6. Membrane

...may the sad ones never will.

Membrane protects - its primary function is to serve as a city wall of nanotech era. The policy of Prague is to be moderate in its security decisions, neither we overestimate possible terrific outcomes of nanotech, nor we underestimate them. We do not ban, but we are not naive. We are fully aware of a fact that compared to nanotechnological assembler replicators even the biggest enemies of humanity of the past like smallpox or plague look like children toys. Not only us, but Automata as well believe in goodness and beauty of an educated (wo)man and they assigned only very tiny probability of 0.06% to the possibility of conscious creation of a malign and agressive nanotech replicator by an engineer inside the city. But from their own experience with battling polymorphic computer viruses Automata are fully aware that "everything which replicates can mutate" and they assigned the probability of 5.8% to the the possibility that spontaneously emerged replicating nanorobot will get to the proximity of outside layer of the Membrane.

Such an "attack" occured for the first time this year. When Automata noticed that woods near Benesov u Prahy started to be literally decomposed into some kind of grey goo matter, all Entrances were hermetically closed and the outside layer was put into immune mode. Luckily, dangerous replicator wasn't able to penetrate through severe gamma ray radiation which is activated during immune mode and didn't even got to 10metres thick diamondoid inside layers of Membrana Major. May it never happen.

The secondary function of Membrane is simple - as I mentioned it defines what belongs to the city and what does not. Similiary "city regions" and "sub city regions" have their own membranes minor which specify their own scope and offer some basic protection. Such a non-fuzzy division of regions allows to have different social contract codes in different areas. As we all know, only thanks to this idea of having "spheres within spheres" Malesice weren't harmed by radiation release from one of theirs hotfusion reactors in 2044. All these membranes are more or less governed by Automata and they open themselves automatically in case anyone wants to enter or leave the region. Only 8% of them were expecting authorization for trespassing or saved passenger's identity data.

One can still live anonymous life in our Polis.

Membrane Major is transparent. Some older citizen live years under it and are not even aware of its presence - nothing blocks blueness of skies in touching one's eyes. Only during equinox sunsets do the small carbonic arms of tiny robots forming Membrane Major glitter in the air and create an emotion of unity, of one dome, for all the citizens who raise their heads toward heaven.