The main characters in The Cyberiad are a pair of robots named Trurl and Klapaucius, who are master inventors (or constructors, to use Lem's term). In a series of stories the pair travel around the universe building computers and other marvelous machines, either to satisfy the requests of various patrons or to show off their own skill as inventors, since they are alternately friends and rivals. The book has many episodes devoted to computers, including an exploration of various logical and scientific paradoxes: If you build a machine that can create anything, can it create Nothingness? How can you tell the difference between a computer simulation of life and life itself? Lem's wit is showcased in stories like "Trurl's Electronic Bard," in which Trurl creates a computer poet and Klapaucius commands it to write "a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics":

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
. . . 
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part. (53)

Arms, and machines I sing, that, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Homo's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Terran shore. . .  (54)

There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie. . . .  For in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the Darness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light . . .  from which the stars were kindled, and then the planets cooled, and in their cores the breath of Sacred Statisticality gave rise to microscopic Protomechanoans, which begat Proteromechanoids, which begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calculate, nor scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats, which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens . . .  (200; ellipses in original)

In the story "How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good," Lem describes how Trurl consoles a deposed dictator named Excelsius by building him a simulated kingdom--a small-scale mechanical model controlled by computer programs--so that his client can play at being a tyrant without actually harming anyone. But Klapaucius objects that, because Trurl's model is so perfect, Trurl has actually created a host of conscious beings who are suffering under Excelsius' misrule. The two argue at length about the distinction between "real" life and a mechanical imitation, with Klapaucius's behaviorist logic winning the debate:

If an imperfect imitator, wishing to inflict pain, were to build himself a crude idol of wood or wax, and further give it some makeshift semblance of a sentient being, his torture of the thing would be a paltry mockery indeed! But consider a succession of improvements on this practice! Consider the next sculptor, who builds a doll with a recording in its belly, that it may groan beneath his blows; consider a doll which, when beaten, begs for mercy, no longer a crude idol, but a homeostat; consider a doll that sheds tears, a doll that bleeds, a doll that fears death, though it also longs for the peace that only death can bring!
. . . 
You say there's no way of knowing whether Excelsius' subjects groan, when beaten, purely because of the electrons hopping about inside--like wheels grinding out the mimicry of a voice--or whether they really groan, that is, because they honestly experience pain? A pretty distinction, this! No, Trurl, a sufferer is not one who hands you his suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it, bite it like a coin; a sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer! (167-169)

Though human and machine bodies are never combined in these stories, they are sometimes compared. Turning the tables on the human-centric view of the cyborg, Lem's characters view the biological body as suspect and even an object of disgust. In the last story, a robot character named Ferrix tries to disguise himself as a human in order to win the hand of a robot princess who wishes to marry a "paleface." But the prince is unable to hide superiority of his mechanical body to a human's:

Ferrix, though he was smeared with mud, dust and chalk, anointed with oil and aqueously gurgling, could hardly conceal his electroknightly stature, his magnificent posture, the breadth of those steel shoulders, that thunderous stride. Whereas the paleface of Cybercount Cyberhazy was a genuine monstrosity: its every step was like the overflowing of marshy vats, its face was like a scummy well; from its rotten breath the mirrors all covered over with a blind mist, and some iron nearby was seized with rust. (294)

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