Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad

“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!”

“But I must, I must!!” bellowed Zipperupus, beside himself, and beat his head against the Black Box until the metal was dented. The old sage then said:

“If such is thy inalterable desire, there is a way I can connect thee to the Princess Ineffabelle, but first thou must part with thy present form, for I shall take thy appurtenant coordinates and make a program of thee, atom by atom, and place thy simulation in that world medievally modeled, informational and representational, and there will it remain, enduring as long as electrons course through these wires and hop from cathode to anode. But thou, standing here before me now, thou wilt be annihilated, so that thy only existence may be in the form of given fields and potentials, statistical, heuristical, and wholly digital!”

“That’s hard to believe,” said Zipperupus. “How will I know you’ve simulated me, and not someone else?”

“Very well, we’ll make a trial run,” said the sage. And he took all the King’s measurements, as if for a suit of clothes, though with much greater precision, since every atom was carefully plotted and weighed, and then he fed the program into the Black Box and said:

“Behold!”

The King peered inside and saw himself sitting by the fire and reading in an ancient book about the Princess Ineffabelle, then rushing out to find her, asking here and there, until in the heart of the gold-plated desert he came upon a humble hut and a snow-white patriarch, who greeted him with the words, “Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor wretch!” And so on.

“Surely now thou art convinced,” said the patriarch, switching it off. “This time I shall program thee in the Middle Ages, at the side of the sweet Ineffabelle, that thou mayest dream with her an unending dream, simulated, nonlinear, binary…”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” said the King. “But still, it’s only my likeness, not myself, since I am right here and not in any Box!”

“But thou wilt not be here long,” replied the sage with a kindly smile, “for I shall attend to that…”

And he pulled out a hammer from under the bed, a heavy hammer, but serviceable.

“When thou art locked in the arms of thy beloved,” the patriarch told him, “I shall see to it that there be not two of thee, one here and one there, in the Box—employing a method that is old and primitive, yet never fails, so if thou wilt just bend over a little…”

“First let me take another look at your Ineffabelle,” said the King. “Just to make sure…”

The sage lifted the lid of the Black Box and showed him Ineffabelle. The King looked and looked, and finally said:

“The description in the ancient volume is greatly exaggerated. She’s not bad, of course, but nowhere near as beautiful as it says in the chronicles. Well, so long, old sage…”

And he turned to leave.

“Where art thou going, madman?!” cried the patriarch, clutching his hammer, for the King was almost out the door.

“Anywhere but in the Box,” said Zipperupus and hurried out, but at that very moment the dream burst like a bubble beneath his feet, and he found himself in the vestibule facing the bitterly disappointed Subtillion, disappointed because the King had come so close to being locked up in the Black Box, and the Lord High Thaumaturge could have kept him there forever…

“Listen here, Sir Cybernerian,” said the King, “these dreams of yours with princesses are a great deal more trouble than they’re worth. Now either you show me one I can enjoy—no tricks, no complications—or leave the palace at once, and take your cabinets with you!”

“Sire!” Subtillion replied. “I have just the dream for you, the finest quality and tailor-made. Only give it a try, and you’ll see I’m right!”

“Which one is that?” asked the King.

“This one, Your Highness,” said the Lord High Thaumaturge, and pointed to the little pearl plaque with the inscription: “Mona Lisa, or The Labyrinth of Sweet Infinity.”

And before the King could answer yea or nay, Subtillion himself took the chain to plug him in, and quickly, for he saw that things were going none too well: Zipperupus had escaped eternal imprisonment in the Black Box, too thickheaded to fall completely for the captivating Ineffabelle.

“Wait,” said the King, “let me!”

And he pushed in the plug and entered the dream, only to find himself still himself, Zipperupus, standing in the palace vestibule, and at his side, Subtillion the Cybernerian, who explains to him that of all the dreams, “Mona Lisa” is the most dissolute and dissipated, for in it is the infinite in femininity; hearing this, Zipperupus plugs in and looks about for Mona Lisa, already yearning for her infinitely feminine caress, but in this dream within a dream he finds himself still in the palace vestibule, the Lord High Thaumaturge at his side, so impatiently plugs into the cabinet and enters the next dream, but it’s still the same, the vestibule, the cabinets, the Cybernerian and himself. “Is this a dream or isn’t it?” he shouts, plugging in again, and once again there’s the vestibule, the cabinets, the Cybernerian; and again, but it’s still the same; and again and again, faster and faster. “Where’s Mona Lisa, knave?!” he snarls, and pulls the plug to wake—but no, he’s still in the vestibule with the cabinets! Furious, he stamps his feet and hurls himself from dream to dream, from cabinet to cabinet, from Cybernerian to Cybernerian, but now he doesn’t care about the dream, he only wants to get back to reality, back to his beloved throne, the court intrigues and old iniquities, and he pulls and pushes the plugs in a blind frenzy. “Help!” he cries, and, “Hey! The King’s in danger!” and, “Mona Lisa! Yoo-hoo!,” while he thrashes around in terror and scrambles wildly from corner to corner, looking for a chink in the dream, but in vain. He did not understand the how, the why or the what of it, but his stupidity could not save him, nor could his cowardice, nor his inordinate greed, for this time he had gotten himself in too deep, and was trapped and wrapped in dreams as if in a hundred tight cocoons, so that even when he managed, straining with all his might, to free himself from one, that didn’t help, for immediately he fell into another, and when he pulled his plug from the cabinet, both plug and cabinet were only dreamed, not real, and when he beat Subtillion, Subtillion too turned out to be a dream. Zipperupus leaped here and there, and everywhere, but wherever he leaped, everything was a dream, a dream and nothing but a dream, the doors, the marble floors, the gold-embroidered walls, the tapestries, the halls, and Zipperupus too, he was a dream, a dream that dreamed, a walking shadow, an empty apparition, insubstantial, fleeting, lost in a labyrinth of dreams, sinking ever deeper, though still he bucked and kicked—only that too was purely imaginary! He punched Subtillion in the nose, but not really, roared and howled, but nothing real came out, and when at last, dazed and half-crazed, he really did tear his way into reality, he thought it was a dream and plugged himself back in, and then it really was, and on he dreamed, and on and on, which was inevitable, and thus Zipperupus, whimpering, dreamed of waking in vain, not knowing that ‘Mona Lisa’ was—in reality—a diabolical code for ‘monarch-olysis,’ that is: the dissolution, dissociation and total dissipation of the King. For truly, of all Subtillion’s treacherous traps, this was the most terrible…

Such was the tale, moving and improving, that Trurl told to King Thumbscrew the Third, who by now had a splitting headache and so dismissed the constructor without further ado, presenting him first with the Order of the Sacred Cy-bernia, a lilac sign of feedback upon a field of green, in-crusted with precious bits of information.