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"By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Public Eye | ||
| A floating, free-roaming surveillance camera. |
| I grabbed him before he hit the deck and dragged him quickly... I turned away.
A Public Eye was floating above and beyond me. No reason to jump out of my boots. Nine times out of ten an Eye is cruising at random, unmonitored, and its twelve-hour loop may or may not be scanned by a human before it is scrubbed. The tenth time - a peace officer may be monitoring closely... So I ignored it and kept on toward the exit end of the corridor. That pesky Eye should have followed me as I was the only mass in that passageway radiating at thirty-seven degrees. But it tarried, three seconds at least, scanning that locker, before again fastening on me. My pocket pen became a laser beam and "killed" that Public Eye - killed it dead as I held the beam at full power until the Eye dropped to the deck, not only blinded but with antigrav shorted out. And its memory scrubbed - I hoped. |
| Technovelgy from Friday,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston in 1982 Additional resources -
|
See an earlier reference to this idea; the copseye from Larry Niven's 1972 story Cloak of Anarchy.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
