Walter Jon Williams - Flatline

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 17.28KB 7 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

FLATLINE

Walter Jon Williams

You can look down from your apartment and see streets full of new automobiles, all smooth geometries

that cut the air with a minimum of fuss and are built of carbonweave fiber strong as diamond and less than

a millimeter thick. Pollution-free fuel cells provide more power than any internal-combustion engine ever

did. Driving one of those cars is as safe as breathing.

You drive a 1952 Buick Roadmaster. Its exterior is made of steel, its aerodynamics are strikingly similar

to those of a brick, and it leaves a trail of smoke behind. If you hit something while going fast enough, you

die.

Call it a form of protest.

* * * *

Your apartment building opens like a flower over the city, a slender alloy shaft topped by a profuse

glass-walled blossom. If you look down from your bedroom window you can see the spidery Gaussian

architecture of Fantasyland, a hyperevolved Crystal Palace where the latest technological artifacts are

made available to an increasingly jaded and unsettled public. Fantasyland's architecture swoops and

soars; it strains toward singularities, geometric infinities. You think it's fairly pretentious for what used to

be called a shopping mall. Particularly since the Exfoliators sometimes dump bodies in the parking lot.

Ninety degrees in the other direction, you can look out your dining room window to see the matte-black

octahedron of Neurodyne Intelgene A.G. The building, 450 meters tall, is packed from end to end with

molecular switches bathed in coolant. The total number of microscopic switches in that volume is so huge

that even when expressed in scientific notation the figure looks absurd. You work in the nearby factory

that produces the coolant, and you've seen the figures. The switches multiply and repair each other and

sometimes, every few weeks or so, mutate to more efficient forms. They absorb raw energy in the form

of sunlight, store it, transform it into things they can eat. Taken together, the switches form an intelligence

far faster, far more complex, than any human brain.

The Neurodyne octahedron is balanced on its point. It looks as if the slightest breeze would push it over.

The octahedron never falls. To some, that's a problem.

* * * *

The Club Danton is a place that caters to forms of protest. Political, social, religious, philosophical--if it's

aberrant, it's there. The strawberry cheesecake is also good.

The club is in an old brick building under a rusting iron railroad bridge. The bridge doesn't connect

anything anymore, and its rails dangle off the ends of the bridge in an oxidized tangle of metal. The bridge

would have been torn down long ago except that the club bought it and allowed it to stand. They thought

it gave the place atmosphere.

Over the structure looms the planar perfection of the Neurodyne octahedron. This is viewed by some as

a comment on things, as another significant metaphor.

* * * *

After finishing your four-hour shift at the underground Neurodyne facility--you supervise automated

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Walter Jon Williams - Flatline.pdf

共7页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Walter Jon Williams - Flatline

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: