The Demon's Passage - Greg Egan

Short Story

Number of words : 6000
Percent of complex words : 11.4
Average syllables per word : 1.5
Average words per sentence : 15.5

READABILITY INDICES

Fog : 10.7
Flesch : 60.9
Flesch-Kincaid : 8.6



PEOPLE

Demon

The first intelligent tumour.

Chief Oncologist

Head of the department working on the tumour.

Billy

A tumour also known as Spinecrusher.


VEHICLES

Shuttle

The space shuttle.


PLACES

Surry Hills

Suburb in Sydney where the Australian Biotech Playground is located.

King's Cross

Haunt of prostitutes in Sydney.

Belsen

A concentration camp.

Brussels

City in Belgium.

Wellington

City in New Zealand.

Cairns

City in Queensland.


ORGANISATIONS

Australian Biotech Playground

A skyscraper that holds many and varied research facilities with a shopping arcade on the ground floor. Floors two to ten hold consulting rooms: neurologists, endocrinologists, gynaecologists, rheumatologists. Floors eleven to eighteen house a wide range of pathology labs. Nineteen to twenty-five are filled with the offices of pharmaceuticals and medical instrumentation firms. Twenty-six to thirty hold libraries, conference rooms, and row after row of
quiet offices. Thirty-one to forty is administration and marketing. On top of that is a simulated Viennese cafe which revolves. Underneath the shoppers are five levels of research labs: flow cytometry, mass spectrometry,
X-ray crystallography, high performance liquid chromatography. Nuclear magnetic
resonance. There's a level of cold-rooms and freezers. There's a level of equipment stores, and another for chemicals. Second-lowest is where they keep the computers. Four of them, big as elephants. And underneath them all is the animal house.


CONCEPTS

Doppler effect

Change in frequency of a wave relative to a moving body.

Marquat-Levenberg algorithm

A numerical method for minimising a function.

Parkinson's disease

A degenerative neurological condition.

Dopamine

A neurotransmitter.

MIPS

Millions of instructions per second for a computer.


MEDIA

Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare

Television doctor characters.


PLOT

Research at the Australian Biotech Playground has come up with an advanced tumour - feeding it rats and rabbits for growth it appears it has become intelligent. A sardonic tour of the facility is constructed for the reader by the tumour, suggesting that the operations there perhaps may be a tad unethical. They are doing tumour research to look into using controlled cancers as producers of other substances people may lack and to treat other conditions. However, an intelligent being may question their own worth and whether it and its telepathic powers should live.


3.5 out of 5


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