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"Evolutionary success ... is going to absolutely require mobility on, at a minimum, an interplanetary scale. We either go or we die out."
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This is one of the more insidious pieces of technovelgy that you are likely to run into. The design is simplicity itself; The part you can see is just a "fist-sized droud that protruded like a black plastic canker from the crown of [the user's] head."
A droud provides the current; the business end of the droud is inserted into an ecstasy plug embedded in the skull.
Here's a quote from a later book, Ringworld Engineers:
Times change. Generations later, these same cultures usually see current addiction as a mixed blessing. Older sins -- alcoholism and drug addiction and compulsive gambling -- cannot compete. People who can be hooked by drugs are happier with the wire. They take longer to die, and they tend not to have children.
It costs almost nothing. An ecstasy peddler can raise the price of the operation, but for what? The user isn't a wirehead until the wire has been embedded in the pleasure center of his brain. Then the peddler has no hold over him, for the user gets his kicks from house current...
Louis seemed to sag in upon himself. He reached across his smooth scalp to the base of the long black braid, and pulled the droud from its socket beneath the hair. He held it in his hand, considering; then, as always, he dropped it into a drawer and locked it.
Fortunately, no one really knows the precise place to insert the wire; also, the operation itself would be expensive, and keeping the site of the incision clean would be difficult.
The author remarks that
More recently, the Vagal Nerve Stimulator (manufactured by Cyberonics Inc), sends a mild electrical pulse to the vagus nerve (10th cranial nerve), which stimulates regions of the brain believed to control emotions. The device, originally designed to help patients with epilepsy (and approved by the FDA for this purpose), is now being proposed for use with patients with otherwise untreatable depression.
Compare to the pleasure cap from Cordwainer Smith's 1961 novel A Planet Named Shayol. Comment/Join this discussion ( 3 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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