"Paul Levinson - The Copyright Notice Case" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

system."
"And --," I prompted.
"And, well, the hope, the goal, was that if we could get a
reliable transformation of that genetic code, whatever it was,
into binary, then we could take that binary rendering and in
turn convert it into words on a screen."
"Read the genetic code, literally?" I asked.
"Well, again, yes and no. Not really the genetic code in
our genes proper, but this code in a tiny part of the other 95
percent of our DNA on the X chromosome," Jenna said.
"I see," I said, though I didn't yet, at least not fully.
"And Glen's death?"
"He phoned to tell me he had completed the final
translation of the code, had words up on his screen ... and when
I came over, he was dead," she started sobbing. "I think those
words killed him."
"Ok," I poured more soda in her cup. So now I knew
something: either she had killed her boyfriend, and cooked up
this story to throw us off track, or there was something
genuinely strange going on here. The coroner's extensive autopsy
had already found no demonstrable cause for the sudden massive
failure of all of Chaleff's systems that had killed him --
"looks like everything just blew at once for no apparent
reason," Dave told me -- so we knew Chaleff hadn't just died of
your common heart attack or stroke while he was doing his
research. It was something more. Like something had reached in
and turned off -- or on -- some master switch, as Dave had said
yesterday. The question was who -- and what. And the what was
not only what reached in, but what was the switch?
I could see why the Lieutenant was thinking homicide. In
cases like this -- cases involving dead young bodies -- the
cause of death was all too often murder. Barring tragedies like
AIDS, young bodies don't very often expire on their own.
Now it might shock the public to hear this, but in many
ways murder is the forensic scientist's best friend. Once the
cops get a confession of murder, however inarticulate, it points
to the facts, and we can use it, working backward, to piece
together a detailed description of the death and its
circumstances. Reverse engineering is always easier than
working from the ground up.
But truthfully, I hated confessed murder as the cause of
death, always resisted it as the explanation until impossible
to do so. Not only for the obvious moral reasons -- I'm as glad
as the next guy to find a bit less depravity in the human
species wherever I can -- but because, well, I savor the thrill
of an investigation in which I don't know the final conclusion
beforehand, in which science leads to the cause of death rather
than vice versa.
And I'd learned the hard way that some kind of nefarious
intervention, something worse than mere murder, always loomed