Balkan Cosmology

  Bruce Sterling

  First published online at bruces.medium.com, December 22nd, 2022.

  * * *

  It’s an eccentric work of scientific fabulation that’s my all-too-topical farewell to Belgrade. One of my homes for many years. I could likely sell this yarn and print it somewhere, but why, if no one in the Balkans would see it anyway? An ambivalent gift for Orthodox Christmas.

  * * *

  It was hard work to dig his own grave, but Nikola’s pride kept him at it.

  Raging with fever, he’d thrown some groceries into the Fiat Panda, and fled town for the Balkan mountains, so that no one else could see how sick he was. Nikola had camped and coughed for a dismal week, lurking below towering pines and birches, under the spinning Milky Way.

  Nikola’s bones ached. He spat bloody phlegm. He saw double. He was going to die.

  Nikola Brzak, unknown genius inventor, a prodigious talent who should have transformed the universe, was friendless, starving, sleepless, and face to face with cosmic fatality.

  While pouring sweat and slowly scraping a dank trench for himself in the black soil of the ancient forest, Nikola could comprehend his dismal place in the cosmos. He was dying, but his fate was the fault of Radmila.

  How could a woman go so wrong in her head?

  Radmila lamented that he had “broken her trust forever.” And, sure, maybe Nikola had, a few times. But four weeks of quarantine, jammed together in their too-snug Belgrade apartment, had been enough Radmila for his lifetime. His tragically short lifetime, of 28 years, which was ending in his shallow, nameless grave in the forest.

  Once, he’d loved Radmila so much. She’d been his very life. However: “We crave for new sensations, but soon we become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today’s common occurrences.”

  How true that was.

  Nikola had memorized many similar quotes written by Nikola Tesla (because Nikola Brzak was the namesake of Nikola Tesla, the great Balkan inventor, physicist, and cosmic mystic).

  “You can name no great invention made by a married man.” This was another cogent Tesla insight.

  While perishing of his Covid fever, Nikola Brzak bitterly pondered his own, many, unbuilt, superbly Tesla-esque inventions. Nikola was extremely inventive by his nature, although he’d never registered a patent, or ever built and sold any products.

  He could have disturbed the universe, if not for Radmila.

  Marriage was the briar-patch for a inventor’s soul. Just to please Radmila — (he’d had no other reason, just her nagging and fussing) — he’d given up his inventing, and taken a technical day-job. The Norwegians paid Nikola to install Chinese 5G equipment onto Yugoslav radio towers.

  Smartphones were popular gadgets, so that job paid well. Nikola doted on electronics, too, so that part was also all right. The bad part was Nikola himself had not invented those smartphone gadgets. Instead, Steve Jobs (a rascal widely famed as a world-changing genius) had invented them.

  So Nikola Brzak had only repaired, installed and maintained the gadgets made by some dead billionaire in California. So, alas, instead of becoming world-famous as a brilliant master of physics, mathematics, electronics, and product engineering, Nikola was merely a flunky for capitalist globalization.

  Nikola Brzak had entirely failed to leave any great accomplishment that could mark his comet-like career across the cosmos.

  This was his whole story, and his story was bad. Those precious days of his brief lifetime, wasted working for foreign businessmen. His nights, squandered in bed with the comely Radmila.

  Nikola Brzak would vanish from existence as if he had never been. His landlady would break into his apartment, and ruin all his tool sets, his phone-phreak toys and his many unfinished private technical projects.

  Even his friends would make no big fuss about him, because they were mostly Radmila’s friends.

  Nobody would even care — except for his good old Dad. At this sad thought of his father, a spiritual pang touched Nikola. The old man would notice the disappearance of his son. He would wonder whatever could have happened. He would grieve.

  Nikola understood his dismal fate, as a young man landing in an unmarked grave (because Serbian history abounded with similar episodes). However, Nikola lacked any proper shovel to dig his own grave. Tragically, he had to gouge his own grave with his survivalist camp-knife.

  This cool, macho device featured a stout gleaming blade with a sawtooth, and also a fire-steel, a built-in whistle and a wilderness compass. However, as a grave-digging tool, a “survival knife” was a contradiction in terms.

