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"I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either."
- William Gibson

Repair Drone  
  Autonomous robots repair damage or sabotage.  

“The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull’s inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan’s corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man’s hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.”
Technovelgy from Neuromancer, by William Gibson.
Published by Phantasia Press in 1984
Additional resources -

Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe, Self-Maintaining Circuit Monitoring and Repair from Gramp and his Dog (1952) by Frank Quattrocchi, the self-repairing robot from Accidental Flight (1952) by W.F. Wallace, the blue collar robot from The Velvet Glove (1956) by Harry Harrison and the service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Neuromancer
  More Ideas and Technology by William Gibson
  Tech news articles related to Neuromancer
  Tech news articles related to works by William Gibson

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