We’re actually done with all of the artifacts from Doctor Strange. But there’s one last kind-of interface that’s worth talking about, and that’s when Strange assists with surgery on his own body.
After being shot with a soul-arrow by the zealot, Strange is in bad shape. He needs medical attention. He recovers his sling ring and creates a portal to the emergency room where he once worked. Stumbling with the pain, he manages to find Dr. Palmer and tell her he has a cardiac tamponade. They head to the operating theater and get Strange on the table.
When Strange passes out, his “spirit” is ejected from his body as an astral projection. Once he realizes what’s happened, he gathers his wits and turns to observe the procedure.
When Dr. Palmer approaches his body with a pericardiocentesis needle, Strange manifests so she can sense him and recommends that she aim “just a little higher.” At first she is understandably scared, but once he explains what’s happening, she gets back to business, and he acts as a virtual coach.
Logan’s life is changed when he surrenders an ankh found on a particular runner. Instead being asked to identify, the central computer merely stays quiet a long while as it scans the objects. Then its lights shut off, and Logan has a discussion with the computer he has never had before.
The computer asks him to “approach and identify.” The computer gives him, by name, explicit instructions to sit facing the screen. Lights below the seat illuminate. He identifies in this chair by positioning his lifeclock in a recess in the chair’s arm, and a light above him illuminates. Then a conversation ensues between Logan and the computer.
The computer communicates through a combination of voice and screen, on which it shows blue text and occasional illustrative shapes. The computer’s voice is emotionless and soothing. For the most part it speaks in complete sentences. In contrast, Logan’s responses are stilted and constrained, saying “negative” instead of “no,” and prefacing all questions with the word, “Question,” as in, “Question: What is it?”
On the one hand it’s linguistically sophisticated
Speech recognition and generation would not have a commercially released product for four years after the release of Logan’s Run, but there is an odd inconsistency here even for those unfamiliar with the actual constraints of the technology. The computer is sophisticated enough to generate speech with demonstrative pronouns, referring to the picture of the ankh as “this object” and the label as “that is the name of the object.” It can even communicate with pragmatic meaning. When Logan says,
“Question: Nobody reached renewal,”
…and receives nothing but silence, the computer doesn’t object to the fact that his question is not a question. It infers the most reasonable interpretation, as we see when Logan is cut off during his following objection by the computer’s saying,…
“The question has been answered.”
Despite these linguistic sophistications, it cannot parse anything but the most awkwardly structured inputs? Sadly, this is just an introduction to the silliness that is this interface.
Logan undergoes procedure “033-03,” in which his lifeclock is artificially set to blinking. He is then instructed to become a runner himself and discover where “sanctuary” is. After his adventure in the outside performing the assignment he was forced to accept, he is brought in as a prisoner. The computer traps him in a ring of bars demanding to know the location of sanctuary. Logan reports (correctly) that Santuary doesn’t exist.
On the other hand, it explodes
This freaks the computer out. Seriously. Now, the crazy thing is that the computer actually understands Logan’s answer, because it comments on it. It says, “Unacceptable. The answer does not program [sic].” That means that it’s not a data-type error, as if it got the wrong kind of input. No, the thing heard what Logan was saying. It’s just unsatisfied, and the programmer decided that the best response to dissatisfaction was to engage the heretofore unused red and green pixels in the display, randomly delete letters from the text—and explode. That’s right. He decided that in addition to the Dissatisfaction() subroutine calling the FreakOut(Seriously) subroutine, the FreakOut(Seriously) subroutine in its turn calls Explode(Yourself), Release(The Prisoner), and the WhileYoureAtItRuinAllStructuralIntegrityoftheSurroundingArcitecture() subroutines.
Frankly, if this is the kind of coding that this entire society was built upon, this whole social collapse thing was less deep social commentary and really just a matter of technical debt.
Dr. Morbius introduces the Krell plastic educator, saying, “As far as I can make out, they used it to condition and test their young, in much the same way as we once employed finger painting among our kindergarten children.”
Morbius grasps the educator’s head mount.
The device is a station at which the learner sits. There is a large dashboard before him, in turn before a space enclosed in a tetrahedral encasement of plastic. To his right is a large column made of plastic with red and yellow graduations running up the side. Inside the column is a strange shape like a lathed accordion, terminating in a pulsing ring that indicates a level against the graduations. An arced panel hangs from the ceiling with other printed graduations with lines of light above and below. Blue neon squiggles blink randomly along the walls.
Morbius demonstrates proper placement of the educator interface.
To activate the station, the learner grasps a pair of curved metal arms, which are connected at a hinged base and tipped with crystal orbs. He leans forward, rests his forehead on a third arm, and pulls the pair of arms to rest on his temples. He turns a pair of dials on the dashboard before him, and the crystal orbs on all three arms glow, indicating that the headset is operational.
Morbius points to the intelligence indicator.
Adams and Doc try to guage their own IQs.
The device’s immediate result is that the accordion shape inside the column rises such that the lit ring indicates the intelligence of the user. (To Adams’ and Doc’s dismay, their readings are much lower than Morbius’.)
With the press of a lever Morbius manifests a thought visually.
The primary function of the device is for the user to make a thought of theirs manifest in the tetrahedral space. The user concentrates on the thing, and then pulls a lever at the base of the headset. A red ring at the base of the headset illuminates, and a material appears above a pedestal at the base of the tetrahedron. By concentrating, the user shapes this material into the desired thing. Morbius shapes it into an image of Alta. The image is a scaled, translucent, volumetric display of Alta, which moves and smiles just as she would.
The projection ceases immediately when the mechanism is removed.
To stop using the device and shut down the projection, the learner simply lifts the lever and removes the headset from contact, and the orbs, the red ring, and the volumetric projection all fade within moments.
Finished with his demonstration, Morbius turns the educator off.
Turning the dashboard off requires a user to turn two free-spinning dials that sit to each side of the headset inwards. The lights of the dashboard fade.
