The Bosch Kanal:Or, Theories on Robot Harmonics
Cornelius Hogbauer was holding a bottle with a big letter “A” on it in one hand and playing with himself with the other, watching the dancers kick legs and blow kisses. Out of nowhere he felt an electric shock: invincible, coming from underneath his head bone, near his hippocampus. “What the fuck was that?,” he mumbled to himself, eyes still affixed to the dancing women on stage, dick in hand. Then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, like toy soldiers or cats claws, and the image of The Man burst into his brain. He jumped up from his seat in the back of the theatre, yelling and throwing slurs towards the stage, tripping over scurrying rats, sticky floors and obscure shadows; stumbling wildly, head full of tainted electricity, and making a mad dash for the outside and into the cold dark light of 1850s Venice.
It was almost midnight when Johan reached up and felt the pistol that was attached to his chest. Laying there in bed, he could only think about his little sister, Johanna, and the new dress he bought her for Sunday mass. He knew he wouldn’t be attending Church anymore, so the dress was sort of an offering to God, to the Singularity, in hopes it would go easy on him when it found out about the assassination. Johan was tall and skinny, maybe 147 pounds, a little over six feet tall, and wore circular glasses and sported slicked back black greasy hair. Despite his superior looks, he was all animal.
“Cornelius Hogbauer is sensing loneliness and he is vulnerable.” Says The Man...
Johan got up from the bed, put his coat on and touched the pistol that was taped to his chest again, just to make sure it was still there. He opened the door to his bedroom, slowly, so Johanna wouldn’t be woken up. He crept into the hall and towards the stairs, which were slightly circular and were painted red, which he supposed had something to do with his mother’s love of symbolism. On the right, at the top of the stairs was a picture of his mother and father, sitting together on a small velvet couch, holding hands underneath a giant picture of Foucault. Johan noticed something he hadn’t noticed before…his father’s smile. It was strange, like the Mona Lisa, a smile that knew something. Johan felt for the railing of the staircase and slowly made his way down, towards the front door, his heart gun beating, and out onto the street where there was no one out except for a few stray cats and a handful of miserable drunks. Outside, a faint glow of pale blue light, coming from the Cathedral, was hovering above the squats with a subversive feel. An electrical whirling sound came from the next door neighbor’s house. Sweat was starting to form on Johans’ frontal head region.
Cornelius found himself squatting outside the theatre, still buzzing. The Fabulous Blue Theatre plasma sign above flickered and popped, intermittently casting hazy blue fuzz onto him and the dirty cobblestone streets. The faint sound of the Midnight Carnival was coming from somewhere deep within the city as he staggered left towards the Bosch Kanal, a 1,516 foot deep, and 100 foot wide apparatus, sunk into the ground between buildings, winding its way throughout the city, filled with translucent water and fishes the size of men, used by the city of Venice for scientific research. He turned right into an alley, lit with only dim candlelight and dead rats, and for a moment, he thought he was being followed, but the footsteps he heard was only the sound of his dry, clicking mind. At the end of the alley, a song off in the distance stopped his rabid, hound dog style navigation: Welcome my son, welcome to the machine….
After a few minutes of listening to the odd sound coming from next door, Johan started towards the Bosch Kanal, up the street that winds past the Magnetic Centrale’, a rustic suicide terminal, where unfortunate people with lymphatic filariasis or cancer could go to pay a fee and have their bodies turned off. As he passed by the closed-down shops, angry prostitutes, laughing midgets, drunks, and the newly remodeled Abattoir, he wondered how many points of light were actually representing the Singularity…“None,” he said to himself in a low whisper, just like the Nihilists within the University of Zero had taught, and began running towards the Kanal.
Frozen with fear in a shitty alley, Cornelius’ heart was totally racing now; his bedraggled beard covered with spit. With the knowledge that he had killed a man of science in order to please an aging, heretic prophet suddenly starting to crawl back into his dry mind, a stream of warm piss came rushing down on him from a balcony above. He fell to the left, knocking over some wooden crates, cursing the piss dumper. Crossing his eyes, and then straightening them, he noticed ahead the sign in front of him that read “Bosch Kanal,” with a little arrow pointing to the right. His feet started moving, and he turned right. He then staggered, he then saw the lights. He then thought to himself that giant fish might be his savior….
Johanna’s eyes suddenly opened up from the middle of deep sleep, and the ceiling was right there in front of her, kinda. “Oohan!” she screamed, “Beltrius, Boton Flax!” She jumped up from her warm strange bed, ran out of her room, down the red stairs, and into the night towards the Bosch Kanal.
The Bosch Kanal was lit with small, beautiful luminescent bulbs, made for the aesthetic of the city, which were lit from sunset until sunrise. Strands of white roses were strung about with great care throughout the wires suspending the catwalks where the scientists worked, and murals of tiny sea creatures were painted on the sides of the Kanal, above the water line, which fluctuated with the rotation of the Earth and the orbit of La Luna. A platform in the middle of the suspension lab, which housed the research hub, seventeen feet above the middle of the Kanal, was oddly similar, yet very much larger, to a plank that was used by pirates to evacuate criminals from shifty wooden boats fifty years ago. There were strange bulbous wires with sensors that hung down from here and deep into the Kanal that were trying to figure out why the fish were so big, and two guards armed with shiny electric batons stationed on either side of the Kanal gates.
