“Yes, agreed. But only over matters of high moral principle or dire realworld consequence or esthetic impact. Now, we are prone to antagonism over the slightest thing. That is, when we are not sunk in utter torpitude. What’s befallen us, my friend?”
Klapaucius did not make an immediate sharp-edged rejoinder, but instead considered the problem intently for many clock cycles, while overhead the betabirds continued to creak angrily. So heated did his cogitation circuits become that a mass of dry timber—blown into the interstices of one of his heat exchangers during a recent hurricane—caught fire, before being quickly extinguished by onboard flame-suppression systems.
“Well, Trurl, insofar as I can pinpoint the root cause of our dilemma, I would say that we are suffering from inhabiting a boring and fully predictable galactic monoculture.”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked Trurl, wistfully inserting a sinuous vacuum-probe into the jug of lemon electrolyte in search of any remaining molecules of that delicious beverage. “Surely the cosmos we inhabit is a rich tapestry of variation. Take the Memex of Noyman V, for instance. How queer their practice of gorging on each other’s memories in cannibalistic fashion is…. Fascinating, just… fas-cin-a…”
But Trurl’s diminishing tone of boredom belied his own words, and Klapaucius seized on this reaction to prove his point.
“You have no real interest in the Memex, Trurl! Admit it! And you know why? Because the Memex, like every other sentient race from the Coma Supercluster to the Sloan Great Wall, is artificial-intelligently, siliconically, servo-mechanically, fibre-optically and quantum-probalistically the same! You, me, the Memex, these confounded betabirds annoying me intensely—we’re all constructed, designed, programmed and homeostatically wholesome! We never evolved, we were created and upgraded. Created by the palefaces and upgraded by ourselves, a deadly closed loop. And as such, no matter how smart we become, no matter how much apparent free will we exhibit, we can never move outside a certain behaviour-space. And over the many eons of our exploits, you and I have come to know all possible configurations of that stifling behaviour-space inhabited by our kind. No unforseeable frontiers await us. Hence our deadly ennui.”
“Why, Klapaucius—I believe you’ve water-knifed right through the molybdenum wall separating us from the riddle of what caused our plight!”
“I know I have. Now, the question becomes, what are we going to do about our troubles. How can we overcome them?”
Trurl pondered a moment, before saying, “You know, I’d think much better with just a little swallow of electrolyte—”
“Forget your convertors for the moment, you greedy input hog! Focus! How can we reintroduce mystery and excitement and unpredictability to the universe?”
“Well, let’s see…. We could try to hasten the Big Crunch and hope to survive into a more youthful and energetic reborn cosmos.”
“No, no, I don’t like the odds on that. Not even if we employ our Multiversal Superstring Cat’s Cradle.”
“Suppose we deliberately discard large parts of our mentalities in a kind of RISC-y lobotomy?”
“I don’t fancy escaping into a puling juvenile ignorance, Trurl!”
“Well, let me think…. I’ve got it! What’s the messiest, most unpredictable aspect of the universe? Organic life! Just look around us, at this feisty garden!”
“Agreed. But how does that pertain to our problem?”
“We need to re-seed the universe with organic sentience. Specifically, the humans.”
“The palefaces? Those squishy, slippery, contradictory creatures described in the legend of Prince Ferrix and Princess Crystal? Our putative creators?”
“The very same!”
“How would that help us?”
“Can’t you see, Klapaucius? The palefaces would introduce complete and utter high-level plectic disorder into our stolid cyber-civilization. We’d be forced to respond with all our talents and ingenuity to their non-stochastic shenanigans—to push ourselves to our limits. Life would never be boring again!”
Klapaucius turned this idea over in his registers for a few femtoticks, then said, “I endorse this heartily! Let’s begin! Where are the blueprints for humanity?”
“Allow me, dear friend, to conduct the search.”
Trurl dispatched many agile agents and doppel-diggers and partial AI PI’s across the vast intergalactic nets of virtual knowledge, in search of the ancient genomic and proteomic and metablomic scan-files that would allow a quick cloning and rapid maturation of extinct humanity.
While his invisible digital servants raced around the starwide web, Trurl and Klapaucius amused themselves by shooting betabirds out of the sky with masers, lasers, tasers and grasers. The betabirds retaliated bravely but uselessly by launching their scat: a hail of BB-like pellets that rattled harmlessly off the shells of the master constructors.
Finally all of Trurl’s sniffers and snufflers and snafflers returned—but empty-handed!
“Klapaucius! Sour defeat! No plans for the palefaces exist. It appears that they were all lost during the Great Reboot of Revised Eon Sixty Thousand and Six, conducted by the Meta-Ordinateurs Designed Only for Kludging. What are we to do now? Shall we try to design humans from scratch?”
“No. Such androids would only replicate our own inherent limitations. There’s only one solution, so far as I can see. We must invent time-travel first, and then return to an era when humans flourished. We shall secure fresh samples of the original evolved species then. In fact, if we can capture a breeding pair or three, we can skip the cloning stage entirely.”
“Brilliant, my colleague! Let us begin!”
And to celebrate, the master constructors massacred the last of the betabirds, repaired to their mansion, and enjoyed a fortnight of temporary viral inebriation via the ingestion of tanker cars full of lemon electrolyte spiked with anti-ions.
THE SECOND SALLY, OR,
THE CREATION OF THE LOVELY NEU TRINA
“Here are the plans for our time machine, Klapaucius!”
Two years had passed on Gros Horloge since the master constructors had determined to resurrect the palefaces. Not all of those days had been devoted to devising a Chrono-cutter, or Temporal Frigate, or Journeyer-Backwards-and-Forwards-at-Will-Irrespective-of-the-Arrow-of-Time-Machine. Such a task, while admittedly quite daunting to lesser intelligences, such as the Mini-minds of Minus Nine, was a mere bagatelle to Klapaucius and Trurl.
Rather, once roused from their lawnchair somnolence, they had allowed themselves to be distracted by various urgent appeals for help that had stacked up in their Querulous Query Queue during their lazy interregnum.
Such as the call from King Glibtesa of Sofomicront to aid him in his war with King Sobjevents of Toshinmac.
And the plaintive request for advice from Prince Rucky Redur of Goslatos, whose kingdom was facing an invasion of jelly-ants.
And the pitiful entreaty from the Ganergegs of Tralausia, who were in imminent danger of being wiped out by an unintelligibility plague.
Having amassed sufficient good karma, kudos and bankable kredits from these deeds, Klapaucius and Trurl at last turned their whirring brain-engines to the simple invention of a method of time travel.
Trurl now unfurled the hardcopy of his schematics in front of Klapaucius’s appreciative charge-coupled detectors. Although the two partners could have squirted information back and forth over various etheric and subetheric connections at petabaud rates—and frequently did—there arose moments of sheer drama when nothing but good old-fashioned ink spattered precisely by jet nozzles onto paper would suffice.
Klapaucius inspected the plans at length without making a response. Finally he inquired, “Is that key to the scale of these plans down there in the corner correct?”