It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet.

It was pretty impressive, considering the boy had started from zero. He had found the iPhone, still warm from someone’s hand, sitting on a windowsill in his favorite privy. He did not recognize the object, having never seen anything like it before. The slick black glass was alien to him, so refined and smooth with beveled steel edges. He thought for a moment that it must be a large jewel. He hefted it in his palms, noticing the metal-frame setting bent around it. In the steel, he saw slightly raised areas and prodded one experimentally.

The jewel in his palm flamed to life, showing a vivid image of two people in front of an enormous waterfall. One of them he recognized—she was Mother, though as he had never seen her before. She wore breeches and her hair was loose. She shaded her eyes with one arm and the other arm was laid over the shoulders of some man Benjamin had never seen before. Not Father who had died in the war, whose portrait he saw every evening on their mantel as Mother read to them, or embroidered as she told them all stories about what a great man their father had been. No, this was some swarthy fellow with many sailor’s marks upon his arms. Benjamin stared at this man’s face, the dark eyes slitted against the sunlight of some other day.

Littered across this image, the boy saw small islands of light and color, each bearing a small name printed beneath. The names were strange. Settings. An image of gears, like the insides of a clock drawn in a diagram. Home with a warm yellow drawing of a house lit from within. Benjamin tried touching the house, but the whole plane slid sideways like a map slipping from the tabletop to the floor. It made him dizzy to look at.

But here there were more! Glyphs of unknown meaning marked Google Photos and Google Calendar and Instagram. Benjamin felt a trifle ill, a sense of unreality opening around him.

“I’m not dreaming,” he said, his voice squeaking in the way it had been a few years ago, when he was attaining his full height and before he had learned to shave. He cleared his throat and got his bearings.

“Wednesday, August eighth in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and fifty,” he recited from that day’s calendar. “Approximately eleven thirty, ante meridian. Eighty-five degrees of mercury, wind from the south.” He glanced out the privy window and saw four servants harvesting tomatoes, their baskets heavy from the garden.

He checked himself. He was hungry. He did not feel feverish. His humors seemed balanced. He had slept well, he had had no wine.

“If all is sound, then this object is real.”

The jewel had gone cold and dark in his hand. Again he pressed the raised bar on the right side. Again, Mother’s face. This time, he pressed deliberately on the colorful glyph marked Google Photos. More of Mother! Much more, exposed nearly enough to nurse a babe. Benjamin’s eyes crawled over the strange, out-of-context Mother. Her eyelids were colored like those in the paintings of Egyptians. Her hair was, again, loose. Her frock was revealing to the point he felt he had to look away.

He touched the glass again and the images rolled. Franklin saw time turn in on itself, moving forward and backward. There was Mother, enormous with child. Chains attached to her arm and chest not, surely not chains. Slim ropes? But not tying her, merely affixed to her body. How strange the bed in which she lay—all white without wood or brass. How strange her garment, too. A white featureless gown with a blue pattern on it. Her face hard with exhaustion. Was this when she was carrying him? Or John? Or Tom?

Only four minutes had elapsed, but Benjamin felt he had broken through a surface of ice that had existed above his head all his life. He had newly discovered that he was a fish, and that he was wet.What lay above the ice was some other world, something he had never even dreamed existed.

He sat a moment on the privy, pleased with himself and his metaphor. Then he turned his attention back to the jewel.

The glyph marked Instagram had beguiled him. He knew the word parts from his Latin instruction. Instare, gramma. It was too tantalizing. What small weight might this magic jewel dispense? Was this machine going to put a gold ingot in his hand?

Pushing it caused Mother’s face to appear again, and this time it made Benjamin terribly unhappy to see it. Her eyes were glassy as if she were ill, and her head lay against the shoulder of yet another man who was not Father. They were in some strange place, all light and glimmer like the surface of water. He didn’t know how to make sense of what he was seeing. He experimented, touching the glass and sliding his finger. He tapped and other faces appeared, other women. Dogs doing clever tricks. Large sandwiches being cut, cheese and sauce cascading down.

Benjamin was a boy who was always hungry; even as his wholesome diet of grains and vegetables and farm-grown eggs was given to him with generosity, he felt as if he could never get enough. He often fantasized about birthdays and Christmases not for their gaiety, but for the memory of little cakes, all butter and sugar and never big enough. He dreamed again and again of the one and only time his chemistry professor, Lord Byron, had sent for a block of ice all the way from Massachusetts and had used it to congeal a cold custard of egg yolks and cream and fed it to them, explaining the actions of heat and cold on the proteins in the dairy. How Ben yearned and lusted to taste it again, how he schemed in winter to pur-loin a measure of cream and precious Malagasy vanilla for his own and make it in the snow.

If it weren’t for the pictures—both moving and still—of food, he might have found the pornography sooner. But his mouth watered and he tentatively pushed up and down, watching slabs of berry pie carved and strange long pasta shoveled into waiting mouths. A few minutes of this and Benjamin was utterly transfixed.

“Am I taking the part of Doctor Faustus? Do I see before me a portal of foul temptation? Is it the Adversary himself who shows me the gluttony of my flesh?”

His stomach rumbled. Breakfast (oatmeal with fresh peaches and milk, side of bacon) had been hours ago. Their midday meal would begin soon but consist only of leafy kale and fresh fish with herbs; a combination that always made him feel as if he had not eaten at all.

“If it is indeed the devil that tempts me, he has found my supreme weakness.” Benjamin watched as a sugar puff was melted down between biscuits and pressed against a glossy slab of something dark brown and decadent. He didn’t know what it was and yet he could taste it; his mind combining custard and Christmas toffee and the majesty of imagination into a tingling lust on his tongue.

He tapped again and his lust abruptly relocated. A young woman of plump and buxom qualities, with skin like cream and hair like strawberries in summer, bounced her bosom exuberantly. Benjamin, a scholar of many things including anatomy, watched the ghostly blue veins beneath her blush and freckles, and saw the hint of a pink areola as her frock strained and struggled to contain her. When the girl put two fingers into her mouth and sucked them, Benjamin nearly dropped the black jewel in his haste to undo his breechclout. He had committed this petty sin in this privy before, but never with such urgency. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s face and an explosion of stars, layered atop one another and swimming in his ecstasy.

Shame followed, as it always does. But so did a strange sense of resolution. He would hold on to this jewel. Who could he tell of its existence? Certainly not Mother, who seemed to have some secrets of her own.

“Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead,” he said, repeating his favorite quote of Father’s.

Even so, he resolved to tell Thomas Jefferson that very night.