The future is now.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in here early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Case?”
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. “You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.” Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. “You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=221 features a video of a new generation of prosthetic technologies.
in 1983, William Gibson was one of a few authors who were ushering in a new genre of writing, Cyberpunk was a exploration of post consumer/post modern decadence and the waste it left over.
Sitting on top of an excellent story, was the technology we watched fly across the pages, like the world described to us, it was equally fantastic, and amazingly familiar.
The video linked above brings the future even closer, if not simply proving William Gibson’s current theory, that the future is now.
Matt! 9:08 am on November 20, 2007 Permalink
Oooooh…