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"The answer to the problem of information overload on the Net is reputations… engineer a system called a reputation server."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Recycler | ||
| A surgically implanted device that enables a diver to obtain oxygen directly from seawater. |
The rifters, or divers working on the deep sea rift, have been surgically modified to adapt them to their new environment. One such modification is a device that extracts oxygen from sea water.
| Ballard peels her 'skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyzer intake pokes out through her rib cage. Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard's flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again. |
| From Starfish,
by Peter Watts. Published by Tor Books in 1999 Additional resources -
|
Getting oxygen from the surrounding water is the best way to have an unlimited air supply. The history of "rebreathing" devices has a rather checkered history. For example, a Frenchmen named Freminet invented a device that recycled the exhaled air in 1772. Unfortunately, his invention failed to fully recharge the air with oxygen; he died from lack of oxygen after twenty minutes.
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'Waldo flexed and extended his fingers gently; the two pairs of waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'They were stylish, with yellow-tinted lenses and hip frames, but the posts were unusually thick.'
'Noiselessly, on rubber-tired wheels, they journeyed...'
'He immediately turned the small shining disc of the Language Rectifier..'
'The delicious, indescribable pleasure of being a little planet swinging through space...'
'The horse reared up, pawing the air, then sprang into a gallop.'
'...most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives.'
'So what we're looking for now is... an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug.'
