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"I operate by a code that makes me responsible for what I do, makes me definitely, directly, genuinely responsible. I am precisely the kind of person I made myself out to be."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Focusing | ||
| Psychoactive microbe improves the attention-focusing ability of those infected. |
The mindrot is a plague that was turned to the service of civilization. It "spreads through the brain in a nearly harmless way, infecting about ninety percent of the glial cells. And now we control the release of neuractives."
| "Focusing ennobles. It is the key to Emergent success, and a much more subtle thing than you can imagine. It's not just that we've created a psychoactive microbe. This is one whose growth within the brain can be controlled with millimeter precision - and once in place, the ensemble can be guided in its actions with the same precision."
"Don't you see? We can improve the attention-focusing aspects of consciousness: we can take humans and turn them into analytical engines." She spelled it out in wretched detail. On the Emergent worlds, the Focusing process was spread over the last years of a specialist's schooling, intensifying the graduate-school experience to produce genius... For many days, Reynolt and her technicians had tweaked the virus, triggering genetic expression that precisely released the chemicals of thought - all guided by Emergent medical computers that gathered feedback from conventional brain diagnostics. |
| From A Deepness in the Sky,
by Vernor Vinge. Published by Not known in 1999 Additional resources -
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| Robothread Robotic Worms Crawling Through Your Brain |
| Skin Electronics Can Show Electrocardiogram |
| Neurodevices For Consumers? Neuroethicists (And Philip K Dick) Say 'Caveat Emptor' |
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'CIC uses [it] to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns...'
'With one fluid motion, it surged forward, plunged, and was gone.'
'Its lines wavered, flowed, and then painfully reformed. For an interval, the device struggled with itself...'
'The program raced up the screen one scan line at a time, subtly smoothing, deleting and coloring.'
'The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all.'
I can't resist science-fictional elements. Especially when they're real.
'The heart of it was a vast hexagonal structure of welded metal, ten miles across...'
