"Levinson, Paul - Dr Phil D'Amato 02 - The Consciousness Plague 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

"I almost wish it wouldn't," I said, "so we could have more time to study whatever it was that happened the past few months."
"Well, epidemics are like that," Andy said. "They tend to come and go on their own schedules."
"So you'd label the cough and flu as an epidemic this year?" I asked.
Andy shrugged. "It's just a name all semantics. But the number of victims of people missing work was pretty impressive. We're still not sure if it was one bug, or two, or more."
He stopped by a small patch of bright green sea grass. "Amazingly tolerant of different environments," Andy said, and touched one of the wet blades with his finger. I did the same. It felt slick, and sharp as a razor on the edge like it could slice through your finger if you weren't careful. "I've been in love with this stuff since I was a kid," Andy continued. "Twice a day it's totally underwater, during high tide. Twice a day it's right out here in the open air, like it is now. And it does fine all the time."
I nodded. "But the patch is pretty small." It was a ragged square, about eight or nine feet long. I didn't see any others on the beach. I also didn't see what this had to do with the cough and the memory loss, but Andy sometimes had a way of approaching important points he wanted to make obliquely, from a seemingly unrelated angle. And this sea grass was beguiling in its quiet audacity, just growing out here, vivid green, in the middle of a half-drenched shore.
"There's a powerful network of roots underneath," Andy said. "Depending upon tidal patterns, storm activity that shifts sands, overall weather conditions, the roots send up more or fewer blades. Some years there's hardly any grass at all. Then the next year the grass comes back four times the area of this. On some parts of the coast it stretches for miles. But the roots are there, under the surface, all the time, unless conditions are so bad in a particular spot that they're totally wiped out. A lot like viruses vis-a-vis their human hosts always there, always under the surface, some years they come out more than others."
Ah, so here perhaps was the relevance.
"Whatever caused the cough this season has likely been around for years," he went on, "maybe centuries, even millennia. The more we study these things, the more we realize they're nothing new."
"Yeah, but the symptoms are different," I said.
"Are they? That's what you've got to investigate. The CDC simply doesn't have the interest, officially I think you'll find no government agency will."
"Why not?" I pressed.
"The symptoms are below the radar they're not important enough, not disruptive enough," Andy responded.
"Hobbling a murder investigation isn't important?" I countered.
"Not when there are people actually dying of other illnesses," Andy said. "Show me a stone-cold murderer who actually got away because of this amnesia business show me that ten, a hundred times and then you'll get official national interest in this."
I sighed.
"I'm not saying I'm not interested," Andy said. "I am even though I had the damn thing and haven't lost a second of memory, as far as I know."
"You didn't take Omnin." I had told him about my shortlived antibiotic theory.
"Turns out most people didn't," Andy said. "Actual prescriptions were much lower than initially projected."
"Maybe that's why we don't have more verified cases of memory loss," I said.
Andy laughed, and shook his head. "That's assuming the very point in dispute that Omnin somehow caused the loss of memory. You know, the FDA put it through all the usual tests before allowing it out on the market. Not that those tests are infallible, but they certainly would have picked up any side effects as serious as amnesia. Anyway, it's not even clear at this point how many actual cases of memory loss we have."
I started to object that statistics and surveys weren't everything
Andy interrupted. "Phil, I'm with you, personally I agree that there's something more than a little peculiar going on. I've known you too long to think for a minute that you're just making all of this up. I'm just saying that, at this point, any investigation into what you think is happening will have to be done off the books, at least as far as my involvement in any official capacity is concerned. You've gone that route before."
I nodded. The story of my life.
"All right," Andy said. "So let's get back to your question about symptoms. Your hypothesis is that this memory loss is something new. Okay. That can be tested against history have there been any times in the past in which any significant number of people reported losing their memories? A yes might be more valuable to us at this point than a no if memory losses did occur in the past, we can see what else the two times, theirs and ours, have in common."
I took a deep breath of the salty air. "How far back do you want to go?"

