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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Biosoft | ||
| A biography that includes actual life experience from the subject; a biographical download. |
This piece of technovelgy is the ultimate in mixed media. Not only do you have the usual items, text reports and photographs along with video recordings of the subject, but actual life experience of the person. In order to experience a biosoft, you need to "jack" it directly into your brain (the expression derives from "phone jack", the connector that you used to plug your phone line into before you got your cell phone.)
| Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the
thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft. One
end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation unlike anything he'd seen. "What is it?" "It's biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was output from an Al. It's sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it yourself; you wanna get the picture fast . . It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input. |
| Technovelgy from Count Zero,
by William Gibson. Published by Arbor House in 1986 Additional resources -
|
A biosoft is apparently not arranged in an ordered sequence; but neither is your life. One of the characteristics of people who request detailed biographies of others (particularly in a business context) is that they are looking for control and want to experience everything being in their control. This bewildering fountain of experience might be too chaotic for such individuals, but if you really want the flavor of the person, you may need to relinquish control.
Compare to the lifelog from Soft Death (1986) by Rudy Rucker.
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'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.'
''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!'
