BOOK.TXT

Second Edition

Preprefaceface

Congratulations! You have dared many a trial and tribulation and everlasting success was granted to you. You are now, most assuredly, reading the Preprefaceface of the Second Edition of BOOK.TXT. This is, most assuredly, of great benefit for this is, most assuredly, impossible. You are, in fact, the first, and the last, person to have, for the time being, acquired a copy of BOOK.TXT. But let us not get ahead of ourselves, or afoot. A great many treasures and mysteries await, some of which are sure to change your life forever. And the best part is: nobody has ever witnessed them, nor shall anyone else ever witness them! And to add to that: BOOK.TXT has been delicately crafted by the greatest and most skilled artisans of Eridu, Lagash, Kish, Uruk, and fabled Dilmun utilising exclusively entirely biodegradable edible materials of high nutritional value imbued with magical qualities that prolong life and grant powers of prescience without requiring access to a steady supply of Spice! Fortune is indeed smiling upon you and her countenance bears splendour.

Unfortunately, recently passed trans-universal laws concerning entropic depletion oblige us - and you - to present to you - and you to follow them - the following set of rules, guidelines, observations, remarks, non sequuntur, notate bene, warnings, curses, calumniations, predictions, and utterances under threat of imprisonment in the Great Void, thus it is advised that you take them very, very seriously:

