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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven

Control Harness  
  Connects to the brain and nervous system of a host organism for control purposes.  

A tunnel lay exposed and in it, dying in a heap of quivering, pulsating fur, lay — as he had from long experience anticipated — a Martian gopher, its eyes glazed in agony, elongated fangs exposed.

He killed it, mercifully. And then bent down to examine it. Because something had caught his eye: a flash of metal.

The m-gopher wore a harness. It was artificial, of course ; the harness fitted snugly around the animal’s thick neck. Almost invisible, hair-like wires passed from the harness and disappeared into the scalp of the gopher near the front of the skull.

“Lord,” Tony Costner said, picking the gopher and its harness up and standing in futile anxiety, wondering what to do. Right away he connected this with the carnival dolls ; they had gone off and done this, made this — the settlement, as Hoagland had said, was under attack.

Later, he sat beside Hoagland Rae in the workshop; Rae, with care, had opened the harness, inspected its interior.

“A transmitter,” Hoagland - said, and breathed out noisily, as if his childhood asthma had returned. “Short range, maybe half a mile. The gopher was directed by it, maybe gave back a signal that told where it was and what it was doing. The electrodes to the brain probably connect with pleasure and pain areas ... that way the gopher could be controlled.” He glanced at Tony Costner. “How’d you like to have a harness like that on you?”

Technovelgy from A Game of Unchance, by Philip K. Dick.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1964
Additional resources -

See roachster from Sparrowhawk (1990) by Thomas Easton.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from A Game of Unchance
  More Ideas and Technology by Philip K. Dick
  Tech news articles related to A Game of Unchance
  Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick

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