In my story, malfunctioning orbital factories occasionally drop odd bits of equipment down upon the colonists living on the planet below. Rarely are these objects at all useful.
The colonists are barely surviving. They can't breathe the air or eat the local flora/fauna. They live in caves with very little technology. Their forefathers, however, that designed the orbital factories, lived in a world where everyone was biologically networked to one another, and were genetically adapted to the planet's harsh environment.
So: help me come up with the most recent object bestowed upon my poor colonists. It must be something that one person can carry, something electrical/mechanical, and something that, while technically impressive, does nothing to aid the colonists in their current predicament.
Any and all suggestions are appreciated!
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47,303 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 19 08
P.S. my wife suggested a can opener, which is simultaneously a genius idea, and a bit too good of a solution to my predicament.
64,504 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 20 02
I don't know if you're going for the irony factor here, but you could always try dropping a laser saw on them. A slightly more advanced society would be able to put them in a backpack with a generator to run it, which would be easily carried by one person.
They're so ridiculously overkill for anything that civilians would use it for that it would be near useless. Within seconds, it can take titanium and make it liquid. If you were trying to cut someone out of a car, it'd cut their leg off with them. (It has about a 3 foot long beam, so it'd cut 3 feet across the car.)
Of course, dropping from the sky, if it hit something too hard it would break its crystals (or misalign them), instead of a beam that's the width of your pinky, you'd get an expensive flood-light that just happened to be all on one wave-length, completely incapable of cutting anything until its crystals were repaired/realigned.
----------40,577 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2009 - 03 53
A Gameboy (or similar). The only game they can figure out how to run is the fortune cookie generator; the cryptic little paragraphs are the basis for a new religion.
There's a wiki of the classic Unix fortunes at http://fortunes.pbworks.com/
------------ Aspen
The perfect is the enemy of the fast. The good is the enemy of the fast. The halfway decent is the enemy of the fast.
--- Gail Carson Levine
44,500 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2009 - 06 28
My first inclination is to say blender. Pretty handy for making margaritas or milkshakes, not really all that useful if you don't really have any food. Or if you don't have an outlet you can plug it into. Do they have power?
What about computers? Do they have computers? Maybe it can be a really impressive flatscreen computer monitor, or some kind of touchpad screen or security device. One of those handheld scanners like what they use to check you out at stores?
I dunno, my knowledge of technically impressive artifacts is severely limited, lol.
17,437 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2009 - 07 28
I'm really interested to hear how the people react to the junk that lands on them. Do they get excited about new arrivals like cargo cults? Or do they hate it like The Gods Must Be Crazy?
I am struggling to think of a piece of technology that could fall from space and still be intact enough to function in a way that would be impressive.
What about a satelite?
----------33,028 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2009 - 07 34
What if they were simply indistinguishable metal objects, broken fragments of satellites that really are nothing more than a tangled mass of wire and metal. Essentially it could be space trash, obviously parts of a once great machine, but was somehow destroyed into little pieces.
As far as people carrying them around, I don't know what role religion plays in your story, but if they are falling from the sky people may think that they would have to be coming from the gods or God. What if they took these objects (this space trash) and crafted them into idols for worship or something? That would give them reason to carry it all around without giving it a specific purpose that would help them survive.