Estou tentando encontrar uma história que li uma vez,
Você está procurando "Coisa de Beleza" , uma novela de Damon Knight , publicado originalmente em Galaxy Science Fiction , setembro de 1958 , que está disponível no Arquivo da Internet . Qualquer essas capas parecem familiares?
sobre um colega que encontra um dispositivo estranho que desenha imagens. Ele não consegue descobrir como funciona ou o que os controles fazem, mas, por tentativa e erro, descobre que pode imprimi-lo para imprimir um desenho artístico pressionando um determinado botão.
What else? There were red buttons marked "Utplåna," "Torka" and "Avslå." He pressed one down, but nothing happened. Then a series of white ones, like on an adding machine, all numbered. He pressed one down at random, then another, and was about to press a third when he leaped back in alarm. The hooked arms were moving, rapidly and purposefully. Where they passed over the paper, thin dark-gray lines were growing.
Fish leaned closer, his mouth open and his eyes bulging. The little points under the ends of the arms were riding smoothly over the paper, leaving graceful lines behind them. The arms moved, contracted on their little pivots and springs, swept this way and that, lifted slightly, dropped again and moved on. Why, the machine was drawing—drawing a picture while he watched!
IIRC, o homem faz uma carreira (possivelmente curta) de vender a arte que esta coisa produz.
Murals, institutional advertising, textile designs, private sales to collectors—my God, how it was rolling in!
Depois de um tempo, ele percebe que, ao pressionar o que ele supõe ser o botão "desenhar e imprimir", ele está realmente apagando padrões e elementos artísticos com cada instância de saída, de modo que o dispositivo eventualmente torna-se completamente inútil.
Sim. Ele recebe a estranha linguagem identificada:
What about the middle button? Torka . . . to wipe. To wipe? Let's see, there was another word—Avlägsna, that was it. Sometimes the phrase "Avlägsna ett mönster" would be running through his head when he was half awake, like a whispered warning . . . Here it was Avlägsna . . . to remove.
His hands were shaking. "To remove a pattern from bank after use, press button 'Wipe.'" He let the folder fall. All this time, not knowing, he'd been systematically using up the precious patterns in the machine, throwing them away one by one, until now thee was nothing left—just eight big hunks of useless machinery, made for somebody somewhere who spoke Swedish.