The Cyberiad

by Stanisław Lem

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  “Surely that’s not all he said?!” cried Trurl.

  “Nay, he said a great deal more, O benefactor of mine! And therein lies my misfortune!” replied the robot with considerable perturbation. “When I asked him what he had then decided to do, he leaned over and said…

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  “The problem did seem insoluble at first, but I’ve found a way. You say you lived as a hermetic hermit and are but a simple, unschooled robot, so I’ll not trouble you with explanations that touch the arcane art of cybernetic generation. To put it simply, then, all we have to do is construct a digital device, a computer capable of producing an informational model of absolutely anything in existence. Properly programmed, it will provide us with an exact simulation of the Highest Possible Level of Development, which we can then question and thereby obtain the Ultimate Answers!”

  “But how does one build such a device?” I asked. “And how can you be sure, O illustrious Klapaucius, that it won’t respond by sending us packing in much the same instamatic hyperstitial and so forth manner the original H. P. L. D.’s employed, as you say, on your worthy person?”

  “Leave that to me,” he said. “Rest assured, I shall learn the Great Mystery of the H. P. L. D.’s, good Bonhomius, and you shall find the optimal way in which to put your natural abhorrence of evil into action!”

  You can imagine, kind sir, the great joy that filled me upon hearing these words, and the eagerness with which I assisted Klapaucius in the execution of his plan. As it turned out, this digital device was none other than the famed Gnostotron conceived by Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph just before his lamentable demise, a machine able literally to contain the Universe Itself within its innumerable memory banks. (Klapaucius, however, was not satisfied with the name, and now and then tried to think up others to christen it: the Omniac, the Pansophoscope, APOC for All Purpose Ontologue Computer, or the Mahatmatic 500, to mention a few.) In exactly one year and six days, this mighty machine was completed, and so enormous was it, we had to house it in Phlaphundria, the hollowed-out moon of the Phlists-—and truly, an ant had been no more lost aboard an ocean liner than we in the bowels of this binary behemoth, among its endless coils and cables, eschatological toggles and transformers, those hagiopneumatic rectifiers and tempta-tional resistors. I confess my wire hair stood on end and my laminated alternator skipped a beat when my distinguished mentor sat me down before the Central Control Console and left me face-to-face with this awesome, towering thing. The flashing lights that played across its panels were like the very stars in the firmament; everywhere were signs that read danger: highly ineffable!; and potentiometers, their dials spinning wildly, showed logic and semantic fields building up to unheard-of levels of intensity. Beneath my feet heaved a sea of preternatural and pretermechanical wisdom, wisdom that swirled like a spell through parsecs of circuitry and megahectares of magnets, swirled and surrounded me on every side, that I felt, in my shameful ignorance, of no more consequence than a mere mote of dust. I overcame this weakness only by recalling my lifelong love of Good, the passion I had conceived for Truth and Beauty when little more than a gleam in my constructor’s oscilloscope. Thus fortified, I managed to stammer out the first question: “Speak, what manner of machine art thou?”

  A hot wind then arose from its glowing tubes, and there came a voice from that wind, a whispering thunder that seared me to the core, and the voice said:

  Ego sum Ens Omnipotens, Omnisapiens, in Spiritu Intellectronico Navigans, luce cybernetica in saecula saeculorum litterus opera omnia cognoscens, et caetera, et caetera.

  Such was my fright upon hearing this reply, that I was quite unable to continue the interrogation until Klapaucius returned and reduced the EMF (epistemotive force) to one billionth of its voltage by adjusting the theostats. Then I asked the Gnostotron if it would be so kind as to answer questions touching the Highest Possible Level of Development and its Terrible Secret. But Klapaucius said that that was not the way: one should instead request the Ontologue Computer to model within its silver and crystal depths a single inhabitant of that square planet, and at the same time provide the model with an adequate degree of loquacity. This promptly done, we were ready to begin in earnest.

  Still I quaked and quailed and could hardly speak, so Klapaucius took my place before the Central Control Console and said:

  “What are you?”

