I may be looking too much into this, but I think that the ship was partly to blame for messing up Victor. He was in charge of bringing up the memories, but he failed because he didn't know how to deal with scary human emotions that with them. Memories are emotional, which is why we remember them. We remember the emotions that are tied to memories, regardless if the memories are actually accurate.
For this reason, I don't think the ship was sentient. Although a funny character, it only cares about having to deal with Victor for the next ten years rather than caring about how much he's suffering. In the end, he contacts Martine to travel to the their destination. The ship is probably only does this because it doesn't want to be responsible with the death of a human, because then Asimov's robot rules (I'm assuming this applies). But that doesn't mean sentience, like we see in the I, Robot short stories. Victor was just a really fragile person to begin with, that needed humans to deal with him because only humans have the compassion.
Overall, I just really pitied Victor. I completely sympathized with what he went through because that would totally be me if I was in that situation. If the story continued, I wonder if Victor could be able to return to (somewhat) normal self, at least one that could tell the differences between reality and fiction. Our own minds can play a pretty convincing part in tricking us, like with illusions and stuff or those dreams that you have where you wake up and get ready for school but then you wake up again and realize you were asleep the whole time. And then you really have to get out of bed now.
I really like the connection to the robot rules presented by Asimov. This really makes me question if the ship was actually sentient, or if it was just trying to follow the rules that were set in place for it.
ReplyDeleteSo you were talking about how only humans could deal with victor. I did research on the mars missions (as one does) and there are not going to have psychologists on board but rather have a computer program to help them work through things. Do you think computers could ever replace humans in this respect?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I think the ultimate proof of the ships sentience would be if it had emotions. All humans experience emotions and it's part of our nature, this ship is cold, metal, and unfeeling. Your post made me sympathize a little more with Victor, who's a victim of his emotions.
ReplyDeleteI think the ship did care how Victor was doing (making sure he was happy) because he realized when Victor was scared and tried to fix it, but maybe that was cause he was programmed to make sure he was happy, which is sort of an in between.
ReplyDeleteYou know, Dick writes a lot about AIs and androids, and I'm not sure Asimov's rules DO apply. His seem to be much more totally human, in psychology, at least.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, I pitied Victor, too! Granted, he pitied himself. But he was also stuck in this horrible schizophrenic reality for ten years.