The Pandoran Wars: Prelude & Empire

ISBN-13: 9781537075297 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 454 str.

Dante D'Anthony; Francis Taylor; Roy Rudder

Opis

...Higher, and bathing the landscape in a form of moon glow, space stations and orbiting solar farms reflected strange geometries in the heavens. At length he finally responded, "Well, buried in my work as I am, it's a welcome break to be reminded there is a world still out there." She raised her eyebrows. The old Wizard was poking his head up from his library and incantations. They made their way to a lift and dropped quickly and deeply into the bowels of the tower. It opened onto a brightly lit lab full of researchers, robots, and discordantly-two military police, apparently cyborged, scarred battle veterans. Lourdes glanced at Dr. Scalotta nervously. "Oh, yes, I'm sorry, they come with the territory. Some of the research we are doing here has been deemed less than popular by certain 'activist' groups" He shambled, staggering somewhat, "No worries, Miss Cassandra. You'll receive no harm from them," he winked, "they'd take fire before failing by their duty, rest assured, and their duty is to protect us." "Protect us from whom exactly?" she asked aloud, but he seemed not to hear her, and they were moving along into the research labs directly. The giant power facilities surprised her. Apparently they were at ground level now, and a great interior space was busy with the comings and goings of aircars and ground trains and maglevs. Eventually he turned his strange visage squarely at her, "The Luddites and Philistines, heh, heh. My research here has not always been warmly received. There have been threats. But I am not deterred. Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. We will win." "What am I getting myself into?" she smiled nervously as they continued deeper into the cavernous bowels of the complex. "Who are these groups?" The lab bustled with activity and she had a sense of a moment turning as in a river, when her last chance to grab the shore was passing. "Wing nuts from various worlds who spend too much time on Hypercasts, berating technology while living off it. They want us all dead, as it were." Finally, Lourdes stopped in her tracks. "Doctor, the rumor is you're creating a better AI, one that goes beyond a Touring test and is truly sentient. Your goal, an actual Transhuman entity. You want to cheat death." He smiled beneath his anachronistic optical displays, "Yes, cheating Death. Something of an obsession of mine." "This kind of research has been going on for centuries, with really no way to prove if the AI is actually self-aware, or not." "Oh my young Neurologist, I can assure you I'm quite unaware," They approached a figure on a table and she came to the sudden shock and recognition of seeing Dr. Scalotta was quite dead, very dead, and laying on the table. She had been conversing with a hologram AI, "because I'm already dead." The Scalotta hologram said. The hologram AI of Dr. Scalotta smiled, and seeing her frown, raised a hand. "Wait, wait, indulge me...the program is quite capable of carrying on as well as I would if I were actually alive." Uncertain of how to continue, she raised her chin and waited. "I anticipated that I may have expired before the objective was met, anticipated our latest developments wouldn't allow for my actual sentience to survive before you arrived, and we are quite on the proper path. You see, it is not our scientific research on the Transhuman system housing I wish you to work on, it is...this." On the table was a broken, metallic bone. She drew closer. No, not a bone at all, bone-like, seemingly organic-but rather, sculpted to appear organic-the object was mineral. Technology such as she had never seen. "This is from preceding our era, my Dear, preceding our civilization, preceding every word ever spoken by the mouths of Human kind; every thought before a single name, from any single place we have known was spoken, this was first-other words of elder gods, so to speak. Things preceded us."

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