The Cyberiad

by Stanisław Lem

One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n.

Today's episode brought to you by the letter N

I can’t go beyond what you programmed. So no sodium.”

I guess he didn't program in C then

“You have insulted me for the fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth times,” said the machine.

No seventh?

covered with the blood of powdered brick and smeared with chalk.

Great visual

a squat machine on three short legs,

R2D2 is that you?

“I’m not any Trurl from a machine! I’m the real Trurl—I only wanted to find out what you’ve been doing lately behind closed doors and drawn curtains, so I built a machine, hid in its belly and had it take me here, pretending to be a gift!”

Is this going to be trurling test?

regulated and standardized all wheels, racks, spikes, screws,

Taming of the screw

The subjects of Ferocitus were thus required, for their own good, to go about shouting how wonderful everything was, and the old, indefinite greeting of “Hello” was changed by the King to the more emphatic “Hallelujah!”—though

Double plus good

and the Thing-in-itself,

Just read Adam Roberts book of this title minus the in - Kant reference?

Consciousness, it seemed, formed a deadly trap, in that one could enter it, but never leave.

Trurl had once had the misfortune to build an enormous calculating machine

But that's another story. Another 8 stories

how sorry they’d all be when it was dead and gone.

Marvin the paranoid robot from Hitchhiker's

each challenger recite, instantly grasp the algorithm of his verse, and use it to compose an answer in exactly the same style, only two hundred and twenty to three hundred and forty-seven times better.

Is this fiction??

broke his leg

Shakespearian superstition?

These had been made to attack in great swarms,

That's what I thought of

Using the general equation of improbability,

Don't tell me they create an improbability drive.

and he often said that everything was a game, his Crown included, and for that matter the whole wide world.

hide-and-seek.

I wonder why Alan Moore didn't do a spinoff from League of Extraordinary Gettlemen called Hyde and Siqh

for he understood that Balerion, having damaged Trurl’s body (and after using it for so short a time), had cunningly switched to the body of some stranger.

I'm hearing the Rolling Stones refrain in the movie Fallen

Balerion,

Game of thrones used this name

change his corporeal quarters three times,

Like this turn of phrase

“Niterc.”

Cretin backwards?

Fee-fi-fo-fum plu-to-ni-um.”

Yes!!

The scarechrome tries once more, this time on a different frequency, but by now it just doesn’t have its heart in it.

Of course a scarechrome tinman wouldn't have the heart

legalistic hence sadistic.

LOL

every direction and it’s true I rob, but in a manner that is modern and scientific, for I collect precious facts, genuine truths, priceless knowledge, and in general all information of value.

Data theiving how modern of a use for the word pirating

We’ll put a little pinhole in it and sit the Demon over the opening;

What's the line about how many angels can dance on a needle?

seemed to Pugg that any minute now he would learn the most fabulous, unheard-of things, things that would open up to him the Ultimate Mystery of Being, so he greedily read everything that flew out from under the diamond nib,

The first doom scroller

“You must be joking!” Trurl exclaimed. “Really, the whole kingdom fits into a box three feet by two by two and a half . . . it’s only a model . . .” “A model of what?” “What do you mean, of what? Of a civilization, obviously, except that it’s a hundred million times smaller.” “And how do you know there aren’t civilizations a hundred million times larger than our own? And if there were, would ours then be a model?

We're in the simulation, also Trurl was into making civilization sims before it was cool

he was a perfect sphere, a sphere of the most engaging appearance

Sounds like an all a round nice guy

he revealed that there were really two of him, the top half and the bottom;

Bi polar

while the ring kept interfering with comments and suggestions, until he had to close the can.

"How will I know if I'm building to your satisfaction?" -Oh I'll give you a ring. I thought of this since he put the ring in a tin can and then the ring was chittering at him. That made me think of the old timey fun of using two cans and string to make a telephone.

and I myself am Vendetius

V for vendetta?

—I don’t need to prove a thing—I said—seeing that I hold this laser in my hand;

Ahh is this a laser pointer?

Truly, you seek amusement and not wisdom—yet, even as you listen, my words do slowly penetrate and act upon your brain, and later too will act, much as a time bomb.

A spooful of sugar helps the medicine go down

figments and mad fictions, sink into dreams lurking within dreams,

Like stories within stories

Bliss in the Eightfold Embrace of Octopauline”—“Perpetuum

Ten tickles please

virgins in serving bowls, four to each, garnished with greens and smelling so good, he started to drool. The table soon set—salt here, pepper over there—he

Spice girls

The King went up to the black one and plugged into the dream

Or jacked in

gage,

When we named our son I had no idea there were so many uses of the name as a word

that King Zipperupus was jolted from head to toe, for he himself was the mattress

King sized bed! Hope this isn't a princess and the pee story.

took a quick look into the gaping moat,

And again remotely

her—not in the flesh, forsooth, but a fair informational facsimile, a model that is digital, not physical, stochastic, not plastic, ergodic and most assuredly erotic,

When Lem writes like this I hear it in george carlin's voice

“Madman! Wouldst attempt the impossible?! For no being made of matter can ever enter a system that is naught but the flux and swirl of alphanumerical elements, discontinuous integer configurations, the abstract stuff of digits!”

Tron

And he took all the King’s measurements, as if for a suit

Diamonds, hearts, clubs or spades?

that thou mayest dream with her an unending dream, simulated, nonlinear, binary

Inception! I've lost track of how far down the inbedded stories this is

King Genius meanwhile offered Trurl a cup of ion mead, wondrously carved with curves of probability and the subtle play of quantum waves.

It was a quaff.

and elementary particles, like the cogiton,

Elementary my dear Watson