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"The planet's immune system is doing everything it can. The planet's immune system is doing everything it can."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Tentacle Machines | ||
| Enormous robots, cylindrical of body, tentacular of arms, autonomous of brain, sinister of intent. |
Slave robots of an artificial intelligence.
| He wrote of the tentacle-machines and claimed that they were merely machines, without any trace of brain or intelligence, simply complex, automatic, and self-powered mechanism that were controlled by the metal brain, perhaps by some intricate form of radio-control. But he wrote also of a thing he had not seen on his first glimpse of the clearing, and that was the existence of the cylinders, as he called them throughout. They were just that, gleaming cylinders of metal, some fifty feet in diameter and half again as much in height, provided with two flexible arms on the same principle as the arms of the metal brain and the tentacles of the working-machines, but much larger and longer.
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| Technovelgy from The Metal Giants,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Weird Tales in 1926 Additional resources -
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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.'
