The Hardworking Truth was happy. He was always happy when he was building machines. And he was always building machines. He would set them to dance. Intricate choreographies of synchronized activity, tracing out precise patterns of relative motion, each dance following its chain of inevitability to a natural conclusion.
The Beautiful Lie was sad, but not with the sadness of stories. Some of her stories were happy, and some were not; often you had to wait until the very end to find out which was which. But the end of one story was always the beginning of another, and with each new story came the potential for a new happiness to nullify the sadness, or vice versa. The Beautiful Lie knew the stories would go on forever: for there are many, many more untrue things in the world than true.
Was this, she wondered, the cause of her sadness?
Sometimes, when she felt this way, she would go to visit the Hardworking Truth. He would ignore her, of course, so engrossed was he in his work. She didn't care. She just liked to watch his machines as they danced.
But on this day the sadness had become too much. She felt a need to speak.
"Why do they dance?" she asked.
The Hardworking Truth looked up for a moment, then back to his machines. He had a tool in his hand and was using it to make some fine adjustment.
After a time, he replied. "They search the topography of conditional truth. I confer them with simple rules; in dancing they explore the confines of those rules, and map out the border between what is and what is not."
The Beautiful Lie watched as two machines collided, rotated in seemingly random directions, and proceeded onwards. "They take some odd turns," she observed.
"The truth goes where it will." The Hardworking Truth had an abstract look in his eyes. As if he had already forgotten she was next to him, was merely talking to the wind.
"I suppose so."
The dance glided on. After a time the Beautiful Lie spoke once more: "Could they dance my stories for me?"
The Hardworking Truth turned to her, allowing his gaze to linger a moment on her face, as if he had seen something there he hadn't expected.
"A story is its own rules. To give my machines the rules of a story would be to tell the story. There would be no point." He went back to his work.
"I want to make my stories real. And not just one. All of them." The Beautiful Lie felt a pang of anguish and turned away, glad that he had not seen her face. Now she understood the source of her unhappiness. Even her sad stories would never be real.
When she turned back, she observed that the Hardworking Truth had turned his eyes to her once more. For a time nothing happened but the clicking and clacking of machines. Then his face broke into a grin.
"In that case, it may be that I can help you. To dance one particular story is hard, it's true; to dance them all should be easier. But to do so one must overcome the halting problem." He paused momentarily, perhaps reacting to the look of incomprehension on her face. "How do you tell all possible stories, one after another, when some stories go on forever? I believe I have an answer. Come back tomorrow and I will show you what I mean."
The next morning she returned, full of hope that her stories would at last come to life. When she arrived at his workplace, he looked up at her and smiled, pointing at a single, very simple-looking machine that was placed on the ground in front of him.
"This is it," he said, and set the machine in motion.
"It looks so lonely, all by itself."
"It is enough. Dance is a true language, and all true languages are capable of expressing the same information. It is this that allows my machine to dance your stories for you. It will begin by dancing the first words of the first story, then on and on, a word at a time. Soon it will be telling the third word of the first story, the second word of the second story, and the first word of the third story. In this way it will tell each and every story, all the way through and all at once, even those that go on forever.
And so it did. The early stories were all nonsense, of course. Not beautiful at all. But the machine didn't care either way, knowing nothing of stories and what they might mean.
Time passed, and every so often real stories would emerge. Stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in all the right places. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, always beautiful.
And as the machine danced on, the stories became more and more elaborate. In time, stories so convoluted and looping and branched that they danced whole worlds into existence – worlds full of clever beings, stories so clever they could understand themselves.
But before all this, just as the machine had begun dancing out the very first words of the very first stories, the Hardworking Truth turned to the Beautiful Lie and said: "This machine will not only dance every story there is to be told, it will also trace out all possible dances. There is nothing left for either of us to do. It is time to find something new." He took her hand and together they walked away, leaving the tapping of clockwork rhythms behind them.
YOU ARE READING
Assorted Shorts
Short StoryWas going to call it Tight Shorts, but that would imply it's a load of old bollocks. A collection of short tales, some humorous, some not.
