One of a series of three calamities that engulfed most of Arbre during the last decades of the Praxic Age and later came to be seen as precursors or warnings of the Terrible Events. The precise nature of the Harbingers is difficult to sort out because of destruction of records (many of which were stored on syntactic devices that later ceased functioning) but it is generally agreed that the First Harbinger was a worldwide outbreak of violent revolutions, the Second was a world war, and the Third was a genocide.
However, Pete, being a proper cat, prefers to go outdoors, and he has never given up his conviction that if you just try all the doors, one of them is bound to be the Door into Summer.
But in the brief seconds before the darkness swallowed him, he realized what must have happened: there had been a cave-in over the old Door–the door that led to another place, the one that had been closed for so long.
Justin Tyme, C.I. That’s what the name on the door says. Blame the name on my old man’s flair for irony. I chose, although I have a feeling Dear Old Dad’s sense of humor may have influenced my career path somewhat.
“I saw you,” Sasha said. “When you entered the room. I went blind almost immediately. Farit, it’s impossible to live in the world where you exist.”
“It is impossible to live in the world where I do not exist,” he said after a short pause. “Although it’s hard to resign oneself to my existence, I understand that.”
“Lessons completed without permission,” Sterkh continued in a soft, colorless voice. “Intentional metamorphosis. Experiments with manifestation of entities. All this I would call a blatant violation of academic regulations.”
The room was once again eerily quiet. And in this silent room Kozhennikov’s voice was heard for the first time.
“Nikolay, there is one nuance.”
“Yes?”
“I promised the girl not to ask anything impossible of her.”
“There are three things that robots cannot do," wrote Maxon. Then beneath that on the page he wrote three dots, indented. Beside the first dot he wrote “Show preference without reason (LOVE)” and then “Doubt rational decisions (REGRET)” and finally "Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE).”
“Yes. Either it possesses an element of irrationality itself, like living things, or it is an intelligence of such an order that some of its processes only seem irrational to lesser beings. Either explanation amounts to the same thing from a practical standpoint.”
“I never had the opportunity to apply some of the tests I’d designed, but can you say from self-knowledge whether you fall into such a category yourself?”
“Me? Irrational? The notion never occurred to me. I can’t see how it could be.”
Intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls…The genius of the irrational…This is the body’s intelligence, not the mind’s. Every living cell possess it…[the] indomitable will to survive.
Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when, at the age of eighteen, the time came for me to “switch.” My organic brain was removed and discarded, and control of my body handed over to my “jewel” - the Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons.
They must have built the implants to kill us. Did the choking mechanism activate in response to some natural transmission generated on planet? Or did someone somewhere turn a dial? Had Harque pushed some button, just following orders? Did he know what he’d done?