Venice, 1474
Even through the mask, the smell of charred flesh lingered. Giovanni Trismegistus wiped the blood from his hands onto his apron and studied the body laid out before him on the table. The corpse’s mouth remained fixed in a silent scream, eyes wide with the final terror of a man who had glimpsed something beyond understanding.
“Another failure,” Giovanni muttered, sliding the mask from his face. He made a notation in his leather-bound journal, the same journal where he had recorded the previous sixteen failures.
From the adjoining room came the rhythmic scrape of metal on stone, his apprentice, dutifully setting type for tomorrow’s mundane commissions. Bills of sale, official decrees, prayer books, the tedious work that funded Giovanni’s true ambitions.
“Master?” Marco called through the curtain. “The Doge’s secretary has arrived with payment for the proclamations.”
Giovanni quickly drew the shroud over the body. “Tell him I’ll be but a moment.”
He placed the mask in a drawer beside curious implements: a set of silver punches unlike any used in ordinary printing, a small vial of quicksilver, and a fragment of jade inscribed with characters no European had ever deciphered, his most precious possession, acquired at ruinous expense from a Cathayan merchant who claimed it was a piece of Gong the Sage’s legendary jade block.
Giovanni had not always been a printer. For seventeen years, he had labored in the Scriptorium of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, hunched over manuscripts until his eyes bled and his fingers cramped permanently into the shape required to hold a quill. In those quiet hours, as he painstakingly copied the words of others, a terrible revelation had dawned on him: the greatest minds of history were imprisoned on these pages, their wisdom trapped in repositories accessible only to the privileged few.
When rumors of Gutenberg’s press reached the monastery in 1450, Giovanni had abandoned his vows without hesitation, traveling north to Mainz to glimpse this revolution with his own eyes. What he saw there changed him forever. The press was more than a machine, it was an instrument of transformation, turning one voice into thousands.
Yet even as he apprenticed with Gutenberg’s former associates, learning the secrets of movable type and the alchemical compositions of ink, Giovanni became haunted by a greater vision. What if the process could be inverted? If a press could take thought and multiply it, could another device capture the scattered wisdom of creation itself and condense it into text?
The notion consumed him. By day, he mastered the craft of printing; by night, he pored over arcane texts, seeking the intersection between mechanical artistry and the metaphysical principles that governed reality itself.
Venice, with its position as the crossroads between East and West, was the natural place for Giovanni to establish his own press in 1469. The city teemed with forbidden knowledge, Islamic treatises on mathematics, Byzantine codices on the mystical properties of language, and fragments of Hermetic wisdom smuggled from Alexandria. The Republic’s relative tolerance for intellectual pursuits provided cover for Giovanni’s increasingly esoteric experiments.
It was here that he first came into possession of the jade block fragment, and here that he learned of the disgraced alchemist known only as “The Maltese,” who claimed to have discovered a method for capturing thought directly in physical form.
“The border between idea and matter is not fixed,” The Maltese had written in a treatise that cost Giovanni three months’ earnings to acquire. “It can be crossed through the proper application of the Prima Materia, which exists in the space between intention and action.”
Giovanni’s first printing press, constructed according to conventional principles, occupied the front room of his establishment on Calle Alce. The second press, the experimental one, he built in the hidden room behind his private quarters, incorporating materials collected at great personal risk: bell metal from monasteries dissolved during regional conflicts, wood from a lightning-struck cypress that still flourished in the garden of a Paduan nobleman, and crystalline deposits painstakingly harvested from an unmapped cave beneath the Dolomites.
“This is unacceptable, Master Trismegistus,” said Secretary Bembo, his thin lips barely moving as he spoke. “These characters are inconsistent with our previous order.”
Giovanni examined the printed decree with feigned interest. The quality was indeed poor, Marco was still learning, and Giovanni had little patience for instructing the boy when his true work awaited.
“My apologies,” Giovanni said, bowing slightly. “We shall reprint them at no additional charge.”
“See that you do. The Doge does not appreciate delays.” Bembo’s eyes drifted toward the curtained doorway to the back room. “I’ve heard curious rumors about your establishment, Trismegistus. They say you consort with peculiar visitors during the midnight hours.”
Giovanni’s smile remained fixed. “A printer keeps irregular hours, Secretary. The nature of the craft demands it.”
“Indeed.” Bembo’s tone made it clear he was unconvinced. “Venice values its artisans, but the Council of Ten has taken a renewed interest in… unorthodox practices. I trust you remember the fate of Paolo Veronese.”
After the secretary departed, Giovanni locked the front door and retreated to his inner sanctum. The conversation had unsettled him. Venice’s tolerance had limits, and he was approaching them. His experiments had grown bolder, and the results more disturbing.
Subject sixteen had been a beggar, paid handsomely for his participation. Subject seventeen, now cooling on the table, had been a failed poet desperate for immortality. Each had willingly placed their hands on the experimental press as Giovanni pulled the lever, each had agreed to Giovanni’s explanation that the machine might be able to transfer the contents of their minds directly to the page.
What emerged instead was always the same: page after page of text beginning with “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,” gradually dissolving into incoherent ravings that mirrored the subject’s dying thoughts.
Giovanni knew he was missing something crucial. The machine worked, it extracted thought, but the process was fatal, and the results were corrupted, as if the human mind was an unsuitable conduit for whatever force he was channeling.
In the darkness of his workshop, Giovanni unfurled the parchment acquired at great cost from a merchant newly returned from Constantinople. The document was allegedly translated from an ancient Chinese text describing Gong the Sage’s methods.
