[1] The title is a play on the first words of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, the Latin phrase meaning "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

Jones becomes obsessed with the topic, and finally discovers that his non-random errors produce almost meaningful sentences, like "JONS RISIV MESSG DLC".

By this time Wallace has gone to Arizona; he sends a letter to Jones admitting that he has made a similar discovery about his own typing.

Back home, Jones starts to speak in foreign languages, sometimes Russian, and he constructs an object in his garage that resembles a miniature building or maze.

One of the two computers, "Dulcie", which Jones thinks of as a female, finds a way to simplify "her" work: Probing into the mysteries of the human brain—so convenient and puzzling a model of her own—she found the pattern that could fix a mind forever in one unreasoning conviction.