All credits to Stanislaw Lem. This if from The Cyberiad.
Mymosh the Selfbegotten
This is the story of how the Great Constructor Trurl, with the
aid of an ordinary jug, created a local fluctuation, and what
came of it.
In the constellations of the Wringer there was a Spiral Galaxy,
and in this Galaxy there was a Black Nebula, and in this Nebula
were five sixth-order clusters, and in the fifth cluster, a lilac
sun, very old and very dim, and around this sun revolved seven
planets, and the third planet had two moons, and in all these
suns and stars and planets and moons a variety of events, various
and varying, took place, falling into a statistical distribution
that was perfectly normal, and on the second moon of the third
planet of the lilac sun of the fifth cluster of the Black Nebula
in the Spiral Galaxy in the Constellation of the Wringer was a
garbage dump, the kind of garbage dump one might find on any
planet or moon, absolutely average, in other words full of gar
bage; it had come into existence because the Glauberical Aberra
cleaans once wage a war, a war of the fission-and-fusion type,
against the Albumenid Ifts, with the natural result that their
bridges, roads, homes, and palaces, and of course they them
selves, were reduced to ashes and shards, which the solar winds
blew to the place whereof we speak. Now for many, many centuries
positively nothing took place in this garbage dump but garbage,
though an earthquake did occur and shifted the garbage on the
bottom to the top, and the garbage on the top to the bottom,
which in itself had no particular signifaicancce, and yet this
paved the way for a most unusual phenomenon. It so happened that
Trurl, the Fabulous Constructor, while flying in the vicinity,
was blinded by a certain comet with a garish tail. He fled its
path, frantically jettisoning out the spaceship window whatever
lay in reach - chess pieces, the hollow kind, which he'd filled
with liquor for the trip, some barrels the Ubbiduds of Chlorelei
employed for the purpose of compelling their opponents to yield,
as well as assorted utensils, and among these, an old
earthenware jug with a crack down the middle. This jug,
accelerating in accordance with the laws of gravity and boosted
by the comet's tail, crashed into a mountainside above the dump,
fell, clattered down a slope of junk toward a puddle, skittered
across some mud, and finally smacked into an old tin can; this
impact bent the metal around a copper wire, also knocked some
pieces of mica between the edges, and that made a condenser,
while the wire, twisted by the can, formed the beginnings of a
solenoid; and a stone, set in motion by the jug, moved in turn a
hunk of rusty iron, which happened to be a magnet, and this gave
rise to a current, and that current passed through sixteen other
cans and snips of wire, releasing a number of sulfides and
chlorides, whose atoms linked with other atoms, and the ensuing
molecules latched onto other molecules, until, in the very center
of the dump, there came into being a Logic Circuit, and five
more, and another eighteen in the spot where the jug finally
shattered into bits.
That evening, something emerged at the edge of the dump, not
far from the puddle which had by now dried up, and this something,
a creature of pure accident, was Mymosh the Selfbegotten, who had
neither mother nor father, but was son unto himself, for his
father was Coincidence, and his Mother --Entropy. And Mymosh
rose up from the garbage dump, totally oblivious of the fact that
he had about one chance in a hundred billion jillion raised to
the zillionth power of ever existing, and he took a step, and
walked until he came to the next puddle, which had not as yet
dried up, so that, kneeling over it, he could easily see himself.
And he saw, in the surface of the water, his purely accidental
head, with ears like muffins, the left one crushed and the right
a trifle underdone, and he saw his purely accidental body, a
potpourri of pots and pegs and flotsam, and somewhat barrel-
chested, in that his chest was a barrel, though narrower in the
middle, like a waist, for in crawling out from under the garbage,
he had scraped against a stone right there; and he gazed upon his
littery limbs, and counted them, and as luck would have it, there
were two arms, two legs and, fortuitously enough, two eyes too,
and Mymosh the Selfbegotten took great delight in his person, and
sighed with admiration at the narrowness of the waist, the
symmetrical arrangement of the limbs, the roundness of the head,
and was moved to exclaim:
--Truly, I am beautiful, nay, perfect, which clearly implies the
Perfection of All Created Things!! Ah, and how good must be the
One Who fashioned me!
And he hobbled on, dropping loose screws along the way (since
no one had tightened them properly), humming hymns in praise of
the Everlasting Harmony of Providence, but on the seventh step he
tripped and went headlong back down into the garbage, after
which he did nothing but rust, corrode and slowly disintegrate
for the next three hundred and fourteen thousand years, for he
had fallen on his head and shorted out, and was no more. And at
the end of this time it came to pass that a certain merchant,
carrying a shipment of sea anemones from the planet Medulsa to
the Thrycian Stomatopods, quarreled with his assistant as they
neared the lilac sun, and hurled his shoes at him, and one of
these broke the porthole window and flew out into space, where
its subsequent orbit subsequently experienced perturbation, due
to the circumstance that that very same comet, which had ages
past blinded Trurl, now found itself in the very same locality,
and so the shoe, turning slowly, hurtled towards the moon, was
singed a little by the atmospheric friction, bounced off the
mountainside above the dump, fell, and booted Mymosh the
Selfbegotten, lying there, with just the right resultant impulse
and at just the right angle of incidence to create just the right
torsions, torques, centrifugal forces and angular momenta needed
to reactivate the accidental brain of that accidental being--and
in this way: Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby
puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water,
and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bubbling, set up a
current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat
up in the mud and thought the following thought: --Apparently, I
am!
