We need an escape route, but you have to be careful.
Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put it in a map of a bottle – or of a body – and feed signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model body in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René Descartes would understand. That’s the state of the passengers of the Field Circus in a nutshell.
Don’t waste your brain on those weirdos, Unity.
“Perhaps I’ll cure Frank and every other alcoholic if I can solve the mystery of Donovan’s Brain. I think it’s a matter of chemistry how the brain thinks. The problem is to find out what chemical combinations are responsible for success – failure – happiness – misery.”
“We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on.
“ Was and will make me ill,
I take a gram and only am.”
What I am not is a disease you can cure.
“Home had a plague, all right. A tree-of-life virus plague. A Pak plague. That’s what wiped out the colony.”
“It’s not a colony,” another of the USIC interviewers said, with an edge to her voice. “It’s a community. We do not use the word colony.”
In one place two of the colonies were in contact; tendrils of pale pink reached out from their red cores. Dower spoke a soft command. The simulated image’s* timescale accelerated, so that days, weeks passed in seconds. Abil could see how the two colonies probed toward each other, over and again, and where they came in contact crimson flared — a crimson, he realized, that showed where people were dying.
I was second mate on Hera’s Dream, a freighter of the line
We were shipping precious metals to the colony on Nine
Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo, third officer reporting. The other members of the crew, Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash and Captain Dallas, are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.
The universe is so vast, so immense, we can never expect to explore it all. It is in effect, not so much a final frontier as an ultimate frontier; the ultimate frontier – as wide as it is deep. Stars shine coldly in the unimaginable blackness.
“The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter.”
Then I am the most important person in the universe.
"It just told me what I knew all the time. I’m a really terrific and great guy. Didn’t I tell you, baby, I’m Zaphod Beeblebrox!”
“One could almost hear him saying, 'It’s me! Here I come, the great man himself, the master of the house, the wage-earner, the one who makes it possible for the rest of you to live so well! Notice me and pay your respects!”
“Well, I was just wondering,” Carrin said. “Signing over my son’s earnings—you don’t think I’m getting in a little too deep, do you?”
“Too deep? My dear sir!” Pathis exploded into laughter. “Do you know Mellon down the block? Well, don’t say I said it, but he’s already mortgaged his grandchildren’s salary for their full life-expectancy! And he doesn’t have half the goods he’s made up his mind to own! We’ll work out something for him. Service to the customer is our job and we know it well.”
Yes, I’m looking for something in a space uniform that’s respectfully humiliating but can come out of an employee’s salary without his noticing.
Back on the ship, I used to try to get you to look at my legs. Captain, look at my legs.