“The jade speaks when blood makes the connection,” read one passage. “Not the blood of sacrifice, but the blood of the vessel who stands between worlds.”
Giovanni had interpreted this to mean the subjects should bleed upon the press—a hypothesis that had produced seventeen corpses and no usable results.
But what if he had misunderstood? What if the “vessel” was not the subject, but the artificer himself?
The realization struck him with such force that he laughed aloud. Of course! He had been offering surrogates, when what the process required was the direct involvement of the creator, his own essence, his own blood.
Working feverishly through the night, Giovanni modified the press once more. He incorporated the jade fragment directly into the lever mechanism, fashioning a sharp edge that would open his palm each time he operated it. The connection would be made, artificer to instrument to manifestation.
As dawn approached, he pulled the lever for the first time, gasping as the jade sliced deep into his flesh. Blood flowed freely onto the press bed, mingling with the ink and soaking into the blank page below.
The machine shuddered, not the normal mechanical movement, but something organic, almost like breathing. The type began to set itself, letters arranging and rearranging without human intervention.
“Yes,” Giovanni whispered, watching in awe as the first words formed on the page: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…”
But this time, the text did not dissolve into madness. It continued, flowing across the page in perfect Latin, then shifting into Italian, then into languages Giovanni had never seen before, yet somehow understood. The page filled, then another and another, each emerging from the press already dry, as if the words had always existed there.
The knowledge contained in those pages was revelatory, secrets of nature, of history, of reality itself. Giovanni read with increasing excitement until he reached a passage that made his blood run cold:
“The artificer becomes the artifice. The creator becomes the created. The name dies that the work might live.”
Giovanni looked up from the page to find that the room had changed. The table that had held his latest subject was empty. The walls seemed different, older, yet newer. And there, in the corner, stood a figure he had never seen before.
“Who are you?” Giovanni demanded. “How did you enter my workshop?”
The figure stepped forward, and Giovanni gasped. The man was himself, yet not himself. Older, with eyes that reflected a depth of knowledge Giovanni had only glimpsed in his most ambitious dreams.
“You know who I am,” the figure said. “I am what you wished to become. The name you chose in your secret heart.”
“Daedalus,” Giovanni whispered, the name coming unbidden to his lips, the identity he had considered adopting to escape the growing suspicions in Venice, the legendary artificer whose creations had transcended mere craft to become something miraculous and terrible.
“Yes,” the figure confirmed. “And now you understand the final component needed for your press to function as intended. Not merely blood, but identity. Sacrifice not of life, but of self.”
Giovanni backed away, suddenly fearful. “What are you saying?”
“You cannot exist as Giovanni Trismegistus and also as the creator of this device. One must be surrendered for the other to manifest. This is the cost of bringing something genuinely new into the world, not mere reproduction, but true creation.”
As the figure spoke, Giovanni felt a curious sensation, as if he were simultaneously more and less substantial than before. He looked down at his hands to find them transparent, his very being seeming to dissolve into the press itself.
“Wait!” he cried out. “I don’t—”
“It is already done,” said Daedalus, now solid and real as Giovanni faded. “The press has accepted your offering. Your knowledge, your ambition, your very identity has been absorbed into its making. I stand in your place now, not as you were, but as what you aspired to become.”
Giovanni tried to protest, but found his voice fading along with his form. His last conscious thought was a realization that the press had not merely taken his name, but had restructured reality itself around the sacrifice, creating a new history in which Giovanni Trismegistus had never existed.
In his place stood Daedalus, master artificer, creator of the Lorem Ipsum Press.
Venice, 1476
Marco raised his eyes from the strange manuscript his master had been composing for weeks. “But Maestro Daedalus, if what you write is true, then you are not…”
“I am exactly who I appear to be,” Daedalus interrupted, a slight smile on his lips. “The press does not lie, though it may reshape truth into more useful forms.”
The apprentice nodded, though confusion still clouded his features. “And these instructions you have me setting in type, this ‘user manual’, who is it for?”
Daedalus ran his hand lovingly over the press, feeling the thrum of power beneath its seemingly ordinary surface. “For those who will come after. The press chooses its own operators, in time. We are merely preparing the way.”
“And the warning about reading the manual without possessing the press?”
At this, Daedalus’s smile widened. “That, my young friend, is perhaps the most truthful part of all. Words have power, especially these words. To read them with sufficient belief is to call the object into being.”
Outside, Venice continued its bustling commerce, unaware that in a modest print shop on Calle Alce, reality had been fundamentally altered. No one remembered Giovanni Trismegistus or questioned his disappearance, for in this new version of history, he had never arrived in Venice at all.
Only the press remembered the truth, and the press kept its secrets hidden beneath layers of Lorem Ipsum, that ancient incantation disguised as meaningless text, waiting for those with the courage or desperation to pull its lever and surrender themselves to transformation.
For as Daedalus now understood, the press was not simply a machine for printing books. It was a device for printing realities.
Very interesting short story – and well written too! I like the concept of fusing Renaissance art and science with the realm of the fantastic. Keep these stories coming!
Thanks Kurt!
It’s a background story for mystery series that I started writing back in 2017… ugh, how time flies…
I’ve recently dusted off the storyline to write a Reader’s Guide for covering topics that the series uses as codes, such as the series title, Lorem Ipsum, but also Anagrams, Pangrams, Lipograms, ETAOIN SHRDLU, The Thousand Monkeys Effect, Etymology (and False Etymology), Palindromes, Acrostics, and Syntactic Reversal to name a few.
I’ll be posting more about it as I develop the series for public consumption.