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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
 |
| Soft Weapon | ||
| A device that changes its shape to alter its function. |
Found in a stasis box, the device is a mystery.
| "...the notches in the handle may control intensity. The guide is now set on 'nil.'"
Chuft-Captain moved the guide one notch down. A moment later he had to resist the panicky urge to throw the thing as far as possible. The mirror-faced sphere was twisting and turning like something alive, changing shape like a drug nightmare. It changed and flowed and became ... a long slender cylinder with a red knob at the end and a toggle near the handle. The handle had not changed at all. |
| Technovelgy from The Soft Weapon,
by Larry Niven. Published by Not known in 1967 Additional resources -
|
The soft weapon was also a computer; it was a device carried by spies long ago that could self-destruct if it fell into enemy hands. The artificially intelligent weapon itself could self-destruct by learning and using an enemy's language to trick them into manipulating its controls into the self-destruct position:
The computer was doing most of the talking.
It began to make sense.
"...I had known that the boss kzin and the Slaver expert were walking to their deaths, because the computer form of the weapon had given them the self-destruct setting and told them it was the matter conversion beam. I knew that; and I let them walk out and blow themselves to smithereens."
“Can you understand me?”
Three pairs of kzinti eyes jerked around. The voice belonged to none of them. It sounded foreign, artificial.
“Repeating. Can you understand me?”
It was the gun speaking. The tnuctip weapon.
"It’s learned their language,” said Jason.
A kzin was holding up the tnuctip cap, the one they’d found in the stasis box. The computer spoke.
He held up the small metal object that might have been a communicator. The computer spoke again. The boss kzin spoke.
The computer spoke at length. The boss kzin picked up the weapon and did things to it...
Did the computer have eyesight? Obviously. The kzinti had been showing it objects from the stasis box.
Take a computer smart enough to learn a language by hearing it spoken for an hour. Never mind its size; any sentient being will build a computer as small as possible, if only to reduce the time lag in thinking with impulses moving at lightspeed or less. Let the computer know only what its tnuctipun builders taught it, plus what it had seen and heard in this room...
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Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
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'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.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
