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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Etherphone Receiver | ||
| A special earpiece to hear coded updates. |
| Concealed in his right ear was a tiny etherphone receiver, part of the equipment of every member of the Terrestrial Guard Police, to which he belonged as a requirement of his position as Chief of Watch in the greatest other-world hostelry in the Americas. He listened now, to low, ticking messages, presented in intricate code, as he walked on through the quiet Martian section of the hotel. “Space Liner Ardis coming in from Planet Five of Antares. Landing at 10:19 p.m. in fourth cradle of Civic Space Docks. 4-2-5 on board! 4-2-5 on board! Caution! Caution!" |
| Technovelgy from Hotel Cosmos,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
You've got to watch out for 4-2-5's:
Planet Five of Antares was a hellish, hot, reeking place with an atmosphere so lethal that one breath of it would swiftly have killed a man. But 4-2-5 ’s kind were not men. Their flesh was of a porous, silicous composition, breath- ing and living in a different way than any flesh native to Earth. Hideous, hard-shelled things, 4-2-5’s kind crept through the shadowy jungles of their world,
4-2-5 — the code number assigned by the Space Travel Bureau to a visiting entity who must otherwise remain forever nameless on Earth. Dave had been warned before of 4-2-S’s possible sinister purposes.
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
