Diana Pho - Steampunk World

The Sultan was interested in lies as well. They were a grand distraction from rumors, and the Ottoman Empire was becoming full of vile and horrid ones.

But behind every rumor is a semblance of truth. Nikos Antonakis learned this when he went to work as one of the myriad photographers called upon by the Sultan to document the Ottoman Empire with their lenses. Many of these photos became official tourist propaganda and souvenirs, but none of Nikos’ images would be found in foreign scrapbooks, even less likely upon the gallery wall.

He began taking images that showed the classical grandeur and status of the Empire, but rumors of an uprising in his home village in Girit made him aim his lens beyond empirical glory and towards some unacknowledged Ottoman truths. He heard of other incidents and revolts in Armenia, and took his lens there.

The Photography Project had little tolerance for journalism, so Nikos sent his tintype testimonies to certain liberal reform newspapers under the Turkish name Bora Fahir Çağlar, thinking a proper Turkish name would give his work more credit. Even with the pseudonym, he knew he’d be found out and arrested.

So it was no surprise that, a fortnight after the photographs were published, police stormed his home, beat him unconscious, and burned down his hut along with his darkroom, and carted him off to Constantinople to a dirty jail cell.

But he did not awaken in a jail. He found himself on a straw mattress shoved in the corner of a stonewall laboratory, his right foot chained to a ball. Standing over him was von Froeschner, with a reassuring smile and a lab coat splattered in oil. He spoke to Nikos in Turkish:

“You don’t know me, my friend, but I know you. While it has earned you the Sultan’s disfavor, I admire your work and have heard much about your methods. In fact, it is my admiration that has kept you alive; it can keep you alive if you will help me.”

Nikos spat at his shoes. Von Froeschner nodded and gestured for the guards to unchain him.

“See, already you are freer than before. Please, let me show you something; it may change your mind.” He held his hand up to the guards to give Nikos over and he led the photographer-prisoner over to a slab where lay the Şehrazat.

She was undressed, with her skull and cabinet-torso open. Nikos could see how her appendages were attached to her torso-cabinet via bronze-wired knitting. The inner workings that would confound the tourists when she was displayed were pulled away, and Nikos could see deep inside her guts were three tiny gas lights sputtering cobalt flame, a slanted mirror that optimized and directed the lightening, and a spool on a rotating mechanism. Von Froeschner rummaged in the cabinet, connecting and attaching various things, and pointed to what Nikos would later learn was Bey’s tableau scroll on an adjacent table.

“I think you know how to install that here.” He watched Nikos place the scroll on the spool and came up behind him to ensure it was aligned. He closed her up, and walked to her skull. He gestured for Nikos to stand next to him. Nikos glimpsed the inside and saw that the skull housed a small brain connected to various internal prongs. The sight startled him, and von Froeschner placed a hand on his shoulder. “Ah, yes. It is disconcerting at first. It was generously donated to us from the Sultan, whose pet capuchin was ravaged by a tiger last week.”

Where matter and metal met, blue sparks exploded when von Froeschner pulled a lever beside the slab. A soft hum emanated from her, and a bright light projected from her eyes to the ceiling, creating the pale yellow and Prussian blue of Cappadocia.

“There. You see?” Nikos marveled with mouth agape as the diorama became animated on the ceiling. The image was as clear and sharp as a photograph, but rendered in the palette of the Orientalists, making it the most realistic image he had ever seen. The image itself moved, not by rotation, but zoomed in and out of the scenery like binoculars. As amazing as that was, Nikos couldn’t help but think: it is inaccurate, like most paintings. It isn’t real; it isn’t truth.

“What…what is this? A diorama?” he asked.

“Yes, for now she is a diorama, but she has the potential to become much more. The Sultan terms her a truth machine. People will believe what they see—it will be real to them. It will become memory—like a visceral dream.”

“But it isn’t true,” Nikos muttered.

“The Truth is not real unless it can be seen—as you well know, a picture never lies.”

Nikos stared up at the projection as it entered the Turkish Baths. “It depends on the picture. Many pictures lie.”

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.