From “How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays” by Umberto Eco
Conversation in Babylon
(Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in the shade of the Hanging Gardens, not many thousands of years ago)
URUK: How do you like the cuneiform characters? My new serf-writer composed the whole beginning of the Hammurabi code in about ten hours.
NIMROD: What did you use? An Apple Nominator from Eden Valley?
URUK: Are you nuts? You can’t trade in one of those things even at the Tyre slave market. No, this is an Egyptian serf-writer, a Thoth 3 Megis-DOS. Very low consumption. One bowl of rice a day, and it has a hieroglyphics program, too.
NIMROD: You’re just cluttering up its memory.
URUK: But it formats while it’s copying. You don’t need a separate serf-formatter any more to collect the clay, mold the tablet, and dry it in the sun, while the serf-writer does the rest. Mine molds, dries at the fire, and writes directly.
NIMROD: But this one takes Egyptian 5.25 cubit tablets and must weigh a good sixty kilos. Why don’t you use a portable?
URUK: What? One of those liquid-crystal Chaldean screens? That’s Magi stuff.
NIMROD: No. I mean a dwarf-writer, an African pygmy as modified in Sidon. You know what those Phoenicians are like, they copy everything from the Egyptians, and then they miniaturize. Look: a laptop. It writes while seated on your knees.
URUK: Disgusting. And hunchbacked as well.
NIMROD: Of course. They inserted a plate under its shoulders for quick back-up. One lash of the whip and he writes directly in Alpha-Beta, you see? Instead of the graphic mode, he uses a text mode. That means you can do everything with twenty-one characters. You can write the whole text of Hammurabi on a few 3.5 tablets.
URUK: But then you have to buy a serf-translator.
NIMROD: Absolutely not. The dwarf has the translator built in. Anoter lash and he transcribes in cuneiform.
URUK: Can he handle graphics?
NIMROD: Naturally. Who do you think did all the plans for the Tower?
URUK: Can you trust him, though? Maybe the whole thing will fall down later.
NIMROD: What an idea! He’s installed Pythagoras in his memory, and Memphis Lotus, too. You give him the surface measurements and crack the whip, and he gives you a ziggurat in three dimensions. When they built the pyramids the Egyptians were still using the Moses ten-commandment system, which required a back-up of ten thousand serf-builders. And they weren’t the least bit user-friendly. All that hardware’s obsolete, and they had to throw it into the Red Sea. I believe the waters rose up.
URUK: What about calculation?
NIMROD: Oh, it speaks Zodiac. It will produce your horoscope in a matter of seconds. What you see is what you get.
URUK: Does it cost much?
NIMROD: Look, if you buy it here, the harvest of a whole season wouldn’t be enough. But if you can get someone to buy you one at the Byblos street fair, it’s yours for a sack of seeds. It demands a lot of input, to be sure, but you know the rule: garbage in, garbage out.
URUK: Hm. I’m still pretty happy with my Egyptian. If your dwarf is compatible with my 3 Megis-DOS, couldn’t you program him for Zodiac, at least?
NIMROD: In theory that’s illegal, because when you buy one, you have to swear it’s for your own personal use.... But everybody does it. Sure, I’ll put them in contact. I just hope yours doesn’t have the virus.
URUK: Bursting with health. What scares me, though, is the way they come out with some new language every day. In the end the programs will all get confused.
NIMROD: Don’t worry. It could never happen here. Not in Babel.
