Mad inventors are plentiful
in this world of ours but only one sits on a genuine throne and rules his own
city like an ancient king. Frabjal Troose of Moonville has many dubious
talents, including the ability to flap his ears. They squeak. But his
cybernetics expertise is considerable and his contributions to the design and
manufacture of artificial nervous systems are almost unparalleled. Only his
perversity prevents him from becoming the saviour of the human race.
Perhaps
I am overstating the case, but his monumental achievements are singularly
unhelpful to his own subjects and the citizens of every other realm. What
amuses Frabjal Troose is to install human intelligence in inanimate objects.
With the aid of extremely small but excessively clever devices, part electronic
and part mechanical, he can bestow the gift of consciousness with all its
attendant emotions on chairs, crockery, table lamps, shoes, clocks, flutes.
He
can and he does. Frequently.
His
other hobby is to worship the moon…
One
morning Frabjal Troose awoke with the urge to give thoughts and feelings to a
mirror. He foresaw all manner of comic and tragic potential in the reality of a
self-aware looking glass. To make the joke even more piquant he decided to
equip his victim with prosthetic legs and allow it to roam freely around the
city. He left his enormous bed and went to the bathroom and there he saw an
appropriate mirror hanging on the wall above the moon shaped sink.
The
operation took several days. Frabjal Troose is a perfectionist and he wanted
the circuits and cogs to be tastefully integrated into the frame of the mirror.
In the end the workings ran over the surface of the wooden frame like complex
ornamentation. By this time, the mirror could already think for itself and was
slowly coming to terms with its sudden awareness and the need to develop an
identity. It was no longer a mere object but a precious sentient being.
It
even had a name. Guildo Glimmer.
Guildo
learned to walk within his first hour. Wandering the palace of Frabjal Troose,
little more than a large house stuffed with components for new gadgets, he came
into contact with the occasional servant. At each encounter the same thing
happened: the servant bent down and made a face at Guildo. Sometimes the
servant picked him up and held him at arm’s length while plucking a nose hair
or squeezing a pimple. What did this mean? Guildo was bewildered.
He
continued his explorations and discovered that the front door of the palace was
open and unguarded. Through it he hurried, into the lunar themed spaces of the
city. Moon buggies rolled past on the roads and the public squares were craters
filled with people dressed in silver and yellow clothes. I know that Frabjal
Troose once issued an edict forbidding any grins that were not perfect
crescents. He also forbade any cakes that were not perfect croissants.
Guildo
proceeded down the street. He desperately needed time for reflection, but
citizens just would not leave him in peace and they treated him in precisely
the same way as the palace servants had, making blatant faces at him, grimacing
and yawning and even frowning in disgust. Guildo began to experience the state
of mind known as ‘paranoia’. What was wrong with his appearance? What was it
about him that provoked such reactions in strangers?
He
must be ugly, a horrible freak, a grotesque mutant: there was no other
explanation. He was overwhelmed with a desire to view his own face, to confront
his visage, to learn the foul truth for himself. But he could think of no way
to accomplish this. Are you stupid, Guildo Glimmer? he asked himself. There
must be a method of seeing one’s own face, but what? Because he was so new to
the conventions of society, he always spoke his thoughts aloud.
“I
know a reliable way,” declared a passerby.
This
passerby was a droll fellow, a practical joker. He told Guildo that when men
and women wanted to look at their own faces they made use of a ‘reflection’.
What was one of those? Well, reflections existed in a variety of natural
settings, in quiet lakes and slow rivers and the lids of clean saucepans, but
only in the depths of mirrors did they realise their full potential. That is
where the highest quality reflections dwelled, untroubled by ripples or cooking
stains.
“You
must look into a mirror!” he announced.
Guildo
was astonished but grateful and he decided to follow this advice. The passerby
chuckled and passed on. He was later arrested for not chuckling in the shape of
a crescent, but that is another story. No, it is this story! No matter, I will
ignore it in favour of what happened to poor Guildo. His little metallic legs
carried him to the market, a bustling place where anything one desired might be
bought, provided one’s desires were modest or at least plausible.
Guildo’s
were. He approached a stall selling mirrors.
The
man who owned the stall was talking to another customer and so Guildo was free
to hop onto a table and examine the mirrors on display. He chose a circular
mirror that was nearly the same circumference as his own head and he stepped in
front of it. What he saw was totally unexpected and utterly profound. He saw an
immensely long tunnel, a tunnel that stretched perhaps as far as the moon or
infinity.
It
must be pointed out once again that Guildo Glimmer was a living mirror. A
mirror is simply unable to view its own reflection. The moment a mirror gazes
into another mirror, its image will be endlessly bounced back and forth between
the two reflecting surfaces. Hence the illusion of a tunnel. This is a law of
geometry and a rule of physics, but Guildo knew nothing of such disciplines.
His education had not covered the sciences.
As
far as he was concerned, the illusory tunnel was an accurate representation of
his form. This meant that he really was a tunnel! Now he understood why people
kept frowning at him and why he was so dissatisfied. It was because he was not
fulfilling his correct role. He was a tunnel and ought to do what tunnels do,
act like tunnels act, think what tunnels think. He rushed out of the market to
embrace his true destiny.
Later
that afternoon, the splinters of a smashed mirror were picked up from the
tracks of the main railway line leading into Moonville. When pieced together
they could be identified as the remains of Guildo Glimmer. There was no way of
resurrecting him. Frabjal Troose came to pay his hypocritical respects but he
quickly lost interest and returned to his palace in a land-boat powered by moonbeams.
By this time the sun had gone down and the moon was up.
People
said that Guildo committed suicide, that he was too full of despair to continue
his existence. Why else would he stand in the path of a moving train? But as I
watched the billowing sails of the receding land-boat, I realised that I knew
better. Guildo was simply serving a mistaken function. Tunnels are there for
trains to pass through, after all. I was the driver of that train: in fact I am
the train itself, an earlier example of the unnatural quest to give
intelligence to inanimate objects.
