Empire of Lies

33

Right from the very second Rasheed finished saying the spell, the jump felt different to him.

They all triggered an instant shock to the senses—the terrifying sense of disembodiment, the dizzying weightlessness, the feeling of being ripped into an infinity of fragments before being instantaneously reassembled as an identical, exact replica a whole universe away. He wasn’t really used to it—it was too intense, too overwhelming for anyone to get used to—but he’d done it enough times to know what to expect.

He hadn’t expected this.

Visually, he hadn’t seen that vista before—a bird’s eye view of the zinc and slate-tiled roofs and, beyond, the towering twin spires and minarets of the great Fatih Mosque, its flying buttresses flanking the squatting domes that surrounded it.

Beyond the visual, however, was the sensorial. Specifically, the feeling coming through the soles of his feet, which was no feeling at all. For there was nothing under his feet.

He was in midair. And a split second after materializing, he started falling.

Precipitously.

The entire sensation lasted less than two and a half seconds. That was how long it took for gravity to yank him out of the sky and drop him a hundred feet to the ground.

In his defense, he had no way of knowing that his windowless room in the ICU of the Hurrem Sultan Külliye was on the tenth floor of the building, in a location that, back in 1721, was only occupied by a landscaped garden adjacent to the old Hôtel-Dieu hospital, the precursor to the Hurrem Sultan. He knew the garden; after all, he’d been to the Ottoman darusshifa a few times over the years, most recently to be examined following flare-ups of his illness in the weeks before he had decided to jump to 2017 and get treated. He’d just never seen it from that vantage point: the old hospital was only four stories high.

His mind also wasn’t at its clearest. The heavy, continuous sedation that he’d been subjected to over the last two days was still clogging vital pathways in his mind, heightening his paranoia and clouding his judgment.

In those two and a half seconds, though, a lot did manage to break through the morass in his head. It was still an unresolved mystery of medicine how that actually happened, how our minds could unleash a cascade of images, thoughts, and memories in such a brief amount of time. And yet that’s what Ayman Rasheed experienced in the last two and half seconds of his illustrious and unique life. He just wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about them.

His first thought was one of anger: that it would all come to an end here, now, like this, in a messy, bloody splatter, after all the risks he’d faced and the battles he’d fought. He’d survived the war in Iraq and its barbaric prisons; he’d survived the savage rampage into Syria and fierce firefights against a multitude of enemies there; he’d made it to Turkey unscathed and had survived installing himself by the sultan’s side along with the political intrigues, backstabbing, and skulduggery that had followed; he’d survived the many battles and campaigns that had begun in the fields outside Vienna in 1683 and culminated with the conquest of Paris a decade later. He’d survived all that—and he would die here, now, from nothing more epic or glorious than falling out of a window in time.

And he was naked. That was how they would find him. Sprawled on the ground, limbs undoubtedly broken and bent in a grotesque arrangement, and naked. He pictured the pathetic, revolting sight in his mind’s eye. It was not how he had planned to be remembered.

That fierce anger ripped through him as he plummeted, a rage at what he’d done, what he’d had to do, what had led him to have to do it. He cursed the anesthesiologist, he cursed the surgeon, but most of all he cursed himself, furious at his own stupidity, his own panic, his own misjudgment, his own failure.

Beyond that, the other main thought that strangled his last breaths was regret. His secret—his world-altering, astounding secret—would die with him. It was how he had wanted it to be, but he now wondered if he had made the right decision.

Right from the beginning, he had contemplated his eventual death and questioned how his knowledge ought to be handled.

He’d initially been worried about how the sultan would react to his revelation. Beyond the fear and the suspicion, there was also the religious ban on what he was bringing. Magic was prohibited by Islam and was only allowed if used to block the evil intentions of a false claimant to prophethood. The hysteria surrounding sorcery was hardly limited to the Ottoman Empire: in America, the Salem witch trials were taking place at the same time. But the sultan had quickly seen the immense benefits of embracing Rasheed’s gift and had happily agreed to keep it secret from his viziers and everyone else.

Once he’d achieved his plans and the Ottomans had conquered Europe, once he’d been rewarded with the governorship of France, Rasheed had spent many a moment contemplating how to handle his legacy. He’d mulled over sharing his secret with a chosen acolyte, someone he could mentor before entrusting him with it. It was one way to safeguard what he’d achieved; if, at some point in the future, something catastrophic threatened the empire, his heir could use the secret to travel back in time and prevent it from happening. But then, what if his heir were to die unexpectedly? Did the secret deserve to have more robust safeguards protecting it? That concern had evolved into wondering whether to bestow his knowledge not on one heir but on two, or three; they could be the beginning of a cabal that could extend forever, a secret circle of protectors of the empire who would watch over it and guarantee its permanence. But other concerns challenged his thinking. What if it fell into the wrong hands? What if an enemy of the state or a foreign power like the Americans or the Russians got ahold of it? What if they used it against the Ottomans? What if they sent a team back to 1683 to undo everything he’d done?

In the end, it was that fear, the fear that his achievement could be nullified and erased from history, that made him decide to keep it to himself. He wouldn’t share it with anyone; he’d use his knowledge of the future to warn those around him as much as he could about the potential dangers to the empire. He’d write, extensively, about different political, societal, and technological challenges that might arise. Beyond that, the empire would have to fend for itself. He would have given it a very solid foundation to achieve more longevity that any other civilization in history. If it did fail because of anything other than an act of God, so be it.

He questioned his decision again in those final two and a half seconds of his life, his rush to meet the ground goaded by the regret and the rage. He didn’t want it all to be lost. He hadn’t told anyone about it. He hadn’t married, he’d never shared it with any of his many lovers, he hadn’t told any of the children he’d fathered. The only other person who’d known, the sultan, had already died. There was no one around who knew the extent of his extraordinary accomplishment. He would die here, now, a respected, admired leader, a visionary, a pillar of Ottoman history, but no one would speak of how he had single-handedly changed the world.

He would have much preferred to die with a more uplifting, optimistic thought to soften the brutal certainty of his impending demise. Sadly for Ayman Rasheed, no such thought materialized by the time he hit the ground. In those frantic, breathless two and a half seconds, his story, and his secret, were extinguished forever.

Or so he thought.