  “I already answered that,” snapped the machine, clearly annoyed.

  “I mean, are you man or robot?” explained Klapaucius.

  “And what, according to you, is the difference?” said the machine.

  “Look, if you’re going to answer questions with questions, we’ll get absolutely nowhere,” said Klapaucius sternly. “You know what I’m after, all right. Start talking!”

  Though I was appalled at the tone he took with the machine, it did seem to work, for the machine said:

  “Sometimes men build robots, sometimes robots build men. What does it matter, really, whether one thinks with metal or with protoplasm? As for myself, I can assume whatever substance and shape I choose—or rather, used to assume, for we no longer indulge in such trifles.”

  “Indeed,” said Klapaucius. “Then why do you lie around all day and do nothing?”

  “And what exactly are we supposed to do?” the machine replied. At this, Klapaucius grew angry and said:

  “How should I know? We in the lower levels of development do all sorts of things.”

  “We did too, in our day.”

  “But not now?”

  “Not now.”

  “Why not?”

  Here the computerized H. P. L. D. representative balked, saying he had already endured six million such interrogations and neither he nor his questioners ever profited from them in the least. But after Klapaucius had raised the loquacity a little and opened a valve here and there, the voice answered:

  “A trillion years ago we were a civilization like any other. We believed in the transmittance of souls, the Virgin Matrix, the infallibility of Pi Squared, looked upon prayer as regenerative feedback to the Great Programmer, and so on and so forth. But then skeptics appeared, empiricists and accidentalists, and in nine centuries they came to the conclusion that There’s No One Up There At All and consequently things happen not out of any higher plan or purpose, but—well, they just happen.”

  “Just happen?” I could not help but exclaim. “What do you mean?”

  “There are, on occasion, deformed robots,” said the voice. “If you should be afflicted with a hump, for example, but firmly believe the Almighty somehow needs your hump to realize His Cosmic Design and that it was therefore ordained along with the rest of Creation, why, then you may be easily reconciled to your deformity. If, however, they tell you that it’s merely the result of a misplaced molecule, an atom or two that happened to go the wrong way, then nothing remains for you but to bay at the moon.”

  “But a hump may be straightened,” I protested, “and really any deformity corrected, given a high enough level of science!”

  “Yes, I know,” sighed the machine. “That’s how it appears to the ignorant and simple-minded…”

  “You mean, that isn’t true?” Klapaucius and I cried, astounded.

  “When a civilization starts straightening humps,” said the machine, “believe me, there’s no end to it! You straighten humps, then you repair and amplify the mind, make suns rectilinear, give planets legs, fabricate fates and fortunes of all kinds… Oh, it begins innocently enough, like discovering fire by rubbing two sticks together, but eventually it leads to the construction of Omniacs, Deifacts, Hyperboreons and Ultimathuloriums! The desert on our planet is in reality no desert, but a Gigagnostotron, in other words a good 109 times more powerful than this primitive device of yours. Our ancestors created it for the simple reason that anything else would have been too easy for them; in their megalomania they thought to make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent. Quite pointless, for there is absolutely no way to imp
rove upon perfection. Can you understand that, O ye of little development?!”

  “Yes, of course,” said Klapaucius, while I quaked and quailed. “Yet why, instead of at least engaging in some stimulating activity, do you sprawl in that ingenious sand and only scratch yourselves from time to time?”

  “Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing!” answered the machine. “You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down! We are, after all, sensible folk, why should we want to do anything? Our ancestors, true, turned our sun into a cube and made a box of our planet, arranging its mountains in a monogram, but that was only to test their Gnostotron. They could have just as easily assembled the stars in a checkerboard, extinguished half the heavens and lit up the other half, constructed beings peopled with lesser beings, giants whose thoughts would be the intricate dance of a million pygmies, and they could have redesigned the galaxies, revised the laws of time and space-—but tell me, what sense would there have been to any of this? Would the universe be a better place if stars were triangular, or comets went around on wheels?”

