Came here hoping to discuss Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad story, Trurl's Machine, and how often that now happens in real life.

What is the name of a short story where a computer insists 2+2 is 5?

https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/24727/what-is...

Oh sorry, that was the story about the computer that insisted that 2+2=7, never mind! Different computer.

>They saw the machine. It lay smashed and flattened, nearly broken in half by an enormous boulder that had landed in the middle of its eight floors... The machine still quivered slightly, and one could hear something turning, creaking feebly within.

>"Yes, this is the bad end you've come to and two and two is - as it always was -" began Trurl, but just then the machine made a faint barely audible croaking noise and said, for the last time, "SEVEN."

Funnily enough, recently I was discussing that LEM story with David Rosenthal, and how it relates to his latest blog post, "Coprophagia Is Bad For You", and how that relates to PKD's story "Rautavaara's Case" (eating your own shit isn't as demented as eating your own god, since he might turn the table and eat you):

Coprophagia Is Bad For You:

https://blog.dshr.org/2026/06/coprophagia-is-bad-for-you.htm...

"Rautavaara's Case" — Philip K. Dick (1980, Omni):

Three human technicians — Rautavaara (Finnish), Travis, Elms — run a monitoring mission near Proxima Centauri. An accident kills all three; Rautavaara dies choking on vomit after her helmet hoses tangle.

The Approximations, a plasma-based Proxima species, reach the wreck. Both men are unrecoverable. They regenerate and life-support Rautavaara's brain.

Her isolated brain replays events backward and generates a hallucination: Christ approaching the crew (her afterlife expectation).

The Approximations treat this as a research opportunity and edit the hallucination, substituting their own savior — one that eats worshippers. The figure walks up and devours Travis, leaving only gloves and boots.

Framing: this is recounted before a board of inquiry. Horrified Earth members order her brain shut down and censure the Approximation crew.

The narrator (an Approximation) is genuinely puzzled by the outrage, arguing their cannibal-savior is just the Christian Eucharist reversed: humans eat their God, so a God eating humans is symmetrical.

Themes:

Ethics of keeping a person alive as a disembodied, suffering mind.

Incommensurable value systems between species; each finds the other's sacraments monstrous.

Religion read literally by outsiders, inverted into horror.

Correction to the common misremembering: the aliens don't benevolently grant a hoped-for vision. They deliberately overwrite her Christ vision with their own as an experiment — that's the act on trial.

When 2+2=5