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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
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| Cyborg Collar | ||
| A device worn around the neck that controls the person for the duration of a working day. |
A Specter is Haunting Texas is a satirical novel set in a future version of Texas, where racial stereotypes are rigidly controlled. Mexican laborers are often required to wear a cyborg collar, allowing them to be controlled remotely.
| Moving about thrice as fast and in numbers a decimal order greater were the Mexicans, all of identical bent-back height and almost all afoot. About sixty percent wore the metal collars and antennae, and these were all furiously busy at various construction and deconstruction jobs; half of our street was torn up, buildings were being dismantled, others assembled, great masts reared, great holes dug. I even thought at first the collared workers could walk up walls - no strange sight to a space-dweller - until I noted that those on vertical surfaces were supported by slim wires, which they swiftly climbed or down-climbed...
Noting my special interest in the collared Mexicans, she explained disdainfully, "They are cyborgs, the estupidos. Their collars feed them orders and happiness - straight into their veins and nerves. From a distance foremen control them - after a fashion." She added the last phrase when two columns of cyborgs collided and instantly began a confused milling aimed at eventual disentanglement, like ants I had once watched in a flatland between grass. "They live like this forever?" I asked with some horror. "Ah, no," she assured me, "only during the working day |
| Technovelgy from A Specter is Haunting Texas,
by Fritz Leiber. Published by Galaxy Publishing in 1968 Additional resources -
|
A bit later in the novel, the author provides some additional details on how this virtual slavery is accomplished:
This method had the additional feature of being highly secure, since hypnotics and suggestions could be administered to make sure that workers promptly forgot what they were doing as soon as they were finished.
Compare to cyborg from Cyborg (1972) by Martin Caidin, the cyborg pilot from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert Heinlein and the cyborg dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic (1981) by William Gibson.
I put in time talking with a grav-topped much bent Mex named Pedro Ramirez, who had been in a cybored work gang for twenty years. He pulled his shirt off his knobby shoulder to show me the puckered scars where deep-probing tubes had once fed tranquilizers, energizers, and hormones from his yoke into artery and vein. He also insisted I inspect the curious callosities in his ears, made by the common plugs that had been housed there daily for two decades...
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
