"Greg Egan - Quarantine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

QUARANTINE
Greg Egan
Copyright ┬й Greg Egan 1992 All rights reserved

The right of Greg Egan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This edition published in Great Britain in 1999 by Millennium An imprint of Victor Gollancz Orion House, 5 Upper St
Martin's Lane, London WC2H 9EA

To receive information on the Millennium list, e-mail us at: [email protected]

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 85798 590 7

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic


PART ONE
1
Only the most paranoid clients phone me in my sleep.

Of course, nobody wants a sensitive call electronically decoded and flashed up on the screen of an ordinary
videophone; even if the room isn't bugged, radio-frequency spillage from the unscrambled signal can be picked up a
block away. Most people, though, are content with the usual solution: a neural modification enabling the brain to
perform the decoding itself, passing the results directly to the visual and auditory centres. The mod I use,
CypherClerk (NeuroComm, $5,999), also provides a virtual larynx option, for complete two-way security.

However. Even the brain leaks faint electric and magnetic fields. A superconducting detector planted on the scalp, no
bigger than a flake of dandruff, can eavesdrop on the neural data flow involved in an act of ersatz perception, and
translate it almost instantaneously into the corresponding images and sounds.

Hence The Night Switchboard (Axon, $17,999). The nano-machines which carry out this modification can take up to six
weeks to map the user's idiosyncratic schemata -the rules by which meanings are encoded in neural connections - but
once that's done, the intermediary language of the senses can be bypassed completely. What the caller wants you to
know, you know, without any need to hallucinate a talking head spelling it out, and the electromagnetic signature at
skull level is, for all practical purposes, inscrutable. The only catch is, in the conscious state, most people find it
disorienting - and at worst traumatic - to have information crystallizing in their heads without the conventional
preliminaries. So, you have to be asleep to take the call.

No dreams; I simply wake, knowing:

Laura Andrews is thirty-two years old, one hundred

3

and fifty-six centimetres tall, and weighs forty-five kilograms. Short, straight brown hair; pale blue eyes; a long, thin
nose. Anglo-Irish features and deep black skin; like most Australians, born with insufficient UV protection, she's been
retrofitted with genes for boosted melanin production and a thicker epidermis.