Heimburger - Yamamoto: Intermission 4 / Story 4 (120-151)

Yamamoto covers deeper aspects of human psychology with a focus on how humans develop both personal connections and feelings of loneliness during periods of exploration in their lives. In the intermission, the Storyteller asks why Ibis has such a meticulously designed exterior as to give an impression of humanity despite what her functions entail. Although the Storyteller understands the appearance is artificial, he can’t help but feel a soul is present in her when he sees her. People often empathize with animals and creatures who bear characteristics that are similar or magnified versions of human characteristics, such as large eyes in dogs and cats. Characteristics that seem far from the spectrum of human traits can create unsettling feelings and responses, such as the many legs of spiders or the large compound eyes of flies. In Story 4, Yamamoto uses a large artificially-intelligent satellite-like structure as a character pondering human emotions of loneliness and desires for expressiveness. Ilianos, as incoming spaceships refer to it, guards a black hole called Upeowadonia, which despite its nature as an empty vacuum of matter, has become a desired destination in the pursuit of meaning for many space travelers, with all having perished due to the destructive tidal force. Seventy six spaceships and 206 space travelers have unintentionally died either trying to cross the black hole or entered it as a form of suicide. The story epitomizes Yamamoto’s theme of new forms of technology bringing out new forms of courage in humanity. At the same time, new forms of escape in technological advancements slowly pervade human societies and numb the new ambitions that seem to arise, as is alluded to when referencing planets that have “sunk” into a global usage of virtual reality. The space explorer Syrinx Dufet is the outlier of humanity that is willing to expand the limits of human exploration of space. Illy, the human form of Ilianos, doesn’t understand poetry and human behavior because humans are impulsive and short-sighted, something that a being of artificial intelligence, even with the ability to process feelings, is not designed to think about, and Syrinx Dufet’s combination of in-the-moment thrill-seeking and her advanced knowledge of the consequences of black hole travel demonstrate what separates humans from forms of artificial intelligence like Ilianos.

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