Technology and Humans

1. pg 3 "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." -The sky itself is described with the television, making the readers think there is something with how the people think about the world with technology.

2. pg 4 "It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic." -In this world, it seems it's pretty easy to get some artificial arm and by the full description, it seems as if this model that Ratz has is pretty common or something.

3. pg 10 "M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in blood stream." -People are implanted with these micro-stuff into them, meaning the surgeons must be really advanced to perform such a task. Plus, microprocessors are computer-like objects... people in this world coexist with the machines by becoming like them.

4. pg 12 "Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old...His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba." -These surgeons are able to stop aging? Now that's just really freaky. They are like vampires, but they don't suck people's blood. Non-aging is more of inhuman; undying experiment of science technology.

5. pg 25 "She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails." -Totally a cyborg (machine and organism combined). Here's an example of machine and human combined, literally.

6. pg 30 "The robot crab moved toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel." -The robots exist like bugs that are everywhere... does this world even have real living bugs?

7. pg 32 " 'I can see in the dark, Case. Microchannel image-amps in my glasses.' " and " 'It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a read out chipped into my optic nerve.' " -Another example of a total cyborg. It's like a new evolution of human species after homo sapiens or something.

7a. pg 57 "Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sportshirt and flicked it open...and inserted it smoothly into his head." -The Panther Moderns are mostly teens that are built with these sockets and splinters (inputs and outputs just like the ones from the computers). They don't seem lively though as nowadays teens do.

7b. pg 59 "The Panther Moderns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. If the technology had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists." -One word: eww. Turning human beings into computers...

8. pg 33 "She rode him that way, ... his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors..." -Even sex is compared to matrix. Matrix = sex?? Isn't matrix like Internet? Kind of hard to see the comparison.

9. pg43 "Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen." -In this world, there isn't any measurement with miles or kilometers. All computer-based descriptions make the readers think that even small descriptions are connected to computer basis.

10. pg 45-46 " 'You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis." -These people can actually threat someone with toxins that are inside their body. As of today, no one can really perform that kind of task. The usual threats are guns and maybe poison gas. Toxins that are injected, maybe but not built inside. I say it's really scary and horrific.

11. pg 51 " 'Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...' " -A full (most the readers can get directly from the author) concept of cyberspace. The whole description is correlated with the humans. It's as if the cyberspace and the humans are working as one thing. Not so different with how we use Internet today, just not with the 'consensual hallucination' and we can't really access our mind to the computer system.

12. pg 56 "For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes." -The technology in this world lets a person to be in a person's body. That's kind of ghostly in my opinion. Would our technology be this close by the end of 21st century?

13. pg 71 " 'He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off." -What happened to the awesome super technology? So, does this mean the super technology is used for the 'important' purposes only? Does this world's technology even save people's lives? Ironic.

14. pg 73-76 The story of Smith and Jimmy -All the serious cases and activities are all have to do with cyberspace and computer 'jacking in'.