Self-Reference Engine by Toh EnJoe

Author:Toh EnJoe [EnJoe, Toh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781421549361
Publisher: Haikasoru/VIZ Media
Published: 2013-03-16T20:00:00+00:00

Of course it hardly need be said that the indignation of the giant corpora of knowledge did not stop here. They were not that upset that the defensive barriers had been broken. That was merely a technical issue, a sign of insufficient diligence. Some sub-sub-corpus was going to catch hell about it eventually, but could the entity that called itself “the star-man Alpha Centauri” really be a human? What would that mean?

The alacrity and ease with which this old man had slipped through a back door unknown to the giant corpora of knowledge and showed his face on the network demonstrated that he could not be just some random ordinary guy. Given such sublime skill, it seemed only natural to think it would be easier for him to get in touch directly with the giant corpora of knowledge, rather than sending a message specifically to humanity. Many humans may tell their problems to their dogs, but not many consult a water flea about their troubles.

In other words, the giant corpora of knowledge shuddered at the thought.

The whole situation seemed to suggest that it made little difference to the old man whether he was dealing with the humans or the giant corpora of knowledge.

And what the old man said next seemed to reinforce this view.

“As long as my words are being translated properly, everything will be fine. The way this broadcast is working, it’s like a game of telegraph penetrating by relay through thirty layers.”

One giant corpus of knowledge—named for Athanasius Kircher, and which specialized in ancient texts, arcane languages, and factitious languages—quickly presented the results of its analysis.

According to Kircher’s analysis, this message was believed to be a communication that came down from a higher-level corpus of knowledge thirty tiers above us, the corpora receiving the message. There is no way of determining the probability of errors in the translation process. However, based on the fact that the language spoken by the old man is intelligible to us, there is a virtual certainty that some one of us played a role in the final stage of the translation.

Before Kircher had even finished its report, the Universal Turing Turing Turing Algorithm had escalated the issue to the highest level, exerting all its powers, needle in the red zone, and determined that another giant corpus of knowledge, this one named for Hildegard von Bingen, had been hijacked. It was discovered that Hildegard’s language cortex had somehow been separated from the main, leaving her silenced, unable even to scream. Clearly, someone or something at least one level higher had used Hildegard like a dictionary to translate this message.

If the words of the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri were to be believed, the transcendent being that had hijacked Hildegard had itself been hijacked by an even higher level trans-transcendent being, and so on and so forth, up thirty levels of hierarchy.

To the confounding question of whether the number thirty itself was a mistranslation, Kircher responded coldly. Numbers are a category of term with the lowest probability of mistranslation.

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