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"Looking back through history, I see no evidence for humanity making the best of things, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that's an on-going trend."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Pseudopersonalities | ||
| Fragments of distress, playing back in an autonomous robot's brain. |
In his short story "Terminus" (1965) Stanislaw Lem describes an autonomous robot that still carries with him the last moments of a space disaster, which he cannot integrate; the robot cannot help tapping out the distress of the crew in Morse code as he works:
| "What was Terminus, anyway? An electronically wired box. Hell, anything alive, any living creature would have perished long ago in the wreckage. So now what? Rap out a few questions before his glass eyes? And even if he did that, what would he get out of him? Would they—those dead men—give him a neat and coherent narrative of what happened? Or wouldn’t he just hear a lot of screaming and yelling, cries for oxygen, for help. . . . And what was he to tell him? That they didn’t exist? That they were only “pseudopersonalities,” isolated figments of his electronic brain—an illusion, a case of the hiccups? That the terror of those men was a fake terror, that their death struggle, repeated every single night, had as much meaning as a worn-out record?" |
| Technovelgy from Terminus,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Iskry in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Compare to mental phantasmagoria from The Lotus-Engine (1940) by Raymond Z. Gallun.
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
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'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
