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

hundred thousand turn out like Laura. You must have heard about Holistic Health Products, in the States; six hundred
people suffered kidney failure from taking their "energy supplement", so they hired a dozen hit men to start wiping out
the victims, faking accidental deaths. Corpses attract much smaller damages verdicts. Okay, kidnapping doesn't seem
to make much sense, but who knows? Maybe they needed to study Laura, to extract some kind of information that
might eventually help them in court.'

'It all sounds rather paranoid to me.' I shrug. Occupational hazard.' She laughs. 'Yours, or mine? Anyway, I've told you,
I think the cause was inherited.' 'But you can't be positive.' 'No.'

I ask the usual questions about the staff: anyone hired or fired in the last few months, anyone known to have debts or
problems, anyone with a grudge? The cops would have been through all of this, but after four weeks of brooding on
the disappearance, some trivial matter, not worth mentioning at first, may have come to assume greater significance.

No such luck.

'Can I see her room?'

'Certainly.'

The corridors we pass through have cameras mounted on the ceiling, at ten-metre intervals; I'd guess that any
approach to Laura's room is covered by at least seven. Seven data chameleons, though, would not have been beyond
the budget of a serious kidnapper; each pinhead-sized robot would have tapped into one camera's signal, memorized
the sequence of bits for a single frame while the corridor was empty, then spat it out repeatedly, replacing the real
image. There may have been faint patches of high-frequency noise when the fake data was switched in and out - but
not enough to leave tell-tale

9

imperfections on a noise-tolerant digital recording. Short of subjecting every last metre of optical fibre to electron
microscopy, hunting for the tiny scars where the chameleons intervened, it's impossible to know whether or not such
tampering ever took place.

The door - remotely locked and unlocked - would have been just as easy to interfere with.

The room itself is small and sparsely furnished. One wall is painted with a cheerful, glossy mural of flowers and birds;
not something I'd care to wake up to, personally, but I can hardly judge how Laura would have felt. There's a single
large window by the bed, set solidly into the wall, with no pretence that it was ever designed to be opened. The pane
is high-impact plastic; even a bullet wouldn't shatter it, but with the right equipment it could be cut and resealed,
leaving no visible seam. I draw my pocket camera and take a snapshot of the window in the polarized light of a laser
flash, then I process the image into a false-colour stress map, but the contours are smooth and orderly, betraying no
flaws.

The truth is, there's nothing I can do here that the police forensic team would not have done first, and better. The
carpet would have been holographed for footprint impressions, then vacuumed for fibres and biological detritus; the
bed sheets taken away for analysis; the ground outside the window scoured for microscopic clues. But at least I have
the room itself fixed in my mind now; a solid backdrop for any speculations about the night's events.

Dr Cheng escorts me back to the lobby.

'Can I ask you something that has nothing to do with Laura?'