Mytro

Chapter 25: Map

again. Men of war saw the Mytro as an excellent way to transport troops and weapons. The pacifists saw grave danger. The group included some of the Llorente family, a young German patent clerk named Albert Einstein, a mathematician from England named David Hilbert, and many others. They began work on the great Mytro map and began to explore the notion of controlling the Mytro so it could not fall into the wrong hands.

The original Mytratti had laid the first tracks and created the first Mytro cars. They were based on the omnibus streetcar designs that were gaining popularity in European cities. Before that, the Mytro had beckoned travelers, much as it had when the Llorente brothers first found it. While the Mytro "worked," it was wildly disconcerting to be flung into the darkness by a wild wind. The Mytratti thought it would be much more comfortable to board a train in a civilized, well-maintained station.

George Brown, a Baltimore businessman who went on to found the B&O Railroad, laid the first tracks and hauled in the first Mytro car on a whim. The year was 1820, and Brown hoped the trains would carry passengers comfortably without the disconcerting feeling of being flung into the darkness by a wild wind. The tracks actually ran only the length of the stations and were cut off abruptly in the dark tunnels. They couldn't figure out how to lay tracks deeper into the darkness and it didn't seem to matter.

Luckily, this station-building experiment worked, and Brown began routing more cars through into the darkness. He built small stations using a group of workers, sworn to secrecy. The Mytratti protected the mystery of the stations with their lives, and once in a great while, men were thrown down into the tunnels to keep them quiet.

Their goal, at the beginning of the 19th century, was to harness the Mytro as a transportation system for mankind. Again and again, however, other groups moved in and took control of stations, capturing them and charging admission to ride. Every time the Mytro was to be revealed to the world, something would happen: a man would be pushed onto the tracks and sucked into the void, a fight would break out in a rarely used station, or a fire would gut a popular terminal. No one could be trusted with the Mytro, and so, again, after years of improvement, the Mytro was shut down for half a century.

Those who knew about the Mytro rarely spoke about it, but in

1914, the Mytro was slowly creeping back into public consciousness. Like a half-remembered dream, these new Mytratti did not question the existence of the Mytro, and tried to devise a method to control it. Like so many before them, they would fail, but in their search they began to learn far more about it than they ever expected.

Their first goal was to be able to shut down the Mytro when it was deemed too dangerous. Their second goal was to control the Mytro completely and to create a group of trained conductors to run the system and protect it. Many of the physicists understood that the Mytro operated well outside the realm of physics but how far outside no one was sure. Einstein and Alan Turing argued that the Mytro, like any physical object, had to follow the laws of nature. Many mystics in attendance, including a hooded man called Frater Perdurabo, believed the Mytro was metaphysical, something spiritual and more akin to a god than a train line. Neither party could agree, and in a way, it didn't matter. The Mytro simply was.

On that night, Perdurabo was dozing in the attic of the factory they had rented in Geneva when he was struck by a vision: a Key, the wards controlled by clockwork, that could send signals through the Mytro that would stop it and start it. Perdurabo imagined keyholes in every car that could shut them down permanently, perhaps even take control of the tunnels themselves.

Perdurabo never looked at the science of the thing, just the mystical patterns that the Mytro cast up before him. In his dream, he saw the shadow of the Key on a stone wall. He saw its patterns, the shape of its wards, the large head. A chain ran down from it and there was a crown, like a watch crown, to wind the Key like a clock. The Keys together would give the owner great power—at least that's what he imagined in his vivid dream.

The Mytro was a closed box, but Perdurabo was sure he had solved the mystery. He gathered the Mytratti together in a room— the scientists, the watchmakers, the astronomers—and asked for a piece of paper. An oil lamp guttered in the drafty warehouse and the Mytratti stood around him in a circle. He took up a long black fountain pen and sat, nib poised to paper, for a long time.

Slowly, slowly, with his eyes open but unseeing, his hand began

to move, seemingly of its own accord. Outside, the cold Geneva evening grew colder as he scratched line after line on the cream- colored paper. In a near trance, he traced out two Keys—one long and thin, a skeleton key topped by a clockwork control system and another, shaped like a coin, designed to wind and set the Conductor's Key. In all, the machine-like key less resembled a skeleton key than clocks on the end of a long rod. When he was done, he threw the pen down and dropped backwards in exhaustion. The many scientists in the room laughed or stormed out while the watchmakers pored over the plans, discussing the finer points of the design.

"I will not be insulted by this hocus-pocus," wrote one prominent chemist that night in his diary.

The manufacture of the Key took a decade. Perdurabo changed the drawings multiple times, adding new read-outs and controls. It became more and more complex and now looked more like a pocket watch than a key. The Conductor's Key, as it was now called, held the real power. Now the Mytratti wanted to make multiple keys so they hired the best watchmakers in Switzerland to begin mass producing them.

The war interrupted the manufacture, and for a brief period, the Key—along with Perdurabo's plans—was lost. It reappeared in Warsaw and then travelled east as the Germans began to menace Europe again.

No one was quite sure what Perdurabo was doing or how his Key even worked. The first person to try the Key was Agata's grandfather who used it to shut down the entire Mytro from New York to Moscow. The only means of communication back then was wireless, and countless coded telegrams flew between continents confirming that the Mytro was not running.

13 SHUT NO TRAINS STOP. One telegram read, "13" being the code name for the Mytro, a sideways letter M with a line under it.

Many were upset with Perdurabo. The Mytratti wrote long, detailed letters to each other, discussing how they would take control of the Mytro if given the chance. Some would help refugees escape war-torn areas, and others would organize bucket brigades for parched farms. There had to be some way to use the Mytro for good, they argued.

Others wanted to use the Mytro for personal gain. They thought

they could use it to smuggle soldiers over distant borders, and there was talk of using it as an ammunition transport for armies. Some Mytro stop doors could be altered to accommodate much larger vehicles, so they often thought of rolling huge carriages laden with goods and leading them out to the streets of a far-off trading post, ignoring local taxes and customs fees.

Perdurabo kept a diary into which he jotted ideas about the Mytro and its possible uses. But the Conductor's Key was still his crowning masterpiece.

Tales were told that Perdurabo died in Brussels or Bruges or sank in a submarine off the coast of Portugal after the war.

Rumor had it, however, that before he died, Perdurabo made one important visit. One night in 1945, the dark, strange man took the Mytro to visit the Llorente villa. He carried with him his diaries, maps, and the Conductor's Key. At some point during the war they had completed multiple copies of the Key. And they worked.

That was the last anyone had heard of the keys. The Llorentes lost their fortune, Perdurabo was gone, and the keys vanished into history. It would take half a century for them to be rediscovered.

"Then your father began to research it again, finding the old books and the old maps," said Mr. Kincaid. "We're the new Mytratti, your father, your uncle, myself, and a group of very rich men who see the potential in the Mytro. We're here to finally tame it, once and for all."

"Do you think all that is true? That story?" asked Agata.

"There are lots of tall tales told about the Mytro, and that's one of them. But I do know your father was closer than most to the truth, and whatever that truth was got him kidnapped," said Mr. Kincaid.