The Sprawl

Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis

Program a map to display trequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse. the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million mega-bytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan. outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . . [N43; ellipsis in original]

Bobby climbed down . . . into the unmistakable signature smell of the Sprawl, a rich amalgam of stale subway exhalations, ancient soot, and the carcinogenlc tang of fresh plastics, all of it shot through with the carbon edge of illicit fossil fuel. High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates. [CZ 114]