"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 09 - Flinx's Folly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

she had no desire to know more.

She fidgeted, waiting for the scanners to finish. Even though no serious trauma
was involved, the sudden influx of unconscious patients had momentarily
overwhelmed the hospital's emergency staff. She was already eager to move on
to the next patient.

The preliminary readings began appearing on her pad as well as on the main
monitor that projected from the wall. Heart rate, hemoglobin content, white cell
count, respiration, temperature: everything was well within normal, accepted
parameters. If anything, the readings suggested an exceptionally healthy
individual. Cerebral scan indicated that the patient was presently engaged in
active dreaming. Neural activity levelsтАж general brain scanтАж

She frowned, checked her pad again. Her eyes rose to squint at the main monitor.
It was already scrolling through a list of possible allergies and finding none.

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Manually interrupting the process, she used her pad to go back to the readout
that had attracted her attention. It now appeared on both her pad and the monitor
as a separate insert.

The figures were wrong. They had to be wrong. So was the direct imaging.
There had to be something the matter with this room's cerebral scanner. If its
results had been a little off, she would have put it down to a calibration error.
But the readouts were so far out of line that she was concerned they could
potentially compromise patient treatment.

For one thing the patient's parietal lobesтАФthe parts of the brain responsible for
handling visual and spatial tasksтАФappeared grossly swollen. Since according to
the steadily lengthening list of benchmarks being provided by the
instrumentation there was no neurobiological basis for such enlargement, it had
to be a scanner error. However, that did not account for the exceptionally
heightened blood flow to all parts of the patient's brain, nor for what appeared to
be some completely unrecognizable enzymatic and electrical activity.
Furthermore, although the frontal cortex was quite dense, its apparent normality
was hardly in keeping with the contrasting readouts for other portions of the
cerebellum.

While many neurons were perfectly normal, dense clusters of others scanned in
certain parts of the brain were swollen so large and were so inundated with
activity as to suggest a potentially fatal ongoing mutationтАФpotentially, because
it was patently evident that the patient was still alive. Deeper probing soon
discovered additional unnatural distortions, including what appeared to be
scattered small tumors of a type and extensive neural integration she had not
previously encountered, either in vivo or the medical literature.