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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Pain Canopy | ||
| Pain by nerve induction improves interrogation. |
| Past cultures have used all manner of devices to induce pain - the rack, the wheel, the boot, the dental drill and a host of others. But the Hierarchy is merciful and is not pleased by mutilation. Therefore, it's priests have devised a means of producing all the same sensations of these varied tortures by direct stimulation of the nerves that transmit the sensation of pain. Thus the same results are achieved without any injury to the bodily organism, save it come from shock or convulsion. There is this further advantage - the torture need not be interrupted for fear that injury to the tissues will result in death...
A thick metallic canopy had been moved forward behind the chair. It fitted around the witch's head like a cowl. Curving flanges followed the lines of her body... "Let the pain enter the fingers of her left hand." |
| Technovelgy from Gather, Darkness!,
by Fritz Leiber. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1943 Additional resources -
|
See also the pain box from Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) as the pain ray from Edmond Hamilton's Crashing Suns (1928).
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
