Comment by db48x

I love that book. I loved that the ships could send text messages across 10,000 light-years, provided the receiving end had an antenna swarm with the mass of a planet.

He played with the idea in at least one other story that I'm aware of, a short story where a human scientist on a planet just inside the Slow Zone (where no FTL is supposed to be possible) acquires a device from the Transcend (where FTL and AI are apparently trivial). The device is a terminal connected to a transcendent intelligence, and it can send and receive a few bits per second via FTL, even in the Slow Zone. Using those few bits it's able to transmit natural-language questions, and reproduce the answers to those questions, but the scientist can't decide whether he can trust it. Can the AI really model him well enough to understand his questions using that tiny amount of information? Can the answers coming back be anything but random? And then the solar weather starts acting a bit unusual...