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"I'm strictly an ivory-tower person. I can explain things but I can't do things."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Hunter Program | ||
| Searching for occupied dwellings by monitoring electric power usage. |
| She frowned. "Conversation with you certainly has a lot of punctuation. Forget I asked." She looked around again. "Who pays the utilities? Since you don't exist, I mean." "Nobody." "What do I look like, an idiot? That's a full-service phone over there, and two powered chairs, and your tape console computer alone must draw . . . not to mention that computer in the bedroom, and lights and climate and—don't tell me. There's an inconspicuous solar collector on top of the abandoned warehouse, no bigger than Washington Square." I smiled. "I misspoke myself. I should have said 'everybody.' I get my power and phone from the same place you do—I just don't pay for it." "But they've got hunter programs monitoring for unmetered drain—" "Programs written and administered by corruptible, fallible human beings. Whoever built this place built it well. I never get a bill." |
| From Mindkiller,
by Spider Robinson. Published by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston in 1982 Additional resources -
|
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'THE red tennis robot scooted desperately across the court...'
'The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-long treeship...'
'Do you know what window washing used to cost by the hour?'
'Once the target is confirmed, it uses an IR laser to send a coded signal back to the parent, clearing it to attack.'
'I filled your bullet hole with flesh putty and the lattice.'
'... it will be easy to form an alphabet which shall enable us to converse with the inhabitants of the moon.'
'From the tower's huge octagonal base radiate wide silvery strips...'
'It was about five feet long... a black bullet head and red camera eyes.'
'The Law Society has strict rules on the use of pseudo-intelligent software...'