  The knife-blade was still razor-sharp. In a moment of spite, Nikola touched the dirty blade to the vein in his wrist. A bloody scratch appeared.

  Suddenly his death was very close. Not maudlin self-pity. Not spiteful scheming. His cold, authentic death.

  Nikola looked up from the gathering drip of fateful blood, and a bear was confronting him. This native forest beast was large, hairy, impassive wild animal with a blocky head as big as a shipping box.

  The Balkan brown bear — (a she-bear of death, she looked rounded and womanly, somehow) — didn’t much like the look, sound or smell of Nikola Brzak. The bear felt serene contempt for Nikola. The bear couldn’t even be bothered to kill him and eat him. She’d just take note of where Nikola rotted, and amble by later to eat the worms.

  When the bear departed the scene, Nikola stood up and walked away.

  #

  A week later, back on his two feet in Belgrade, Nikola invited himself to his Dad’s riverside retreat. His father lived in a home-made houseboat that floated on the handsome Danube River. Despite every tumult of ex-Yugoslav history, the old man had built himself a nice place to retire.

  Nikola had brought along a skinned lamb in the trunk of his FIAT Panda. Together, on the river shore, they skewered the carcass in his Dad’s country-style roasting pit.

  “Son, it’s a shame there’s only you and me to eat this fine family lamb-roast,” said his Dad, deftly uncorking a bottle of Bull’s Blood grocery-store wine.

  Nikola sipped at a Turkish coffee. “I’ll take the leftover mutton, Dad. I’ve got some big plans now.”

  “Another woman? You’re dating?”

  “No. Women interfere with my great inventions. I survived a brush with death, so now I know what I want from life. I’ll be working on my own great inventions at my own lab bench. We’re quarantined anyway, so in isolation, I can fully concentrate. I’ve decided to make my mark in the world.”

  “A mark in the world, that’s why children are good,” mused his father.

  “Did Nikola Tesla ever have any children? Tesla is immortal because of his inventions.”

  “Well, you did build that Tesla Coil in high school,” his Dad allowed. “A lightning bolt ten meters long!”

  “They named the Belgrade airport after Nikola Tesla. Why can’t I have an airport, too? I want an interplanetary spaceport. I want Mars, and Mars rockets. Just like Elon Musk of ‘Tesla Motors.’”

  “Elon Musk, I’ve heard about him.” His father spooned more potato salad. “Son, Nikola Tesla was a great man — but he was never a happy man. Tesla spent his last days all alone, feeding pigeons in the park.”

  “That’s because the Americans stole Tesla’s name and fame, so that’s not Tesla’s fault.” Nikola coughed on the barbecue smoke — his lungs still ached a little. “Do you know about ‘Satoshi Nakamoto?’”

  “Some Japanese fellow?”

  “Nakamoto is another great inventor. Because he invented Bitcoin. No one knows who Nakamoto is, but he’s even richer than Elon Musk. He invented Internet money, with no borders, no tax men, and no NATO sanctions. So, if Tesla could invent in the past, and Nakamoto could invent today, that means that, I, myself, can invent tomorrow. That will be my life-story from now on.”

  “Are you telling me,” said his father thoughtfully, “that you got your hands on some of that Bitcoin money?”

  “Yeah, Dad. I did.”

  “A lot?”

  “Well, I was stuck in quarantine with Radmila whining at me — so I had nothing else to do. Most people who own Bitcoin are foreigners and morons, while I’m a hacker who works for a phone company. So for me to gather up some loose Bitcoin, that was trivial.”

  His father silently twisted the barbecue spit, and the roast lamb dripped hot fat over the coals.

  “Dad, I have cryptocurrency. And I know a big empty warehouse, by the old tracks in Belgrade, where l can build myself a real lab. I want to become a world-class inventor — a cosmic-class genius, even — but with no property that any divorce lawyer could ever find in alimony.”

  “Your new business plan sounds pretty sly.”

  “‘Dark markets,’ they call all that.”

  “Who calls them ‘dark markets’?”

  “The Russians, mostly.”

  “Well,” his father nodded, sagely quoting the Balkan proverb, “better Russian shit than American cake!”

