Sitting on the edge of his desk in the basement of the Regenstein Library, the 78-year-old Wyatt is excitedly holding court with a group of librarians from the National Archive in Washington, D.C. When the assembled shake their heads, Wyatt's devilish smile widens. Leaning forward, he teases, "You will."

For most of his 36-year tenure at the University of Chicago, Wyatt has studied the effects of modern technology on Western civilization. To the wiry professor, who was raised on a farm in Oklahoma during the Great Depression, "modern technology" means everything from the printing press to the electronic pager.

An old-fashioned scholar, Wyatt is best known for The American Telephone and Telegraph: Language in the Modern Age, a treatise on the telephone and its impact on spoken English. Released in 1967, the two-volume study was also his last published book. By 1970, the academic was already immersed in a new and mysterious project. It would be almost three decades before the world would again hear from the linguist.

Down the hall from Wyatt's office is a cramped, well-air-conditioned room filled with two hulking computer mainframes and a lone terminal. Here lives "the Epic Engine," the culmination of 30 years of meticulous research, nearly $10 million in development funds, and the life's work of one inspired man. Despite its lofty name, the Epic Engine performs only one function: translating English-language prose into metered verse.

Though many might question the usefulness of a computer that can rewrite any sentence into iambic pentameter, Wyatt insists that his system will play a key role in the preservation of the modern era's cultural artifacts.

"The Y2K phenomenon," argues Wyatt, "betrays a deeper concern about the possibility of a blackout that could last not one day or one week but one hundred years. In essence, it's a fear of another Dark Ages. And when you look for the embers of civilization that have already survived several 'dark ages,' what you find is metered prose. The Aenid, the Illiad, the Torah, etc. That's what the Epic Engine is all about."

Technically, the Epic Engine is a suite of software designed to run on large mainframe computers. It combines a massive database of English words and a powerful analysis program in order to parse the meaning and structure of a text and then rearrange its stressed syllables. In other words, a line from a detective novel goes in, and out comes something akin to epic poetry.

In order to test his program, Wyatt has been slowly translating Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 into blank verse. Wyatt says, "I needed a text loaded with American idioms but also complex in nuance and rhythm. Of course, it is a happy coincidence that the story is also full of linguistic issues."

Those familiar with the 1966 Pynchon novel and its author's dense, often difficult style, will not be surprised to learn that early "rewrites" of the novel by the Epic Engine were less than inspiring. The clunky excerpt below, a reworking of the book's first sentence, was produced by an adolescent version of the "cyber-bard" in 1983:

One summer afternoon came home one Oed- Ipa Maas who had just left a tupperware Affair at which the hostess had put too Much kirsch in the fondue to find that she Was named executor, or she supposed Executrix of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a Californ- Ia speculator who once lost two mil- Lion bucks in his spare time but still had ass- Ets tangled such that sorting it all out Was more than honorary.

Stilted and often distressingly punctuated, this passage nonetheless evinces something quite radical for a work that was drafted by a computer: a hint of spirit. Although the Epic Engine is not the first computer program to recognize and record the rhythm of written statements, it is the only one that strives to capture their "historical weight."

To be successful, the Epic Engine must be faithful not only to the meaning of a work but also to its more intangible aspects. This ability to preserve the subtleties of a "classic" make Wyatt's creation less of a scientific tool for the exclusive use of linguists and more of a landmark innovation in the art of writing.

Less than a year old, the latest incarnation of the Epic Engine has already garnered open praise from both academic and financial circles and may be poised to usher in a new age of "intelligent" -- or, at least, very cultured -- machines. Last month, in an ironic twist to the professor's half-century career, AT&T entered into licensing negotiations with the University of Chicago for use of the Epic Engine in "undisclosed future applications."

But the twice-retired Wyatt says he is not interested in "farming out" his invention for strictly commercial use. He is pressuring the university to ensure that cultural institutions like the National Archive and other public libraries will continue to have subsidized or even free access to the Epic Engine. He has also contacted private foundations to set up a fund for the "preservation of modern classics."

Says Wyatt, "This is a very, very long-term project. We're not going to put the cart before the horse on this one."

The South to the Future World Wide Wire Service is a weekly feed of technology and media news commentary and satire published by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Quotations attributed to public figures who are satirized are often true, but sometimes invented. Some fictional statements may, in fact, be true. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental.