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

Even the stillest, quietest night comes alive for Harold. He sees gas molecules
spinning through the air, and photons pouring down from the stars, the way some
insane medieval monk might have imagined angels and demons battling it out
behind every corner and beneath every cobblestone. And the frenzy isn't confined
to his surroundings; the real bedlam is inside him. He pictures it all, vividly,
in garish, comic-book, computer-graphic colours: DNA being transcribed, proteins
being synthesised, carbohydrates being burnt in flameless enzymatic fires.
Everybody's made up of molecules, and plenty of people know it, but nobody feels
it like Harold.
Above all, he dizzily marvels at the fact that the molecules in his brain have
managed, collectively, to understand themselves: his neurotransmitters are part
of a system that knows what a neurotransmitter is. He can sketch the structures
of the central nervous system's one hundred most important substances; he's


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synthesised half of them with his own hands. He's even viewed real-time images
of his brain metabolising radioactively-labelled glucose, revealing which
regions were most active as he watched himself thinking about watching himself
think.
Harold doesn't know quite what to make of this molecular self-knowledge. He
can't decide if consciousness is miraculous or meaningless; he hovers between
mystical ecstasy and the purest nihilism. Sometimes he feels like a robot,
raised by human parents, who's just discovered the awful truth: poring over his
own circuit diagrams, horrified but enthralled; scanning a print-out of his own
software, following the flow of control from subroutine to subroutine;
understanding, at last, the ultimate shallowness of the deepest reasons for
everything he's ever done, everything he's ever felt - and dissociating into a
mist of a quadrillion purposeless, microscopic causes and effects.
This mood always passes, though, eventually.

Mary is responsible for oogenesis. Primary oocytes undergo meiotic division to
yield four cells, but only one of the four is a mature ovum; the others are tiny
cells known as polar bodies, and the second division is only completed if
fertilisation takes place. In a massive cultured substitute for the ovarian
cortex, millions of ova mature and burst from their follicles daily - no
parsimonious one a month here. The Vat has no time, and no need, to ponderously
mimic the stages of the human menstrual cycle; as in any good assembly line,
everything is happening at once.
Harold knows exactly where Mary lives, although of course he's never been
inside, and when he walks by at two in the morning, the narrow terrace house is
always black and silent. He hurries past, terrified that she might be awake, and
might glance out at the sound of his guilty footsteps.
He knows he ought to forget her. Sometimes he swears that he will. He sees
women on the street every day whom he finds a thousand times more attractive.
Total strangers treat him with far greater kindness and respect. He knows his
mere presence annoys her - and her presence evokes in him more shame and
confusion than tenderness, or even lust.