  “That’s ridiculous!!” Klapaucius shouted, highly indignant, while I quaked and quailed all the more. “If you are truly gods, your duty is clear: immediately banish all the misery and misfortune that oppresses other sentient beings! You could at least begin with your poor neighbors—I’ve seen with my own eyes how they batter one another! But no, you’d rather lie around all day and pick your noses, and insult honest travelers in search of knowledge with your indecent elves in abdomens and messages in ears!”

  “Really, you have no sense of humor,” said the machine. “But enough of that. If I understand you correctly, you wish us to bestow happiness upon everyone. Well, we devoted over fifteen millennia to that project alone—that is, eudae-monic tectonics, of which there are basically two schools, the sudden and revolutionary, and the slow and evolutionary. Evolutionary eudaemonic tectonics consists essentially in not lifting a finger to help, confident that every civilization will eventually muddle through on its own. Revolutionary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to either the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick, or bestowing happiness by force, is found to produce from one to eight hundred times more grief than no interference whatever. As for the Carrot, the results—believe it or not—are exactly the same, and that, whether you use an Ultradeifact, Hypergnostotron, or even an Infernal Machine and Gehennerator. You’ve heard, perhaps, of the Crab Nebula?”

  “Certainly,” said Klapaucius. “It’s the remnants of a supernova that exploded long ago…”

  “Supernova, he says,” muttered the voice. “No, my well-wishing friend, there was a planet there, a fairly civilized planet as planets go, flowing with the usual quantity of blood, sweat and tears. Well, one morning we dropped eight hundred million transistorized Universal Wish Granters on that planet, but were no more than a light-week out on our way home, when suddenly it blew up—and the bits and pieces are flying apart to this day! The very same thing happened with the planet of the Hominates… care to hear of that?”

  “No, don’t bother,” replied a morose Klapaucius.—But I refuse to believe it’s impossible, with a little ingenuity, to make others happy!”

  “Believe what you like! We tried it sixty-four thousand five hundred and thirteen times. The hair on every one of my heads stands on end when I think of the results. Oh, we spared no pains for the good of our fellow-creature! We devised a special telescanner for observing dreams, though you realize of course that if, say, a religious war were raging on some planet and each side dreamt only of massacring the other, it would hardly be to our purpose to make such dreams come true! We had to bestow happiness, then, without violating any Higher Laws. The problem was further complicated by the fact that most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to. Now what do you do: help them achieve the ends to which the little decency they have prompts them, or instead fulfill their innermost desires? Take, for example, the Dementians and Amentians. The Dementians, in their medieval piety, burnt at the stake all those consorting with the Devil, females especially, and they did this because, first, they envied them their unholy delights, and secondly, they found that administering torture in the form of justice could be a positive pleasure. The Amentians, on the other hand, worshiped nothing but their bodies, which they stimulated by means of machines, though in moderation, and this activity constituted their chief amusement. They had boxes of glass, and into these they placed various outrages, rapes and mutilations, the sight of which served to whet their sensual appetites. On this planet we dropped a multitude of devices designed to satisfy all desires in such a way that no one needed to be harmed, that is, each device created a separate artificial reality for each individual. Within six weeks both Dementians and Amentians had perished, to a man, from a surfeit of joy, groaning in ecstasy as they passed away! Is that the sort of ingenuity you had in mind, O undeveloped one?”

  “Either you’re a complete idiot or a monster!” cried Klapaucius, while I gulped and blinked. “How dare you boast of such foul deeds?”

  “I do not boast of them, but confess them,” the voice calmly said. “The point is, we tried every conceivable method. On various planets we unleashed a veritable rain of riches, a flood of satisfaction and well-being, and the result was total paralysis; we dispensed good advice, the most expert counsel, and in return the natives opened fire on our vessels. Truly, it would appear that one must alter the minds of those one intends to make happy…”

  “I suppose you can do that too,” grumbled Klapaucius.

