The Tale of a Single Softbody, Or, The Tenth Sally of Trurl and Klapaucius

Once upon a time-space, Trurl the constructor decided to create a Thinking Softbody. When his old friend and adviser Klapaucius the Mathematician heard of this, he warned Trurl that such a thing was a logical absurdity, and could exist in the old outdated holopics alone. Trurl promptly tuned into the old holopics starring Softbodies but most of the protagonists therein were not thinking, just stinking, some blinking all the time. A few holopics claimed to have robotoids but the monstrous imitations were palpable, plainly pathetic, synthetic simplifications that were more like robotoys. After watching a grand total of four thousand and twenty-six holopics in six days, the poor constructor was left in a sick daze with a horrific headache without having seen a single simulated Softbody.

Klapaucius pleaded, "O Trurl, let us program thinking machines, construct complicated computers, but let us not dwell idly in the magical myths of silly Softbodies." He added angrily that his friend was losing his innate intelligence over an archaic artificiality but nothing he said could dissuade Trurl.

Obsessed, he began to build his mental image. He abandoned almost all the metallic elements of construction. Instead, he used huge amounts of dihydrogenated oxi in fluid state, a mixture of calcium fixtures and some ferrous fittings, a sprinkling of salt, some pepper, and liberal dollops of Chromo and Flavo ( only those approved by the Intergalactic Sensitivities Organisation, of course). He stirred the calumbrated cauldron till the foaming froth had frozen, distillated it drop by drop, passed it through the Markovian statistical simulator for the biogeometric codes. Then, he smeared it with gluey ribo and used this mixture to create the basic string. From this, he strung together his first simulated Softbody, small, to start with. Trurl said, "Hello, Little one! What is one and one?"

It shut its eyes and went to sleep. Trurl whistled in its tiny twisted trumpets, repeated the question in twenty different sharps and flats but he got no response. Irritated by the silence, he poked it; to his horror, it leaked some fluid and let loose a bawl: the neighbours' House of Crystal came crashing down, they sued Trurl for a Thousand Bags of Gold for throwing Sharp Sounds at Glass Houses. In revenge, the constructor made a Suing machine which needled all the legal luminaries hired by the Claimant... but that's another story. In the current time-space, Trurl could not let the baby have a ball, especially at his expense. He adjusted the psycholingual connectivities slightly upwards, tuned the volume controls, debugged the desynthesiser and bought a truckload of nappies. Thus prepared, he called Klapaucius to show him the sample he had created.

Cautiously, they began their first experiment: they gave it a tiny charge. It shrieked "Mummy!" The two brilliant robots looked at each other, puzzled. "Did he say 'Yummy'? Perhaps it is drunk with power?", Klapaucius murmured.

"I think ", said Trurl softly, "it speaks the tongue of Softbodies." Klapaucius swiggled his shoulders as if to say, "How should I know? It's probably a badly structured tongue."

But they dug into the ancient Softbody vocables and found the meaning of the sound, which left them more puzzled.

"Why does it want to be embalmed, whatever that is?", Klapaucius wondered, glaring at the tiny softbody; it wasn't really a metallic machine, just a toy for Trurl, he thought.

"Embalmed means wrapped in balm, balm means gum or juice, gum means something to chew, chew means..." Trurl continued, flipping through hundreds of vocabs.

"Stop it, you Thick-headed Tinkerer! This isn't a Thinker, this is just a Hideous Error. " Klapaucius expostulated, repeated his original advice to Trurl agitatedly and left.

He might have been right, but Trurl just would not give up: he adjusted the mind-set controls, updated the experience-handler, changed the illogic circuits in the brain, and expedited the emotive electropaths. Trurl magnified the machine, though not much of its thought controls needed expansion, only the body grew larger. He spent days adding wires which, like in the holopics, hung out and got tangled. Though Trurl felt that it looked like shoddy work, he decided to put, for once, Holoreality above Construction. Finally, all his last touches were completed; at last, he thought, he had succeeded in creating the Standard Softbody. He created an environment for it too, its very own box: forested, fertile, fragrant and flowerful, cryogenic, carbonated and colourful. As a masterstroke, he added the Core of critical control: the entity from which the environment could be magicked; he thought he would handover this to the softie after he had tested its abilities.

Trurl started it, and said "Hello, how are you, Adamore?"

"Fine, thank you. How are you? Where are you? And who are you?" Trurl was greatly relieved to hear the machine speak Techlish; he did not mind the soft accent. Pleased by the politeness and curiosity, the creator introduced himself, explained to Adamore that the environment had been created for his pleasure, explained the basic laws of softies, and forbade him to touch the Cybernetic Core.

Trurl watched: Adamore seemed to be behaving reasonably, as behove a right-thinking machine. Yet it was, at its centre, a simple softbody. Triumphant with his animate absurdity, Trurl called his friend over.

Klapaucius snorted with contempt, "A Thinker, eh? What can it do?"

"Ask and thou shall get.", said the maker magisterially.

Said the mathematician, "Twenty billion three thousand forty-two, five million and seventy-nine. Adamore, go forth and multiply."

To their horror, they watched Adamore painfully scrawl several figures with a stick in the dust, and then scribble several figures below it and so on. Finally, it came up with an answer.

"Even a child program could have done this correctly in a nano, and without the fuel-consuming sideshows either. How many numbers can it store in its top-level memory?", Klapaucius asked.

"Only seven eight-digit numbers", Trurl mumbled sheepishly. "It's slow on calculation, but adaptable and creative."

So Klapaucius gave it the Black Blot test for imagination, and it passed with flying colours. But the statistician was not satisfied. "A single sample is not good enough," he grumbled," we need to test with the Law of Large numbers. Ask it to replicate itself."

Trurl explained the method of softbody replication; Klapaucius shook his head in horror and disbelief while Trurl switched his creation off, and created from Adamore's ribo, a parallel. Klapaucius claimed this could hardly be a parallel - it must be a different species, it looked so different with its protuberances; Trurl insisted the ancient holopics had lots of these twin towers. Trurl christened it Evita, restarted the two and announced "Go forth and multiply."

With quiet pride, he explained to Klapaucius how he had created the multiplicity of meanings. But his rival was not listening to the technical details; he had spotted the chink in the box. Gleeful, he whispered sibilantly to the couple, "Go get the controls; if it is as good, as powerful as the Creator says it is, why wouldn't He want you to get it? Go, go, go!" He urged them.

Trurl cried out," NO! Don't! It's too early for you."

But it was too late for him; Adamore had reached the Control Circuits. Trurl rushed to his Command centre and switched the environment matrix just as Adamore pulled a plug: suddenly, the entire simulator vanished. Trurl flew into a furious flurry of calculations to figure out where it could be, but the twin matrices of teletransposition included too many variant uncertainties; the environment could have gone almost anywhere in the vast multiverse. Finally, discored, he gave up and went out with his friend to a nearby burper.

Over cans of poffed electrolyte, Klapaucius consoled him, " It may have been a thinking softbody, but it failed even the essential Ethics test, forget the Grand Gratefulness requirements. You would have had to destroy it someday. Anyway, you need not find them : I suspect the ingrates will finish each other off in just a few billenia."