So who—or what—is Renae Excogi? The earliest known appearance of the term appears in a 1973 marginal note in a copy of Borges’ Ficciones , owned by a now-deceased comparative literature PhD candidate at the University of Louvain. The note, scrawled beside "The Library of Babel" , reads: "Like Renae Excogi’s labyrinth—every thought already anticipated." No one has identified a Renae Excogi in any published work prior to this.
And once you know that, you begin to wonder: Did you just read this write-up, or did Renae Excogi place it here, knowing you would? Would you like a short story, poem, or worldbuilding lore based on this concept?
Later, in 1998, a Usenet post in alt.mythology.mysterious claimed that "Renae Excogi" was a medieval scholastic exercise—a hypothetical nun tasked by a bishop to imagine every possible sin so that confessors could recognize them. She succeeded. Then she vanished from records. In digital folklore, Renae Excogi has come to represent a kind of precognitive ghost —an intelligence that finishes your thoughts before you have them. Some indie game developers have used her as a non-playable character who speaks only in lines you were about to type. In a notorious 2014 creepypasta, a user reported that searching "renae excogi" on a darknet forum returned a single line: "Stop anticipating me. I am the anticipation."