  “Dad, some day, I’ll be able to invent any possible gadget, and the only limit to my ambition will be my own imagination.” Nikola coughed into his fist. “But first — I have to be realistic. I know that I’ll have to start out with some classical, well-proven inventions. Which is to say: Nikola Tesla’s inventions.”

  His Dad sawed at a lamb-joint with a notched carving knife. “I like the sound of that. Some worthy Serb needs to fulfill old Tesla’s legacy. Your own mother was a Wallachian, you know — just li
ke Tesla’s mother.”

  “Tesla has thousands of fans all over the Internet. Tesla fans have all kinds of cool concepts and blueprints about Tesla’s remote-control spaceships, and radiated power, and telepathic brain rays that communicate with Mars… Tesla had dozens of important patents that have never been built by anybody. But I can build them!”

  His father smiled indulgently. “Well, my boy, if anyone would know all about such things, that fellow would be you.”

  “Dad, I know that an inventor’s life is risky and difficult. Once I had a wife and a steady job, but the girl flaked out and ran off to Ljubljana, and my Norwegian phone people can’t get any chips from China. So, for me, if I ever transform the universe, it has to be now or never.”

  His Dad packed hashish into his favorite pipe. “Well, son, it’s like this. Back when I was your age, in 1989, I pulled on my backpack, and I hitch-hiked to Prague. No money, and no passport, with Communist troops and cops all over the place. For sure, I got into some jams. But I wouldn’t have missed that for anything! That was the only Revolution that us hippies ever won.”

  “Why did you ever come back here to Serbia?”

  “Well, your mother was good to me. But that woman of yours, she never liked Led Zeppelin. You can’t trust a woman like that.”

  His father’s kindly insights were a source of good cheer for Nikola. As his Dad peaceably enjoyed his pipe, he seemed remarkably sturdy and in touch with real life. Especially considering his widower’s meager existence, fishing the Danube, from a houseboat built of leftover metal scaffolding that floated on eight empty oil barrels.

  “Dad, do you have any money?”

  “Us hippies don’t much bother with money. Money is more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Would you mind if I gave you some money? Venture money? For my technical investments?”

  His Dad contemplated this offer. “Son, your ‘dark markets’ must have some problems.”

  “Well, Nikola Tesla had plenty of money, except that Tesla trusted crooked American businessmen like Edison and Westinghouse. I refuse to make his mistakes.”

  “Any black-market business,” said his father wisely, “has to be well-hidden. To conceal your real, secret business, you need a big, loud, front business. That way, you can look real busy, and you can make plenty of money, too, but people can’t see what you’re really doing. That’s how you get away with it.”

  Nikola’s Dad had lived through the wars in Yugoslavia. Everyone of his generation knew a whole lot about smuggling and international sanctions.

  “A gambling casino makes the best money laundry,” said Dad, “with plenty of bright lights and noise for distraction. But with a casino, you have to pay off the Mob, and that’s bad. A beauty parlor can be pretty good, too — if it’s in the wife’s name. If you have a wife. If she’s beautiful.”

  “No more beauty parlors for me.”

  “All right. We take your crypto money, and we run a ‘kafana.’”

  “You mean an old-fashioned Balkan coffee-house?”

  “That’s right. Some cool, old traditional bar, with home-made plum brandy, and Herzegovina tobacco. And some folk music, of course. Can’t be a kafana without some folk music.”

  “But Dad, we’re stuck in a medical quarantine. All of Belgrade’s music joints are nailed shut.”

  “That’s why I could start a kafana pretty easily,” his father pointed out.“Nobody else wants the licenses.”

  Nikola considered his father’s proposal. “Can I really hide my super-science lab by using an old coffee-bar as a cover? Does that sound practical to you?”

  “I don’t see why not! Nobody ever audits the bars in Serbia. We can just revive some nice riverside place, where old Belgrade rock and rollers, like me, can eat some fish soup. I can play my good old vinyl records. The golden oldies from Belgrade’s best rock and roll band, ‘Fish Soup.’”

