Stumbled across this: Lag in Real Life. Is it just me, or do they move exactly the way a lot of artificial limbs move? (See also: the Luke arm), and compare it to this: 3d printed hand controlled by human muscles. In the absence of feedback, movements become robotic. If you want to know where cybernetic evolution needs to go next, realtime broadband feedback of vast amounts of sensory data seems to be the answer. -JRS
Just a little snippet of Brass and Steel: Inferno that I'm cutting out in this (hopefully) final polishing pass. It has several nice bits of research - gungee candy, for example - and I hated to see it go, but really most of this scene was repeated in another chapter, and it slowed the pacing down too much. So here it is, completely out of context. All I'm going to say is that the narrator is Dante Blackmore, the hero of Brass and Steel: Inferno, and he's a very powerful cyborg. She is Josephine Li, the heroine of this story. The year? 1895. It's steampunk. :)
The tiny woman sits bolt upright in bed with a stifled whimper, breathing hard. She blinks and fumbles for the covers. Pulls them tight to her chest.
“Bad dreams?”
She stares at me next, her breathing slowing. The eyes squeeze tight. “Marshal. Shit.” The lower lip quivers, tears fill her eyes again, and in a moment she’s sobbing. “Oh my God. ‘M sorry.” she says. “‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have. I. Oh my God.”
Shrug a little bit at her, and get up from my chair, slow as you please. Stretch. My joints crackle. Metallic sound that makes my teeth ache. “Let’s not go through all that again.”
Her brow furrows, and she exhales slowly. Her nose quirks. “I’m drunk.” she says, a little more meekly than last time. She fumbles under the blankets, and her expression goes puzzled. “We didn’t?”
Shake my head at her. “You made an offer. I let it ride.”
She takes a deep breath and nods. “I don’t remember. God. I’m sorry, Marshal.” she says. She looks down. “How bad was I?”
“You were rubbin’ your teat in my ear, and generally carryin’ on to make a man sell his soul for you. We talked a bit after that. Then you went to sleep. Nothin’ too bad.”
She squeezes her eyes shut, and slowly sinks down to the bed, sobbing. “Oh God.” she says. “Oh God. I am a whore. Just like my sister. I’m sorry, Marshal. I’m so sorry.”
“You had a lot to drink. Don’t worry about it.”
“Did I say anythin’ that wasn’ bad?”
“You just asked me to tuck you in.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just looks down. Closes her eyes, and breathes.
I try not to look at her bare shoulder, the sweep of her bare neck, the angle of her lower jaw, and the smooth skin underneath, and the broad chin that makes her look less Chinese than she might. Try not to look. Try not to picture the bare flesh in my arms, or the bloody furrow and spraying blood. Close my eyes a moment.
“I ain’t gonna be sick.” she says, finally. She takes a slow breath and says it again. “I am not gonna be sick. I can hold my liquor. I used t’drink a lot more’n I do now. I ain’t gonna be sick.”
She repeats it often enough that I nudge the chamber pot her direction. “You ain’t goin’ temperance, are you?” I think of McInnis. Maybe have a joke at his expense.
She looks at me, pupils nearly black in this light, glistening darkness that draws my eyes. “No, no. I got tired of bein’ sick, you know? Annabel likes gungee candy. Sometimes she gives me some. Mostly I drink. Used to drink. Try to move on now before things get so bad …” Her eyes glisten like a newborn fawn’s a moment before she closes them, sobs freely.
It's MileHiCon time again, and once again, I'm on the schedule. :) So if you're looking for me, here's where and when to look:
4:00pm Friday - Wind River B - Author reading with Donita K. Paul.
3:00pm Saturday - Wind River B - Psychology of Fandom Panel
11:00pm Saturday - 12th floor - Exquisite Corpse Reading with A. Bugg, T Kroenung, and N. Leyba.
2:00pm Sunday - Wind River A - Bionics now and in the future (I'm moderating this one)
This year, I'll be handing out some promotional thingies, starting at my reading on Friday, and after that there will be a basket of them out somewhere. I'll probably save some to give out at the Exquisite Corpse reading too.
Hope to see y'all there.
-JRS
Yesterday was a red-letter day for me. I sold my first short story ever. Brass and Steel is slated to appear in Science Fiction Trails some time in December.
My short summary of it goes like this:
After winning a 12 year war with the Hive; a mysterious organization of techno-zombies called Doppelgängers and their human supporters; the United States has had two years to rebuild and exploit the technology looted from their conquered foes. The result has been a steampunk explosion of Victorian proportions. In a thriving gold town called Perdition, Marshal Dante Blackmore, once a soldier and an investigator for the War Department, tries to keep the peace, and mops up any leftover doppelgängers that turn up. An adventuress named Jo seeks him out with an urgent story to tell...
I must say about the Brass and Steel world, that it was fun to write in, and fun to create. Steampunk by its nature isn't a hard-scifi genre, and I can see why people write the other kind. It's fun. I got to spend my research time on things like 19th century American slang, and things like that. :) I may have to revisit the world. I don't think I've spent all its DNA yet.
JRS
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One of the big problems science fiction (to say nothing of actual medical science) has had a problem with is how do you power all these cool cybernetic gismos you, the author, want to put in someone's body. Going back to the Six Million Dollar Man (and Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels upon which the series was based), the most common power source seems to be nuclear, robably Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. They certainly have the longevity for the job, with endurances measured in decades. Indeed, these devices were used in pacemakers in years past, and according to the Wikipedia article, some ninety of these are still in service.
Realistically, though, equipping j random cyborg with plutonium pellets seems problematic on a number of levels.
This is a problem I've wrestled with before, and my solution, as it appeared in a brief mention in Irreconcilable Differences was the glucose fuel cell. I reasoned, positing it, that since fuel cells can extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels such as alcohol or gasoline, it seemed reasonable they could extract it from carbohydrates like glucose, which the body conveniently supplies from food energy. As long as one didn't get carried away with them and exceed the fuel supply the body could deliver, it seemed like a nice solution.
Using these gadgets gave my cyborgs a different feel from the brute force cybernetics of yesteryear. It meant that they were predominantly meat with hormonal implants and small, low power cybernetics.
It also appears to be practical. Via Singularity Hub, comes the news that scientists in France have not only built such a thing, but implanted them in rats and had them function. The scientific paper is here.
Interestingly, the paper also discusses using urea as one of the fuels, though not with this particular fuel cell. If practical, such a fuel cell would be even better, as it would use metabolic waste as its fuel. This, by contrast, had not occurred to me, and it's a great addition. The body can afford to be far more generous with its waste products than its primary fuel chemistry.
The future just keeps arriving, doesn't it? :)
-JRS
Technorati Tags: Irreconcilable Differences, technology