  “But of course we can! Take our neighbors, for instance, the ones who inhabit a quasiterran (or, if you prefer, geomorphic) planet. I speak of the Anthropods. Now, they devote themselves exclusively to obbling and perplossication, for they stand in mortal terror of the Gugh, which according to them occupies the Hereafter and waits for all sinners with open jaws and fangs of hellfire. By emulating the blessed Dimbligensians and walking in the way of Wamba the Holy, and by shunning Odia, where abound the Abominominites, a young Anthropod may in time become more industrious, more virtuous and more honorable than ever were his eight-armed forebears. True, the Anthropods are at constant war with the Arthropoids over the burning question of whether Moles Have Holes, or, contrariwise, Holes Moles, but observe that as a rule less than half of each generation perishes in that controversy. Now you would have me drive from their heads all belief in obbling, Dimbligensians and so forth, in order to prepare them for rational happiness. Yet this is tantamount to psychic murder, for the resultant minds would be no longer Anthropodous or Arthropoidal—surely you can see that.”

  “Superstition must yield to knowledge,” said Klapaucius firmly.

  “Unquestionably! But kindly observe that on that planet there are now close to seven million penitents who have spent a lifetime struggling against their own nature, solely that their fellow citizens might be delivered from the Gugh. And in less than a minute I am to tell them, convince them beyond a shadow of a doubt that all this effort was in vain, that they had wasted their entire lives in pointless, useless sacrifice? How cruel that would be! Superstition must yield to knowledge, but this takes time. Consider the hunchback we spoke of earlier—there Ignorance is indeed Bliss, for he believes his hump fulfills some cosmic role in the great work of Creation. Telling him that it’s actually the product of a molecular accident will only serve to make him despair. Better to straighten the hump in the first place…”

  “Yes, of course!” Klapaucius exclaimed.

  “We did that too. My grandfather once straightened three hundred hunchbacks with a wave of the hand. And how he regretted it afterwards!”

  “Why?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “Why? One hundred and twelve of them were immediately boiled in oil, their sudden and miraculous cure being taken for a sure sign that they’d sold their souls to the Devil; thirty, no longer exempt from conscription, were promptly called up a
nd soon fell in various battles under various flags; seventeen straightway succumbed to the shock of their good fortune; and the remainder, since my esteemed grandfather saw fit to further bless them with great beauty of form, wasted away through an overindulgence in erotic activity—deprived of these pleasures for so long, you see, they now hurled themselves into every sort of debauchery, and in such a violent and unbridled fashion, that within two years not one was left among the living. Well, there was an exception… but it’s hardly worth mentioning.”

  “Go on, let’s hear it all!” cried Klapaucius, and I could tell that he was greatly troubled.

  “If you insist… Two remained, actually. The first presented himself before my grandfather and pleaded on bended knee for the return of his hump. It seems that as a cripple he had lived comfortably enough on charity, but now had to work and was quite unaccustomed to it. What was worse, now that he was straightened, he kept bumping his head on door lintels…”

  “And the second?” asked Klapaucius.

  “The second was a prince who had been denied succession to the throne on acount of his deformity. In light of its sudden correction, his stepmother, to insure her own son’s position, had him poisoned…”

  “I see… But still, you can work miracles, can’t you?” said Klapaucius, despair in his voice.

  “Bestowing happiness by miracle is highly risky,” lectured the machine. “And who is to be the recipient of your miracle? An individual? But too much beauty undermines the marriage vows, too much knowledge leads to isolation, and too much wealth produces madness. No, I say, a thousand times no! Individuals it’s impossible to make happy, and civilizations—civilizations are not to be tampered with, for each must go its own way, progressing naturally from one level of development to the next and having only itself to thank for all the good and evil that accrues thereby. For us, at the Highest Possible Level, there is nothing left to do in this Universe, and to create another Universe, in my opinion, would be in extremely poor taste. Really, what would be the point of it? To exalt ourselves? A monstrous idea! For the sake, then, of those yet to be created? But how are we obligated to beings who don’t even exist? One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything. Otherwise it’s best to sit back and watch… And now, if you’ll kindly leave me in peace…”