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"I long ago realized that I could reach far more people by writing something, than by walking down the street with a banner."
- John Brunner
 |
| Cog Life | ||
| Life in the bureaucracy. |
| And there was, Lars Powderdry reflected, nothing quite so disorienting as knowing that not only are you indispensable but that simultaneously you can be replaced. It was the sort of paradox that no one enjoyed, except of course UN-W Natsec, the governing Board of Wes-bloc, who had contrived to keep a replacement always visible in the wings.
He thought. And they’ve probably got another one waiting right now. They like me, he thought. They’ve been good to me and I to them; the system functions. But ultimate authorities, in charge of the lives of billions of pursaps, don’t take risks. They do not cross against the DON’T WALK signs of cog life. |
| Technovelgy from The Zap Gun (Project Plowshare),
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Galaxy Publishing in 1965 Additional resources -
|
PKD continues:
The English archaic definition had always seemed almost supernaturally apt to him. Cog. Using one’s finger as a sort of cog to guide or hold the dice; i.e. to cozen, wheedle; to cheat...
Lars said, “I do not object to a monopoly of knowledge by one small class. It doesn’t upset me, that there are a few cogs and a lot of pursaps. Every society is really run by an elite.”
But then Miss Bedouin didn’t know what went on. She was sublimely pursap [pure and saps]. As if the era before the Fall had been re-established for roughly four billion citizens of Wes-bloc and Peep-East. The burden, which had once been everyone's rested now on the cogs alone. The cognoscenti had relieved their race of a curse ... if “cog” really derived from that and not, as he suspected, from an English rather than Italian word.
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
