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"Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two?"
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| 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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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
