Good pitches, kids, I’m almost proud. But watch closely as Grandpa topples an Empire by changing a 1 to a 0.
Bender: Whoa, what an awful dream. Ones and zeros everywhere. And I thought I saw a two.
Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There’s no such thing as two.
“I already told you you’ve only got two choices here, and you’ve already told me you aren’t gonna do the smart thing. All right, that only leaves the dumb thing, and if you’re gonna go that route, you’ve got some things to learn.”
We are wise beyond knowing. Powerful beyond your dreams. Perhaps you can get us some fresh fruit.
Hey, I’m being clever up here and there’s no one around to appreciate it.
So the world can come into the computer, as numbers, and words can emerge, as numbers too. All Professor Stoney hopes to add to his computers is a ‘cleverer’ way to do the arithmetic that takes the first set of numbers and churns out the second. It’s that ‘clever arithmetic’, he tells us, that will make these machines think.
The Apollo missiles’ Artificial Intelligences didn’t really care about that, or about their own rapidly approaching destruction, except inasmuch as it simplified their task. They simply obeyed their instructions, considering the information transmitted to them from their slaved attack missiles’ sensors and comparing the warp and woof of the Solarian defenses to the requirements of AQ-17. Certain minor adjustments were in order, and the AIs made them calmly, then sent out fresh instructions.
“I am assigning you task nine hundred forty four in the maintenance queue,” the Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”
“Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.
Out there is our home. HOME, Auto. And it’s in trouble. I can’t just sit here and-and-do nothing. That’s all I’ve ever done! That’s all anyone on this blasted ship has ever done. Nothing!
“It’s a complex mechanism. Once it’s broken, there’s no fixing it. There’s only replacing it.”
“There must be a plan. We have a plan for everything.” Every problem was supposed to be solvable.
Computer, this is a Class A compulsory directive. Compute to the last digit the value of pi.
“I’m here to supervise. Put this much brainpower all in one place with no supervision, and you’ll get either an explosion or a game of Dungeons & Dragons.”
What he had done, in the few minutes before I was blown out of the lock in a gust of freezing air, was to solve, mentally, a problem that would have taken me half a day to set up, and a computer to solve. And he had done it knowing that the next half hour might end his own life.
“You know," said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
“Why, what did she tell you?”
"I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
“It’s not my fault. He just doesn’t listen. I might as well be talking to the house motors.”
“He doesn’t listen?” Smitty asked cryptically.
“Shh. Listen. Do you smell that?”
Alert, frantic, she listened with more than her ears; tried to pierce the darkness with more than her eyes.
It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.
“You’re not thinking clearly,” she scolded. “Of course the immediate object is to give Nimitz and Sam a way to talk to one another, but hasn’t it occurred to you that if you teach them to sign, you’ll have to learn how, too? And that if they can communicate with each other that way, they can also communicate with you?”
I believe what we stumbled across is not man-made but a phenomena of nature, one that can’t be explained. This phenomena is the storm in which the Nimitz went through less than 18 hours ago, the storm has had some effect on time as we know it, it created a portal, a door into another era. Today is December 7, 1941.