Von Froeschner chuckled. “And there are many truths. There are harmful truths, just like there are beneficent lies. All are just means to an end.”
“Whose end?”
“That is a good question.” Von Froeschner turned off the machine and walked around the Şehrazat, running his hand down her cabinet-torso. “We are learning that the brain’s capacity is grossly under-utilized. It is much like a difference engine, you know. It has electrical impulses that process and synthesize information at an uncanny rate, and yet we only use it for quotidian tasks, and it could be argued we barely use it for that. I want to test it—to challenge it. With constant stimulation, its capacity for performance could in theory double exponentially, to eventually maintain a tintype-like memory that could store and recall information and perhaps eventually become clairvoyant based upon patterns and probabilities it perceives.”
Nikos could not comprehend what von Froeschner blathered about, but he knew it was momentous, and the excitement of the new, of the truly revolutionary, welled inside him. It made him forget that he was a prisoner and why he had been imprisoned.
“All of that from the brain of a monkey?” Nikos looked away from the diorama to meet von Froeschner’s lachrymose smile.
“Perhaps it could,” he said. “But I am not speaking of this there.” He pointed to the beating rose matter. “I am speaking of that here.” He gently placed his pointer finger on Nikos’ temple. “This is what I need to help me.”
Excitement gut-soured into trepidation within Nikos. “Help you? I am just a photographer. What does this have to do with me?”
Von Froeschner nodded with a frown. “You are aware of the extreme disfavor you’ve garnered yourself? The Sultan wants your head, but he has no use for it other than to make it an example to others. But I have use for it, and so have asked him to give it to me. I admire your mind, you see? I want it to live, to share many truths.”
Nikos looked von Froeschner in the eye. Von Froeschner nodded and then turned away. Before Nikos could ask von Froeschner his meaning, he felt a cold prick at the base of his head and entered an unknown darkness.
The café scene is now a distant one. The image pans over the hundred or so men sitting and discussing politics in traditional costume, and goes beyond the city passing the Basilica Cistern and flying over the slate domes and white spires of Topkapı Palace, soaring over the three courtyards until landing on the Bosporus shore.
Underneath the current of the projections, Nikos dreams of his homeland. Eventually, after being encased within von Froeschner’s contraption of charms for several months, he was able to achieve what von Froeschner had predicted, and under the constant stimulation and processing of tourist information, which included learning their languages, his mind developed the ability to multi-task, to dream and inhabit his internal world of personal memory while continuing to project the faux monde for the tourists, all while processing their cues to synthesize and revamp the diorama.
The Bosporus sea reminds him of the shore where he was born, and he thinks of his mother wasting away.
He is distracted from the dream by the tourists’ gasps—not of the usual astonishment—but of distaste and disappointment. The sea’s flawless view is obstructed by a consumptive Magdalene, who leans over a bed of sand and seaweed and spews sputum from behind her long stringy hair.
“Why, that woman is dying!” a matron proclaims, and Nikos holds onto the image to make it clearer. The tourists see the shore disappear behind barren stone walls and several newly-orphaned children tugging at their lost mother’s soiled skirts.
Several of the female tourists wail at the pathos, upsetting their men.
“Von Froeschner!” a male tourist bellows. “This is grotesque. What is the meaning of this?”
Von Froeschner feigns ignorance and asks the audience to bear with what must be a glitch.
To their relief, they are lead out of the woeful house and into an image of a white stone church on the shore, the azul water lapping the pale yellow sand.
“Now that’s more like it,” says the bellowing Brit. Just then, the image becomes crowded with Turkish soldiers slicing kilijs into Cretan women and children; the church is engulfed in flames. The chiaroscuro haze is so realistic that the tourists panic, and some seek the doors. In response, the image leaves the Cretan massacre and enters the door of the church. The entire room darkens for a moment, and the complaining tourists quiet.
Slowly, a stonewall laboratory fades into their vision. Once the image is fully developed, they see von Froeschner standing in-between two operating tables. On his right they can make out the Şehrazat, her head unbolted, brain exposed and blue-sparking. It takes several moments for the exposure to reveal the other slab, but eventually the tourists make out the chiaroscuro depth of an open and empty human skull.
The tourists become frantic. The atramentous curtains are ripped from the rods, making the horrid image fade.
Those who haven’t fainted or sought escape stare at von Froeschner and the orb-shining Şehrazat. The joke made fifteen minutes ago now hangs in the air like a noose.
Ignoring the tourists, who are demanding to be let out of the locked room, von Froeschner grins and saunters over to shut the Şehrazat down. She returns to her default position, her arm gesturing at the triumphant scientist musing over the mob scene unfolding before him.
The Constantinople street is drenched in pure sunlight, saturating almost all color from the scene. The tall, alabaster stone building that zigzags and narrows the passage casts a Payne’s grey shadow onto the ocher cobblestones. Despite its disparity in hue, the street is made interesting by the people who populate it. Several dozen panting and pale Western tourists, sweating in their grey and pastel wools and cottons, faint and gesture wildly at shrouded women who ignore them, dazed by the seen and unseen of their dreams, bewildered by the scenes of Bora Fahir Çalğar and the truths of Nikos Antonakis.
The Emperor Everlasting
Nayad A. Monroe
September, 1914
With one day left until the Sapa Inca’s meeting with emissaries from the Unified States of Ameriga, Ilyapa had no idea how to salvage the situation. The Emperor was still broken, and to the minds of anyone whose opinions mattered, it was her fault.
The Sapa Inca Ninan Cuyochi, Son of Sun, Emperor of Viracocha’s Land, rested in a musty bundle in the corner of Ilyapa’s temporary workshop, his four-hundred-year-old mummified body wrapped in a gold-embroidered cloak trimmed with hummingbird feathers and turquoise, and his glorious face hidden from the gazes of ordinary people by a translucent cloth.
“How will you demonstrate your superiority to the Amerigans now that you are broken, Powerful Lord? Was it worth the trouble to acquire one thousand wives?” Ilyapa asked him, staring at the metal mechanisms that usually made the Sapa Inca function. Even she, the First Deviser of his court, was now a wife of the Emperor, despite not being noble by birth. Newly and unwillingly wed as an old woman, aged forty-three. She might now have the right to see his face, but she felt no urge to do so.
For the dozenth time that morning, she lifted her gaze from the stone work surface to look out at the distracting view: the modern city of Cuyochitampu, with its driven professionals scurrying along the river-side streets in this wealthy section near the ocean, more colorfully dressed than the workers one might see on the other side of the city, closer to the overpowering Wall of Inti which separated Viracocha’s Land from the strange little country called Panama. Cuyochitampu’s hard edges were so different from the rustic, weathered stone of Ilyapa’s normal surroundings in the University District of ancient Machu Picchu. She wondered if she would be allowed to return to her own small house, or be forced to move into some sort of wives' dormitory in one of the palaces. The oligarchy would at least permit her to continue running the royal workshops; they had promised.