from _Schismatrix_, by Bruce Sterling:
"The pirates had been through the radio room. They had smashed about
them wildly in the darkness. The transmitters were saw-torn wreckage;
the tabletop console had been wrenched off and flung aside.
Fluid leaked from the liquid crystal display. Nora pulled needle
and thread from her hairnet and sewed up the gash in the screen. The
CPU was still working; there were signals incoming from the dishes
outside. But the deciphering programs were down. Ring Council
transmissions were gibberish.
She picked up a general frequency propaganda broadcast. The slashed
television still worked, though it blurred around the stitches.
And there it was: the outside world. There was not much to it:
words and pictures, line on a screen. ...
She could not believe what the faces on the screen were telling her,
what the images showed. It was as if the little screen in its days of
darkness had fermented somehow, and the world behind it was frothing
over, all its poisons wetwared into wine. The faces of Shaper politicos
were alight with astounded triumph.
She watched the screen, transfixed. The shocked public statements
of Mechanist leaders: broken men, frightened women, their routines and
systems stripped away. The Mech armor of plans and contingencies had
been picked off like a scab, showing the raw flesh of their humanity.
They gabbed, they scrambled for control, each contradicting the last.
Some with tight smiles that looked wired on by surgery, other misty-eyed
with secondhand religious awe, gesturing vaguely, their faces bright as
children's."
(from pp122-3, first published in 1985)
I really like the idea of sewing up a display...
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