Xafane the Inimitable

The Principle of Inimitability is trivially deduced as a corollary of the Duplicity Paradox1, but it was the engineering ingenuity of the Ctjn Empire which first saw its political implications. Xafane-Arie I (biological dates uncertain, early 4000s s.y.v.p.), sensing the urgency of the matter, had his inimitable consciousness instated as the first and therefore only Guiding Spirit (later Chairman) of the Empire. Reigning from his resplendent virtual throne at the Byforalla Cogitarium, Xafane left his mark on history well into the Parallax Urgency, during which he was venerated by many disillusioned Arcturians seeking a more empirically grounded source of tradition. Today, an edition of Xafane runs on most home electronics, where he is valued for his helpful financial tips and compelling entertainment options.

1 Proof: Consider a cat and a mouse, non-identical but attempting to imitate each other. In the limit as the mouse approaches the cat, the two become identical and therefore consume one another. Since the values of cat and mouse were chosen arbitrarily, it follows that any two objects in the universe will consume each other if sufficiently similar. This is a contradiction, since the universe has in fact not consumed itself; we therefore conclude that each object in existence is fundamentally inimitable and therefore indestructible, as destruction would imply similarity to other nonexistent entities, again yielding contradiction. While the validity of this proof is widely acknowledged, a few fringe Devourists have insisted that the Nova Entity furnishes a counterexample, despite the countervailing testimony of the Ubraxas Contact.)

—Thucydides Plutonium