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"The answer to the problem of information overload on the Net is reputations… engineer a system called a reputation server."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Airchair | ||
| A floating armchair. |
| Helping the thing into Gramps’ airchair, Phillipa swore. With the maintenance the ’chair required, it would’ve been cheaper to get a nerve regen. That wasn’t Gramps’ way, though — and apparently, it wasn’t going to be the lazarus’, either. A shelter Panic had put Gramps in that chair when he was still part time with the Civil Guard, and he was damned if he’d pay out good money to correct someone else’s mistake...
 (Personality-construct from ‘Killing Gramps' by Ann K. Schwader) Moments later, the lazarus’ airchair malfunctioned. From standard height, the device dropped to within a centimeter of the floor and began spinning erratically. Dumped off sideways, “Gramps” himself sprawled in an untidy heap, mumbling at random as his verbal programming choked. “The ’chair’s fritzing again,” Phillipa called to her mother. “Didn’t Gramps just have the thing serviced before he…” Abruptly, the ’chair rose to standard height again. “What’s that again, dear?” Meredith asked from the kitchen. “You know I can’t hear with the unsealer on.” Hauling the lazarus off the floor, Phillipa managed to get it seated before her mother came out. Gramps’ second-hand ’chair had evidently developed a new circuit problem triggered by the appliance. She doubted it could be fixed, though of course Meredith — and the lazarus — would insist on trying, at considerable expense. |
| Technovelgy from Killing Gramps,
by Ann K. Schwader. Published by Aboriginal Science Fiction in 1988 Additional resources -
|
Here's a more dynamic illustration:
(Armchair from 'Killing Gramps' by Ann K. Schwader)
I'm reminded of a much more elaborate variation on this idea from Foundation by Isaac Asimov:
He had been introduced to Lepold as one of a long line of introducees, and from a safe distance, for the king stood apart in lonely and impressive grandeur, surrounded by his deadly blaze of radioactive aura. And in less than an hour this same king would take his seat upon the massive throne of rhodium-iridium alloy with jewel-set gold chasings, and then, throne and all would rise maestically into the air, skim the ground slowly to hover before the great window from which the great crowds of common folk could see their king and shout themselves into near apoplexy. The throne would not have been so massive, of course, if it had not had a shielded nuclear motor built into it.
Here's an earlier example of the same idea, in a great illustration from Amazing Stories, 1929:
(Flying Chair from 'The Flying Fool' by David H. Keller (1929))
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