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"I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology."
- Roger Zelazny
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| Personality-Construct (Lazarus) | ||
| A chip providing a robotic body with the attributes of the selected person. |
| The watery blue eyes stared at her blankly.
“Gramps, you’re dead! You’re a lazarus, a personality-construct chip shoved into a casing of metal and plastic and God knows what. Certainly nothing with a right to run my life."
 (Personality-construct from 'Killing Gramps' by Ann K. Schwader) The eyes did not change expression. Pivoting its ’chair away from her, the lazarus headed for the living room’s front window at a fast walking speed. Phillipa nearly panicked. If the thing had fritzed, there was no way of stopping it from — what? Biomechanical suicide via the twentieth floor? Maybe a lazarus couldn’t survive being told what it was. Centimeters away from the window, the lazarus thumbed a remote button on the ’chair’s armrest. One wide pane slid open as ’chair and passenger sailed into a clear afternoon sky, the ’chair’s nullgrav adjusting to the drop. Cursing under her breath, Phillipa got up to shut the window. Midair exits had been Gramps’ favorite response to any argument — and he’d never bothered to close the pane behind him, either. Just how much personality did a “personality construct” preserve? |
| Technovelgy from Killing Gramps,
by Ann K. Schwader. Published by Aboriginal Science Fiction in 1988 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Electronic Analogue of Living Brain from The Tunnel Under The World (1955) by Frederik Pohl, the construct from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson, recorded personality, from Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive. See also the personality simulator from The Dosadi Experiment (1977) by Frank Herbert and the Neuro-netsukes from Rim (1994) by Alexander Besher.
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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
