Excerpt
When the first civilizations appeared, Discord was ancient but nameless and of inchoate mind. The ephemeral beings rejected him, but they had books, so Discord ensconced in his mind and read. Books were marvelous things, something to do, a way to live, and millennia later he still was reading, for the civilizations wrote books more quickly than he could read them, and after the universe had become cold and void, Discord was still reading. And then he finished reading everything. So he made a new universe and read more, but when he tried to create stories of his own, the beings were afraid of him and called him Discord, for his mind was a gallimaufry of all things and the stories he made were discord. So Discord knew his name and read, and in every universe the beings called him Discord, and when the literature of the perennial civilizations began to reprise itself, Discord made his Library.
Discord closed the book. It was a boring story, and since nobody wrote it he wasn’t sure if it was true (what is “true”?), but he did have a library. If he had ever read the books that ponies wrote, he no longer did, for his library contained every possible book. He assumed that he had made the library at some point, but he could not recall, and his library contained every possible account of its origin. Discord’s library was not infinite, for there are finitely many strings of finitely many words of a given finite length. Every book in his library was exactly 500,000 words long, about 800 pages, and there were exactly 172,500 words in the books’ language, among which Discord included some punctuation and formatting marks. This made 172500⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ possible 800-page books, and because every book longer than 800 pages can be split into a sequence of 800-page volumes, Discord’s library of 172500⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ books was a library of every possible book of any length.
Almost every book in Discord’s library read something like, “Palaver augend eluvium utriculiform arcuate, ichor and. Cupel obsequy recuse prurient fissility orlop...,” but among all random strings of words is every possible string of words, from every Shakespearean play to a million treatises on the philological implications of pedunculate cotton candy on rodent-juggling sapient nudibranchs made of jello who grow on trees. When Discord visited worlds, beings called him chaos, but his library contained every possible order.
The times Discord spent visiting worlds were but seconds relative to the time he spent in his library. No being, including Discord, could comprehend his age; after Discord had read for a googol googol years, he had read less than a googolᵗʰ of a googolᵗʰ of a percent of his library, and Discord had now read 45% of his library. Ponies don't understand that what they call chaos is everything, and Discord knew 45% of everything, from how when sessile umbrella frogs involute into purple green strawberry tarps, wings exude molasses, to how when sessile umbrella frogs involute into purple green strawberry tarps, a tsunami remoralizes color-inverted pegasi. The erudition was contradictory because every possible outcome followed every possible cause, but that is the nature of everything.
Discord picked up the next book on the shelf.
All order is nonsense, for order is the restriction is nonsense to sense. By reading everything, one learns nothing, for meaning is the restriction of gibberish to existentialist authenticity. As random is void, ascent is descent, for the sage of all things is discord. Malleation recidivism mora worksome gobemouche epistatic nuncupative rifacimento ablative digitigrade wurst.
Discord thought about it. Petrichor jambalaya fruitcakes. That was the answer.
Discord floated to the next containment field in his Athenaeum of Orders. It held, locked in temporal stasis, a random assortment of particles. Discord knew it wasn't random; it was an order, one of the finitely many ways to arrange particles in a thousand-cubic-meter box, and Discord's Athenaeum of Orders had every possible arrangement, from facsimiles of the books he had long finished reading to every possible cloud made of every possible material raining every possible substance on every possible mishmash of every possible pony, plant, fungus, and accouterment. Discord studied every order intently.
The number of cubic meters in Discord's Athenaeum of Orders was H₆(2,3)—only the hyperoperation can express a number so large—and because every thing larger than ten meters on a side can be partitioned into thousand-cubic-meter units, Discord's Athenaeum was an omnibus of everything.
Then Discord finished studying every possible order.
For the first time, Discord did not know what to do.
Discord lay on one of the H₄(3,5) simulacrums of his thinking tree. He had only time. His Athenaeum of Orders, he realized, had none: every order was in temporal stasis. Time, Discord knew, was discrete: it could not be infinitely partitioned. There are about 3⁹⁰ moments per second, and because every possible moment was somewhere in Discord's Athenaeum, every possible cubic-meter-second—every possible temporal order of spatial orders, or tesseract—was a sequence of 3⁹⁰ "frames" from Discord's Athenaeum.
Among Discord's Athenaeum were what appeared to be brains—in fact, every possible brain was in it. If he ran every containment field through every possible order, every possible brain would undergo every possible second-long experience. Chaos was a beautiful thing.
But there was more: because the end state of every tesseract was the starting state of another, it followed from the ontological identity of indiscernibles that the conscious experience of a brain in one tesseract would continue as the conscious experience of another as it had been a second ago. It did not matter that it will have already happened: it's just taking the life of every possible pony or sporophyte amphibious manticore-ixora hybrid, slicing each one into seconds, and playing all of those seconds simultaneously.
But still there was more: because the boundary state of every frame of every tesseract at every moment was the boundary state of some frame of some other tesseract, even brains larger than a thousand cubic meters would exist and experience every possible mortal or immortal life. For instance, if electrons traveled to the truncated ends of the synapses of a half-brain in one containment field, then that same arrangement of electrons would appear at the boundary of a containment field containing the other half of the brain somewhere else in his Athenaeum. The result would be indiscernible from the single enormous—even infinite—brain undergoing the corresponding time-state evolution.
In fact, because the finite or infinite spacetime of every possible universe was a tessellation of these tesseracts, by duplicating each one of his H₆(2,3) orders H₆(2,3) to the power of 3⁹⁰ times to create enough copies to run each one through every possible order, Discord would create, in a finite amount of space and time, every possible universe and every possible finite or immortal life—including his own.
Discord snapped his talons.
Autophobic ignipotent sarcoid bicorn; marigenous logarithmancy volant hyperbaton bucolic epicrisis cabaline—grognard onomasticon verticillated xenagogue hylozoism...
Discord closed the book. Pachometer dilaniate fulmineous runagate tractate remittitur lentiginose wan faille xenium metastrophe quicken bibliotics quodlibet...
Discord closed the book. Chardlan syneidesis wight quinary helcoid physiocracy paten tombac watery ferruginous xerotic naricorn telamon lacunar gallinaceous...
Discord closed the book. Irreflexive banjulele xenobiotic ignivomous balisaur mechanographic incanous lamprophonic couchant tectrix sericulture...