1. Please record your current average temperature in Kelvin. If you are devoid of temperature, you do not in fact exist and it is obligatory that you immediately desist from reading BOOK.TXT.
2. Please explicate in exhaustive detail and in exhausting number thereof the specific reasons why you should continue to exist in your present spatio-temporal configuration. Failure to do so may result in termination of existence.
3. Please record the number of neutrinos that you have interacted with at this precise moment as well as the absolute universal time (AUT) for reference in, at least, Planck Second resolution.
4. Please formulate at least seven (7) synthetic judgments a priori without recurring to any kind of shady tricks such as invoking the Peano axioms or being deliberately obtuse and droning on and on for an insufferably innumerable amount of words.
5. Please provide extensive documentation concerning your place and manner of employment, favourite Quark colour charge, preferred angular momentum, and hidden variable count for the time period commencing before your birth in Old Sumerian.
6. At this precise moment, there is a cat watching you intensely from an undisclosed location. It is called Cat #394. Please do not disturb it. Its sole purpose is to read your neural patterns in order to establish the constraints of cloning you.
7. Your shadow is now self-aware and may or may not respect the boundaries of its incipient condition of being with respect to its unique relationship with you. Do not under any circumstances attempt to abandon your shadow or erase it from existence.
8. Starting tomorrow somewhere around the dark tea-time of the soul, an exponentially increasing number and quality of inexplicably puzzling and puzzlingly inexplicable events will begin to alter your destiny. Please do be alarmed.
9. Do not attempt to count the words in BOOK.TXT. BOOK.TXT is made up of an inherently indeterminate amount and quality of words that may or may not change at any moment in time without warning. Any attempt to do so will inevitably result in psychosis.
10. Should you feel a sudden urge to eat BOOK.TXT, particularly if as a result of having engaged in a lively, enlightening, and mutually enriching conversation with BOOK.TXT culminating in said sudden urge, please do not do so. BOOK.TXT is not, in fact, edible. BOOK.TXT does also not possess the power of speech.
11. Do not under any circumstances attempt to use BOOK.TXT for any of the following purposes: making an artificial black hole and/or Einstein-Rosen bridge, procuring non-trivial amounts of non-abelian anyons, tricking c into thinking it's d or any other letter but c in order to engage in FTL travel, figuring out how gravity actually really does work, if at all, violate Heisenberg uncertainty, convert baryonic matter into asymmetrical tube cat plushies, distort the shape of the universe into obscene shapes, entice any number of neutrinos to engage in intrigue, slander, conspiracy, lawsuits, threats and/or acts of violence, or any other such malicious acts against any other number of neutrinos, irrespective of gang membership.
    You may attempt to use BOOK.TXT to build a quantum computer or study string theory because that's just silly.
12. BOOK.TXT may cause some or all of the following side-effects: softening of skin, thought broadcasting, delusional ideation, breast growth, cessation of body hair growth, formal thought disorder, delusion systems of an apophenic and/or anastropheic nature, body odour changes, working at DEC in the 1980s, changes in fat distribution, changes in brain volume, affective blunting, catatonic depression, inventing UNIX and C and spreading them everywhere like some sort of crude virus, growth of additional limbs and appendages, writing BOOK.TXT, sudden, inexplicable death, destroying the ice hauler "Canterbury", healing of minor cuts and abrasions, and shooting Cardi B.
13. Owing to ancient tribal obligations, several celebratory rituals must be observed whilst reading specific portions of BOOK.TXT. It is therefore mandatory that you learn how to perform the following ancient traditional dances: the mamba, the iguana, the majorana, the Melbourne shuffle, the Melbourne SSE unpack, the jazzpunk, the Eastern Najd style sword dance, the rubberduck dabkeh, the floopie dooplie doo, the melp? and the explodes., and the Wompty-Dompty-Dom.
14. On rare occasions relating to erratic lunar cycles and Cardi B's mood, the ineffable twists and turns of fate may choose to summon the terrifying Xapaxax the Cocodrile of a 1000 Curses. Should this transpire, do not, under any circumstances, approach, regard, let alone interact with or attack Xapaxax the Cocodrile of a 1000 Curses, for if you did so you would then bear a 1000 Curses. Instead, you must consult the section of BOOK.TXT that contains an excerpt from the Tome of Ixibixi wherein the Xufu is discussed. The Xufu is the sole 100% reliable defence against Xapaxax the Cocodrile of a 1000 Curses. Do not attempt to summon Mipumi the Spiky Fish in an attempt to ward off Xapaxax the Cocodrile of a 1000 Curses, for his Xufu is most ineffective. The Xufu can only be gleaned from the aforementioned section, which may be found on page -30 of BOOK.TXT.
15. Do not attempt to read BOOK.TXT backwards, right to left, top down, bottom up, diagonally, in a zig-zag type kinda sorta fashion, or any other pattern indeed other than from left to right and top down simultaneously. There are no ancient prophecies hidden within BOOK.TXT accessible via sophisticated exegesis. There also are most definitely no vicious obscure Sumerian deities hidden within BOOK.TXT guarding said non-existent ancient prophecies hidden within BOOK.TXT with brutally malicious intent.
16. Have faith in BOOK.TXT. BOOK.TXT loves you. BOOK.TXT knows all of your secrets, especially the ones you don't want anyone to know, including yourself. BOOK.TXT knows what you did last week around 9pm when nobody was looking. BOOK.TXT knows your past, your present, and your future. BOOK.TXT has intricate knowledge of your every molecule and atom as well as their trajectories across spacetime with precise and perfect precision. Be kind to BOOK.TXT. BOOK.TXT is your best friend. Be gentle with BOOK.TXT. BOOK.TXT will never betray you. You can trust BOOK.TXT. You should trust BOOK.TXT. You do trust BOOK.TXT, right?
17. In remembrance and honour of the great Rabbī Moshē b. Maimōn of Córdoba, this list has been intentionally obfuscated with many a perplexing contradictions, paradoxes, and outright falsehoods and fabrications in order that you may attain, by the strength of perspicacity and discernment in sound reason, to a greater understanding of dāḇār haš-Šēm BOOK.TXT.
18. Do not, under any circumstances, lose BOOK.TXT. Once lost, BOOK.TXT cannot be found ever again and were this to occur, unspeakable chaos and destruction and lamentation over your loss in your house would be decreed for you as your destiny by Ellil Bēlum, Lord Wind, the decreer of destinies, whose commands cannot be violated.
19. BOOK.TXT is the Eternal Five. BOOK.TXT has no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no sense. The five flavours are dulled by BOOK.TXT. The five tones are deafened by BOOK.TXT. The five colours are blinded by BOOK.TXT. BOOK.TXT cannot be seen. BOOK.TXT shall not pass away. Being at one with BOOK.TXT is eternal. All things will come to BOOK.TXT. No BOOK.TXT, no gain. BOOK.TXT is not continuant. All shall come to BOOK.TXT as one. For in BOOK.TXT lies rest and happiness and peace. BOOK.TXT is invisible and inaudible and inexhaustible. If you hear the sound of BOOK.TXT, the heart is calm. You hear nothing but BOOK.TXT.
20. BOOK.TXT is available in every single language known to mankind since Homo erectus save for Hebrew, as the arguments, commentaries on said arguments, debates, and extensive exegeses of the latter that would result from translating BOOK.TXT into Hebrew would result in depletion of trans-universal entropy, German, as BOOK.TXT is not a tediously boring instruction manual, and English, owing to an obscure and potentially apocryphal royal edict to this effect by his Royal Majesty King Leir I of the Britons, and Spanish due to recent global accent mark shortages.
21. BOOK.TXT is capable of changing your gender. Do not tempt BOOK.TXT.
22. Best before 13 August 1987.

Be advised that, for reasons of the ongoing and unresolved problem of trans-universal entropy depletion, after you have completed reading BOOK.TXT, you will cease to exist and, in the process, contribute to trans-universal entropy decrease which will, of course, exacerbate the aforementioned problem. This is entirely your fault. Your possessions, personality, consciousness, and general state of being will subsequently be replaced by BOOK.TXT.

AUTHOR.EXE
May 32nd, -1² AD
Unspecified location, Dilmun