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"Real science opens windows for us to look through. We're right at the footsteps of the most interesting scientists around."
- Larry Niven
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| Machine Birds | ||
| Flock of mechanical winged birds. |
| At the top of the hill, she stopped to recover her breath, but the boy didn't greet us or even look our way. He had in his hands a circular device, and was looking at the sky between the two houses where a group of birds was flying in formation, and I quickly realized these were machine birds. He kept his gaze on them and when he touched his control, the birds responded by changing their pattern.
‘Wow, they're beautiful,' Josie said, though still short of breath. ‘Are they new?' Rick kept his gaze fixed on the birds, but said: ‘Those two on the end are new. You can tell they don't really match.' The birds swooped till they were hovering directly above us. ‘Yeah, but real birds don't all look the same either,' Josie said. ‘I suppose. At least I've got the whole team taking the same commands now. Okay, Josie, watch this.' The machine birds began to come down, landing one by one on the grass in front of us. But two remained in the air, and Rick, frowning, pressed his remote again. ‘God. Still not right.' ‘But they look great, Ricky.' Josie was standing surprisingly close to Rick, not actually touching him, but with hands raised just behind his back and left shoulder. ‘What those two need is a complete recalibration.' |
| Technovelgy from Klara and the Sun,
by Kazuo Ishiguro. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2021 Additional resources -
|
Compare to tiny robot planes from Blood on the Sun (1942) by Hal K. Wells.
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'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
