The Prince

Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza looked with narrowed eyes at the map that lay spread out below him on the table. His two hands were clenched in fists, the left resting on the border between Serbia, which belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and Walachia, the right on the Russian city of Kishinev, not far from the border of the Principality of Moldavia. Bucharest… Iași… The prince's eye travelled back and forth between the capitals of the two principalities he had united into the United Principalities of Moldavia and Walachia. Mihail Kogălniceanu, his closest adviser, was in the room with him. And as always when the prince was silent and had put on a look like this, Mihail knew that he would do well not to disturb him. What he didn't know was that the prince's mind was not on the revolution, as Mihail had assumed. The prince watched his realm from above, but instead of thinking of the tremendous tasks that lay ahead of him and his followers, his thoughts turned to the dream he had dreamed the night before and which left him no longer in peace. Restlessness had spread in him since those hours when he had awakened from the dream. A strange thought crossed his mind: had he woken at all? How could he be sure that he wasn't still dreaming? He frowned at the thought and turned his attention to the document on the table.

The map the prince was staring at began to blur. The borders between Walachia, Moldavia and Transylvania were no longer clearly visible and the blue of the Black Sea was now a viscous mass that gradually flowed into the interior and swallowed ever larger parts of land. The prince blinked and rubbed his eyes, but it didn't help: the world blurred more and more before his eyes. Suddenly an image flashed through the prince's mind. It was like the echo of a memory that danced erratically through his head, like the flame on a candle wick in the wind. A feeling of familiarity overcame the prince, but it remained abstract, intangible, like the shadow of waving leaves in the moonlight. The prince suspected that he had already experienced what he was just experiencing, and with this insight a sense of urgency rose in him. It was almost as if someone inside wanted to warn him about what was happening. But the more Cuza tried to get a clear thought, the more the thoughts blurred in his head. The world around the prince began to spin in an onset of vertigo. Cuza intuitively wanted to support himself on the table, but his hands disappeared into the tabletop... He wanted to cry for help, yet all he managed was a silent scream. The prince tried to turn to his companion, but before he could twist his body the table swallowed him whole as he fell headlong into the swirling mass in front of him.

When the prince came to, he found himself in a place unknown to him, at a time – he did not know when – far in the future or long in the past. Cuza hovered at a dizzying height over a city that grew like a huge ulcer from a sea bay into a wide plain. He was hundreds of meters above this city and yet he could recognize all the details of the world below him. He saw people of different sizes and colors, accompanied by machines – or machine-like beings. In one moment man and machine went side by side, in the next moment they merged and became one. The prince was aware that he was dreaming. He even warned himself to wake up, but he didn’t succeed. It was as if something held him in that dream. Cuza only tried to fight the dream briefly, but quickly realized that this was pointless. Then he realized that he could control his dream.

The prince hovered over the city and looked at the world below. There, streets ran wildly criss-cross, apparently without any system. Long trains drove in complete silence and without emitting any steam on endless tracks into the horizon. A myriad of smaller vehicles drove on streets, which seemed to float above the ground. The vehicles were lined up like pearls on a chain. Sometimes they stood still, then the pearls started moving again. Stop – move – stop – move... It was like the rhythm with which a monk leads a rosary through his hand. It was a strange spectacle that struck the prince from up here as utterly unreal. Yet he knew that the world he was seeing was the real world. It was his world in another time, in another place.

Place... As if this thought had set a movement in motion within him, the prince's attention was suddenly drawn to another place. The prince glided weightlessly through the air and soon hovered over a large square surrounded by buildings towering high into the sky. Thousands upon thousands of small dots scurried across the square, people who, from up here, looked like ants following an invisible chemical trail. After a short time, Cuza recognized a pattern in the dynamics on the ground. The surroundings, which had previously appeared random to him, now showed a clear order: the place over which the prince was hovering was the focal point of a center. Roads led to and from this center. The concrete desert beyond this center was riddled with streets, tracks, electrical lines and countless houses that protruded from the ground like gravestones. For miles this image dominated the landscape until it was disrupted by another center, similar to the one above which the prince was hovering. The prince looked around and saw that a total of seven of these centers lay around him on an arc of a circle which, had it not been interrupted by a huge bay, would have formed a full circle that connected all centers with one another. Suddenly it was clear before the prince's eyes: the city he was hovering over was not a city but a multitude of cities that had grown together. It was a huge agglomeration of man, machine, concrete and steel.

