Still Life with Bacteria continued
'Painted on wet plaster by candlelight, The Last Supper is one of many masterpieces damaged by natural erosion. Termites attacked sixteenth century Flemish masterpieces painted on wooden panels. The Mona Lisa spent many years in Louis XV's bathroom at Versailles. Humidity took its toll. Human error saw Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass dropped by removal men. In the mid-1970's, Buckminster Fuller calculated that at any one moment in North America there were two million automobiles idling at red lights. At an average of 100 horsepower per car, that's 200 million horses jumping up and down all the time, going nowhere, their carbon dioxide emissions destroying stone monuments from the Parthenon to the Colosseum. Pigment used by Andy Warhol began peeling off some of his paintings a few years after their completion. Certain art historians have speculated that this was a guileful prank by the mischievous Drella.'
A sudden jump-cut reveals Mister Asshole Art-Collector's illegal immigrant cleaning lady, humming Maria from West Side Story as she vacuums up precious flakes of Pop-Art from the penthouse floor. Clad in fluorescent chiffon tutus and revolving bow ties, the three bears dance by on neon stilts scoffing porridge as they perform a pastiche of a Busby Berkeley routine, the soundtrack The Torture Never Stops by Frank Zappa.
Extending the telescope to its limit to scrutinise the offending area, Alias grimaced.
'Living!' He bellowed. 'Tiny foreign bodies, breathing, shitting and who knows what else, in my art? A microcosm. A tiny, self-perpetuating, self-sufficient, microcosm of billions of life forms. And unless I'm mistaken, the ringing of those damned bells is their doing.'
Making mental notes of what he was able to observe from such a distance before spinning on his heels, Alias grasped the dejected curator by the lapels of his coat.
'I'm going in.' He growled, pointing at the tiny speck. 'I created this as a still life, and a still life it shall remain!'
The curator began twitching, his voice suddenly a distorted electronic stutter. 'Going in? That place is more of a bio-hazard than a leper's toilet bowl. Are you serious?'
Alias remembered creating the curator as an experiment, and one he had never been entirely satisfied with. His intention had been to make a vassal who could be custodian of Stasis, but allowing bacteria to grow on his masterpiece proved the curator had been negligent on his watch.
The curator's expression conveyed his understanding of what was about to befall him.
'Going in?' He repeated. 'Are you serious?'
When his maker disconnected the curator's power cell, the automaton's eyelids fluttered rapidly before he collapsed and his body began to bubble and melt.
'Am I serious?' Alias chuckled, a grin spreading across his face as he prodded quivering lumps in the molten grey puddle with his foot. 'Is that a rhetorical question?'
§
He went amongst them, observing and making notes. Amongst the larger genus, some walked on two legs, others on four. Some flew in the air and some swam in oceans lakes and rivers. Large or small, the hideous bacterial envelopes breathed, drank, ate, urinated, defecated, fornicated, died and rotted back to feed the microscopic bacteria from whence they came. Alias had not revisited Stasis since he had created it; it wasn't so much that there was life in this tiny area of the still life which irked him, rather the destructive nature of what the life forms were doing. Although it wasn't the worst of their attributes, the dreadful noise they made brought on waves of nausea which made him dizzy and sick. Accustomed as he was to perfect silence, their brouhaha was a veritable aural assault. In particular, he could detect each single tick-tock of their timepieces, the irritating and useless monotony of their measuring of time. This was aggravated by the tolling of bells announcing the passing of segments of time or the calling of the faithful to worship the mythical God who they believed had conceived the masterpiece of which Alias was the voluntarily anonymous creator.