Play 6: Tesla is the Man

CHARACTERS
TYLER, 17
GREG, 16

(They sit on the steps outside a school entrance.)

TYLER
You ever heard of him?

GREG
What’s his name again?

TYLER
Nikola Tesla.

GREG
Nope. Who is he?

TYLER
Pretty brilliant scientist and engineer.

GREG
He do anything?

TYLER
He figured out a way to harness the energy of the Earth’s rotation to produce unlimited energy; all you’d need to do is buy a transformer and you’d have all the energy you’d need for free from then on.

GREG
Did it work?

TYLER
In theory it did.

GREG
How bout in practice?

TYLER
Never tried.

GREG
How come?

TYLER
He worked for PG&E, and when he told them his idea they told him to give them all his files and that he was fired.

GREG
What the fuck? Why?

TYLER
If once you buy the transformer you have unlimited energy for free, then they’d go bankrupt pretty fast.

GREG
So we gotta pay for energy and waste all these resources cause the people at PG&E were greedy bastards?

TYLER
Pretty much.

GREG
Wait, when did all this happen?

TYLER
Somewhere around the forties I think, I’m not sure really.

GREG
He do anything else cool?

TYLER
Yeah, bunch of shit. One thing I remember is he only would take naps, never sleep for long, so he found it very inconvenient that it got dark at night and figured out a way to ionize the upper atmosphere.

GREG
And that means?

TYLER
Pretty much it’d be light out all day. But it was questionable whether the process would be reversible.

GREG
I kinda get why that one didn’t happen.

TYLER
Yeah. You gotta admit it’s still pretty fucking brilliant though.

GREG
Yeah.

TYLER
He invented a shitload of other stuff too. The depressing thing is almost no one knows who he is. They all talk about finding renewable energy and can’t seem to do it and someone figured it out fifty years ago, and almost no one has a clue.

GREG
That is kinda depressing.

TYLER
Yeah, fucking capitalism at its best right there.

GREG
Better than communism still.

TYLER
Ehh, at least communism worked in theory.

GREG
How bout in practice?

TYLER
Everything went to hell. People are bastards, what can I say.

(Lights down.)