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"We are all repositories for genetically-encoded information that we're all spreading back and forth amongst each other, all the time. We're just lousy with information."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Remote-Control Slavery | ||
| Mental control (possibly mediated by radio waves) of individuals of other species. |
| “We’re only beginning to understand this, and of course I don’t have much of the inside information myself, but as I piece it together it seems that these beings make use of lower life-forms, turning them essentially into radio-controlled robots. They’ll use anything with limbs and mobility. They started with certain animals of their own planet, a small dolphin-like form perhaps on the threshold of intelligence, and worked through them to achieve a space drive. Then they got to neighboring planets—land planets— and took control of pseudoprimates, protochimps of some kind. They look for fingers. Manual dexterity counts a great deal with them. At present their sphere of influence covers some eighty light-years and appears to be spreading at an exponential rate.”
Muller shook his head. “This is worse nonsense than the stuff you were handing me about a cure. Look, there’s a limiting velocity for radio transmission, right? If they’re controlling flunkeys from eighty light-years away, it’ll take eighty years for any command to reach its destination. Every twitch of a muscle, every trifling movement—” “They can leave their home world,” said Rawlins. “But if they’re so big—” “They’ve used their slave beings to build gravity tanks. They also have a star drive. All their colonies are run by overseers in orbit a few thousand kilometers up, floating in a simulated home-world environment. It takes one overseer to run one planet. I suppose they rotate tours of duty.” |
| Technovelgy from The Man in the Maze,
by Robert Silverberg. Published by Avon Books in 1969 Additional resources -
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'...they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs.'
'...some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre...'
'These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern...'
'...the meteor caught and halted just as a small boy catches a swift ball in his cap.'
'We have decided that it shall be but one ship... it must contain everything needed to take us through the generations.'
'You’re the robopsychologist of the plant, so you’re to study the robot itself...'
