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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders."
- Larry Niven
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| Wimp | ||
| A special-purpose body; grown without personality, but physically intact. |
In the future world of Millennium, people speak what is described as a polyglot language; not only words from different languages, but different times as well. "Wimp" is used to describe a body that is grown complete, but left as a "blank slate" in terms of experience or awareness. Wimps are used to replace live people snatched from the past, people who will die anyway and not be missed, like people on a boat that goes down with no survivors.
| I was tumbled in a blue light. It was frightening, even to me, and I knew what was happening. My body was being studied in minute detail, from the bones outward. The process took about two seconds. I was catalogued out to eighty decimal places and the Big Computer began thumbing through its card file of wimps, looking for the best match. That took about a picosecond. Miles away, a morgue drawer would be springing open in the wimp vaults. My slumbering double would then come rushing toward the prep room, pulling twenty gees of acceleration... enough to cause brain damage if sustained, but that would be carrying coals to Newcastle. Compared to a wimp, a carrot is a mental giant. |
| Technovelgy from Millennium,
by John Varley. Published by Berkley Books in 1983 Additional resources -
|
In this scene the protagonist Louise Baltimore is mistakenly sorted into the wrong line; she is mistaken for someone snatched from the past. Her wimp is prepared, much to her disgust.
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
