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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."
- Larry Niven
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| Biosoft | ||
| A biography that includes actual life experience from the subject; a biographical download. |
This piece of technovelgy is the ultimate in mixed media. Not only do you have the usual items, text reports and photographs along with video recordings of the subject, but actual life experience of the person. In order to experience a biosoft, you need to "jack" it directly into your brain (the expression derives from "phone jack", the connector that you used to plug your phone line into before you got your cell phone.)
| Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the
thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft. One
end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation unlike anything he'd seen. "What is it?" "It's biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was output from an Al. It's sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it yourself; you wanna get the picture fast . . It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input. |
| From Count Zero,
by William Gibson. Published by Arbor House in 1986 Additional resources -
|
A biosoft is apparently not arranged in an ordered sequence; but neither is your life. One of the characteristics of people who request detailed biographies of others (particularly in a business context) is that they are looking for control and want to experience everything being in their control. This bewildering fountain of experience might be too chaotic for such individuals, but if you really want the flavor of the person, you may need to relinquish control.
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'the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits...'
'Over her lacerated right shoulder he sprayed art-derm...'
Now, that was a Pontiac Trans Am with some real style.
'There is a built-in microphone that hears everything you say, and an electric brain that selects a suitable answer.'
