{"id":5801,"date":"2024-11-12T14:42:38","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T12:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/?p=5801"},"modified":"2024-11-12T14:43:16","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T12:43:16","slug":"martha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/?p=5801","title":{"rendered":"Martha"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Martha<\/em> is a 1976 short short Science Fiction story by Fred Saberhagen. Short short stories are special, as Asimov says in the introduction to his <em>100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Finally, in the short short story, everything is eliminated but the point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Martha is an AI, being asked a question:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cYes, sir,\u201d said the pleasant feminine voice in my ear, made up, I knew, of<br \/>\nindividually recorded words electronically strung together. \u201cWhat can I do<br \/>\nfor you?\u201d Inspiration came. \u201cYou ask me a question,\u201d I suggested.<\/p>\n<p>The pleasant voice repeated: \u201cWhat can I do for you?\u201d \u201cI want you to ask me<br \/>\na question,\u201d I repeated.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou are the first human being to ask me for a question. Now this is the<br \/>\nquestion I ask of you: What do you, as one human being, want from me?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I was momentarily stumped. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I said finally. \u201cThe same as<br \/>\neveryone else, I guess.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Next day the director called to tell me that Martha was rebuilding herself. The<br \/>\nday after that I went back to look. People were crowding up to the guardrail,<br \/>\naround new panels which held rows of buttons. Each button when pushed<br \/>\nproduced noises, or colored lights, or impressive discharges of static<br \/>\nelectricity, among the complex new devices which had been added atop the<br \/>\nmachine. Through the telephone receivers a sexy voice answered every<br \/>\nquestion with clearly spoken scraps of nonsense, studded with long technical<br \/>\nwords.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>1976. Saberhagen called it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Martha is a 1976 short short Science Fiction story by Fred Saberhagen. Short short stories are special, as Asimov says in the introduction to his 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories: Finally, in the short short story, everything is eliminated but the point. Martha is an AI, being asked a question: \u201cYes, sir,\u201d said the pleasant feminine voice in my ear, made up, I knew, of individually recorded words electronically strung together. \u201cWhat can I do for you?\u201d Inspiration came. \u201cYou ask me a question,\u201d I suggested. The pleasant voice repeated: \u201cWhat can I do for you?\u201d \u201cI want&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farting-around"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5801"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5803,"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5801\/revisions\/5803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}