Walter Jon Williams - Flatline
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2024-11-23
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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
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分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：7 页
大小：17.28KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-23
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