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"The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer. Day after month after year after story after book."
- Harlan Ellison

Jodie Grid  
  A 'tattoo' that provides points for mapping your face into a grid.  

The tat machine worked on her for sixteen hours; they dripped Valium into her arm so she wouldn't whine... A Jodie was top of the line, it had a hundred times as many 'sites as the lo-res grid sported by many a porn starlet, something like ten thousand of them in the face alone...

When her face had gotten back to looking exactly the same as it had before her trip to the tat parlor, she packed everything she owned into a carpet bag and took the tube into the city.

"Let's have a gander at your grid, sweetheart," said a man identifying himself as Mr. Fred ("not my real name") Epidermis...

Miranda was looking at a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pinpricks of white light. Taken together, they formed a sort of three-dimensional constellation of Miranda, moving as she moved. Each point of light marked one of the 'sites that had been poked into her skin by the tat machine during those sixteen hours. Not shown were the filaments that tied them all together into a network - a new bodily system overlaid and interlaced with the nervous, lymph and vascular systems...

"It's a Jodie," she said...

"Looks like we got ourselves an artiste here," Fred Epidermis said. "lemme try you in one of our most challenging roles."

Suddenly a blond, blue-eyed woman was standing in the mediatron, perfectly aping Miranda's posture, wearing big hair, a white sweater with a big letter F in the middle, and a preposterously short skirt...

...for the first time ever, she was watching another person move exactly as she moved, as the stage mapped Miranda's grid onto this imaginary body. Miranda pressed her lips together as if she'd just put on lipstick, and Spirit did the same. She winked and Spirit winked...

Technovelgy from The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.
Published by Bantam Books in 1995
Additional resources -

Compare to the scramble suit from A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick.

Thanks to Vik Oliver at Diamond Age Solutions for suggesting this item.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Diamond Age
  More Ideas and Technology by Neal Stephenson
  Tech news articles related to The Diamond Age
  Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson

Jodie Grid-related news articles:
  - Electro-Cosmetics Let You Input With Your Face

Articles related to Medical
ErythroMer Artificial Blood
MouthPad Supports Head And Tongue Tracking
Drug Induces Hibernation-Like State In Humans
Drug To Regenerate Teeth In Humans

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