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

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



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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?"

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"Wait until they've seen the documentary." The pathologist's assistant sprayed a depilatory enzyme
onto the victim's skull, and then wiped all the close-cropped black hair away with a couple of
sweeps of his gloved hand. As he dropped the mess into a plastic sample bag, I realized why it was
holding together instead of dispersing like barber's shop waste; several layers of skin had come
with it. The assistant glued the "hairnet"-a skein of electrodes and SQID detectors- to the bare
pink scalp. The pathologist finished checking the blood supply, then made an incision in the
trachea and inserted a tube, hooked up to a small pump to take the place of the collapsed lungs.
Nothing to do with respiration; purely as an aid to speech. It was possible to monitor the nerve
impulses to the larynx, and synthesize the intended sounds by wholly electronic means, but
apparently the voice was always less garbled if the victim could experience something like the
normal tactile and auditory feedback produced by a vibrating column of air. The assistant fitted a
padded bandage over the victim's eyes; in rare cases, feeling could return sporadically to the
skin of the face, and since retinal cells were deliberately not revived, some kind of temporary
ocular injury was the easiest lie to explain away the pragmatic blindness.
I thought again about possible narration. In 1888, police surgeons photographed the retinas of one
victim of Jack the Ripper, in the vain hope that they might discover the face of the killer
embalmed in the light-sensitive pigments of the human eye . . .
No. Too predictable. And too misleading; revival was not a process of extracting information from
a passive corpse. But what were the alternative references? Orpheus? Lazarus? "The Monkey's Paw?"
"The Tell-Tale Heart?" Reanimator? Nothing in myth or fiction had really prefigured the truth.
Better to make no glib comparisons. Let the corpse speak for itself.
A spasm passed through the victim's body. A temporary pacemaker was forcing his damaged heart to