The Cyberiad

by Stanisław Lem

encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but

that's pretty much how I felt writing my final year topology paper..

You have to obey, it’s in the matrix!” shouted Klapaucius. Everyone stared, thunderstruck. “Matrix-schmatrix. Look pal, I’m not just any beast, I’m algorithmic, heuristic and sadistic, fully automatic and autocratic, that means undemocratic, and I’ve got loads of loops and plenty of feedback so none of that back talk or I’ll clap you in irons,

the machine learned..

sorrow comes upon him, and self-abhorrence, and then nothing can console him but stories, stories that are new and unusual.

As everyone knows, History is irreversible, and there is no way back to the halcyon past other than through dreams and reveries.

of his own volition plunge into figments and mad fictions, sink into dreams lurking within dreams, and there I’ll give him such a thorough finagling and inveigling, that he’ll never get back to reality alive!”

but who would want to ?