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

he could have achieved it in other ways; some quite effective pharmaceuticals
and tailored viruses had existed for decades, but he had chosen not to use them.
He had enjoyed looking the part of the dissolute billionaire, and his wealth had
brought him more sexual partners than his new body would ever attract through
its own merits. In short, he neither wanted nor needed to change his appearance
at all.
So, in the end it came down to longevity, and the hope of immortality. As his
parents had proved, any transplant involved a small but finite risk. A whole new
body every ten or twenty years was surely a far safer bet than replacing
individual organs at an increasing rate, for diminishing returns. And a whole
new body now, long before he needed it, made far more sense than waiting until
he was so frail that a small overdose of anaesthetic could finish him off.
When the day arrived, Gray thought he was, finally, prepared. The chief surgeon
asked him if he wished to proceed; he could have said no, and she would not have
blinked - not one his employees would have dared to betray the least irritation,
had he cancelled their laborious preparations a thousand times.
But he didn't say no.
As the cool spray of the anaesthetic touched his skin, he suffered a moment of
absolute panic. They were going to cut up his brain. Not the brain of a
grunting, drooling Extra, not the brain of some ignorant slum-dweller, but his
brain, full of memories of great music and literature and art, full of moments
of joy and insight from the finest psychotropic drugs, full of ambitions that,
given time, might change the course of civilisation.
He tried to visualise one of his favourite paintings, to provide an image he
could dwell upon, a memory that would prove that the essential Daniel Gray had
survived the transplant. That Van Gogh he'd bought last year. But he couldn't
recall the name of it, let alone what it looked like. He closed his eyes and
drifted helplessly into darkness.
When he awoke, he was numb all over, and unable to move or make a sound, but he
could see. Poorly, at first, but over a period that might have been hours, or
might have been days - punctuated as it was with stretches of enervating,
dreamless sleep - he was able to identify his surroundings. A white ceiling, a
white wall, a glimpse of some kind of electronic device in the corner of one
eye; the upper section of the bed must have been tilted, mercifully keeping his
gaze from being strictly vertical. But he couldn't move his head, or his eyes,
he couldn't even close his eyelids, so he quickly lost interest in the view. The
light never seemed to change, so sleep was his only relief from the monotony.
After a while, he began to wonder if in fact he had woken many times, before he
had been able to see, but had experienced nothing to mark the occasions in his
memory.
Later he could hear, too, although there wasn't much to be heard; people came
and went, and spoke softly, but not, so far as he could tell, to him; in any
case, their words made no sense. He was too lethargic to care about the people,
or to fret about his situation. In time he would be taught to use his new body
fully, but if the experts wanted him to rest right now, he was happy to oblige.
When the physiotherapists first set to work, he felt utterly helpless and
humiliated. They made his limbs twitch with electrodes, while he had no control,
no say at all in what his body did. Eventually, he began to receive sensations
from his limbs, and he could at least feel what was going on, but since his head
just lolled there, he couldn't watch what they were doing to him, and they made