"Greg Egan - The Extra (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

brain adjust to the specifics of a new body, when that body's original brain
already contained neural systems fine-tuned to perfection for the task? If the
aim was to transplant memory and personality, why transplant anything else?
After many years of careful brain-function mapping, and the identification and
synthesis of growth factors which could trigger mature neurons into sending
forth axons across the boundaries of a graft, Gray's own team had been the first
to try partial transplants. Gray watched tapes of the operations, and was both
repelled and amused to see oddly shaped lumps of one Extra's brain being
exchanged with the corresponding regions of another's; repelled by visceral
instinct, but amused to see the seat of reason - even in a mere Extra - being
treated like so much vegetable matter.


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The forty-seventh partial transplant, between a sedentary, ailing
fifty-year-old, and a fit, healthy twenty-year-old, was an unqualified success.
After a mere two months of recuperation, both Extras were fully mobile, with all
five senses completely unimpaired.
Had they swapped memories and "personalities"? Apparently, yes. Both had been
observed by a team of psychologists for a year before the operation, and their
behaviour extensively characterised, and both had been trained to perform
different sets of tasks for rewards. After the selective brain swap, the learned
tasks, and the observed behavioural idiosyncrasies, were found to have followed
the transplanted tissue. Of course, eventually the younger, fitter Extra began
to be affected by its newfound health, becoming substantially more active than
it had been in its original body - and the Extra now in the older body soon
showed signs of acquiescing to its ill-health. But regardless of any
post-transplant adaption to their new bodies, the fact remained that the Extras'
identities - such as they were - had been exchanged.
After a few dozen more Extra-Extra transplants, with virtually identical
outcomes, the time came for the first human-Extra trials.
Gray's parents had both died years before (on the operating table - an almost
inevitable outcome of their hundreds of non-essential transplants), but they had
left him a valuable legacy; thirty years ago, their own scientists had
(illegally) signed up fifty men and women in their early twenties, and Extras
had been made for them. These volunteers had been well paid, but not so well
paid that a far larger sum, withheld until after the actual transplant, would
lose its appeal. Nobody had been coerced, and the seventeen who'd dropped out
quietly had not been punished. An eighteenth had tried blackmail - even though
she'd had no idea who was doing the experiment, let alone who was financing it -
and had died in a tragic ferry disaster, along with three hundred and nine other
people. Gray's people believed in assassinations with a low signal-to-noise
ratio.
Of the thirty-two human-Extra transplants, twenty-nine were pronounced
completely successful. As with the Extra-Extra trials, both bodies were soon
fully functional, but now the humans in the younger bodies could - after a month
or two of speech therapy - respond to detailed interrogation by experts, who
declared that their memories and personalities were intact.