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"The way you write science fiction is: you sit down at your writing machine and you open your mind to the first thought that comes through."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Testing For Human | ||
| How can you distinguish the artificial from the real? |
An interesting description of how a Berserker robotic device could be distinguished from a human being.
| A little distance to one side of the names, an English message in the same script and apparently made with the same writing instrument went down the wall like this:
Oh Kiss
Liao was willing to bet that particular message wasn't written by anyone wearing a space helmet. But no, he wouldn't make such a bet, not really. If he tried he could easily enough picture the two young people rubbing faceplates and laughing, momentarily able to forget the dead wedged in the twisted girders a few meters away. Something about that message nagged at his memory, though. Could it be the first line of an English poem he had forgotten? The slow turn of the torn ship was bringing the dreadnought into view again. "Bridge, this is Captain. Tell me anything that's new." "Sir, here's a little more that came in clear from the lifeboat. I quote: 'This is Winifred talking now, stop. We're going on being human even if you don't believe us, stop.' Some more repetitious stuff, Captain, and then this: 'While Henri was navigating I would come out from the lifeboat with him and he started trying to teach me about the stars, stop. We wrote our names there on the wall under the telescope; if you care to look you'll find them; of course that doesn't prove anything, does it. If I had lenses for eyes I could have read those names there and remembered them...'It cuts off again there, Chief, buried in noise." "Second, confirm my reading of how much time we have left to decide." "Three minutes and forty seconds, sir. That's cutting it thin. |
| Technovelgy from Inhuman Error,
by Fred Saberhagen. Published by Analog Science Fiction in 1974 Additional resources -
|
So, the captain finally figures out a way to tell the machines from the people:
"So," he was explaining, soon after the first round of mutual congratulations had been completed, "when I at last recognized the mnemonic on the wall for what it was, I knew that not only had Henri and Winny been there but that he had in face been teaching her something about astronomical spectroscopy at that very place beside the instruments —therefore after the ship was damaged." Henri was shaking his youthful head, with the air of one still marveling at it all. "Yes, now I can remember putting the mnemonic thing down, showing her how to remember the order of spectral types. I guess we use mnemonics all the time without thinking about it much. Every good boy does fine, for the musical notes. Bad boys race our young girls—that one's in electronics."
The captain nodded. "Thirty days hath September. And Barbara Celarent that the logicians still use now and then. Berserkers, with their perfect memories, probably don't even know what mnemonics are, much less need them. Anyway, if the berserker had been on the Wilhelmina, it would've had no reason to leave false clues. No way it could have guessed that I was coming to look things over."
Winifred, slender and too fragile-looking for what she had been through, took him by the hand. "Captain, you've given us our lives, you know. What can we ever do for you?"
And then Captain Liao had a chance to get down into the domed colony and talk to two people who wanted very much to meet him.
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