Procurando o nome de um conto.
"Itself!" por A. E. van Vogt , publicado pela primeira vez em Gamma , Vol . 1, No. 1, 1963 , disponível no Arquivo da Internet .
Era sobre um submarino AI que acordou um dia
Itself, king of the Philippine Deep—that awesome canyon where the sea goes down six miles—woke from his recharge period and looked around suspiciously.
His Alter Ego said, "Well, how is it with Itself today?
His Alter Ego was a booster, a goader, a stimulant to action, and, in his limited way, a companion.
e batalhar com uma espaçonave invasora que estava se escondendo embaixo d'água em preparação para invadir a terra
His was almost perfect perception. Clearly and unmistakably, Itself made out the intruder in the far distance of that twisting ravine. A ship! Anchored to rock at the very edge of the canyon.
The Alter Ego goaded. "You're not going to let somebody invade your territory, are you?"
Instantly, Itself was furious. He activated the jet mechanism in the underslung belly of his almost solid metal body. A nuclear reactor immediately heated the plates of the explosion chamber. The sea water which flowed through the chamber burst into hissing clouds of steam, and he jetted forward like a missile.
Arriving at the ship, Itself attacked the nearest of the four front anchor lines with the nuclear-powered heat beam in his head. When he had severed it, he turned to the second cable, and burned through it. Then he moved for the third cable.
But the startled beings aboard the alien ship had spotted the twenty-foot monster in the black waters below.
[. . . .]
But it was a sorely wounded ship that now drifted helplessly in a slow current. The aliens had thus far used no energy that might be detected from the surface. But they had come to Earth to establish a base for invasion. Their instructions were to accumulate enough data about underwater currents to enable them to leave the Deep, and eventually to be able to drift near land, launch atom bombs, and drift away again. For this purpose they were mightily armed, and they refused to die in these black waters without a fight.
A batalha terminou com ambos, sub e nave espacial sendo destruídos.
The second setback had driven Itself completely berserk. He aimed his nuclear pellet gun, firing twice. In the next split-second, a blast from the invader pierced his brain.
The Alter Ego yelled, "You're not going to let them get away with that, are you?"
But the king of the Philippine Deep was dead, and could no longer be goaded.
[. . . .]
Through the Philippine Deep there began presently to flow an enormous balancing river. It carried the aliens' invasion vessel in a long, slanting, upward direction. But several weeks passed before the drifting ship actually broke surface, and another day or two before it was seen.
A naval patrol boarded it, found the aliens dead more than a month from concussion, and—after examining the damage—correctly analyzed what had happened.
O fim da história foi um homem conversando com o outro
Não há diálogo humano na história, apenas Alter Ego falando consigo mesmo e os invasores alienígenas conversando entre si, A história termina com a si mesma sendo substituída:
And so—a new king "woke" to the first "day" of his reign, and heard his Alter Ego say, "Well, Itself, what's the program?"
Itself glared with a royal suspicion.
sobre a reativação dos subs que foram projetados para manter os subs inimigos afastados.
Aparentemente, a guerra antisubmarina não era o único propósito de si mesmo. Desde o início da história:
Itself perceived the black world which surrounded him with high frequency sounds which he broadcast continuously in all directions. Like a bat in a pitch dark cave, he analyzed the structure of all things in his watery universe by interpreting the returning echoes. And the accompanying emotion of suspicion was a device which impelled Itself to record changing pressures, temperatures and current flows. Unknown to him, what he observed became part of the immense total of data by which faraway computers estimated the inter-relationship of ocean and atmosphere, and then predicted water and air conditions everywhere with uncanny exactness.