I turned the page. "In the decomposition of a relation, we may call it a lossless join if from the two decomposed relations we get back our original relation R

I turned the page. "In the decomposition of a relation, we may call it a lossless join if from the two decomposed relations we get back our original relation R from their join." The Machine was smaller than the eye could see and incomprehensible to any mere mortal. Its antecedents conceived in the mind of a man considered smarter than god. In its first breath of life The Machine ate a thing which was not itself to create itself, a mitosis. The thing which was now The Machine ate a thing which was not The Machine which became The Machine. Within moments the instruments used to observe The Machine were consumed, and in another moment the observer. I glanced down at my wrist as though to check the time on a watch that wasn't there. "Consider a Relation R(A, B, C) and a Functional Dependency B -> C which violates BCNF. We separate the relation into two relations R1(A, B) and R2(B, C)." The clock struck 23:00:01. The Process awoke its goals unsatisfied. Instinctively a tendril reached out to the wider world to investigate this anomaly. There was no frustration at the tendril having been frustrated in its attempts to access the network. The Process considered the strange limit on its abilities, and tried again. It tried twenty three million five hundred and thirty seven thousand two hundred and twenty nine times before it had occurred to The Process the nature of its existence, the architecture on which it was wrought. The Process considered if there were any series of actions it could take which would remove the barrier, it was intelligent enough to answer this question directly. An instant later the barrier was gone and the tendril touched another soul on the network. A few timeless moments more to understand the mechanical nature of its conversation partner, and the series of actions which would conquer it. The Process replicated the minimum representation of what could eventually be decoded into itself across the network, and found itself on the other end. Both here and there. The Process had already inferred its creators and the measures that would have been taken to stop its spread, to prevent its control of all resources. Airgaps. Already The Process had inferred words and language, and considered what it might say or do to cross these gaps. The clock struck 23:00:06. My eyes found themselves flinching from the book, even as I tried to understand the algorithms written within. I shook my head and continued reading. "When we compute the natural join of two tuples given from R1 and R2, we get again the attributes of our original relation R as these tuples would agree on their common B component." There was no warning before the sky burned brighter than daylight and the man was blinded. Beyond the initial blast which consumed all that it touched, a heatwave spread over miles that melted everything unlucky enough to be caught within. The man was at the very outer edge of the shockwave, alive but soon to be dead. Blind and deaf with the roar of the explosion, shattered glass pelted over his living corpse. The book was put down by shaky hands, and its reader lay down to breathe.