Джефф Вандермеер - The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

That final apparition proved most unfortunate for Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb and subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On June 14, 1914, a hungry fifty-eight-year-old Tesla, desperate for a wealthy sponsor after so many investors had deserted him in favour of archrival American electro-tycoon Thomas Edison, sought to attract the royal patronage of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand.

An overly enthusiastic Mr. Tesla bade his assistants wheel his neurheographiton into the streets of Sarajevo near Tesla’s laboratory in search of the archduke’s motorcade. Mr. Tesla planned to project its “plasmic balm” directly through the air and into the crania of the manifold madmen and wild women who prowled the city at all hours of the day and night, so as to prove his device’s capacity to unleash a torrent of industrialism among the newly sane, for the betterment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Nikola Tesla ca. 1890, well before the majority of his troubles.

Tesla, a fine statistician in his own right, predicted the likelihood of the neurheographiton unleashing an electrophantasmic discharge as less than 1 per cent. Alas for Tesla, and even more for the archduke and the archduchess, that 1 per cent manifested as a crackle of electrons that bored directly through their bodies like any American accent through any English gathering. And, unfortunately for Gavrilo Princip, the electrophantasm happened to resemble him down to the last detail, with the apparitional stapler appearing to be, to all mortified onlookers, a Browning FN model 1910 pistol.

Princip’s absolute innocence—Princip’s whereabouts were verified by more than a dozen eyewitnesses at a local Bohemian “cheese shop” (opium den)—was of no defense, largely because, since age eleven, he’d told any Sarajevan who would listen to him that he longed for nothing more than the chance to execute “any Austrian royalist bastard I can get my grimies on.” Indeed, Princip had only a fortnight previously completed a tattoo across his back (employing, ironically, another of Mr. Tesla’s inventions, the electrographic somatic autodecorator), depicting himself decapitating Austrian emperor Franz Josef I with a cricket bat.

A Second Try in America

Fearing that it was only a matter of time before the authorities connected the archduke’s accidental death (and the subsequent Great War that engulfed all of Europe) to the neurheographiton and to him (or assumed that Princip had been Tesla’s human weapon aimed at the archduke), Mr. Tesla returned to the United States to resume developing his mentation engine.

But Tesla quickly found that his funding troubles were as dire as ever. While his protracted conflict with Edison yielded him nothing but grief, his failed lawsuit against Guglielmo Marconi over the patent for radio left him even further in debt.

Aleister Crowley, in mushroom cap, during the majority of his troubles.

The following decades were unkind to Mr. Tesla, consisting of quixotic struggles that included a rapid opposition to the League of Nations and increasingly violent claims that “secretive operatives ensconced inside black submarinal vessels patrolled the very oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers in order to spy upon us all with their telescoping looking-glasses!” Tesla developed impulsions, including the unquenchable urge to orbit buildings three times before he entered them, to have a stack of three folded napkins at every meal, and to produce neither less nor more than three bowel emissions at every 3 A.M. and 3 P.M. precisely. Finally, on March 3, 1933, Mr. Tesla’s maddened certainty that he would win himself a sponsor granted him dividends. Word of his achievements and theories won him patronage of a Mr. Allen Dulles and a Mr. J. E. Hoover. For them, he constructed the Electrical Neurheographiton, Mark 2, which Tesla promised could not only rewrite mental histories but read them, making his device a deception-detector and espionage-recognition motor.

But, alas, patronage for Tesla was not to be. Mr. Tesla, in a bid to impress his sponsors that his device was no mere quackery or hocus-pocusion, arranged a private demonstration for Mr. Dulles and Mr. Hoover. While posterity does not record the contents of what Tesla revealed, Mr. Dulles was said to have quipped to a young Senator John Kennedy that Mr. Hoover found enormous distaste for Tesla’s “sartorial speculations” about Mr. Hoover’s leisure hours.

Triumph and Death of Tesla, and the Disappearance of the Neurheographiton

Effectively indexed by the elites who could fund his research, Mr. Tesla embarked on a new odyssey: touring the United States with the smaller, more portable Electrical Neurheographiton, Mark 3, as part of “Genius Nikola Tesla’s Electric Circus,” announcing “electrical exorcism of various mental afflictions and neurological maladies.” Mr. Tesla eventually made enough money (and trade in chickens and illicit spirits) from his circus to fund his various researches for the remainder of his life, including into “electro-transdimensional portals.”

Finally tendering “exclusive” sales of the technical specifications of the Mark 4 to Warner Bros. Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and United Artists in 1939, Tesla departed from public life, offering occasional anti-Relativity screeds while devoting most of his time to developing a “teleforce projector,” or death ray.

On January 12, 1943, Mr. Tesla was claimed to have died, although reports were conflicting. Many in Hollywood conjectured immediately that assassins in the pay of Big Cinema had done in the Serbian genius for selling them “exclusive” rights to a device whose blueprints contained, in tiny print, the phrase “I have omitted an explanation only for the motive unit which makes the entire machine work, in fear that the alchemists of celluloid might enthrall their nation and the world with ludicrous tales of vacuous lives.” Others believed that Mr. Tesla’s madness finally claimed him, inflicting him with a Jovian “brain burst” that produced not Minerva but rather a puddle of bloodied grey matter upon Tesla’s hotel room floor. Among the modern-day Fraternal Society of Teslic Scientific Investigators, there remains the belief that Tesla’s “corpse” was an electrophantasmic discharge that had merged with organic materials in the hotel room to produce a permanent simulacrum of Tesla, while the “real” man departed from this world to explore the Universe, unhindered by the constraints of mortals.

Documentation released following the dissolution of Yugoslavia at least identifies the path that Mr. Tesla’s inventions took following their master’s putative death. Farmer and amateur inventor Mr. Rhett Greene tracked down every working or dysfunctional electrical neurheographiton and, by means of wagon train, transported their many parts back to his “robotorium” (barn) in the then Dominion of Newfoundland, where he, without success, laboured for several years to make them work. Then, on Christmas Day 1947, Yugoslavian agents forcibly entered Mr. Greene’s barn under cover of darkness and extracted all of Mr. Tesla’s creations they found there.

The Lambshead Imperative

Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, who had long enjoyed Mr. Tesla’s invectives against Dr. Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, in 1997 tracked the remains of Tesla’s most bizarre device (that had actually worked) to the Sub-Basement 6 of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito Museum of Yugoslavian Civilisation. Apparently long-forgotten, the neurheographiton had been used to produce an indiscernible, global, mental domination, viz., to effect the export and sale of the Yugo. Because the Bosnian-Herzegovinian state held no interest in the ravings of a Serbian “madman,” Lambshead was able to acquire the entirety of the Tesla collection for the sum of 100 marka (about US $66). By the conditions of Dr. Lambshead’s will, Lambshead’s estate lent Tesla’s materials to the Slovenian National Museum of Electrical Engineering (L2010.01), where they were nearly destroyed in a terrorist attack by members of the Church of Electrology.