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"We're about 20 minutes away from the point where Clarke's law kicks in and technology becomes indistinguishable from magic."
- Peter Watts
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| Recycler | ||
| A surgically implanted device that enables a diver to obtain oxygen directly from seawater. |
The rifters, or divers working on the deep sea rift, have been surgically modified to adapt them to their new environment. One such modification is a device that extracts oxygen from sea water.
| Ballard peels her 'skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyzer intake pokes out through her rib cage. Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard's flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again. |
| Technovelgy from Starfish,
by Peter Watts. Published by Tor Books in 1999 Additional resources -
|
Getting oxygen from the surrounding water is the best way to have an unlimited air supply. The history of "rebreathing" devices has a rather checkered history. For example, a Frenchmen named Freminet invented a device that recycled the exhaled air in 1772. Unfortunately, his invention failed to fully recharge the air with oxygen; he died from lack of oxygen after twenty minutes.
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'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
