fixing electrical equipment in a hole beneath the earth. "Come on, you old bitch," he...
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  • THE PEOPLE'S ENGINE
    ### Act I: The Spark James Callahan first understood what engineering meant at the age of twelve, when he was sent into the depths of the Homestead Steel Plant to unclog a jammed conveyor belt that had brought the entire rolling mill to a halt. The foreman had given him a choice: crawl through the gap between two moving rollers, or watch his father lose a week's wages for the downtime. James...
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  • The jazz of fading stars
    The music was dying, and nobody wanted to admit it. Not in New York, where the music was everything. Not in Chicago, where the music was the only thing. And certainly not in Julian Ashford, who had spent the last five years composing jazz that made people dance because they were afraid of what would happen when the music stopped. It was 1925, and the city was drowning in its own prosperity....
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  • The patient from below
    Dr. Eleanor Hart had been coming to the Blackwood Institute for three weeks when she first heard the word transfiguration. The patient who said it was in Room 217—the highest security room on the fourth floor, where the walls were padded with beige fabric that had been stained by decades of fingerprints, heads thrown against them in moments of despair, and hands pressed flat in moments of...
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  • THE LAST LIGHT
    The antenna was old. That was the first thing Matt Wheeler noticed when he arrived at Outpost Delta—that everything about it was old. The dish was scratched and faded. The transmitter unit was a model that had been discontinued five years ago. The cables were frayed in places and patched with electrical tape in others. It was the kind of equipment that the Army kept because replacing it would...
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  • The Aetheric Persistence
    The fog rolled off the Thames that July of 1876, thick as wool and just as suffocating, and into it came the light that would end Arthur's life and begin hers. Eileen Watson was nineteen when she stood in the garden of their Sussex estate and watched the impossible light descend upon her uncle and aunt. It was not lightning as any sensible person would recognize it -- no crack of thunder, no...
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  • THE WEIGHT OF NOTHING
    ### Act I: The Spark Ethan Cross stood in the supermarket aisle for twelve minutes before making a decision. The decision was about cereal. There were fourteen brands on the shelf, from store-brand corn flakes at three dollars a box to artisanal granola at nine dollars, and Ethan was trying to choose one. Not because he was hungry—hunger was not the issue. The issue was that each choice carried...
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  • The Golden Exchange
    The ticker tape never stopped talking. That was the first thing Vincent Moretti learned on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: the machine had opinions, and they came in the form of punched paper ribbons that fell like confetti from the ceiling of a cathedral built for a new god. He was nineteen, Irish-Italian from Hester Street, with ink on his fingers and a photographic memory that made...
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