Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad

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 10 9times 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 improve 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?”