Melding Plague

This article lists elements of technology in the fictional Revelation Space universe created by Alastair Reynolds.

Abstraction is the process by which humans with neural implants gain access to wireless data networks, the data rate of which is far beyond anything current technology can offer. The most essential feature of abstraction was political participation in the Demarchy's absolute democracy through near-constant polling. Regardless of a given habitat or citizen's views on implants or abstraction, participation in the polling process was nearly universal. The term "abstraction" itself refers interchangeably to both the ubiquitous wireless computing networks embedded in and controlling most advanced technology, as well as to the human participation in these networks. In The Prefect, for example, automated robots are remote-governed via abstraction, while citizens also use abstraction to engage in esoteric virtual realities and participate democratically.

Entoptics are another feature of abstraction technology and consist of various visual layers interpolated into human sight at some point between the viewer's cornea and visual cortex. These effects can either be created by a single person (e.g., the projection of the appearance of clothing, glowing tattoos, etc.) or an authority (e.g., public visual displays "projected" into mid-air without the use of any actual display devices). While some forms of abstraction, especially those in use during the Belle Epoque, were profoundly immersive and based on wireless networking between sophisticated brain implants and local computer architecture, entoptics by themselves could be technologically quite simple, with convincing visual phantoms being produced solely within ordinary ocular implants, or artificial eyes. The Conjoiners developed the first Entoptics early in their history, used in "Great Wall of Mars". By the time of The Prefect, much of humanity was engaged in abstraction in some form. Most of the characters in Reynolds' novels participate in abstraction through the use of neural implants, though after the advent of the Melding Plague, when complex cybernetics became liable to dangerous infections, many characters choose simply to use entoptics without engaging in the more intimate forms abstraction could take. Others, such as the Prefects of Panoply, a police force charged with defending the universal enfranchisement championed by Demarchists, are explicitly denied access to abstraction implants as part of their job, in order to foreclose potential avenues for the manipulation or obstruction of justice. Instead, Prefects carry with them simple pairs of goggles which simulate entoptics for use in situations where they need to be privy to activity within local abstraction, without having it broadcast immediately into their nervous systems.

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