"A couple of sensor spots and a niello of letters and numbers..."
-A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, II, p. 357.
The bracelet, powered by body heat, is audiovisually linked to a global monitor net. (We have become familiar with global links but not for this sort of use.) Computers noticing anything suspicious, such as tampering with the bracelet, alert a human operator who signals the bracelet to stimulate a centre in the brain causing several seconds of pain throughout the body, harmless for less than a minute unless the slave has some such condition as a weak heart.
Ingenious - especially when we reflect that that level of technology could be used to maintain a comfortable life-style for everyone.
5 comments:
See "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, for another variant of technologized slavery.
Anything by Vinge is well worth reading.
Probably by 21st century standards, physically life -is- more comfortable for almost everyone on Terra then.
We tend not to notice things that improve.
Eg., when my maternal grandmother was born in England in the 1890's, 248 out of every 1000 children born died between birth and age five. Over 10% died in their first year.
It's about 4-5 per 1000 dying by age 5 now, almost all of them with very bad genetic birth defects.
By way of comparison infant mortality (0-5) was 52 in Burkina Faso this year, and that's in the bottom 10 of the poorest countries in the world.
In 1900 the infant mortality rate even of the rich in England was about three times what it is in Burkina Faso now.
And back in 1900, when she was a young girl, the average height of boys starting at Oxford was 5-6 inches higher than those of boys of the lower classes of the same age.
(Purely a matter of diet, btw.)
My father could remember children in St. Johns' when he was a young man down at the fishing docks begging for cod tongues (which they would eat raw). And dory-mens' wives in the outports lost a tooth with every pregnancy, as a rule of thumb -- their bodies cannibalizing the calcium in their bodies for the fetus.
Family legend has it that my maternal grandmother born in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1896 was premature & probably would have died if nurses hadn't improvised an incubator over the steam radiator in a room of the hospital.
OTOH, you could luck out.
My father's mother was the youngest of 13 children of a farmer in Wiltshire -- and all of them survived to become adults. I've seen a group photo from around 1911, when she was in her late teens, and they're an impressive group -- all tall (averaging near 6ft for the males) and well-built and looking strong enough to lift oxen overhead. Obviously well-fed and worked hard!
One died young in WW1, and she died in a traffic accident in 1934, but the rest of her siblings, 11 of them, all lived to fairly ripe old ages and IIRC they all had children of their own.
I met one of her brothers, Great-Uncle Gordon (named for guess who), in the 1960's, when I was about 9 and he was in his 80's.
He wasn't very mobile but he could still crack walnuts by squeezing them in one hand with his fingers. He'd been a sailor (on a windjammer) before 1914, in the RN in WW1 and WW2, and a trawler captain until he retired.
Still had a grip like a mechanical grab, and callus like a tortoise-shell on his palms, from all the years on nets and ropes. He called my father "lad", which was rather startling.
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