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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Scramble Suit | ||
| A superthin membrane upon which are projected the characteristics of a million different people, it confers instant anonymity. |
In the novel, narcotics officers wear these suits to disguise their appearance.
"Let's hear it for the vague blur!" the host said loudly...
"Now you will notice," the Lions Club host said, "that you can barely see this individual... because he is wearing what is called a scramble suit...
| The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.
As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure - the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next... In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless. |
| Technovelgy from A Scanner Darkly,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1977 Additional resources -
|
As it turns out, they have artificial voices as well, leaving "in our minds no characteristics."
Here's an explanation of how this "technology" of Dick's was shown in the movie version of the book:
(Explanatory Scramble suit video from the movie version)
Compare the scramble suit with the optical effects suit from A Plague of Demons (1965) by Keith Laumer, the mimetic polycarbon suit worn by Panther Modern leader Lupus Yonderboy in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the Jodie grid from The Diamond Age (1995) by Neal Stephenson and the abglanz from The Mountain in the Sea (2022) by Ray Naylor.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from A Scanner Darkly
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip K. Dick
Tech news articles related to A Scanner Darkly
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Scramble Suit-related
news articles:
- PKD's Scramble Suit In A Scanner Darkly Movie Trailer
- Let's Hear It For The Vague Blur!
- Face Recognition Now Sees Through Disguises
- HyperFace Aims To Foil Facial Recognition
- Camouflage To Confound Face Recognition
- RealFace Glamoflage T-Shirt Like PKD's Scramble Suit
- CV Dazzle Anti-Surveillance Make-Up
- Project KOVR Fashion Protection From Infosphere
- Deep Learning Creates New Faces
- Adversarial Pattern Shirts Confound Object Detection Systems
- CGI 'Master Faces' Impersonate Several Identities
| Skip Movewear Arc'teryx AI Pants |
| Kolors Virtual-Try-On Predicted, And TRIED, By Harry Harrison |
| Qore IcePlates Are Personal Cooling Suits |
| Fabrican Dress Sprayed Directly Onto Model On Coperni Runway |
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'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
'...like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'You hate the whole idea that some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre has got your life... in his hands.'
'My homeland is being threatened by the Replicators. Thus far all attempts to stop them have failed.'
'A robobus had just rolled up to the curb.'
'And there in the next room by the sofa sat a familiar suitcase, that of his psychiatrist Dr. Smile.'
'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.'