A buzzing sound interrupted the prince's thoughts. It stirred from below and gradually grew louder. The prince looked along his feet into the abyss and saw a machine fly towards him. The machine was not large and had no recognizable weapons or anything to alert the prince (apart from the fact that first contact with this type of machine should have alerted the prince). But curiosity and boldness took precedence over fear and allowed the prince to follow the approaching machine with those narrowed eyes with which he would otherwise study documents of strategic relevance. The machine approached quickly and as it did the prince wondered how this little thing could move through the air. The device was small, much smaller than him. In the middle it consisted of a kind of plate on which four other, smaller plates hung at equal intervals. These little plates, the prince assumed, had to be the driving force. The plate in the middle was big as a fist. Its color was a shade of black. Not as black as the black of the oil, but not yet dark gray, more like a lump of coal. The flying plate was now whirring around the prince. Cuza suspected that the whirring sound came from the drive of the device, but he could not make out a drive system. It appeared to be a technology that was way ahead of his time. So the prince came to the conclusion that he had to be dreaming of a future. Which time he was exactly dreaming, however, remained a mystery to the prince. The little flying machine had circled the prince a few times and was now hovering some distance in front of his face. Something that looked like a big pupil made of black glass stared at him. In it he saw the reflection of his own face. Suddenly a green light appeared next to the lens that was looking at him. For a moment the haze of a cloud enveloped the prince and the machine. In those seconds the prince realized that the point was really a line between him and the machine. It was a kind of beam aimed right at his heart. The point on his chest parted and spread like a fan. The prince looked down at himself and saw a green line on his torso that went from arm to arm. The prince blinked. As if he had activated a trigger, the beam of green light split again into an upper and a lower one. The upper ray traveled from his heart to the prince's head. The lower beam traveled down his body to his feet. As the beam moved along his body, the prince felt a shiver travel up his spine. He didn't know why, but the prince immediately realized that the beam would not harm him. It occurred to him that this device was somehow measuring him. After both beams had scanned him, there was a beep and the green light went out. With that the machine turned away from him and flew off ... Intuitively, the prince wanted to follow the machine. The thought was enough to get his body moving.

Like the seed of the dandelion in the wind, the prince flew through the air and followed the unknown aircraft when he heard a whisper behind his back:

“The children of the future paint pictures

of a long forgotten past

this way they craft ideas

that in our world cannot last.”

“The children of the future paint pictures

of a time that has not yet been

this way they point toward the truth

which in our world remains unseen.”

The prince looked around and suddenly found himself surrounded by absolute darkness. He still seemed to float, but instead of being in control of his movement as before, he was now hanging on the invisible ropes of an equally invisible puppeteer, in the center of a void space. The prince felt helplessness and panic bubble up in him. His throat felt like it was squeezed by strong, ghostly hands that wanted to choke him. He writhed, but his arms and legs wriggled like those of a man drowning helplessly in water. Cuza opened his mouth to scream, but the world remained silent.

Then he saw the light. It suddenly stood right in front of him in the void and blinded him so much that he was forced to close his eyes.

Again he heard the voice.

"What glows will soon unglow...

what withered, again shall grow."

Countless points of light danced in front of his closed eyelids and flew around him like fireflies. Cuza followed one of the larger points of light and saw it connect to another point of light. This spectacle was repeated and suddenly the multitude of radiant points of light became a wave on which the prince rode. When the prince realized this, all points of light and the wave disappeared with them.

For a moment there was absolute darkness and only a thought remained.

Every act of power is a compromise.

Then Cuza opened his eyes and saw.