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

day before; it was as if I'd never left.
She said, "How was filming?" I'd sent her a message from the hospital, explaining that we'd
finally got lucky.
"I don't want to talk about it." I retreated into the living room and sank into a chair. The
action of sitting seemed to replay itself in my inner ears; I kept descending, again and again. I
fixed my gaze on the pattern in the carpet; the illusion slowly faded.
"Andrew? What happened?" She followed me into the room. "Did something go wrong? Will you have to
reshoot?"
"I said I don't want to-" I caught myself. I looked up at her, and forced myself to concentrate.
She was puzzled, but not yet angry. Rule number three: Tell her everything, however unpleasant, at
the first opportunity. Whether you feel like it or not. Anything less will be treated as
deliberate exclusion and taken as a personal affront.
I said, "I won't have to reshoot. It's over." I recounted what had happened.
Gina looked ill. "And was anything he said worth . . . extracting? Did mentioning his brother make
the slightest sense or was he just braindamaged and ranting?"
"That's still not clear. Evidently the brother does have a history of violence; he was on
probation for assaulting his mother. They've taken
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him in for questioning . . . but it could all come to nothing. If the victim's short-term
memories were lost, he could have pieced together a false reconstruction of the stabbing, using
the first person who came to mind as being capable of the act. And when he changed his story he
might not have been covering up at all; he might simply have realized that he was amnesic."
Gina said, "And even if the brother did kill him ... no jury is going to accept a couple of words,
instantly retracted, as any kind of proof. If there's a conviction, it will have nothing to do
with the revival."
It was difficult to argue the point; I had to struggle to regain some perspective.
"Not in this case, no. But there have been times when it's made all the difference. The victim's
word alone might never stand up in court- but there've been people tried for murder who would
never have been suspected otherwise. Cases when the evidence which actually convicted them was


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only pieced together because the revival testimony put the investigation on the right track."
Gina was dismissive. "That may have happened once or twice-but it's still not worth it. They
should ban the whole procedure, it's obscene." She hesitated. "But you're not going to use that
footage, are you?"
"Of course I'm going to use it."
"You're going to show a man dying in agony on an operating table- captured in the act of realizing
that everything which brought him back to life is guaranteed to kill him?" She spoke calmly; she
sounded more incredulous than outraged.
I said, "What do you want me to use instead? A dramatization, where everything goes according to
plan?"
"No. But why not a dramatization where everything goes wrong, in exactly the way it did last
night?"
"Why? It's already happened, and I've already filmed it. Who benefits from a reconstruction?"
"The victim's family. For a start."
I thought: Possibly. But would a reconstruction really spare their feelings? And no one was going
to force them to watch the documentary, in either case.