They're good at this stuff. Really good. But now they propose to become
something else as well; a coherent city of information, its architecture
planned from the ground up. And they expect that whole highways of data
will flow into and through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that
this won't affect them. And that baffles us, and perhaps it baffles the
Singaporeans that it does.

Myself, I'm inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will
really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but
about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through
the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that
information does not necessarily want to be free.

But perhaps I'm overly pessimistic here. I often am; it goes with the
territory. (Though what could be more frightening, out here at the deep
end of the 20th century, than a genuinely optimistic science fiction
writer?) Perhaps Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a
smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of
unthinkable...weirdness.

Dear God. What a fate.

Fully enough to send one lunging up from one's armchair in the atrium
lounge of the Meridien Singapore, calling for a taxi to the fractal-free
corridors of the Airtropolis.

But I wasn't finished, quite. There'd be another night to brood about the
Dutchman.

I haven't told you about the Dutchman yet. It looks like they're going to
hang him.