06 January 2010

Life Canal

by Andrew Alleman

Quivering like a mirage, fuzzy at the edge of vision, madmen have dreamt its poetry, only to succumb suddenly to drugged states, with the babble of gods and monsters. Philosophers and spiritualists have long theorized its possibility, ‘existence’ being not the correct term for an object with no historical record. Now, thanks to swift-thinking field technicians, the life canal, in existence, will begin the history. An object of awe to zealous Pan-Africans, to them the life canal is spiritual excrescence; but more, it is the excreter itself, the colon of the prophet. To archaeo-science, it is pure gold research.

The life canal is under Code 5, maximum alert, in an undisclosed location. Squads of armed men stare space down in a ring around the wooden experiment, in a cage of interrogatory lighting. The technicians enter through an elevator to adjust a battery of sparkling equipment immediately surrounding the phenomena. Cameras, cables, a heart/brain activity monitor (in itself an experiment in this strange circumstance), stacked in corners of the lit square. Here, in this underground parking lot, all fixture surfaces are chrome with softened edges, the cement shines, and dark space goes on for miles, the right conditions for an American religious experience.

The bud’s provenance began on alien soil, under the Algerian sun. Since its discovery it’s become a crucial evolutionary linchpin. Peeking around pillars, bronze men furtively gaze upon their beloved root. The hum of belief vibrates in their sinuous frames. Not merely a life canal, it fulfills a semi-obscure prophecy of Abiku, the 12th-century scholar of Constantinople. It is a soul seeking a new host; a new god, apprehended on its journey. What brought about the gods’ shifting loyalties to transparency? Is the gift of invisibility in its genetic code? Is materiality a destructive act? The spies will not tell you what they know. Eventually, the lights will be turned on. Security will fan out, their Kalashnikovs piercing—goodbye mujahedeen.

How this strange root came into being, biologists cannot tell. Even now, its substantiality, its being, is in question, as its corkscrewed, barbed corpus, housed in a botanical garden below the city, occasionally fades, disappears, according to its keepers. Is this object sentient? It was; it’s origin code shifted like analog, needed only small amounts of information. It has planned obsolescence, but possible transition. Is this object illusion? It used to be, but is now failing. This is key to the relic’s followers. They believe this fallen state portends something foretold by the modern theologian Hassan—‘The Perfect One will be brought by the miracles of the prophets.’

Even to the specialized team assigned to and employed at studying the thorny bud, this is new territory. Their numbers come from hospital surgery units, zoo-botanical graduate programs, simple ‘field digger’ archeology internships. Yet there is not even a school, or theory, that anticipates this experience. There are no numbers to analyze. The first of several micro-video inspections (based on Fantastic Voyage technology) has been conducted. There were CAT scans and blood tests, but they revealed nothing. There was a carbon test begun, but dilatory effects were noticed almost immediately. From the field diggers comes the spiritual element. They are professional, but frustrated when the thorny object disappears.

It is several miles long, the crawling king snake that is the soul of the earth, but coiling and folding in upon itself compresses down to roughly nine by three feet. Its diameter shrinks to hundredths of an inch (measurements supplied by a gyrating micrometer), and bulges to 9-plus inches. The pulpy maze has the knotty, random bulbousness of the conqueror root. A fecal tang heralds the arrival of the baby’s changing room, the bouquet of an aged compost heap. This is a problem for the scientists. Now burnt gold and copper, then dark chocolate and tan, sometimes resembling a chunky anal clod: tender, lyrical tendrils sporadically sprout from its mass.

A kind of transcript winds with the ease of a long and complex life, scarring and calcifying the inner walls of the root: a chronicle self-created, autonomic, stream of conscious. Long moments of clarity unfurl in the passages, long moments of absolute disorder. The transcript is alternately crabbed, cursive, or blocky. There are rarely gaps, but at regular intervals the script thins and executes perfectly rounded and spaced curlicues. Many characters are reminiscent of known languages; Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic are represented. Many characters are not characters at all, but superflourishes. There is a vague suggestion of color. Researchers question its role in the memory of the colon. These details exist on a miniscule scale; this is why the colon can host a secret operation.

This miracle object has no equal: we do not know if all consciousness is like this. It has no antecedent as consciousness, or soul; it has no reference. It has substance and can be measured as a material object, yet occasionally, it does not, it cannot. At any moment, the holy bush can become a will-o-the-wisp. Yet, while it is considered by theoreticians who ponder its purpose to be a startlingly old model of propulsion (where existence is not dependent on being), they see its applications for a new engine design. Now, even when nothing is there, it is considered as extant.

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