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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Fatline | ||
| A communications technology that provides immediate communication between star systems; faster-than-light communication. |
The fatline is an artifact served up to humanity by The Core, a group of artificial intelligences that have effectively divorced themselves from human control. The term derives from the common acronym for faster-than-light, FTL.
| Urgent fatline messages from Tau Ceti Center demanded that the ranking officer abord the orbiting HS Denieve settle the situation on Qom-Riyadh, free all hostages and depose the New Prophet ... without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons within the planet's atmosphere. |
| Technovelgy from Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
I've included the reference here because I like the word and it's derivation; other earlier examples of faster-than-light communication include the cosmic teletype from Carl Jacobi's Cosmic Teletype (1957), ansible from Rocannon's World by Ursula LeGuin, ultrawave relay from the Foundation stories by Isaac Asimov and taprisiots from Whipping Star by Frank Herbert.
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'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
'... all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it.'
