"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Nanotech 02- Mississippi Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

precision into cities, making every Flower City almost a single
biological entity. Nanotechnology was perfectly poised to inject the
correct minuscule information into living matter and thus regulate
its growth, its utility, any and all characteristics.
Pheromones, used by many living creatures for precise
communication, were studied in great detail, isolated, and combined
like an entirely new alphabet into metapheromones. People within
the cities could choose to purchase biomodifications from
developers. With these receptors, transformed humans could use
metapheromones to communicate virtually any information swiftly,
fully, and precisely.
Thus the Flower Cities were born.
New and magnificent, they studded North America. Each city
that could afford to do so voted on whether or not to convert. Most
did. Denver, New York, San Francisco, the eastern seaboard from
Boston to Washington, Seattle, Houston, New Orleans all became
part of a vast network of new, almost Utopian cities. They were
linked by the powerfully swift maglev train line known as NAMS,
the North American Magline System, running on a switching
amalgamation of solar power, steam, and electricity. Jets were
unusable, since so many components of their operations were
undependable, but NAMS was almost as swift, and much more
convenient, delivering travelers within blocks of their destination.
Small planes flown low, in daylight, were still used by some people,
particularly those in the fiercely independent AviatorsтАЩ Clubs.
Verity lost the flow as the building shuddered again. Again, the
motion subsided quickly.
Verity struggled to subdue her rising panic and remain within
the cocoon rather than rise in fear and flee. She believed that there
were at least a few more hours until Cincinnati began its
conversion in earnest, and information was quite precious. During
her seventeen or so years as a Shaker, the history of the changes
nanotechnology had wrought were scant. Now she was filled with a
desire to know . She took a deep breath and returned to the lost
history, a combination of images, voice, and simulated experiences.
During the heyday of the Flower Cities, pouches of
business-imbued metapheromones flew back and forth on NAMS;
literature hypertexed metapheromonally filled users with emotional
intensity and immersion in authorsтАЩ visions an infinity beyond
clumsy old-fashioned virtual reality. Within the cities, information
could be accessed or sent from any room. Glowing interstices filled
with fluid transported information that converged in rooftop
collectors. These evolved via nanotechnological breakthroughs into
huge flowerlike entities. Taking advantage of the fascinating and
precise communicative abilities of honeybees, nanotechnologists
quickly realized that large genetically engineered Bees (tm) were
far superior to the prototype cyborgs which originally collected
information and disseminated it throughout the cities, particularly
when implanted with human limbic tissue, which gave them an
emotional imperative to deal in human information.