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

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The Vat
A Romantic Comedy


Greg Egan


Harold's in love.
There's no hiding it. You can see it in his eyes, in the heat distribution on
his skin, in the twists and whorls of his brain's magnetic field.
Mary knows he exists, all right. When she looks his way, she doesn't look
through him - not quite. She notices him with a mild frown. She notices him like
a splinter in her thumb, or a crease in her lab coat. She notices him like a
faint odour; nothing utterly repulsive, but nothing too pleasant either.
Poor Harold was once a promising neurochemist. He discovered a brand new
neurotransmitter-antagonist which could make rats lethargic and depressed.
However, while proving that injections of this substance, during or immediately
after feeding, could produce an aversive association strong enough to make the
creatures starve themselves to death, he accidentally jabbed himself with the
needle, and soon found he was no longer able even to contemplate experiments
with rats. So these days, he works on The Vat.
Harold is in charge of spermatogenesis. In truth, he doesn't have a lot to do.
The computer monitors the temperature, the pH, the concentrations of nutrients,
growth factors, and waste products. Four hundred square metres of glass plate
are coated with a gelatinous matrix in which spermatogonia, the stem cells, are
embedded. When these cells divide, some of their daughter cells are more of the
same, the others are primary spermatocytes. Each primary spermatocyte gives rise
by meiosis to two secondary spermatocytes, each of which in turn divides into
two spermatids. Under the influence of Sertoli cells, also embedded in the
matrix, spermatids mature and shed cytoplasm to become spermatozoa.
Harold has seen all of these stages hundreds of times under the microscope, in
samples taken for quality control. He ought to find the whole business utterly
mundane. Sometimes, though - transfixed for a moment by the image on the screen
- he says in dreamy tones of sudden recognition (to no one in particular, often
to no one at all), "Yes! This is it. This is life." Staring at these specks of
unthinking biochemical machinery, he grows dizzy with wonder, then numb with
awe.
Then he gets on with the job.
Some nights, Harold wakes in the early hours and goes out to walk the empty
streets. Why? It's the hottest summer on record, and he can't get back to sleep.
Why? Unrequited love, of course. Why? Studies of the sequence of neurological
events which occur when a subject makes a self-motivated choice between hitting
a button and not hitting a button have revealed that the conscious
decision-making process starts milliseconds after other parts of the brain are
already committed to action. "Will" isn't the cause of anything, it's an
afterthought for the sake of peace of mind. Since reading this, Harold has
stopped making an effort to force his intentions to conform to his behaviour;
there doesn't seem much point now in maintaining the illusion. He just walks.