q=chr(34)*3
s='q=chr(34)*3\ns={2!r}\na="""{0}"""\nb="""{1}"""\nprint(s.format(a,b,s))'
a="""
A quine is...
I just woke up from a nightmare. The events are still hazy, as they always
are, but if I jot them down quickly, maybe they will stay.
I used to have lots of nightmares when I was a little boy. The wake up and
piss yourself kind of nightmares. I struggled with them for years before they
finally went away, of their own accord. The most troubling part about them was
that I could never figure out what exactly they were about. I don't mean like
metaphorically, I mean I didn't know what they were. And I don't mean I forgot
them per se, because I remembered enough about them the next day to still send
a shiver down my spine. Over the years, as my vocabulary and introspection
grew I began to put some words to them. I began to call them infinite dreams.
Infinity has always been a fascinating concept to me. The mere fact that it
exists in the human lexicon is a tribute to our mental faculties. Here is a
concept that is so big you can't put it inside your head, yet there it is. I
mean, most people think about large things, like the universe or the number
of stars or grains of sand on a beach and just extrapolate from there. They
say 'it's bigger than those things'. So we can take these concepts and wrap
it all up in a little squiggly line and just store it on a shelf somewhere
in our head for when we need it. Like a little mathematical shovel.
In these dreams I think I see infinity. I don't have words that are adequate
because how can you adequately describe the infinite? I have tried over the
years though.
It's black. Not black like coal, but blacker. So black that it seems to have
no surface. But I'm up against this surface, this cold buzzing surface that
extends forever. Absolutely alone. It's cold, but not freezing. Like a metal
that is just slightly colder than you, so that it is not cold in an absolute
sense, yet it sucks the heat out of you. And it hums, a terrible hum, but a
hum below your threshold of hearing so that you just feel the pressure of it
against your ear drums, constantly pressing. And even this attempt doesn't
quite catch the nature; I just can't quite pin it down. Because it isn't
really a surface, but more like I'm embedded in it, yet I get the feeling
of being able to see an infinite horizon.
And the awe and magnitude of this thing...it makes you weep and scream.
Alcoholics know this thing. This is the abyss. You stand on the precipice
and see the blackness staring back at you without eyes. Great artists have
tried to paint it and musicians have tried to compose it. I happen to dream
it.
I just woke up from a dream. In this dream I'm with my friend Nan. It's a
typical college weekend. We are hanging out, drinking beers, smoking some
weed. I think we are at her apartment. There are other people there. They
are younger. Maybe they are friends of her roommate. I both know and don't
know them in a way that makes sense only in a dream. They're not really
hanging out with us, because they don't do drugs. They're innocent the way I
was when I thought it was a mortal sin to smoke a cigarette when I was in
fourth grade before I knew that half the world smokes. But they are also self
righteous in only the way youth can be. This irritates me. Because I can see
in their eyes disapproval, yet they will likely be in my shoes in two years.
I think we were at a club earlier, but things are hazy. Maybe it's the weed?
I want to talk to Nan about this and complain about these young
kids who think they know everything. She'll understand. We head outside
because she needs to get something from her car.
It's a nice cool night, comfortable. I try to explain to Nan how I feel
about those kids.
Sometimes I can be a little paranoid. I can attribute malice where there is
none. Like, I can sort of overhear someone talking and assume they are
talking about me and my mind fills in the rest of the conversation. I'm not
saying that I hear voices in my head, but I have very good hearing and can
sometimes hear conversations that are meant to be private, and sometimes my
brain fills in the missing details in a pessimistic way.
So I tell her that I heard a couple of these guys talking and I'm getting a
kind of negative vibe from them and it's bumming me out. She's kind of busy
digging shit out of her car. She says it probably has something to do with
the shit that went down at the club.
Or wait...did she say that or did I think that? Because I don't remember her
talking. But I do vaguely remember some commotion at the club. What was it
that happened? The weed must be more powerful than I thought. Are we tripping
on shrooms? I would remember taking shrooms, right?
I don't have much time to think about this though, because just then some
jets streak by overhead. They roar through the night sky, low and serious,
and then more appear, doing maneuvers that don't make sense, folding back
on themselves. I can hear helicopters too, the rotor sound echoing off of
everything. That sound fills my head.
I decide to run back to the house. Maybe someone inside knows what's going
on. As I approach the house I can see into the field across the way. I catch
some movement, like shadows darting around. I pause to look closer. I see
soldiers weaving in and out of the tall grasses. I can't actually see the
soldiers, but I can see the patches of darkness. The patches of not-field
moving and circling.
I'm inside now. Many more people are here. The lights are on. People are
quiet like they know what is going on but they are scared. I start asking
frantically what is going on. No one speaks. I start to become shrill and
stand on a coffee table, but no one will speak to me. There are police or
soldiers everywhere outside, I can see their masked faces staring at me
through the windows.
Sometimes when you are dreaming, things that you should always have known
become apparent to you only suddenly. Your mind then retroactively fills in
the details for you. The event is like a stone dropped on a pond and your
mind cascades the ripples backward in time for you.
Something did happen at the club. Something with a gun. A shotgun. Yes, I
remember that. My mind is filling in more ripples, but I don't like where
this dream is going.
You see, your mind is an inference engine. It is efficient and precise like
a razor. You have spent your entire life honing this razor against the stone
that is our deterministic objective reality. You can pretty well predict
which way the billiard balls will bounce around in this mostly Newtonian
world.
