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Authors: Maurice G. Dantec
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glass—it takes up almost the entire wall from floor to ceiling—just in time to witness the takeoff of the shuttle he noticed earlier on one of the astroport’s launching platforms.
The fire is white streaked with dazzling molten gold. It forms a sphere as bright as a bit of the sun fallen to Earth and returning now to its birthplace. The shuttle itself is barely visible in the midst of the glowing gases; it is merely a tiny gleam at the top of the ball of sun-fire, trailing flame as it shoots toward the high atmosphere. Then it is lost, somewhere in the direction of Ursa Major.
Suddenly, he understands why so many people are irrevocably drawn to this city, so many lost souls from all four corners of the Earth. He understands that even a slight chance to share your life with this dancing, meteoric dream could keep you here forever.
Nothing happens over the next few days. At night, his metacortical nanocomputer furtively organizes the networks within his nervous system. Bioprocessors self-replicate on ribbons of protein. The genetic instruction program scrolls its lists of invisible codes. His dreams are absolutely black.
He is content to stay in his room, eating trans-G sushi and nutrimedical pizza delivered by the hotel’s room-service robots. The active vitamins, trace elements, and minerals are accompanied by several types of specialized antiviral GMOs (genetically modified organisms) that the console menu lists relentlessly every time he places an order.
The bathroom is programmable; it can serve as a shower, a water closet, even an emergency room if necessary. Twelve layers of intelligent poly-alloys are able to take on any of these three forms on command. It is an old system, one of the first of its kind, produced by General Electric in one of its last acts of brilliance before being purchased by a Sino-Japanese cartel. It takes almost twenty seconds for the programming to be finished and the facility configured for the desired use; the latest Fujitsu models open ten times faster, nearly instantaneously.
The cliché, it turns out, was true: a stay in a capsule motel like this one really was the best preparation imaginable for life in a pressurized box orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 450 kilometers, or en route to an agglomeration in circumlunar orbit.
It is also true that the power of UHU is obvious, even here on the margins
—especially
on the margins. The correlation between the presence of capsule motels and that of a crowd of lost souls longing to leave for the new frontier is purely economic. And yet, it is also as if the
economy
has created a mysterious link between these areas of temporary residence and the groups that gather there before departing for the moon, or perhaps Mars. Some of them do not stay, and come back to Earth. They resell their claims, their Golden Tracks, to the highest bidder, and thus the black market grows, the market of fake, real-fake, fake-real documents on which so much of Grand Junction’s underground economy depends.
An interesting detail: in Grand Junction, the economy is underground by nature. Elsewhere, it is the opposite.
CATALOGUE OF NEUROPORTABLE WEAPONS
Cortical control metabolic nanoviruses, targeted cellular destroyers
Rapid-intrusion neurotoxic nanoviruses
Pathogenic metabolic nanoviruses, contagious pseudoviruses
Any of the following specialized neurovectors: neuroblocking neurovectors, prionic investigation and neuronal targeting agents, neuronic countermeasure and antiviral security systems, synaptic propagation retroviruses
Memory-controlling neuroprocessors
Neuroconnections with orbital telemetry and GPS surveillance systems
Integrated neuro-optic displays
Global language neuroencryption software
Programmable sensorial amplification
Plotkin vaguely understands that in this world where the rockets blasting into orbit are twentieth-century antiques, where cosmodromes are erected on rebuilt offshore oil-drilling platforms;
The fire is white streaked with dazzling molten gold. It forms a sphere as bright as a bit of the sun fallen to Earth and returning now to its birthplace. The shuttle itself is barely visible in the midst of the glowing gases; it is merely a tiny gleam at the top of the ball of sun-fire, trailing flame as it shoots toward the high atmosphere. Then it is lost, somewhere in the direction of Ursa Major.
Suddenly, he understands why so many people are irrevocably drawn to this city, so many lost souls from all four corners of the Earth. He understands that even a slight chance to share your life with this dancing, meteoric dream could keep you here forever.
Nothing happens over the next few days. At night, his metacortical nanocomputer furtively organizes the networks within his nervous system. Bioprocessors self-replicate on ribbons of protein. The genetic instruction program scrolls its lists of invisible codes. His dreams are absolutely black.
He is content to stay in his room, eating trans-G sushi and nutrimedical pizza delivered by the hotel’s room-service robots. The active vitamins, trace elements, and minerals are accompanied by several types of specialized antiviral GMOs (genetically modified organisms) that the console menu lists relentlessly every time he places an order.
The bathroom is programmable; it can serve as a shower, a water closet, even an emergency room if necessary. Twelve layers of intelligent poly-alloys are able to take on any of these three forms on command. It is an old system, one of the first of its kind, produced by General Electric in one of its last acts of brilliance before being purchased by a Sino-Japanese cartel. It takes almost twenty seconds for the programming to be finished and the facility configured for the desired use; the latest Fujitsu models open ten times faster, nearly instantaneously.
The cliché, it turns out, was true: a stay in a capsule motel like this one really was the best preparation imaginable for life in a pressurized box orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 450 kilometers, or en route to an agglomeration in circumlunar orbit.
It is also true that the power of UHU is obvious, even here on the margins
—especially
on the margins. The correlation between the presence of capsule motels and that of a crowd of lost souls longing to leave for the new frontier is purely economic. And yet, it is also as if the
economy
has created a mysterious link between these areas of temporary residence and the groups that gather there before departing for the moon, or perhaps Mars. Some of them do not stay, and come back to Earth. They resell their claims, their Golden Tracks, to the highest bidder, and thus the black market grows, the market of fake, real-fake, fake-real documents on which so much of Grand Junction’s underground economy depends.
An interesting detail: in Grand Junction, the economy is underground by nature. Elsewhere, it is the opposite.
CATALOGUE OF NEUROPORTABLE WEAPONS
Cortical control metabolic nanoviruses, targeted cellular destroyers
Rapid-intrusion neurotoxic nanoviruses
Pathogenic metabolic nanoviruses, contagious pseudoviruses
Any of the following specialized neurovectors: neuroblocking neurovectors, prionic investigation and neuronal targeting agents, neuronic countermeasure and antiviral security systems, synaptic propagation retroviruses
Memory-controlling neuroprocessors
Neuroconnections with orbital telemetry and GPS surveillance systems
Integrated neuro-optic displays
Global language neuroencryption software
Programmable sensorial amplification
Plotkin vaguely understands that in this world where the rockets blasting into orbit are twentieth-century antiques, where cosmodromes are erected on rebuilt offshore oil-drilling platforms;
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