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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Dormancy Switch | ||
| Essential device 'switches off' your cyborg animal, causing it to quickly drop off to sleep. |
Bernie Fischer landed his police Hawk, a cyborged flying bird based on common hawks, at the scene of the disaster. Naturally, you'll want to switch your cyborg off.
| He lifted a small, bright green hatch in the control panel to reveal a recessed toggle. The switch was wired to the Hawk's sleep center. When he flicked it, the bird would tuck his head beneath one wing and go dormant. It would wake only when he touched the switch again. |
| Technovelgy from Sparrowhawk,
by Thomas A. Easton. Published by Ace Books in 1990 Additional resources -
|
I think that DARPA will want to have some sort of dormancy switch installed on its various cyborg insects; sometimes, you want to just park them and have them stay put.
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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.'
