Falkayn's Interview With The Serendipity Computer

Poul Anderson, Satan's World In Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 329-598 AT Chapter III.

"He sat in an ordinary self-adjusting chair..." (p. 348)

Such chairs are ordinary in Anderson's fictional futures. See Futuristic Furniture.

When the computer speaks:

"The voice was not the flat baritone of most human-built robots; it was high, with a curious whistling quality, and varied both pitch and speed in a way hard to describe." (p. 349)

Anderson has described the experience quite effectively. This computer is not of human manufacture. A customs inspector bribed by van Rijn had said that Serendipity received a shipment of computer components that he was sure were not human-made. He had acquired an eye for style and his hunch was confirmed when the computer worked in ways that no one else was quite able to duplicate.

The computer connects Falkayn's name with incidents involving Beta Centauri, Ikrananka and Merseia. Thus, Anderson refers back to three of the four previous Technic History installments featuring Falkayn. Only Ivanhoe, where he was an apprentice, is not mentioned here.

On p. 350, Anderson describes how "...the machine thought...":

"...electrons and quanta hurtled through vacuum...";
"...charges and the absence of charges moved through crystal lattices...";
"...distorted molecules interacted with magnetic, electric, gravitational, nuclear fields..."

Charge and absence of charge correspond to binary 1 and 0. We can use lines of 1's and 0's to record information but the mechanism processing the 1's and 0's is not conscious. Nor are electrons, quanta, molecules or fields. Thus, it sounds as if the Serendipity computer is not "consciousness-level." (See AI Again.) Falkayn thinks of it as "...the great quasi-brain..." (p. 347) as "...a gadget...," (p. 349) that does not warrant an apology and as "...the huge blind brain." (p. 351)