I never would have thought I'd be stuck in the Big Numbers sector, but the onboard computer began displaying alarming glitches, claiming a direct correlation between the oil level in the gyroscopes and the price of dried vobla on Entia. I immediately realized: we were in the habitat of Causator Fallax, or, as it's colloquially known, the False Causer.

The planet I landed on was a dismal sight. It was a dumping ground for discarded information: gigabytes of stock market reports, writers' drafts, meteorological tables, and sociological surveys, compressed by gravity into a dense, rustling humus. It was here, in the rarefied atmosphere of meaning, that the beast nested.

It appeared suddenly—not as a body, but as a function. In appearance, Causator resembled a tangle of multicolored curves, trembling with statistical excitement.  It had no claws, no teeth, only coordinate axes, which it swung with terrifying elegance.

"Get away!" I shouted, grabbing the atomic emitter. "I know that correlation is not causation!"

The creature merely contemptuously curved the distribution graph. At that moment, a blinding, crystal-clear thought pierced my mind. I suddenly saw clearly how global warming in the Aldebaran system inexorably led to a decline in the space pirate population in the Andromeda Nebula. The connection was so obvious, so mathematically flawless, that it took my breath away. The graph that the Illegible Causer projected directly onto my retina was beautiful: the asymptote of piracy gently touched the temperature parabola, and at the point of their contact, Truth was born.

The beast crept closer, rustling Venn diagrams. It did not attack physically;  He attacked the very foundation of my logical thinking. He showed me that the length of my answers in an argument with Professor Tarantogaga had a 0.99 correlation with their truth value. The longer I spoke, the more right I was! It was so tempting, so convenient. Why bother looking for facts when stretching out a sentence would suffice?

I felt my will weakening. The world around me began to rapidly simplify. Randomness disappeared. My tripping over a rock was a direct consequence of a supernova a thousand years ago. My untied shoelace dictated the exchange rate on Earth. The chaos of the Universe had transformed into a harmonious but utterly insane mechanism. I was ready to fall to my knees and bow to the Great Regression.

Only a miracle—or rather, good old stupidity—saved me.  I snatched a volume of poetry from my pocket (I think it was an early collection of scribblings by the robot poet Electrobard) and began reading aloud, breaking all laws of logic and rhythm.

"Cyber-fish, quasi-cluster, rusty nail of entropy!" I screamed, backing toward the rocket.

Causator Fallax froze. His graphs trembled. He couldn't connect the meaningless rhyme with the phases of the moon. A fatal error had occurred in his algorithms: he had tried to build a relationship between absurdity and vacuum, but got division by zero. With a plaintive squeak, like the sound of a snapped string, the creature curled up into a point and disappeared into a jumble of meaningless data.

I took off immediately. But even now, weeks later, I sometimes shudder when I see the graph.  And, to be honest, I still avoid eating cucumbers on Tuesdays – stock indices behave too suspiciously after that.

MeaningSystems LLM bestiary