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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Smart Rope | ||
| Long 'rope' consisting of a variety of intertwined cables with different properties; controlled with special glove interface. |
| ...The cable weighed only a couple of kilos, but it felt bizarrely serpentine and supple, somehow dry and greasy at the same time. It was as thick as his little finger, and maybe twenty meters long. "What is this thing exactly?"
"Smart rope." "What's smart about it?" "Well, there's this chip in the battery box that understands knot topology... It's a kind of math about deforming the geometry of space... Anyway, that rope is braided from a lot of different cabling. Got sensor cable, power cable, and this is the tricky part electric reactive fiber. Okay? It'll stretch, it'll contract - hard and fast - it can bend and wiggle anywhere along the length. The damn thing can tie itself in knots..." |
| Technovelgy from Heavy Weather,
by Bruce Sterling. Published by Bantam in 1994 Additional resources -
|
Here's a description of the smart rope in use.
Alex pulled the coil of smart rope from his shoulder, put his gloved hand on it. The thin black rope slid out instantly across the bubblepak flooring, reared like a cobra, seized the end of the vise grip in its metal-collared noose, and lifted the tool into the air. It then swayed across the floor, the vise grip dangling gently from the noose, and hung the tool in midair, within her easy reach.
Thanks to Bob for pointing this one out.
"Can you reach me that big-ass vise grip over there?"
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'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.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
'It seems that at one time computers were designed directly by human beings.'
'...the spot was a lonely one in an uncharted region, far from the normal lanes of space traffic.'
