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

A rubbish-strewn alley leads to a back window, very slightly ajar. Harold can
fit only his fingernails into the crack, and clawing the window open causes him
a lot of pain, but this doesn't deter him at all.
The window leads into a damp, warm bathroom, between a toilet and a dripping
shower. He fears that the sound of the dripping will betray him; it rings so
loudly in his head that he believes Mary might be wakened, not by the sound
itself, but by his amplified perception of it. He tightens the hot water tap
with all his strength, and then the cold, but there's a leaky washer, and no
amount of force is going to change that.
He tip-toes into the kitchen, opens the drawers and searches them methodically.
It's not until he has the carving knife in his hand that he reflects on his
likely use for it. Part of him is shocked, but part of him is delighted; it's
one thing to muse and fret like a tenth-rate philosopher, but here at last is a
test for his ideas that goes beyond inconsequential speculation.

A proportion of the embryos are simply liquefied; the cell walls, and indeed all
intracellular structures, are ultrasonically disrupted. The broth of chemicals
this produces is then fed into a sophisticated purification system, based mainly
on electrophoresis and affinity chromatography, and many valuable substances are
extracted.
The remaining embryos are broken into individual cells. In theory, perhaps,
almost anything can be achieved with engineered bacteria, or some modified
tumour cell line, but in practice there are still many properties of healthy
human tissue that can't be faked. Persuading E. coli to churn out hormones like
insulin or dopamine is simple enough; turning it into a perfectly functional
equivalent of an islet cell or a dopaminergic neuron - an integral part of a
complicated regulatory system - is something else entirely. It's simply not
economical, trying to make all that human DNA work in a foreign environment,
when the real thing is available for a fraction of the cost.
Harold passes the refrigerated storerooms every morning as he arrives for work,
and every evening as he departs. It's a relaxed, cheerful place; the storemen
always seem to be whistling, or playing a radio loudly. Vans come and go at all
hours, picking up the large, but light, containers of insulating foam in which
the small, precious vials are packed. When Harold sees a crateful of the end
product of his work being loaded into a van, when he sees the driver sign for
the consignment, slam his door, and drive away, he says to himself aloud,
nodding, "Yes! This is it. This is life."
Harold stands by Mary's bed. She's lying on her side, turned away from him. He
breathes slowly - through his mouth, hoping that this is the quietest way - and
thinks about the trillions of cells of her body. If he stabbed her in the heart,
only the tiniest fraction of them would be killed directly by the blade - just a
few million cells in her skin, her soft tissue, her heart muscles. The death of
her neurons would be almost coincidental, more a product of this organism's poor
design than anything else. A slime mould would easily survive similar treatment.



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