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

His love is ridiculous. His love is a farce. Yet the persistence of his
obsession doesn't surprise him at all. Evolution, he reasons, has not had time
to trim human consciousness down to the most productive, most essential
elements. His brain is capable of many arbitrary, even self-defeating, modes;
perhaps that is the price to pay for its flexibility, perhaps there is no easy
sequence of mutations which could remove such disadvantages without sacrificing
much more.
As for his own wish to be rid of this miserable, pointless love, Harold knows
that this has no more power to change his feelings than it does to change the
weather on Jupiter or the electron's charge-to-mass ratio; it's merely another
aspect of the state of his brain. Whatever admirable progress evolution has made
towards lining up intentions with behaviour to pander to the vanities of the
conscious mind, has - in Harold's case, at least - been wasted. The neurological
facts refuse to stay decently theoretical; the irony is that this shattering of
the illusion of will, although entirely reasonable, is not by any means
necessary; after all, the human brain is under no deep biochemical edict to be
reasonable. The epiphenomenon of logical thought simply happens to have been
more resilient, in this case, than the epiphenomenon of will; in a million other
people, as familiar with the facts as Harold, the battle happens to have gone
the other way.
Harold wonders, with a mixture of unease and fascination, if his reason is
strong enough to move on from this conquest to the ultimate triumph of
undermining itself.

When Mary's ova meet Harold's sperm, a high proportion are fertilised. Most of
the sperm go to waste, but not nearly as many as are lost in vivo. The rates of
polyspermy, and fertilisation by defective sperm, are consequently higher, but
such abnormalities don't really matter, in The Vat.
The resulting zygotes drift, slowly, along a vast conduit. They undergo


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cleavage, redistributing their cytoplasm amongst more and more cells. Between
four and six days after fertilisation, blastocysts form: hollow balls of cells,
with a cluster at one end which is destined to become the embryo. Other cells
will, in time, give rise to the protective foetal membranes.
Cultured slabs of uterine endometrium - hormonally stimulated into a swollen,
receptive state, and replete with artificial blood circulated by electric pumps
- are introduced into the conduit at the point where the blastocysts are ready
to implant. Within days of implantation, chorionic villi - the links between the
placental and "maternal" blood supply - will form, guaranteeing essential
nutrition for the haemotropic development to come.
Tonight, after passing Mary's dark house - on the far side of the street, as
always - Harold stops and turns back. Why? Because certain of his motor neurons
fire in the necessary sequence. Why? Because sufficient excitatory signals are
received at their dendrites. Why? Because of the neural topology of Harold's
brain, the product of his genome, and his life history, and the way the quantum
dice have fallen.