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"...if you want to know what your future looks like, don't waste your time on Analog; read Time magazine. We are already saturated in the future. "
- Peter Watts
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| General Bodies Tortoise | ||
| A passenger vehicle genetically engineered from tortoise DNA and controlled by implanted electronics. |
| Nick had opened the garage door that morning and led the Tortoise out for relief from the heat. Now the family vehicle was waiting in the drive, shaded by nearby trees. Nick had bought it when he was in college and single. It had been young then, with the passenger compartment in the shell just big enough, in a squeeze, for two... As advertised, the Tortoise had grown too, maturing from the sportscar stage to coupe. Eventually, timed by gengineers like Emily to match a family's growth, it would gain the capacity of a station wagon.
...The gengineers had given it size and speed, and a cavity beneath the shell. The General Bodies shops had fitted a windshield, side windows, and doors, installed plush seats, added headlights and taillights, and wired the controls into the Tortoise's nervous system. |
| Technovelgy from Sparrowhawk,
by Thomas A. Easton. Published by Ace Books in 1990 Additional resources -
|
See also the entry for Roachster from the same book.
Compare to Robert Heinlein's Steel Tortoise, the original all-terrain vehicle.
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