Johan came raging around the corner of the olfactory shop, recently abandoned because of the smell, and tripped on a rat, falling to the ground creating a loud thud, triggering his heart gun strapped to his chest to fire, and inadvertently causing a giant fish in the Kanal to shimmy and sway in nervous aggravation. He was getting up quickly, checking his face and extremities for bullet wounds and blood, and noticed not fifty feet in front of him, the lights from the Bosch Kanal Laboratory, lit like mermaids breath on nitrous oxide, and Cornelius Hogbauer standing at its laboritorious edge, red electric shooting up from below.
Johan peeled the taped, smoking gun from his chest and held it in his left hand, trigger finger dancing; ready to explode his demon bullets into the devils heart, when out of nowhere an explosion in the sky dropped him to his knees, taking his breath away, shivering and puking as he went down--click pop bleep--dreaming in color for the first time.
Worm, salutations & The Boton Flax…
Johan woke to find God standing over him, checking his pulse, reassuring his vitals, stat this and stat that, everything being scoured by a maniac with earplugs and a heart suction cup; men screaming, explosions off in the distance. Johan saw the black clouds above, through blurry eyes, and felt God’s hands, soft and delicate, putting something into his pocket. He blinked his eyes and stood up all fucked up like, against the wishes of God, and looked over a burnt out city with his thom yorke eyes, noticing some enormous, black, shelled out guns to the right, over by some empty canal. Click, pop, bleep. A handful of men came running up to him and were asking and shouting all kinds of questions about “Theman Industries,” “the detonation,” and other stuff Johan didn’t understand. God then put her hand on his shoulder and asked him to lie down on this portable bed-type device, which some other men had brought over. “Please lay down Oohan, we need to get you to the Observatory before the gates close,” said God. “Gates, what gates? Oohan? What fucking gates!” He yelled. “The pearly ones, with white puffy clouds and Caucasian angels playing harps! What gates you think?” Damn robots. “Be quiet, these men mustn’t figure out what’s going on here. And by the way, my name’s not God, its Anna, and I need you to listen…”
Oohan’s brain blinked on and off in asymmetrical phases. A beautiful haze surrounded his thoughts, and colored bars raced through his mind, the speed at which color would be racing in bar form, warping and bending, turning him seemingly into pure energy. Words and emotions started to form in his head, and a vaguely familiar voice played…
“I must tell you Oohan, even from this place you cannot see or comprehend, that I love you more than you will ever know. Please understand that I had to do what I had to do in order to save you and the Icaai. You are the most important design, and I regret having to put you through what you are going through now. You will understand this most unfortunate turn of events more clearly in the coming days, and what is to become. Never forget that I love you. –Herbert Theman.”
Cornelius was shrouded in harsh fluorescent white light from above, and pulses of red light from the ships navigation panel from below, revealing the maniacal smile plastered across his face. “How long until we reach The Boton Flax?” barked Cornelius into the intercom to his Bot, Oohan, (who was currently laying down in hibernation, with Arthur C. Clarkes’, 2001: A Space Odyssey on his chest, down in his quarters.) “HOW LONG UNTIL WE REACH THE BOTON FLAX, GODDAMNIT!.” yelled Cornelius into the intercom again. Oohan opened his eyes, put his book down, got up from his semi-comfortable hibernation terminal and stood in front of The Garden of Earthly Delights; an actual painting he acquired twelve years earlier on a trip to Earth. “Four hours, thirty two minutes, and 16 seconds, sir.” Oohon said, with a sad, metallic, monotone voice into the intercom. “Goddamn right! I’m happier than……pig in shit that…crackle pop bleep….Themann…Theman decid…..get rid of all his…..utdated Bots at such low……price…buzz, bleep…..but I don’t think I actually got my monies….…orth with you. Too bad he had to go and kick the….what the…uck are you do…there? Im gonna…”Oohan, realizing the ships communications system wasn’t doing anyone any good, switched off the intercom and made his way to the bridge.
The music of Piink Floide, an obscure musician from way back in the twentieth century, was playing on Cornelius’s MD6 as Oohan opened the bridge doors.
“Sir, what is it that you were saying? The communication system seems to be malfunctioning again,” said Oohan.
“I was SAYYYING…that basically…you’re cheap and Theman’s dead. Why in the goddamn hell do I have to ask you twice to do something? Were you down there thinking up those useless fucking stories again instead of going over our navigational charts?” said Cornelius.
“I don’t believe so, sir” said Oohan, as Cornelius was reaching over from his chair to flip some sort of switch.
“Good. Because I need you to be calculating distances, not jerking your imaginary wiener off to some…garden of earthly fucking delights or whatever whatever…is that understood?”
“Yes, sir. Is there anything else?” Said Oohan.
“Yeah. Go fix the goddamn communications system.”
Oohan turned and left the bridge, closing the hatch behind him. As he was heading down the corridor towards the electro hub, Oohan stopped midway down where there was a window that separated him from the stars, and stared out into the emptiness of space. With the faint sounds of beeps, whirs, and clicks coming from somewhere deep within his titanium clockwork, he wondered about Herbert Theman. He then began to think (is this even possible?) about The Boton Flax. About Phillip Dick, Hieronymus Bosch, and about how his pathetic, metallic life would turn out…After all, he was machine, and machines weren’t supposed to think…he thought.
