The Darmstadt Museum Of Invention, Science and Technology was a hive of activity for half term, or as the Germans have coined it: ‘the home-time week between one half of school in autumn and the half of school before Jesus Christ’s Birthday Celebrations’. On tables in the grand hallway, children were folding paper into the shape of crescent moons, oblivious to the majestic 7 storey masterpiece that housed them. Opened in 1956, this godless cathedral built entirely from white concrete invisibly praises the lords of architecture who defy gravity with every jutting buttress and brickless archway. In the middle of the great hall, the world’s biggest elephant dangled from the ceiling, threaded to the ceiling by wire no thicker than a human hair, but much, much stronger than it. The elephant was dead now of course, but what a marvel it must have been when alive, suspended in a near pristine museum.
A young child walked in with her father, about 60 or so years after the opening. Shy, withdrawn and reserved, she did not have the confidence to sit down and craft like the bigger ones. Her father looked down at her little face and recognised her predicament. She hated busyness. She despised the company of anyone much. He gave her hand a squeeze to get her attention.
“We’ll find something else to do… look let’s ask this lady what she’s got” he said, but in German.
The half term week was always a tough time for families. Every activity in town was overrun by desperate parents hoping to have them entertained and exhausted, ideally by someone else, while they got on the with their eternal job of worrying about things, an activity much easier when alone. As such, the institutions laid on extra activities to cope with the demand, and this included their archivists and researchers, the most presentable of which they wheeled out to front of house. One such employee manned a desk describing itself roughly translated as “the wonders we can’t see”.
“Would you like to see the invisible world around you?” She asked the girl, again in fluent German. The girl nodded, because she understood the language and trusted her demeanour. She seemed calm and nice. No one else had stepped up all day so the little girl was her first customer.
“The world around us is more than what we can see” she announced like an amateur showman, “from the atoms and particles too small for the human eye, the colours and wavelengths beyond our imagining to the imperceptible elements that are eyes simply are not trained to record”. The native German here really bounced with poetry and intrigue, but this is difficult to translate. Despite comprehending these words, they still went over the girl’s head.
“Watch this”, the assistant winked and placed a paper bag over the dad’s head and then pointed a heat camera at him. “Though we can’t see ourselves what’s in the bag, his heat signature can still be picked up by this device and…”
“…through the magic of heat, we know your dad is still in there.” The screen behind glowed an orange head where there should be a bag. “And from the looks of it, he’s sweating!”
The dad took off the bag grinning. There was enough commotion and joy from the reveal that he let off a little fart that he’d hoped would be ignored.
The assistant’s nostrils flaired. She picked up another device and pressed a few buttons and the screen flickered, before pointing it directly at the man’s bottom half.
“This one shows something a little different” she smiled at the girl who gawped back without much intent. “Could you fart again please sir?”
“Of course” the dad replied, matter-of-factly which is quite a trait associated with German speakers. His buttocks squeaked painfully.
On the screen, a small wisp of purple steam let itself out of his trouser legs.
“Is that…?” the girl started to ask without wishing to speak aloud
“A fart, yes.”
The camera worked by taking a picture at an atomic layer; it can understand the chemical elements everywhere, those which make-up people, those that make up the air, the floor, the sky - literally seeing everything that exists on a chemical plane. But, this data is impenetrable for the human eye.
This is where the symbiosis of man and computer shines. Using a complex AI model, these molecules are then rematerialized into a tangible picture, coloured with appropriate intensity. The end result, was not dissimilar to a normal photograph. Except, and I cannot emphasise this enough, these photos were particularly adept at displaying the movements of gas… with a focus on methane. Farts.
It’s a camera that can see farts.
“I can’t go into he details but… this camera can see farts”
In that moment the girl’s jaw dropped and her eyes lit up. Because of this moment, she would grow up to become a scientist working in important science. But this isn’t her story…
The lecture hall was just as you would imagine it. The white of the walls, clinical like a hospital but cavernous like a cave. The stacked seating - long benches hemmed tightly by long desks of synthetic wood, chosen to withstand the scratchings of pencils for uncountable hours, rhythmically defined the room’s function. On the stage, a lectern, behind which a giant projection showed the stage. It existed as a bizarre mirror to the world in front of it, enlarged so that those at the back could see every movement, every thought, every gesture of minute insignificance
“What is a fart?” the professor directed towards his class.
No one laughed. Good, he thought. Respect for a serious subject matter. This demanded gravitas. This wasn’t a circus act. This was science, with a capital “W” (the German word for science is Wissenschaft).
“We know many things about the fart. We understand how they exist, where they go, what we can do to lower their intensity, the requisite skill to restrict even prevent them entirely. We’ve battled in journals for decades to define the shape we think they would take. But there was so much we did not know and could not know, and many said should not know… because farts are, ostensibly, invisible.”
He paused for effect.
“Well, they were invisible…”
He squinted and clenched both fists. There was a loud rumble. The audience gasped. On the live video of the professor playing behind him, a beautiful green cloud emanated from behind him. As gently as the clouds above, the nebula of methane flowed gently into the air, rising like the moon, as subtle as the phototaxis that wheat in a field gracefully chase the light each day.
“Yes”, he smiled “that was me. For once, truly, whoever articulated it… particulated it.”
