（外文电子版资料）Walter Jon Williams - Flatline.pdfVIP

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. Fantasylands architecture swoops and soars; it strains toward singularities, geometric infinities. You think its 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 youve 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 o