Altruizine
or, How Bonhomius Tried to Make Everyone Happy
THREE LINES
- The GnostotronOne can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything.
- A policemanThat one felt nothing.
- BonhomiusI only wished to make them happy.
HOW IT IS MADE
When the drug reaches a place, the film turns into a grid of panels, one per household or room. One panel holds the cause: a cow giving birth, a punch in a tavern, a toothache, a cat in a cellar, a widow. The feeling travels outward from that panel. Each panel it reaches shows its people taking on the feeling, and the source panel’s picture is printed over theirs, so you see the same image copied across the grid.
The sound follows the same rule. Every panel gets its own voice crying out, delayed by its distance from the source, and each copy is louder than the one before because, as the card says, the signal grows with the number of people near.
Bonhomius is a robot, and the drug has no effect on robots. His narration is the only sound in the film that is never copied, and in the test scene his panel is the only one the feeling skips. That is how the police find him.
AFTER THE OTHER THREE FILMS
The Seventh Sally’s maker commands his world, Dobb only listens to his, and the Storytelling Machines nest worlds inside each other. Altruizine has no box and no frame: the feeling crosses from one person to the next, and nobody controls it once it is in the water.
FOR THE BENCH
The grid is a 2D array, and each cell updates from its neighbours. Write the rule as one line: a cell’s feeling is the source’s feeling, delayed by distance, scaled up by how many cells already share it. What happens if the scaling is above 1? Find the line in your own sketch that keeps a feedback loop from running away.
Narration and dialogue paraphrase Stanisław Lem, “Altruizine,” The Cyberiad. Drawn after the Altruizine plates. Download the film.
THE SCRIPT
TRURL'S YARD
Trurl. Hold still. There. What happened to you?
Bonhomius. I was a hermit, kind sir, sixty-seven years in a cave. One morning I saw that it was wrong to live alone, when my first duty was to help my neighbour.
Bonhomius. In the city I met your friend Klapaucius. He had gone looking for the beings at the Highest Possible Level of Development.
THE SQUARE PLANET
Bonhomius. He found them on a square planet, under a square sun.
Klapaucius. Excuse me. Is this the Highest Possible Level of Development?
Bonhomius. They lay in the sand and scratched themselves, and would not answer.
THE GNOSTOTRON
Bonhomius. So he built a machine that could model one of them, and asked it instead.
Klapaucius. If you are gods, your duty is clear. Banish the misery of others!
The Gnostotron. We tried, sixty-four thousand times. When a civilization starts straightening humps, there is no end to it.
The Gnostotron. One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything.
Bonhomius. Surely there is something you can give us!
The Gnostotron. Very well. Here is a formula that has not been tried. No good will come of it.
THE CARD
Bonhomius. Whoever takes it, everyone within fifty yards feels what he feels. It has no effect on robots.
THE INN
Bonhomius. I dropped one pinch into the well of a country inn.
Bonhomius. In the barn, a cow was giving birth.
[labor pains spreads through 16 panels]
[labor pains spreads through 16 panels]
[labor pains spreads through 16 panels]
THE BRIDGE
Bonhomius. On the bridge to the city my suitcase fell open.
Bonhomius. Forty kilograms went into the stream the whole city drinks from.
THE CITY
Bonhomius. By night the city had drunk it.
[a punch spreads through 25 panels]
[a toothache spreads through 25 panels]
Bonhomius. A toothache was everyone’s toothache.
[fear of a cat spreads through 25 panels]
Bonhomius. A cat chased a mouse in the cellar, and the whole hotel ran.
[a sneeze spreads through 25 panels]
[grief spreads through 25 panels]
Bonhomius. They drove a widow out of town, because they could not bear her grief.
THE TEST
Bonhomius. Then two men stopped in front of me. One struck the other in the face.
[a punch spreads through 15 panels]
A policeman. That one felt nothing.
THE CANNON
Bonhomius. They broke every plate in me, and fired what was left out of a cannon. Going up, I could see the rivers carrying it on.
Bonhomius. I only wished to make them happy.
TRURL'S YARD
Trurl. And now?
Bonhomius. Now I am cured, kind sir, of making anyone happy by revolutionary means.