"Greg Egan - Yeyuka (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

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Yeyuka a short story by Greg Egan

On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an
hour, then lay on the sand and stared at the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there
were half a dozen booths set up amid the sun bathers, dispensing the latest fashion: solar
tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror, you could choose a design and then
customise it, or create one from scratch with software assistance. Computer-controlled jets
sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your skin, then an hour of UV exposure rendered all the
colours visible.
As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow butterflies perched between shoulder blades, torsos
wrapped in green-and-violet dragons, whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching
these images materialise around me, I couldn't help thinking of them as banners of victory.
Throughout my childhood, there'd been nothing more terrifying than the threat of melanoma -- and
by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than neck-to-knee lycra. Twenty years later, these
elaborate decorations were designed to encourage, to boast of, irradiation. To proclaim, not that
the sun itself had been tamed, but that our bodies had. To declare that cancer had been defeated.
I touched the ring on my left index finger, and felt a reassuring pulse through the metal. Blood
flowed constantly around the hollow core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The
ring's inner surface was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded funnel-shaped
structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms wide. Every sizable
molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these traps was seized and shrink-wrapped,
long enough and tightly enough to determine its shape and its chemical identity before it was
released.
So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew what belonged, and what didn't. Under
its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a
microscopic tumour far downstream, could never escape detection for long -- and once a diagnosis
was made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were programmable
catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer control. The ring could
manufacture a wide range of drugs from raw materials circulating in the blood, just by choosing
the right sequence of shapes for these catalysts -- trapping the necessary ingredients together in
nooks and crannies moulded to fit like plaster casts around their combined outlines.
With medication delivered within minutes or seconds, infections were wiped out before they could
take hold, tiny clusters of cancer cells destroyed before they could grow or spread. Linked by
satellite to a vast array of medical databases, and as much additional computing power as it
required, the ring gave me a kind of electronic immune system, fast enough and smart enough to
overcome any adversary.
Not everyone on the beach that morning would have had their own personal HealthGuard, but a weekly
session on a shared family unit, or even a monthly check-up at their local GP, would have been
enough to reduce their risk of cancer dramatically. And though melanoma was the least of my
worries -- fair-skinned, I was covered in sunscreen as usual; fatal or not, getting burnt was
painful -- with the ring standing guard against ten thousand other possibilities, I'd come to
think of it as a vital part of my body. The day I'd installed it, my life expectancy had risen by
fifteen years -- and no doubt my bank's risk-assessment software had assumed a similar extension
to my working life, since I'd be paying off the loan I'd needed to buy the thing well into my
sixties.
I tugged gently at the plain metal band, until I felt a sharp warning from the needle-thin tubes
that ran deep into the flesh. This model wasn't designed to be slipped on and off in an instant
like the shared units, but it would only take a five minute surgical procedure under local