Tuesday, October 7, 2008

EPICAC

I just read today the saddest, sweetest I can think of at the moment. Perhaps the saddest, sweetest thing I’ve ever known, or maybe that I can think of at the moment. It is the short story “EPICAC”, by Kurt Vonnegut. Here’s the full story, or for those who don’t care for something that’s that long (it’s not long at all…), here’s the Wikipedia summary of it.

For those of you who don’t care for either of those, I’ll give a really short and lazy version of it. There’s this dude who is in love with this girl who never says yes to his constant proposals. So, he goes to this supercomputer thingermabobber where they work. He asks it to write love poems for him, and soon enough, the girl is wooed. However, when he asks the computer for the perfect proposal, the computer tells him that it’s in love with that girl too. After reasoning to it that it is a machine and blahblahblah, he goes on to propose to that girl and she says yes as long as he writes her a poem every anniversary. The next day, it happens that the supercomputer thing blew it self up, but before that, it made enough love poems for the dude to keep his end of the bargain for 500 years.

It’s so sad how this “machine” (the narrator says that it was less of a machine than other people he knew…, it was also his best friend) finally gets a problem it can’t solve, and that it never will solve. Although, instead of being a huge jackass about it, like it could have been, it does a really sincere gesture for his friend.

The end

I don’t what the point of this was

I wonder if EPICAC stands for anything specific…

Lalalalalalalalala

the end

sorry...

-digitaldelay


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5 comments:

the clam said...

Haha!

Kurt Vonnegut? We read Harrison Bergeron from him...and The Lie.

Yeah, his stories are weirdly epic o_O.

Anonymous said...

haha..that's where i heard of him...from Harrison Bergeron.....just from that story and this one...he seems like a genius, wonderful author...

digger dell

my.great.ESCAPE. said...

Have you read THE LOTTERY by Shirley Jackson?
It's genious :)

mourning.glory said...

I love Kurt Vonnegut's stories. I read EPICAC from the link you put it. It was sad. I also read Harrison Bergeron! That was also sad. But the author is a genius.

Maren said...

The name Epicac is a joke - Epicac is a kind of syrup you give someone to make them throw up. Also it is a pun on HELIAC - a 1950s computer the Pentagon used. Thought you might want to know. Better late than never.