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"I've been very obsessive about writing science fiction for far too many years. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have given up years ago."
- Charles Stross
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| Brainlock | ||
| A technique to focus the attention of prisoners on a limited task, precluding the possibility of escape. |
Control the mind and get what you want. That's the purpose of a brainlock. Why spend money on guard towers and barbed wire when you can focus the attention of prisoners so precisely that they can't think of anything else?
| Jerry's beeper went off while they were drinking coffee in Slick's room, huddled side-by-side at the edge of the bed. He'd been telling her as much as he knew about the Korsakov's, because she asked him. He hadn't ever really told anybody about it, and it was funny how little he actually knew. He told her about previous flashbacks, and then tried to explain how the system worked in jail. The trick was that you retain the long-term memory up to the point where they put you on the stuff. That way, they could train you to do something before you started serving your time and you didn't forget how to do it. Mostly you did stuff that robots could do. They trained him to assemble miniature geartrains; when he'd learned to put one together inside five minutes, that was it. "And they didn't do anything else?" She asked. "Just those gear trains." "No, I mean like brainlocks." He looked at her. The sore on her lip was almost healed. "If they do that, they don't tell you," he said. Then the beeper went off in one of her jackets. "Something's wrong," she said, getting up quickly. |
| Technovelgy from Mona Lisa Overdrive,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1988 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the asteroid prison from One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the Alcatraz of Space from Reunion on Ganymede (1938) by Clifford Simak, the Moon as prison from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert Heinlein, zero-time jail from A World Out of Time (1976) by Larry Niven and the orbital penal colony from Tekwar (1989) by William Shatner.
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
