On the website, as it came into being, visitors would be able to wander at will between the project’s different storylines and themes: Zameen of Rijk’s search for Akasz Kronos, Zameen vs. the Goddess of Victory, the Tale of Two Dollmakers, Mogol the Baburian, Revolt of the Living Dolls 1: The Fall of Kronos, Revolt of the Living Dolls lI (This Time It’s War), The Humanization of the Machines vs. the Mechanization of the Humans, the Battle of the Doubles, Mogol Captures Kronos (or Is It the Dollmaker?), the Recantation of the Dollmaker (or Was It Kronos?), and the grand finale, Revolt of the Living Dolls III: The Fall of the Mogol Empire. Each of these in turn would lead to further pages, plunging ever deeper into the multidimensioned world of the Puppet Kings, offering games to play, video segments to watch, chat rooms to enter, and, naturally, things to buy.

Professor Solanka was intoxicated for hours on end by the Puppet Kings’ six-pack of ethical dilemmas; was at once fascinated and revolted by the emerging personality of Mogol the Baburian, who turned out to be a competent poet, expert astronomer, passionate cultivator of gardens, but also a soldier of Coriolanus-like blood lust, and the most cruel of princes; and was deliriously entranced by the shadow-play possibilities (intellectual, symbolic, confrontational, mystificational, even sexual) of the two sets of doubles, the encounters between “real” and “real,” “real” and “double,” “double” and “double,” which blissfully demonstrated the dissolution of the frontiers between the categories. He found himself inhabiting a world he greatly preferred to the one outside his window, and thus came to understand what Mila Milo had meant when she said that this was where she felt most alive. Here, inside the electricity, Malik Solanka emerged from the half-life of his Manhattan exile, traveled daily to Galileo-1, and began, once more, to live.

Ever since Little Brain’s censored remarks to Galileo Galilei, questions of knowledge and power, surrender and defiance, ends and means, had gnawed at Solanka. “Galileo moments,” those dramatic occasions when life asked the living whether they would dangerously stand by the truth or prudently recant it, increasingly seemed to him to lie close to the heart of what it was to be human. Man, I wouldn’t have taken that stufflying down. I’d have started a fucking revolution, me. When the possessor of truth was weak and the defender of the lie was strong, was it better to bend before the greater force? Or, by standing firm against it, might one discover a deeper strength in oneself and lay the despot low? When the soldiers of truth launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of the lie, should they be seen as liberators or had they, by using their enemy’s weapons against him, themselves become the scorned barbarians (or even Baburians) whose houses they had set on fire? What were the limits of tolerance? How far, in the pursuit of the right, could we go before we crossed a line, arrived at the antipodes of ourselves, and became wrong?

Near the climax of the back-story of Galileo-1, Solanka embedded one such defining moment. Akasz Kronos, a fugitive from his own creations, was captured in great old age by the Mogol’s soldiers and brought in chains to the Baburian court. By this time the Puppet Kings and the Baburians had been at war for a long generation, locked in a stalemate as debilitating as the Trojan War, and ancient Kronos, as creator of the cyborgs, was blamed for all their deeds. His explanation of his creations’ arrival at autonomy was rejected by the Mogol with a snort of disbelief. There followed, in the pages Solanka wrote, a long dispute between the two men on the nature of life itself—life as created by a biological act, and life as brought into being by the imagination and skill of the living. Was life “natural,” or could the “unnatural” be said to be alive? Was the imagined world necessarily inferior to the organic one? Kronos was still a creative genius in spite of his downfall and long penurious concealment, and he proudly defended his cyborgs: by every definition of sentient existence, they had grown into full-fledged lifeforms. Like Homo faber, they were users of tools; like Homo sapiens, they reasoned and engaged in moral debate. They could attend to their ills and reproduce their species, and by shedding him, their maker, they had set themselves free. The Mogol rejected these arguments out of hand. A malfunctioning dishwasher did not become a busboy, he argued. By the same token, a rogue puppet was still a doll, a renegade robot was still a robot. This was not a fit direction for their discussions to take. Rather, it was for Kronos to recant his theories and then provide the Baburian authorities with the technological data required to bring the Peekay machines under control. If he refused, the Mogol added, changing the tenor of the conversation, he would of course be tortured and, if necessary, torn limb from limb.

The “recantation of Kronos,” his declaration that machines had no souls whereas man was immortal, was greeted by the deeply religious Baburian people as a mighty victory. Armed with information provided by the broken scientist, the antipodean army created new weapons, which paralyzed the cyborgs’ neurosystems and rendered them inoperative. (The term “killed” was forbidden; what was not alive could not be dead.) The Peekay forces fled in disarray, and a Baburian victory looked assured. The Dollmaker cyborg himself lay among the fallen. Too egotistical—too “consistent”—to have created any replicas of himself, the Dollmaker was still one of a kind; thus his character was erased with his termination. The only person who could have re-created him was Akasz Kronos, whose fate was obscure. Perhaps the Mogol killed him, even after his abject surrender; or perhaps he was blinded like Tiresias and permitted, by way of further humiliation, to wander the world, begging bowl in hand, “speaking the truth that no man would believe,” while from every quarter he heard tales of the collapse of his own great enterprises, of the reduction of the great Kronosian Puppet Kings, the sentient cyborgs from Rijk, the first machines ever to cross the frontier between mechanical entities and living beings, into piles of useless junk. And while nobody would now believe the truth that he had himself denied, he himself had no choice but to accept the reality of the catastrophe that his own cowardice, his lack of moral fortitude, had brought about.

At the eleventh hour, however, the tide turned. The Puppet Kings regrouped under a new, dual leadership. Zameen of Rijk and her cyborg counterpart the Goddess of Victory joined forces, like twin Ranis of Jhansi rising up against imperialist oppression, or like Little Brain in a new, double-trouble incarnation, leading her promised revolution. They used their combined scientific brilliance to build electronic shields against the new Baburian weapons. Then, with Zameen and the Goddess at their head, the Peekay army began a major offensive and invested the Mogol’s citadel. Thus began the Siege of Baburia, which would not end for a generation or more…

In the world of the imagination, in the creative cosmos that had begun with simple doll-making and then proliferated into this many-armed, multimedia beast, it wasn’t necessary to answer questions; far better to find interesting ways of rephrasing them. Nor was it necessary to end the story-indeed, it was vital to the project’s long-term prospects that the tale be capable of almost indefinite prolongation, with new adventures and themes being grafted onto it at regular intervals and new characters to sell in doll, toy, and robot form. The back-story was a skeleton that periodically grew new bones, the framework for a fictional beast capable of constant metamorphosis, which fed on every scrap it could find: its creator’s personal history, scraps of gossip, deep learning, current affairs, high and low culture, and the most nourishing diet of all-namely, the past. The ransacking of the world’s storehouse of old stories and ancient histories was entirely legitimate. Few Web users were familiar with the myths, or even the facts, of the past; all that was needed was to give the old material a fresh, contemporary twist. Transmutation was all. The Puppet Kings website went on-line and at once achieved and sustained a high level of “hits.” Comments flooded in, and the river of Solanka’s imagination was fed from a thousand streams. It began to swell and grow.