WE WALKED ALONG the shore, past a cropping of glistening black stones, freshly uncovered by the still-receding tide. Gulls hovered above, dropping clams and mussels and other shelled creatures they had captured, so they fell and broke open on the rocks. Each shell made a loud crack! as it met its fate like a finger-snapping scorecard of the seagulls' triumph. "That's a pretty old technology right there," I said admiringly, and pointed at the birds. "Human technology is supposed to have begun in equivalent ways from what I've read in opportunistic use of materials already present in the environment, like rocks."
Andy nodded. "You always had a yen for history. So I assume you've already done some digging into the history of epidemics and memory loss?"
I told him about McNair. "Not much that I can find or anyone else seems to know on that score. But McNair's work seems in some way relevant. What do you know about the Phoenicians?"
Andy opened his hands. "Not much. They thrived around the same time as the ancient Egyptians or part of that time. They sailed around the Mediterranean. Their home base was where Lebanon is today. Didn't they found a colony in North Africa which later became Carthage?"
"Yeah," I said. "They apparently also invented our alphabet."
"Interesting," Andy said. "Does that have relevance to our problem?"
"Well, McNair looks at writing, the alphabet in particular, as a great memory aid," I replied. A seagull shrieked overhead. "Which of course it is."
"So you're thinking ... that maybe the Phoenicians invented the alphabet because they were suffering from widespread memory loss?"
"The thought occurred to me, yes," I replied.
"Any proof documents, whatever, from the time to support this?" Andy asked.
"None that McNair knows of," I said. "It's all speculation as to why they invented it." We started walking the beach again. My feet were beginning to feel a little cold. "Did the Phoenicians suffer any plagues, epidemics?" I asked.
"I'm not sure about the Phoenicians," Andy replied. "I know the Carthaginians did in Hannibal's time. I've seen it argued that Hannibal lost the second Punic war to the Romans because his men were too sick to fight and the Romans were fine, because the battles were fought near their home ground, and they had immunity to whatever it was that got the Carthaginians sick."
"Hmmm ... intriguing," I said. "I think I've seen that theory, too, now that you mention it. But Hannibal can't be very relevant to the invention of the alphabet he crossed the Alps a good millennium later."

I DROVE BACK to the city that evening. The Cape had been beautiful. I could feel its pastels draining from my perception, and not just because it was dark outside.
I would have jumped in the bay I love cold water but my toes had insisted that it was too cold even for me. I made a mental note to return for a long swim in the summer with Jenna. Mental notes ... Anything that smacked of memory left a sour taste in my mouth these days.
Too bad I had to leave the Cape right now, with or without the swim. There was no doubt I could learn more from Andy. But my cell phone had informed me about another Riverside attack and this one was a murder, with no apparent witnesses at all.
I cursed under my breath as I drove towards Providence. The two big aggravations in my life these days the memory loss and the Riverside assaults had no deep connection I could fathom. Just two big pieces of bad news, unfolding at the same time. But our investigation of the murders was definitely being hamstrung by the amnesia. And every time something new happened in Riverside Park, a face leered out to taunt me that I hadn't made more progress on the amnesia. My face...
It was Dugan's face that was talking to me the next morning Sunday for a special briefing in his office. Just him and me. "Everyone else is already up-to-speed on this, so I figured I'd give them the day off," Dugan said. "Officer Gonzales is out of town her mother had a stroke, in Philadelphia."
I felt bad for Claudia, but was glad for her that at least she wasn't in any way involved in the new murder. No one could have felt worse than she had, when Carol Michosky picked her out of the lineup. She'd been carrying around a load of guilt already for blacking out on the first Riverside crime.
Dugan was painting the context for me, which I well knew. "The mayor's livid about this," Dugan said, "this is not the kind of town we want "
I'd heard this all before. I didn't need that kind of motivation I'd help solve this, whatever the public relations. That was my job.
" We have to get a better handle on these kinds of cases, much sooner," Dugan continued. "Maybe we should get cracking on that special unit I was talking to you about last month "