Laughs in the audience. He was in control of those, he thought. One student even clapped in appreciation. The professor let out an extra thin and crispy one out of appreciation, which really got him clapping.
“When this technology was first developed, many refused to acknowledge it would be possible or even have a use. They laughed at my plans”
“Now, who’s laughing”
He looked down at the nobel prize medal hanging from his neck. He loved that thing like a second wife. He wasn’t married, but his first wife was his invention. But, in his mind, he was a polygamist. The world’s greatest fart camera inventing polygamist. He could ménage à trois - which in German translated to a “three-player pussy exchange” - whenever he wanted. Not tonight, of course, he had plans to watch his favourite detective drama, but realistically he could. He was the envy of every physicist you could name.
He picked up the camera and turned it on the audience; an audible German murmor of anticipated embarrassment ran its way around the room as the general hubbub increased in intensity. On the screen behind Professor Poopennshitzen, the audience was now visible, and the fart camera was looking at them. The seers had become the seen.
“Beans, beans the musical fruit” the professor begun to sing in his native German, “the more you eat, the more you…”
He paused, searching the crowd. There was a general purple hue in the air according to his device, invisible to the naked eye of course; he’d become accustomed to the idea that 300 sweaty undergraduates, with their pheromones, stress and general body odour, would distort the camera’s purity of vision, blurring the scientific potency of his invention. Added with the low lighting, it took a trained eye to really find what he was looking for. But then, as inevitably as the horse would neigh, he found it.
“…toot?” he literally said without translation.
He zoomed the lens towards his victim. A greasy, sad lonely geek cradled his head in shame. The room broke out in uproarious laughter, everyone turning to either point at the young man, or at the screen itself, with a few waving at the camera to see their hand travelling through the fart and sniff it, while another couple took their opportunity to make out and basque in the glory of this cloud of invention. It was all a bit of harmless fun, but honestly, who would come to a dietary photoscience lecture by the world famous Professor Schtinky Poopennshitzen with their bowels so obviously heaving with the need to expel?
When first invented, the technology was seen through a comedic lens. But, the ecological impacts of measuring their output meant that cow breeding could now focus on the calfs with the lowest carbon emissions, with measurable certainty. In just 5 years, between breeding programs and experimentation in feed/anal gas relationship, the global population of livestock had become essentially fartless, nearly stopping global warming entirely. The outside world even smelled a little sweeter.
But the technology got out of control. The first warning signs were car manufacturers, who implemented the technology at a micro level into an internal CCTV system for family SUVs. Though designed to map potential failings in the car’s architectural integrity, the technology meant the mystery of a unclaimed fart on a long road trip could be solved. Many, many families were separated, where before there was enough uncertainty to keep the familial stitching unbreached.
Boffins ran with the ideas and re-implemented the technology to process photos taken with normal cameras, partly to avoid the patent costs and the expensive equipment, but mostly because they could. At first, it was only analogue film stock which could be processed, given the original images had in the residue of their negatives a chemical footprint enough for an enlightened machine network to fill in the gaps. But the processing power of AI meant that we were able to study digital imagery of increasingly minimal resolution, and see farts in any image.
The impact of this was devastating. Great moments in history were being reprocessed just to sate our curiosity. The first major landmark in these investigations were the moon landings - researchers hypothesised this technology could establish a lunar chemical trace to prove the veracity of these endeavours. Alas, not only did no expected evidence from the moon exist, and not only did the images glow with particles unique to the LA area, but it turned out that the images that had been captured, those which depicted the pinnacle of man’s evolution, were riddled with farts. Armstrong even let rip during his famous line, while another astronaut getting extra traction in the air with the fuel of a particularly nasty break of wind.
They found them everywhere. Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show was bending his knee to accommodate his flatulence. In the JFK assassination, an extra cloud can be seen by the grassy knoll. Obama’s historic election speech, his whole family are losing gas. Further back still, they used the tech on painted objects - in royal portraits, in the Mona Lisa, and on Holbein’s Ambassadors? Mostly farts.
Everything society was built on, the respect and mutually agreed certainty of scientific endeavour and accepted fact - was crumbling because of the whiff of uncertainty. The shoulders of giants were tainted by farts, and people wanted out.
Another manilla envelope fell on his. Urgent. Another writ from a court. He was being sued to oblivion by the Martin Luther King estate. Everyone was having a go.
Oh well, he thought to himself, at least i’m immensely rich. He caught his bank balance in an app on his phone. It was close to empty. He’d invested poorly on cryptocoins and lost them in a scam. “Shit”, he thought. “Another royalty cheque will be coming soon I bet”. He was panicking a little.
He looked down at the university paper that had been delivered on his doorstep. The front page, a picture of the young man he’d caught farting in his lecture. The headline beside it: “Junger Mann begeht Selbstmord, nachdem er aus Verlegenheit gefurzt hat”. He knew what it meant, he thought. He translated it in his head then said it out loud… “young man commits suicide after farting embarrassment…”
He had blood on his hands.
He must have cut one of his fingers, so he washed his hands, and then sat down again in shame. This feeling, he thought, us Germans don’t have a word for that.
The CIA agent watching through his sniper rifle took the shot. Professor Stinky Poopennshitzen was gone. “Target executed” the agent spoke into his watch. He looked on again through his fart enabled scope. He smiled at what he saw.
(a death fart)