It's like a fantastic cuisinart. Taking in all the raw ingredients of your
senses in one end and spitting out fine and logical dishes for your
consumption on the other. And these outputs are closely matched to the real
world in which we live. This is what the machine does. It is its only
purpose. It never stops.
But when you dream, your senses, for the most part, shut off. People die in
fires every day because they can't smell smoke when they are asleep. So what
happens to the cuisinart when you pull the ingredients away? It doesn't stop.
It can't stop. It has been running since you were born and it will not be
interrupted by something as trivial as sleep. So it cannibalizes itself. It
plugs its outputs into its inputs and puts the whole thing on a spin cycle.
Instead of your senses it takes memories, fragments of emotion, scraps of
the day, and it tries to build a coherent world from them because that is in
fact its only job. And then you run through this world and produce fake
senses which feed back into the engine, which produces more world, which
produces more senses. A machine whose output is its own input. A process
that generates itself.
There is a word for this...
There are two men in the room. One is some sort of policeman in a riot suit.
It is completely black, with a black gas mask. I can't see his eyes. I'm not
sure how I know this though because I can't seem to turn around to see him
as he always manages to stay behind me. Always perfectly behind me no matter
how fast I spin. The other man looks like an officer or an interrogator of
some type. He is asking me a question. I think he has been asking me this
question for a long time, but I can only now hear it.
"Why are you asking about quines?" he is shouting.
Quines. I remember now, I was asking about them I think. I do know what they
are but I couldn't remember before. I was asking everyone. But now I
remember.
A quine is a computer program that prints its own listing. They are part
novelty and part hard science that falls out of a consequence of the nature
of computer language. To be pedantic, here is an example:
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main()
{{printf(f,34,f,34,10);}}%c";
main(){{printf(f,34,f,34,10);}}
They can be quite an interesting area of study. You can write a quine in any
computer language. You just need to know the language well and be slightly
clever. A computer program is just a list of commands or instructions. It is
just a processing engine. You may think that the easiest quine would be a
command that opens the program's source file and prints it out. This is
considered cheating, however."""
b="""
The weird part about dreams is that most of the time you don't know you're
dreaming. You start to become confused about what is dream and what is real.
There is no seam. You can't find the edge of the thing because you are
inside it, the way you can't see your own eye.
There is a painting by M.C. Escher called Print Gallery. In it, a young man
stands in a gallery, looking at a painting on the wall. The painting shows a
Mediterranean town with buildings and a harbor. Follow the buildings along
and they curve upward, and the town expands, and in the lower right corner
of the town there is a print gallery, and inside that gallery there is a
young man, looking at a painting. It is the same man. It is the same
painting. The image contains itself. Escher followed the recursion as far as
he could, spiraling inward, but at the center he hit a point where the math
broke down, where the image could not contain itself any further, and he
left it blank. He signed his name there in the void, in the place where
self-reference collapses. Even Escher had to cheat.
But here is the thing about that painting. It reaches across a barrier. The
man is inside the painting, but he is looking at the painting. He is both
subject and viewer. The frame that separates the art from the observer is
dissolved. And this is what recursion does. It reaches across gaps that are
supposed to be uncrossable. The program that writes itself. The dreamer who
dreams the dreamer. The story that tells itself.
I started to become convinced that maybe I had done something wrong earlier,
something bad. I was a victim to those mind ripples. My mind filling in
details that weren't there, to make everything fit. There were still people
all around me. They still weren't answering my pleas. I realized that they
weren't answering because they were afraid. Not afraid of the police
outside, but of me. I decided to focus on one person. I tried to plead with
her to explain. I tried to tell her that I didn't remember what happened.
Could she please help me? I told her not to be afraid, I wasn't going to
hurt her. I could see in her eyes she didn't believe me. I could see how
afraid she was of me and seeing that fear made me weep. I started asking
leading questions. I dreaded this, because I felt this would only steer me
to the place I was trying not to go.
"Are these people here for me?
Did I do something wrong? Something terrible? You're afraid I'm going to
hurt you aren't you? I'm not! I'm not! I'm not playing a game, just tell me
the truth, I won't hurt you! What is happening to me?"
And just silence. Just her eyes welling with tears and mortal fear. She had
no reason to trust me. My mind made more ripples, tying together loose ends.
I had said this same thing to someone else didn't I? I didn't spare him, did
I?
It was over, they were taking me down. The unseen one behind me tackled me
to the ground and placed a hood over my head. I was jostled around. I think
I passed out.
I awoke in a dark place. It was damp and I couldn't move. A dim light
flicked on across from me. I was in a hospital or a prison. A nurse appeared
in the light. She was bloated and wormlike, squeezed into her white
costume. Her face was all mouth and hair. She was wedged into a high
chair facing me.
She spoke in a booming voice, asking a question, but I don't know what the
words were.
I spoke, "I know...it has something to do with the quines...I was asking
because I forgot..." I was broken. I was hooked up to some kind of device
by a catheter. She approached me somehow without getting out of her chair
and I felt her breath on my ear. There was a wheezing and a distant hum
was rising. I heard her speak.
"you cheated."
And then I felt that thing. The abyss. Like a snake swallowing its tail. The
black spherical planet of steel with its unearthly hum. The same cold
surface from the dreams I had as a boy, the ones I could never name. I had
been dreaming this dream my entire life. A program that generates itself. An
output that becomes its own input. A machine that was never reading from the
outside world at all.
It was always a quine.
I just woke up from a nightmare. The events are still hazy, as they always
are, but if I jot them down quickly, maybe they will stay."""
print(s.format(a,b,s))