Jag försöker hitta en historia som jag läste en gång,
Du letar efter "Thing of Beauty" , en novelette av Damon Knight , som ursprungligen publicerades i Galaxy Science Fiction , september 1958 , som finns tillgänglig på Internetarkiv . Några av dessa omslag ser bekanta ut?
Om en kollega som hittar en konstig enhet som drar bilder. Han kan inte räkna ut hur det fungerar, eller vad kontrollerna gör, men genom försök och fel upptäcker han att han kan få den att skriva ut en konstnärlig ritning genom att trycka på en viss knapp.
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, mannen gör en (möjligen kort) karriär av att sälja den konst som den här saken producerar.
Men efter en stund inser han att han, genom att trycka på vad han har antagit, är "draw and print" -knappen, raderar han faktiskt mönster och konstnärliga element med varje instans av produktion, så att enheten slutligen blir helt värdelös.Murals, institutional advertising, textile designs, private sales to collectors—my God, how it was rolling in!
Yep. Han får det märkliga språket som identifierats:
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.