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

none of your business, you pathetic-"
An ear-splitting alarm went off, somewhere deep in the electronic guts of the revival apparatus.
The pathologist's assistant bent over the equipment, and bashed on the keypad like a frustrated
child attacking a broken toy, until the noise went away.
In the silence that followed, I almost closed my eyes, invoked Witness, stopped recording. I'd
seen enough.
Then Daniel Cavolini regained consciousness, and began to scream.
I watched as they pumped him full of morphine, and waited for the revival drugs to finish him off.
9

2
It was just after five as I walked down the hill from Eastwood railway station. The sky was pale
and colorless, Venus was fading slowly in the east, but the street itself already looked exactly


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as it did by daylight. Just inexplicably deserted. My carriage on the train had been empty, too.
Last-human-on-Earth time.
Birds were calling-loudly-in the lush bushland which lined the railway corridor, and in the
labyrinth of wooded parks woven into the surrounding suburb. Many of the parks resembled pristine
forest-but every tree, every shrub was engineered: at the very least drought and fire resistant,
shedding no messy, flammable twigs, bark or leaves. Dead plant tissue was resorbed, cannibalized;
I'd seen it portrayed in time-lapse (one kind of photography I never carried out myself): an
entire brown and wilting branch shrinking back into the living trunk. Most of the trees generated
a modest amount of electricity-ultimately from sunlight, although the chemistry was elaborate, and
the release of stored energy continued twenty-four hours a day. Specialized roots sought out the
underground superconductors snaking through the parks, and fed in their contributions. Two and a
quarter volts was about as intrinsically safe as electric power could be-but it required zero
resistance for efficient transmission.
Some of the fauna had been modified, too; the magpies were docile even in spring, the mosquitoes
shunned mammalian blood, and the most venomous snakes were incapable of harming a human child.
Small advantages over their wild cousins, tied to the biochemistry of the engineered vegetation,
guaranteed the altered species dominance in this microecology-and small handicaps kept them from
flourishing if they ever escaped to one of the truly wild reserves, distant from human habitation.
10
I was renting a small detached unit in a cluster of four, set in a zero-maintenance garden which
merged seamlessly with the tendril of parkland at the end of a cul-de-sac. I'd been there for
eight years, ever since my first commission from SeeNet, but I still felt like a trespasser. East-
wood was just eighteen kilometers from the center of Sydney, which- although ever fewer people had
reason to travel there-still seemed to hold an inexplicable sway over real-estate prices; I
couldn't have bought the unit myself in a hundred years. The (barely) affordable rent was just a
felicitous by-product of the owner's elaborate tax evasion schemes-and it was probably only a
matter of time before some quiver of butterfly wings in world financial markets rendered the
networks slightly less generous, or my landowner slightly less in need of a write-off, and I'd be
picked up and flung fifty kilometers west, back to the outer sprawl where I belonged.
I approached warily. Home should have felt like a sanctuary after the night's events, but I
hesitated outside the front door, key in hand, for something like a minute.
Gina was up, dressed, and in the middle of breakfast. I hadn't seen her since the same time the