| Nova Swing | Contributor: Edwin | Posted: 18/02/07 | 09:32 |
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page 2 of 4 Those who require implants, activate a dial-up communication link by thinking and then simply speaking. The most overt form of hardware is in a living tattoo called a “datableed”, which shows a constant boiling stream of information, which the owner can read visually from their own skin. Despite this advanced age, this world isn’t only buoyed by benevolent wizardry. There are hints of self-replicating miniature robotics getting scarily out of hand. "Code", now refers to nanotech and nanomachines which manifest themselves in brilliant shimmering drops of liquid and hijacked human corpses. These unlucky souls show signs of infection in a harmonic, pipe-tune edge to their vocal spectrum and a tendency to vomit a disgusting fatty material, a literal gray goo. This Code is so pernicious and contagious that police departments are in place to handle these outbreaks with their own quarantine, cleanup and extermination divisions. Most of the dangerous items are sealed into solid coffins and set adrift in a zero-gee containment field, their entombed occupants machinating and fulminating within. However, discovering the root cause doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. That would be a job for learned scientists and thinkers, whom we never see. Our characters have limited abilities, only capable of observing their surroundings and ineptly coping with them as best they can. In his novel, Harrison explores the lives of small-time criminals and police whose are entwined with something called the Saudade site. The action in the universe seems to primarily be elsewhere. We’re situated in something of a planetary backwater, only made notable by the presence of the malevolent Saudade site. This lynchpin of the story is a kind of event horizon beyond the realms of science or imagination, which engulfed a city district. The Saudade event site is a cloud-like zone where no particular rules apply, or can be made to stick. This anomalous alternate universe mysteriously collided with the dockyard region of this bustling city when fragments of a vast, ancient, alien artifact called the Kefahuchi Tract fell to ground. Visible in the sky, the Kefahuchi Tract is parked in orbit, but its original purpose and meaning are beyond understanding. Giant mysteries of the universe like this are rife in Nova Swing, but the bottom-feeding people in view seem content to simply accept them. Like televisions or DVD players, people don’t care much to understand the workings, rather they blithely accept their existence and make use of them. |