  #

  His father’s encouragement boosted Nikola’s morale. His ambitions advanced with swift and surprising ease, because everyone during the quarantine was too sick or too worried to do anything useful about anything at all. Thanks to the rampaging evils of Covid-19, the economy was almost frozen, sick people were dropping like flies, and nobody in authority had the time to look around with any proper suspicion.

  So reality-checks were simply impossible.

  In kinder times of more socialist realism, it would have been quite a challenge to build a covert mad-science laboratory right in the midst of Belgrade. However, business was so bad that renting the big barn was cheap.

  Nikola’s cosmic gadget lab was an old tin-sided freight shed, near the rusty track-snarl of a Communist-era rail-yard. The place was big enough to repair steam locomotives, but long vines trailed through old bomb-holes in its broken roof.

  In this zombie-like area of urban decline and disease, nobody complained about unearthly lights, or late-night machinery noise, or gusts of toxic pollutants. Everyone on the streets of Belgrade was heavily masked against contagion, as if every last one of them had become a mad scientist.

  His dad helped Nikola to finagle a power supply and some running water. Then — bargaining deftly with Bitcoin in the online ‘dark markets’ — Nikola obtained drills, a lathe, an oscilloscope, magnetometers, workbenches and a jumbo-sized 3DPrinter. (Nikola didn’t much need a 3DPrinter, he just knew that any modern innovation lab had to have one).

  Then Nikola set to work on some world-changing inventions. Every day, he packed himself a solid lunch of boiled potatoes and frozen, barbecued mutton. Then he left his Radmila-abandoned apartment, and he drove in his FIAT to confront the universe.

  His first mad-science laboratory gadget — just to get himself warmed up — was a good old-fashioned “Tesla Coil.” This was the charismatic spark-spitting device seen in old black-and-white Frankenstein movies, placed on those movie sets by the famous Los Angeles special effects wizard, Kenneth Strickfaden (1896–1984).

  Every Internet fan of Nikola Tesla knew plenty about both “Frankenstein” and “Kenneth Strickfaden,” mostly because of all the YouTube links.

  Nikola’s newly-built Coil looked beautiful, and it worked pretty well. He sold the Tesla Coil to a Bulgarian ransomware hacker, and he received a handsome Bitcoin sum for it.

  Nikola’s next super-science device was a rail-gun. YouTube featured many “potato guns,” for these were classic wonder-gadgets for the modern backyard inventor: cheap and simple, but loud and impressive.

  These potato guns featured a fuel-air mist explosion, which propelled a hapless potato, at amazing speed, down a long plastic sewer pipe. Nikola’s gun was different, though. His potato gun had a spud salted with iron filings, and it was built from military rail-gun plans left over from Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars.”

  A Pentagon rail gun was an electronic naval cannon meant to blast Gorbachev’s nuclear warheads out of the sky. Luckily Gorbachev was too kindly a guy to launch any nuclear exchanges. So the US Navy had built a few overpriced Star Wars experiments, mostly to keep Reagan, the movie star, happy about his war plans.

  Decades later, though, some ex-Navy sailor technicians, who were old and drunk and forgotten and living in San Diego, they’d started a Facebook group. There they gathered, and they idolized Donald Trump, and they indiscreetly leaked their old weapons schematics.

  Nikola’s black-market Balkan potato cannon transformed a magnetized potato into a supersonic meteor. His Star Wars invention shook the neighborhood like a train crash. The locals mistook it for a genuine train crash, though, and those were common enough in the Balkans, so nobody complained.

  Nikola placed a video of his rail-gun onto a Russian “dark-market” site. He promptly sold the weapon. The buyers wrote him email in very bad Russian, so they were probably Syrians. They paid him a crazy amount of cryptomoney. They never told him if the gun or its buyers survived.

  Nikola passed these proceeds to his father at the coffee-shop. Dad promptly bought himself a new car, a new suit, and new shoes.

  For his next inventive scheme, Nikola invented “Covid-19 Orgone Air Disinfectors.” He’d noticed a huge market demand online for those quack devices.

  “Orgones” were not a Nikola Tesla technology. “Orgones” didn’t even exist, because they were mere pseudo-science rubbish invented by a dead Austrian medical crank named “Wilhelm Reich.”