"Greg Egan - Distress (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

I set the alarm clock for two in the afternoon. The pharm unit beside the clock said, "Shall I
prepare a melatonin course to get you back in synch by tomorrow evening?"
"Yeah, okay." I stuck my thumb in the sampling tube; there was a barely perceptible sting as blood
was taken. Non-invasive NMR models had been in the shops for a couple of years, but they were
still too expensive.
"Do you want something to help you sleep now?"
"Yes."
The pharm began to hum softly, creating a sedative tailored to my current biochemical state, in a
dose in accordance with my intended sleeping time. The synthesizer inside used an array of
programmable catalysts, ten billion electronically reconfigurable enzymes bound to a semiconductor
chip. Immersed in a small tank of precursor molecules, the chip could assemble a few milligrams of


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any one of ten thousand drugs. Or at least, any of the ones for which I had software, for as long
as I kept paying the license fees.
The machine disgorged a small tablet, still slightly warm. I bit into it. "Orange-flavored after a
hard night! You remembered!"
I lay back and waited for the drug to take effect.
I'd watched the expression on his face-but those muscles were palsied, uncontrollable. I'd heard
his voice-but the breath he spoke with was not his own. I had no real way of knowing what he'd
experienced.
Not "The Monkey's Paw" or "The Tell-Tale Heart."
More like "The Premature Burial."
But I had no right to mourn Daniel Cavolini. I was going to sell his death to the world.
And I had no right even to empathize, to imagine myself in his place.
As Lukowski had pointed out, it could never have happened to me.
16

3
I'd seen a nineteen-fifties Moviola once, in a glass case in a museum. Thirty-five-millimeter
celluloid traveled a tortuous path through the guts of the machine, moving back and forth between
two belt-driven spools held up on vertical arms behind the tiny viewing screen. The whine of the
motor, the grinding of the gears, the helicopter whir of the shutter blades-sounds coming from an
AV of the machine in action, showing on a panel below the display case-had made it seem more like
a shredding device than any kind of editing tool. An appealing notion. I'm very sorry . . . but
that scene has been lost forever. The Moviola ate it. Standard practice, of course, had been to
work only with a copy of the camera original (usually an unviewable negative, anyway)-but the idea
of one slip of a cog transforming meters of precious celluloid into confetti had stuck in my head
ever since, a glorious, illicit fantasy.
My three-year-old 2052 Affine Graphics editing console was incapable of destroying anything. Every
shot I downloaded was burnt into two independent write-once memory chips-and also encrypted and
sent automatically to archives in Mandela, Stockholm, and Toronto. Every editing decision that
followed was just a rearrangement of references to the untouchable original. I could quote from
the raw footage (and footage it was-only dilettantes used pretentious neologisms like 'byteage')
as selectively as I wished. I could paraphrase, substitute, and improvise. But not one frame of
the original could ever be damaged or misplaced, beyond repair, beyond recovery.
I didn't really envy my analog-era counterparts, though; the painstaking mechanics of their craft