Skin Horse
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.skin-horse.com.
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Black market, more like, unless some entrepreneur can convince humans that the drones are worth having. Which is possible; they would be a godsend to the bed ridden. But then there’s the matter of the requisite technology, which I assume is not meant for public consumption.
Also, it’s not entirely certain that they’ll be able to notice. Realistic humanoid drones with full, immersive VR control may be straddling the line of what the reality blind can see.
Wait, why don’t they just drive around barely-bipedal clanking mechanical automatons wearing t-shirts with writing on them? Reality Blindness would force people to interpret them as perfectly normal humans, because nothing else in nature has t-shirts with writing on them.
The problem here is, living in a Rule Of Funny universe. Reality blindness is only going to paper over the cracks to turn you into a human if that would be an inconvenient and/or wacky misunderstanding. If that’s what you’re going for, they’ll wonder who put this t-shirt on this panini press.
Wasn’t that the plot of some Bruce Willis movie?
Surrogates was a Bruce Willis movie?
The black market *is* a free market. It may actually be the only free market.
Touche. But it’s going to be a significantly smaller market than the one for illicit drugs, I’d imagine, so it’s not clear that there are sufficient incentives in place.
I think AI drones for the “Bed ridden” are already available in Japan and Germany…
Not quite yet, but there are a number of companies working on them…
With mass production, the price ought to come down.
Quite a few in the non-human community probably don’t have money at all: Sweetheart’s folks in Canada have an underground mad scientist’s lair, but I doubt they can use it as security for a loan, and I suspect most of the critters in Skin Horse’s former basement don’t have bank accounts.
It’s not just mass production. You don’t need a human body *all* the time, only when you’re going to the bank or otherwise have to directly interact with other humans. Your community probably wants one they can whip out at a moment’s notice to explain why, e.g., the apartment is *supposed* to be full of silverfish, or one so someone can do the grocery shopping, but if a couple dozen people are chipping in, the price is going to go way down.
And since your inhuman abilities give you a comparative advantage over humanity in a significant number of fields (which ones, obviously, depending on what type of nonhuman you are), you ought to be able to make the money to pay for a 1/25ths share without too much difficulty. You might need to temporarily hire a not-yet-reality-blind human as liaison to sell the unique product of your labors and so get you the seed money to buy the drone, but there shouldn’t be too many difficulties present in the transition. This does indeed seem to solve the problem nicely.
(Except, obviously, for the fact that Anasigma (a) hates you, and (b) owns all legal rights to VR helmets and human drones and can sue anyone else who messes with them into oblivion, but that’s a minor difficulty that can be solved by a wacky Skin Horse adventure.)
I suppose that the big question here is, how many people will need a drone in order to get around the larger population’s reality blindness? If there’s only about five thousand or so in the USA, they can probably get away with time-sharing the existing drones. For a while. But if there’s ten million, well… actually, there might be a manufacturer or tech billionaire in that ten million who can underwrite a crash program. It’s that bit in the middle of the range that’s going to be the problem.
Dr. Lee has a lot of drones just lying around…
I keep thinking: Why stop at being human? There’s got to be at least a few nonhuman sapients out there that’d prefer to be something other than a hairless monkey, even temporarily. I mean, given the opportunity I’d be all “Fuck this human-shaped shit, can you make me a drone that’s a Pteranodon? Or Godzilla? How about Godzilla? –okay, okay, too big, I understand that. So how about a SMALL Godzilla?” And then you’d end up with reports of Pteranodons dropping watermelons onto the White House from 200 feet up, or 3-meter-tall Godzillas roaring and stomping through Shinjuku.
Well I’m all for going big, but reality blindness is still going to be a problem. “Freak Tornado smashes path through Shinjuku” type problem.
For a moment there, I thought you were going to say helicopters
Sure, humanwashing is so tasteful…
I have never heard the term “broseph”, but yeah, that bot looks like the mental image that popped up.
It’s a new one to me. I’m thinking “brother” and “Joseph,” but I’m not sure of meaning here.
The spawn of Broseidon, god of the Brocean?
There’s the difference between Tip and Sweetheart. Tip has no qualms about running against the system while Sweetheart prefers to go deep undercover within the system and bust it from the inside – through carefully aimed bureaucracy!
Well, her stated life purpose is taking over the United States
More like take over rather than bust the system. Tigerlily has her pegged, Sweetheart is ‘the man’ down to her bones.
Sweetheart, naturally, will meet the Man face to face, only to find her own face, hidden behind two masks.
Be seeing you…
Does that make Tip the new #2 then? -_^
This was meant in Reply to Bergerjacques, but WordPress decided to be weird again.