"Daryl Gregory - Second Person, Present Tense" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gregory Daryl)

Second Person, Present Tense
DARYL GREGORY
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Daryl Gregory (darylgregory.com) lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, a
psychologist and university professor, and their two children. He is a full-time writer, although
half of what he writes is web code for a software company. His stories have appeared in Asimov's
Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and
elsewhere. He's working on his first novel, a science-fantasy about demonic possession and golden
age comics.

"Second Person, Present Tense" appeared in Asimov's, and is certainly one of the stories that
made that magazine a leader in the field in 2005. Gregory postulates a drug that can destroy the
construction of self. A teenage girl overdosed, and the new replacement self has been, in effect,
raised for a couple of years by her neurologist. Now she has to go back to the family that raised
the original personality that she can remember, but whom she is not. Good science and good
writing make this story a candidate for the single best SF story of the year.

If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just
a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.

тАФShun Ryu Suzuki

I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was
telling me that.

тАФEmo Phillips

When I enter the office, Dr. S is leaning against the desk, talking earnestly to the dead girl's parents. He
isn't happy, but when he looks up he puts on a smile for me. "And here she is," he says, like a game show
host revealing the grand prize. The people in the chairs turn, and Dr. Subramaniam gives me a private,
encouraging wink.

The father stands first, a blotchy, square-faced man with a tight belly he carries like a basketball. As in
our previous visits, he is almost frowning, straggling to match his face to his emotions. The mother,
though, has already been crying, and her face is wide open: joy, fear, hope, relief. It's way over the top.

"Oh, Therese," she says. "Are you ready to come home?" Their daughter was named Therese. She died
of an overdose almost two years ago, and since then Mitch and Alice Klass have visited this hospital
dozens of times, looking fo her. They desperately want me to be their daughter, and so in their heads I
already am.

My hand is still on the door handle. "Do I have a choice?" On paper I'm only seventeen years old. I have
no money, no credit cards, no job, no car. I own only a handful of clothes. And Robierto, the burliest
orderly on the ward, is in the hallway behind me, blocking my escape.

Therese's mother seems to stop breathing for a moment. She's a slim, narrow-boned woman who seems
tall until she stands next to anyone. Mitch raises a hand to her shoulder, then drops it.

As usual, whenever Alice and Mitch come to visit, I feel like I've walked into the middle of a soap opera