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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Machine Birds | ||
| Flock of mechanical winged birds. |
| At the top of the hill, she stopped to recover her breath, but the boy didn't greet us or even look our way. He had in his hands a circular device, and was looking at the sky between the two houses where a group of birds was flying in formation, and I quickly realized these were machine birds. He kept his gaze on them and when he touched his control, the birds responded by changing their pattern.
‘Wow, they're beautiful,' Josie said, though still short of breath. ‘Are they new?' Rick kept his gaze fixed on the birds, but said: ‘Those two on the end are new. You can tell they don't really match.' The birds swooped till they were hovering directly above us. ‘Yeah, but real birds don't all look the same either,' Josie said. ‘I suppose. At least I've got the whole team taking the same commands now. Okay, Josie, watch this.' The machine birds began to come down, landing one by one on the grass in front of us. But two remained in the air, and Rick, frowning, pressed his remote again. ‘God. Still not right.' ‘But they look great, Ricky.' Josie was standing surprisingly close to Rick, not actually touching him, but with hands raised just behind his back and left shoulder. ‘What those two need is a complete recalibration.' |
| Technovelgy from Klara and the Sun,
by Kazuo Ishiguro. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2021 Additional resources -
|
Compare to tiny robot planes from Blood on the Sun (1942) by Hal K. Wells.
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'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
