"Organic? Are you fucking kidding me? Dude, even we’ve got CPUs made out of meat, we had neuron cultures wired into machines back before the turn of the century! Why do you think those blobs in the exoskeletons are any different? What makes you think the Ceph — or whatever made the Ceph — what makes you think they even draw a distinction between meat and machinery? Because I’m telling you, Roger, that line is not nearly as black-and-white as you seem to think. Trust me on this."
— Alcatraz, Crysis: Legion, by Peter Watts
Crew Member: Captain, I'm picking up an approaching ship.
Captain: What can you tell me about it?
Crew Member: Oh my God, it's organic! What are we going to do, Captain?
Captain: There's not much we can do, Ensign. Organic technology is so far beyond our grasp that we can't even imagine the power they must have. All we have is high-powered guns, nuclear missiles, and our primitive metallic armour. What are you reading from their incredibly advanced bio-ship?
Crew Member: Their ship is soft and flexible. Its construction materials are semi-permeable and laced with a network of delicate circulation passages. Instead of using impermeable high-density materials, it's made from countless tiny thin-walled cells which tend to rapidly break down in the presence of corrosive chemicals or radiation.
Captain: What? And we were supposed to be afraid of this? Open fire!
Captain: What can you tell me about it?
Crew Member: Oh my God, it's organic! What are we going to do, Captain?
Captain: There's not much we can do, Ensign. Organic technology is so far beyond our grasp that we can't even imagine the power they must have. All we have is high-powered guns, nuclear missiles, and our primitive metallic armour. What are you reading from their incredibly advanced bio-ship?
Crew Member: Their ship is soft and flexible. Its construction materials are semi-permeable and laced with a network of delicate circulation passages. Instead of using impermeable high-density materials, it's made from countless tiny thin-walled cells which tend to rapidly break down in the presence of corrosive chemicals or radiation.
Captain: What? And we were supposed to be afraid of this? Open fire!
— StarDestroyer.net article on Brain Bugs
"They've got technology, sweetheart. They just build it in different ways."
— Han Solo to Leia Organa Solo about the Yuuzhan Vong, New Jedi Order
Shan-Pier: The newest locomotive no longer eat beets. They drink blood.
Frieda: Don't natter. What does a brat like you know about trains? There, a beautiful chunk of sugar beet! You almost trampled it with your clumsy clogs!
Shan-Pier: Master Peter said it himself! Brunel has ordered to abolish the oxen. The new express trains are now cultured from vampire bats. On the benches grows the softest, warmest fur. Even in third class.
Frieda: Don't natter. What does a brat like you know about trains? There, a beautiful chunk of sugar beet! You almost trampled it with your clumsy clogs!
Shan-Pier: Master Peter said it himself! Brunel has ordered to abolish the oxen. The new express trains are now cultured from vampire bats. On the benches grows the softest, warmest fur. Even in third class.
— With Musket And Ducat, by Tais Teng
"You don't have to feed the controller. It's self sustaining, right up until it dies from starvation. Then the mother console just lays a new one."
— Xefros Tritoh attempting to use food on his gaming controller, Hiveswap
A modern city of the Breeders was a sight to behold. Huge, heart-like creatures pumped out nutritious fluids to a network of self-repairing, living conduits. This was their equivalent of a power grid, and it reached every single one of the Breeders' huge, exoskeletal dwellings; "powering" bioluminescent lights, flickering cephalopod skin televisions, medicinal sea-squirts and countless other devices that had been bred from living creatures. The advances in biology had risen exponentially, until genetic engineering was completely mastered. Modern Breeders did not even need to use animals; a simple manipulation of cultured tissues and stem-cells could give solutions to any problem at hand.
"Old legends say that in the age before the Seven Days of Fire they had the skills to control the well-springs of life. They say that once, man remolded the plants and animals to his pleasure, like clay.."
— Master Yupa, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
"And no, I don’t think that all the world’s problems can be solved with Genetic Engineering. [...] I just think that the world would be vastly better off if we simply discarded this neurotic, counterproductive, and inexorably suicidal fixation with inorganic technology and embrace the staggering potentials within enzyme-catalyst energies!”
