BARBAROSSA: EARLY ROBOTIC EXPERIMENTATION BY A RENEGADE ANTHROPOSOPHIST.

BARBAROSSA: EARLY ROBOTIC EXPERIMENTATION BY A RENEGADE ANTHROPOSOPHIST. 

A remarkable machine created in 1909 by the poet, tinkerer, and renegade Anthroposophist Zylmar Zygmunt Amador-Fleché, head of our branch in Amsterdam and regarded (unfairly) by local devil-worshippers as a quack. Barbarossa could count, sing, dance (gauchely), eat, and excrete. 

Satanism, quite popular in fin-de-siecle Amsterdam, had at least three hundred adherents in the neighborhood of our office, a tri-story walkup on Rigalistrasse; on a lark, a thirteen-man cell of them invaded our office in a sweltering June of 1911 and absconded with a kicking and shrieking Barbarossa, threatening to sodomize the dwarf that they declared must be within. 

Amador-Fleché then utilized what he later described as the only spell he knew, a scream he learned from a Maghreb prince (the infamous “sheik shriek”). 

The thieves recoiled and fled, leaving Barbarossa intact. 

While Amador-Fleché departed the Earthly coil decades later whilst defending the Maginot Line, Barbarossa still stands in our Amsterdam office’s foyer, startling visitors with nursery rhymes in Occitan and Romansh. Another lost annal in the early history of robotics.