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

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I woke disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was Iying on the narrow, lumpy single bed in Room 22 of
the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was
depressingly familiar. But there was something wrong with the way I was Iying; every muscle in my
neck and shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural causes,
however badly they'd slept.

And I could smell blood.

I opened my eyes. A woman I'd never seen before was kneeling over me, slicing into my left tricep
with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed
to the head and foot of the bed.

Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I could start stupidly thrashing about,
instinctively trying to break free. Maybe an even more ancient response-catatonia in the face of
danger-took on the adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when
I'd been expecting something like this for weeks.

I spoke softly, in English. "What you're in the process of hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One
heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and the cargo gets fried."

My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black hair. Not Chinese: Indonesian, maybe.
If she was surprised that I'd woken prematurely, she didn't show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes
I'd acquired in Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good thing
the local anaesthetic was beyond their reach.

Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, "Look on the table next to the bed."

I twisted my head around. She'd set up a loop of plastic tubing full of blood-mine, presumably-
circulated and aerated by a small pump. The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the
intersection controlled by a valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to
the inside of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt that she
could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute without missing a beat.

I cleared my throat and swallowed. "Not good enough. The trap knows my blood pressure profile
exactly. A generic heartbeat won't fool it."

"You're bluffing ." But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The hand-held MRI scanner she'd used to
find the trap would have revealed its basic configuration, but few fine details of the engineering-
and nothing at all about the software.

"I'm telling you the truth." I looked her squarely in the eye, which wasn't easy given our awkward
geometry. "It's new, it's Swedish. You anchor it in a vein forty-eight hours in advance, put
yourself through a range of typical activities so it can memorize the rhythms . . . then you
inject the cargo into the trap. Simple, foolproof, effective." Blood trickled down across my chest
onto the sheet. I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't buried the thing deeper, after all.

"So how do you retrieve the cargo, yourself?"
"That would be telling."