"Distress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Distress
A Novel by
Greg Egan

HarperPaperbacks

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 1995 by Greg Egan
ISBN: 0-06-105264-7
Printed in the United States of America First HarperPrism printing: May 1997 Designed by Lisa Pifher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Egan, Greg, 1961-
Distress/Greg Egan.
p. cm. ISBN 0-06-105264-7 I. Title. PR9619.3.E35D57 1997
823-DC21 96-54709 CIP
Visit HarperPaperbacks on the World Wide Web at http://www.harpercollins.com/paperbacks


Thanks to Caroline Oakley, Deborah Beale, Anthony Cheetham, Peter Robinson, Lucy Blackburn, Annabelle Ager, and Claudia Schaffer.


It is not true that the map of freedom will be complete
with the erasure of the last invidious border when it remains for us to chart the attractors of thunder
and delineate the arrhythmias of drought to reveal the molecular dialects of forest and savanna
as rich as a thousand human tongues and to comprehend the deepest history of our passions
ancient beyond mythology's reach
So I declare that no corporation holds a monopoly on numbers
no patent can encompass zero and one
no nation has sovereignty over adenine and guanine
no empire rules the quantum waves
And there must be room for all at the celebration of
understanding
for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

From Technoliberation by Muteba Kazadi, 2019


Part One

I
лAll right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him."
The bioethicist was a laconic young asex with blond dreadlocks and a T-shirt which flashed up the slogan SAY NO TO TOE! in between the paid advertising. Ve countersigned the permission form on the forensic pathologist's notepad, then withdrew to a corner of the room. The trauma specialist and the paramedic wheeled their resuscitation equipment out of the way, and the forensic pathologist hurried forward, hypodermic syringe in hand, to administer the first dose of neuropreser-vative. Useless prior to legal death-massive ly toxic to several organs, on a time scale of hours-the cocktail ofglutamate antagonists, calcium channel blockers, and antioxidants would halt the most damaging biochemical changes in the victim's brain, almost immediately.
The pathologist's assistant followed close behind her, with a trolley bearing all the paraphernalia of post-mortem revival: a tray of disposable surgical instruments; several racks of electronic equipment; an arterial pump fed from three glass tanks the size of water-coolers; and something resembling a hairnet made out of gray superconducting wire.
Lukowski, the homicide detective, was standing beside me. He mused, "If everyone was fitted out like you, Worth, we'd never have to do this. We could just replay the crime from start to finish. Like reading an aircraft's black box."
I replied without looking away from the operating table; I could edit out our voices easily enough, but I wanted a continuous take of the pathologist connecting up the surrogate blood supply. "If everyone had optic nerve taps, don't you think murderers would start hacking the memory chips out of their victims' bodies?"
"Sometimes. But no one hung around to mess up this guy's brain, did they?"

3 (Note: The numeration of pages preserves the page numeration of the original copy. the page numbers indicate the bottom of the page)