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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Cybrid | ||
| An organic body used by an artificial intelligence. |
This interesting word is a combination of "cyborg" and "hybrid." From the way the character is used in the novel, it appears to be purely android - no metal parts. It is an extension of an artificial intelligence.
| Cybrids are a whole different matter. Tailored from human genetic stock, they are far more human in appearance and outward behavior than androids are allowed to be. Agreements between the TechnoCore and the Hegemony allow only a handful of cybrids in existence... From an AIs perspective, the beautiful body and intriguing personality sitting across the desk from me must be merely another appendage, a remote, some what more complex but otherwise no more important than any one of ten thousand such sensors, manipulators autonomous units or other remotes.. |
| Technovelgy from Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
From this passage, the cybrid appears to be little more than a remote sensor, an input/output device. However, the development of the cybrid into a more complete, independent personality is an interesting theme in the book.
I’d heard about cybrids. Who hasn’t? I once accused my first husband of being one. But I never expected to be sitting in the same room with one. Or to find it so damned attractive.
Johnny was an AI. His consciousness or ego or whatever you want to call it floated somewhere in the megadatasphere dataumplane of the TechnoCore. Like everyone else except maybe the current Senate CEO or the AIs’ garbage removers, I had no idea where the TechnoCore was. The AIs had peacefully seceded from human control more than three centuries ago—before my time—and while they continued to serve the Hegemony as allies by advising the All Thing, monitoring the dataspheres, occasionally using their predictive abilities to help us avoid major mistakes or natural disasters, the TechnoCore generally went about its own indecipherable and distinctly nonhuman business in privacy.
Fair enough, it seemed to me.
Usually AIs do business with humans and human machines via the datasphere. They can manufacture an interactive holo if they need to — I remember during the Maui-Covenant incorporation, the TechnoCore ambassadors at the treaty signing looked suspiciously like the old holo star Tyrone Bathwaite.
Johnny — his real name was a code of digits, letters, and cipher bands longer than my arm — was a cybrid.
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