Core claim (story): A demon tries to know everything — and keeps discovering that perfect prediction collapses into being the universe.
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Interlude: The Demon and the Box That Wouldn’t Seal
Once there was a demon who knew everything — everything, that is, inside its box. It knew every speck and every wobble, and it could tell you what every speck would do next Tuesday. “Nothing gets in,” said the demon, “and nothing gets out. That’s why I know it all.” One night the moon drifted by and — without opening the lid, without so much as a knock — tugged every speck in the box a tiny bit moonward. All the Tuesday predictions came out wrong. “That’s cheating!” cried the demon. “You didn’t come in!” “Didn’t have to,” said the moon, and drifted on. The demon patched the box with lead, then with mirrors, then with very stern signs. The moon tugged anyway. Gravity, it turns out, has never once read a sign.
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Interlude: The Demon Becomes an Accountant
You may remember a certain demon, who found out that its box could not be perfectly sealed. Yet it had one marketable skill: it never lost track of a speck. So it became an accountant. Every evening it audited its box — information in minus information out equals internal change in information — and every evening the ledger balanced to the last bit. “Nothing was created today!” the demon announced proudly. “Nothing was destroyed!” Yet the account book ended at today. He couldn’t balance tomorrow’s books until he knew what tomorrow’s credits and debits would be. Keeping the books, it turns out, is not the same as reading them ahead of time, which is why nobody has ever asked an accountant for a prophecy. Though you could say this much for the demon: its books always balanced — and no prophet in town could claim the same.
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Interlude: The Demon’s Notebook Problem
Studying its books, the demon — no longer king of its box, merely moonlighting as an accountant — resolved to win back its reputation. It bought a notebook. “I’ll simply write the future down,” it said. “One line per speck.” It wrote beautifully, for a while. But the notebook was made of specks too, so it needed lines about its own lines — and then lines about those lines, which needed lines of their own. The notebook grew heavier; carrying it changed how the demon walked, which required a correction, which required more notebook. At this rate, by the time the notebook was finished, it would be exactly the size of everything, and by the time you read it the thing you were reading about would have already happened. The demon scratched its head, and went back to the drawing board.
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Interlude: The Demon Meets a Thermostat
The demon — its ledger balanced, but its box unsealable and its prediction notebook bloated, unwieldy, and still a work in progress — was wandering the halls of an office building when it met a small beige box on the wall. “What do you know?” asked the demon, out of professional habit.
“65,” said the thermostat.
“I once knew every speck in the universe,” said the demon, “or at least I thought I did. Anyway, today I’m feeling generous, so what is it that you want?”
“70,” said the thermostat.
The demon laughed for the first time since the moon had upset its perfectly ordered box. But while it laughed, the thermostat clicked. The furnace woke, and the room warmed.
The demon stopped laughing. In all its centuries of knowing the position of every particle in its box, it had never once made any of them do anything. “Teach me,” said the demon.
“Click,” said the thermostat, as the furnace shut off — which was actually all it knew how to say.
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Interlude: The Demon Hits Snooze
Whatever became of the demon? (An unsealable box, a balanced ledger, a ballooning-yet-still-incomplete prediction notebook, and a standing holiday visit to a thermostat it admires.) One evening, after hours of modeling itself modeling itself modeling itself, it felt the old notebook-dizziness coming on, and attempted what seemed like a simple prediction: I’ll get up tomorrow morning as soon as my alarm goes off and sort out all this self-referential nonsense once and for all.
The next morning, the demon’s alarm went off. The demon, bleary eyed, hit the snooze button, rolled over and covered its head with the pillow.
At last report the demon had given up on trying to predict everything and settled into a comfortable retirement, completely happy to allow itself to be surprised by things like a common mortal.
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