[dfcarney]

Check out Arithmetic Coding: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding

[utopcell]

Yep, not fiction at all, pretty much what is used for state-of-the-art compression.

[im3w1l]

The fiction part is being able to notch the bar sufficiently precise to store any significant amount of data.

[ddalex]

You can if you start from the middle out.

[utopcell]

:-)