edgecase
Five hundred years ago, the head of an upper hexagon came across a book as confused as the rest but which had almost two pages of identical lines. He showed his find to a peripatetic cryptographer, who told him they were in Portuguese. Others said they were Yiddish. Within a hundred years, the language had been established as a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic. The contents, which were also decoded, proved to be theories of synthetic analysis, illustrated by endlessly repeated examples of variations. Such examples led one librarian of genius to stumble on the Library's fundamental law. This thinker noted that all the books, however different they may be, have identical elements - the space, the full stop, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also claimed something that all travellers have confirmed - that in the whole vast Library no two books are the same. From these undeniable premises he deduced that the Library is complete and that its shelves hold all possible permutations of the twenty-odd symbols (a number which, although vast, is not infinite) or, in effect, everything that can be expressed in all languages - a history of the future down to the last detail, the autobiographies of the archangels, a true catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false ones, a proof of the falseness of these catalogues, a proof of the falseness of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, a commentary on this gospel, a commentary on the commentary on this gospel, a true account of your death, translations of each book into all languages, interpolations from each book into every other book.

~ The Library of Babel
Author: StJohn Piano
Published: 2018-04-16
Datafeed Article 47
This article has been digitally signed by Edgecase Datafeed.
557 words - 141 lines - 4 pages



The Eye of Argon, by Jim Theis, may be the greatest piece of fan fiction ever written.


"The story introduces Grignr the Barbarian, closely resembling Conan but worse-tempered, worse-spelt and harder to pronounce."
~ David Langford


Selected quotations:


The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Noregolian empire.



Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives.



Grignr leashed his mount forward as the hoarsely piercing battle cry of his wilderness bred race resounded from his grinding lungs.



A gasping gurgle from the soldier's writhing mouth as he tumbled to the golden sand at his feet, and wormed agonizingly in his death bed.



"You city bred dogs should learn not to antagonize your better."



Eyeing a slender female crouched alone at a nearby bench, Grignr advanced wishing to wholesomely occupy his time.



"The slut should have picked his quarry more carefully!" Roared the victor in a mocking baritone growl.



"By the surly beard of Mrifk, Grignr kneels to no man!"



Crushing prudence to the sward, he plowed into the soldier at his left arm.



Grignr grappled with the lashing flexor muscles of the repugnant body of a garganuan brownhided rat, striving to hold its razor teeth from his juicy jugular.



The antagonized pack of leering shaman converging tensely upon her prostrate form were entangled all too lividly in the grim web of reality.



"Take hold of this rope," said the first soldier, "and climb out from your pit, slut. Your presence is requested in another far deeper hell hole."



Grignr slipped his right hand to his thigh, concealing a small opague object beneath the folds of the g-string wrapped about his waist.



With a zealous grunt, the Ecordian flexed his tightly corded biceps.



Snorting a gusty billow of mirth, he once more concealed th e tiny object beneath his loin cloth; the tediously honed pelvis bone of the broken rodent.



If not for his keen auditory organs and lighting steeled reflexes, Grignr would have been groping through the shadowed hell-pits of the Grim Reaper.



Grignr percieved a scene which caused his blood to smolder not unlike bubbling, molten lava.



Writhing agonizedly against the hideous image, foam flecking his chalk white lips, the priest struggled helplessly - - -the victim of an epileptic siezure.



After all, a man cannot slink from a heavily guarded palace while burdened down by the intense bulk of a squatting statue, providing of course that the idol can even be hefted, which in fact was beyond the reaches of Grignr's coarsing stamina.



Grignr merely voiced an sighed grunt.



"Aye! The ways of our civilization are in many ways warped and distorted, but what is your calling," she queried , bustily?



The priest was transformed into a raving maniac bent soley upon reaking vengeance. With lips curled and quivering, a crust of foam dripping from them, the acolyte drew a long ,wicked looking jewel hilted scimitar from his silver girdle and fled through the aperature in the ceiling uttering a faintly perceptible ceremonial jibberish.



Then the hideous transgressor of nature flowed towards Grignr, a trail of greenish slime lingering behind it.



Mounting one of the disgruntled mares, and leading the other; the weary, scarred barbarian trooted slowly off into the horizon.







[start of notes]



Changes to the original text:
- If the first letter of the quoted section is a lower case character, I have capitalised it.
- I have added a period to the end of some quoted sections.


Other changes (made on 2018-06-05):
- <preserve_whitespace_lines> element removed.
- Instead of all quotations being enclosed in a single <blockquote_lines> element, each quotation is now separately enclosed in its own individual <blockquote_lines> element.
No checkpoint article has been made yet. Article signed again.


[end of notes]