Spirit Phone

The Spirit Phone was a device created by great Cog Thomas Edison to contact to dead. It was located in room XIII of Edison General Electric's (EGE) Shelved Projects Branch in Menlow Park, NJ

It started as a lark, an experiment to silence the quacks and charlatans, who all claimed that they could talk to the dead. Edison's reasoning was that if he built a machine sensitive enough that a ghost could talk through it, then surely, if ghosts were real they’d make themselves known. Then his Cog magic got fired up while he was working on it, and he ended up fiddling with it for three straight weeks, hardly stopping for food, sleep or even water. When he finally dropped from exhaustion, it had nearly and he killed him, and his Power was burned out for a year afterward, but it worked. But nobody ever called in, it was a one-way street and EGE’s best minds don’t know why.

 Lots of money and work went into running the spirit phone, but they never met George Washington or Julius Caesar or anyone interesting. EGE was spending a million dollars a pop to make a call to some random somewhere, and most of the time nobody answered. When it did occasionally work, EGE wasn't getting happy people, many of them didn’t even know they were dead and couldn’t figure out who they were talking to. EGE didn't know where they connected to, just that the spirits of some dead people ended up there. The conversations were usually screaming gibberish, angry ranting in Chinese, that kind of thing. Edison brought in teams of interpreters and even a Babel, because just from pure statistics, most of the ghosts who picked up the other end of the line didn’t speak English. After a while, most people thought that Edison had built a phone line to hell. The Coolidge administration decided that it should be kept secret because news of the spirit phone could cause anxiety among the public and asked that the project be shut down. It didn’t help that a couple of researchers went crazy and there was a rash of suicides on the EGE team. Plus, it was sucking up too much of EGE’s capital to keep it running and it wasn’t like Edison could tell the board that calling hell was a sound investment. So they powered it down, quit making calls, and just gave it enough juice to keep the connection live in case we ever decided to fire it up again. They were worried that if we shut it down completely, we might not ever be able to reconnect. It stayed dormate for a number of years.

 Then on Feburary 13, 1933 the spirit phone rang and for the first time ever, the dead called them. The thing on the other end claimed to be the ghost of Baron Okubo Tokugawa, Chairman of the Imperial Japanese Council, and he asked to speak to Jake Sullivan former Sergeant of the1st Volunteer Active Brigade. EGE then contacted the Bureau of Investigation to locate Mr.Sullivan and they also sent Pemberly Hammer to locate him. He was located within a few days. After the first call the phone rang every seven hundred and seventy-four minutes. The longest that EGE had ever been able to keep a connection was five minutes.

 After Jake Sullivan was located and brought to the Shelved Projects Branch in Menlow Park, NJ, the phone rang early. After a conversations about The Power, The Enemy and The Pathfinder there was a power surge and the containment glass broke, everyone was able to make it out of the room and the blast door shut behind them.

Physical Discription
It's was in a room filled with panels of gauges and flashing lights, and in the very center, cordoned off by protective railings and metal safety cages was a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot glass box filled with crackling lines of electricity and another, slower, blue energy that might have been the visible manifestation of raw magic. The cube was filled with "half the periodic table, including some things that are theoretically supposed to annihilate each other on contact." At the base of the massive, flashing box, there was an older two-piece telephone unit, with separated microphone and earphone, sitting on a small metal cradle next to a folding chair. The room was reinforced, because if the containment box were every to break, it could destory Menlo Park.

Quote
"Finders have proven the existence of disembodied spirits. Thus, I’ve had to revise my opinions on the nature of such spiritualist matters. If we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something."

—Thomas Edison, New York Times, 1921