That, however, was all he was able to think for the next
sixteen centuries, and the rain beat down upon him, and the hail
pommeled him, and all the while his entropy increased and grew,
but after another thousand five hundred and twenty years, a
certain bird, flapping its way over the terrain, was attacked by
some swooping predator, and relieved itself out of fright and also
to increase its speed, and the droppings dropped and hit Mymosh
square on the forehead, whereupon he sneezed and said:
--Yes, I am! And there's no apparently about it! Yes the
question remains, who is it who says that I am? Or, in other
words, who am I? Now, how may this be answered? H'm! If only
there was something else besides me, any sort of something at
all, with which I might juxtapose and compare myself--that would
be half the battle. But alas, there's not a thing, for I can
plainly see that I see nothing whatsoever! Therefore there's
only I that am, and I am everything that is and may be, for I can
think in any way I like, but am I then--an empty space for
thought, and nothing more?
In point of fact he noo longer possessed any senses; they had
decayed and crumbled to dust over the centuries, since Entropy,
the bride of Chaos, is a cruel and implacable mistress.
Consequently Mymosh could not see his mother-puddle, nor his
brother-mud, nor the whole, wide world, and had no recollection
of what had happened to him before, and generally was now capable
of nothing but thought. This alone could he do, and so devoted
himself wholeheartedly to it.
--First I ought-he told himself- to fill this void that is I,
and thereby dispel its insufferable monotony. So let us think of
something, for when we think, behold, there is thoought, and
nought but thought has existence.--From this one could see he
was becoming somewhat presumptuous, for already he referred to
himself in the first person plural.
--But wait - he then said - might not something still exist
outside myself? We must, if only for a moment, consider this
possibility, though it sound preposterous and evan a little
insane. Let us call this outsideness the Gozmos. Now, if there
is a Gozmos, then I must be a part and portion of it!
Here he stopped, pondered the matter awhile, and finally
rejected that hypothesis as wholly without basis or foundation.
Really, there was not a shred of evidence in its favor, not a
single, solid argument to support it, and so, ashamed he had
indulged in such wild, untutored speculation, he said to himself:
--Of that which lies beyond me, if anything indeed there lie,
I have no knnowledge. But of that which is within, I do, or
rather shall, as soon as I think something into thought, for who
can know what I think, by thunder, better than myself!--And he
thought and thought, and thought of the Gozmos again, but this
time thought of it inside himself, which semed to him a far more
sensible and respectable solution, well within the bounds of
reason and propriety. And he began to fill his Gozmos with
various and sundry thoughts. First, because he was still new at
it and lacked skill, he thought out the Beadlies, who grambled
whenever they got the chance; and the Pratlings, who rejoiced in
filicorts. Immediately the Pratlings battled the Beadlies for
the supremacy of filicortions over gramblement, and all Mymosh
got for his world-creating pains was an awful headache.
In his next attempts at thought creation, he proceeded with
greater caution, first thinking up elements, like Brutonium, a
noble gas, and elementary particles, like the cogiton, the
quantum of intellect, and he created beings, and these were
fruitful and multiplied. From time to time he did make mistakes,
but after a century or two he grew quite proficient, and his very
own Gozmos, sound and stable, took shape in his mind's eye, and
it teemed with a multitude of entities, things, beings,
civilizations and phenomena, and existence was most pleasurable
there, for he had made the laws of the Gozmos highly liberal,
having no fondness for strict, inflexible rules, the sort of
prison discipline that Mother Nature imposes (though of course
he'd never heard of Mother Nature).
Thus the world of Selfbegotten was a place of caprice and
miracle; in it something might occur one way once, and at another
time be altogether different--and without any special rhyme or
reason. If, for example, an individual was supposed to die,
there were always ways of getting around it, for Mymosh had
firmly decided against irreversible events. And in his thoughts
the Zigrots, Calsonians, Flimmeroons, Jups, Arligynes and
Wallamachinoids all prospered and flourished, generation after
generation. During this time the haphazard arms and legs of
Mymosh fell off, returning to the garbage from which they'd come,
and the puddle rusted through the narrow waist, and his body
slowly sank into the stagnant mire. But he had just put up some
brand-new constellations, arranging them with loving care in the
eternal darkness of his consciousness, which was his Gozmos, and
did his level best to keep an accurate memory of everything that
he had thought into existence, even though his head hurt from the
effort, for he felt responsible for his Gozmos, deeply
obligated, and needed.
Meanwhile rust ate deeper and deeper into his cranial plates,
which of coourse he had no way of knowing, and a fragment from
Trurl's jug, the selfsame jug that thousands of years ago had
called him into being, came floating on the puddle's surface,
closer and closer to his unfortunate head, for only that now
remained above the water. And at the very moment when Mymosh was
imagining the gentle, crystal Baucis and her faithful Ondragor,
and as they journeyed hand in hand among the dark suns of his
mind, and all the people of the Gozmos looked on in rapt silence,
including the Beadlies, and as the pair softly called to one
another--the rust-eaten skull cracked open at the touch of the
earthenware shard, pushed by a puff of air, and the murky water
rushed in over the copper coils and extinguished the current in
the logic circuits, and the Gozmos of Mymosh the Selfbegotten
attained the perfection, the ultimate perfection that comes with
nothingness. And those who unwittingly had brought him into the
world never learned of his passing.