"picoult, jodi, mercy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Picoult Jodi)

As soon as Cam began to lead James MacDonald into the Wheelock Police Department, the crowd outside began to disperse. At the front desk, he unlocked the handcuffs and asked James to empty his pockets. He watched a handful of pennies, a packet of gum, and some lint fall onto the Formica, but nothing that would incriminate the man as a murderer.
Hannah was out to lunch, so the station was empty, silent except for the intermittent static and calls of the dispatcher on the radio. "Mr. MacDonald," Cam said, "why don't you come on in here?"
He led the prisoner into the booking room and gestured to a chair. Then Cam sat down and pulled a custody report out of a file in the drawer, laying it facedown on the desk in front of him. He'd listen to what the guy had to say, but he'd bet his gun this was going to end in an arrest.
He looked up to find the man staring at him with a grin turning up the corner of his mouth. "They say you look like him, you know," James said.
"Look like who?"
"Cameron MacDonald. The first one. The famous one."
Cam made a big production of arranging the spill of pens and pencils on the desk. "I wouldn't know," he said. He took a deep breath. "Look, right now I'm just the chief of police, and you've confessed to murder. So let's forget the other crap."
"I can't. I came to Wheelock on purpose, because you were here."
Cam narrowed his eyes. "How exactly are you related to me?"
"Your grandfather is my great-uncle. Ask Angus, if you don't believe me. What is he now, eighty? Eighty-two?"
"What he is is senile, at least most of the time," Cam admitted. His great-uncle Angus had been the keeper at Carrymuir during the years that Cam and his father had prospered in Wheelock. When Ian MacDonald died, Cam had flown to Scotland, brought his uncle Angus home with him, and signed Carrymuir over to the Scottish National Trust.
"Mr. MacDonald--"

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"Jamie." He leaned forward, as if he was about to confide a secret. "I was named for our own uncle Jamie," he said. "The one who was killed in the war."
Cam's mouth fell open. No one talked about his uncle Jamie, the hero, because it used to make his grandmother weep. Jamie had been the firstborn son, the one who would have been clan chief if he hadn't been shot down over the Pacific in 1944. Cam's father, the second son, had taken the title by default.
Cam swallowed, recovering. "Well, Jamie," he said. "Tell me what brought you to Wheelock."
He hesitated only a second. "I came here to kill my wife."
Cam stared right into Jamie's eyes, almost the same color as his own--sea green, a MacDonald trait. He looked for a swift check of rage, a curl of remorse, or God willing, the blaze of insanity. He saw none of those things. "Jamie," he said, rolling the custody report into the typewriter, "you have the right to remain silent."
Tamie MacDonald had made a career of creating alternative / worlds. He let young couples designing their first home walk through houses that had not yet been built; he gave paraplegic men a chance to walk again; he let medical students do surgery on patients that did not suffer or bleed. As the president and founder of Techcellence, a conceptual-design computer company specializing in virtual reality, he had joined the cutting edge of a radical technological movement and had become a symbol for the entire field. Maggie, whose computer skills extended to booting up WordPerfect, used to say it was much simpler than that. "You're the Wizard of Oz," she would tell him. "You make people's wishes come true."
He'd sort of liked that image. It was true--people tended to seek out Techcellence to do things no other conceptual-design firm would do. Because Jamie wasn't afraid to take a challenge and shape it with his mind and his hands until it fit on a seven-by-nine screen, his company often produced the systems and models for virtual worlds that became prototypes for other firms to copy.
Jamie had a high-end computer system at his house in Cum-mington, complete with a bodysuit and glove and head-mounted device, but most of the design work was done in his lab. Located downtown, it had computers with more technological expertise, as

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well as the big equipment--the SGI Onyxs, graphics machines which could generate the real time in the virtual world. There were about ten people who worked full-time for Jamie, and when Tech-cellence secured a contract with Nintendo or the Defense Department or a teaching hospital, there were two hundred more people he could hire on as subcontractors--digital sound mixers, artists, story writers, texture mappers, producers, directors, programmers. In many ways, Jamie was like a chef--finding cooks who had already made dishes that he could combine into something even more flavorful, in spite of the fact that he'd grown none of the ingredients himself.
He often came into work on weekends, when it was quietest; and he'd bring Maggie with him. One Saturday, a few years after they were married, Jamie had come in to fiddle with a program for a private client, a formerly seeded millionaire tennis player who had become quadriplegic after a heli-skiing accident. Maggie, who openly admitted to being terrified of so many computers, sat curled with a book on a Salvation Army wing chair where some of the best brainstorming was done.
Jamie was stuck. It wasn't creating the virtual world--any savvy hacker could jump on the Internet and download to do that. This client had a specific request: he wanted to play tennis again.
Had Jamie wanted to milk him for his money, he could have simply set the program up like some of the other virtual reality systems developed for handicapped people. A sweatband around a quadriplegic's head could measure the magnetic field given off by the optic nerve, so that the guy would be able to move a cursor--or a virtual tennis racket--simply by shifting his eyes. But Jamie, who had always been something of a perfectionist, wanted to give his client more. It would not be enough to see a racket swing on a computer screen and know you had connected with a ball, like those archaic Pong games on the old Atari video game systems. He wanted his client to believe he was on his own feet again.
Ordinarily, this wasn't a problem when creating a virtual world. A good HMD tracked your head movements and isolated your views to computer-generated images, in a 190-degree field. With the addition of a glove, a bodysuit, and a motion platform, there were three kinds of feedback a designer could generate. Tactile

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feedback produced vibrations at specific parts of your body, which your brain would interpret along with visual and auditory clues--if you see and hear oozing slime, you'll feel it. Auditory and visual feedback employed subtleties, such as subfrequencies outside the hearing range, to give the sensation of motion, or flight, or vertigo. And force feedback--actual shoves applied to the body--could make you feel like you were in microgravity, or blasting off in a rocket.
The problem was, on someone who couldn't sense anything beneath his neck, these types of feedback would be lost.
Jamie pulled the HMD off his head and rubbed his hands over his face. He wasn't even aware he'd sighed in frustration until Maggie put down her book and came to stand beside him. "Tough day at the office?" she said, rubbing his shoulders.
"Impossible," Jamie admitted. "How do I go about making someone feel something they're not physically capable of feeling?"
Maggie frowned. "I'm not following you."
"VR for the handicapped," Jamie explained, passing her the HMD. "Quadriplegic wants to play tennis."
He knew, by the smile that curved Maggie's lips beneath the high-tech helmet, that she was delighted with the visual images of the tennis center in Flushing Meadow--the lined courts, the perspiring crowds, the smoggy blue of the sky. He watched on the flat screen as Maggie flickered her eyes, making a tennis racket appear at the edge of her virtual vision and swing in a forehand. "He wants other friends to be able to connect into the virtual space. And he wants a neural network thrown in, a 'smart enemy,' in case no one else is around to play against him."
"Why are you stuck?"
Jamie shrugged. "Because I can't make him feel the sweat on the grip of his racket. Because I won't be able to make his legs tired from running."
"That's hardly your fault," Maggie said. "Couldn't you over-compensate somewhere else? You know, like a scent--sun tan lotion waving in from the stands, or that rubbery smell you get when you open a can of tennis balls?"
"He can already smell," Jamie said. "He wants to walk."
Maggie sank down on his lap. She pulled off the HMD and

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touched her hand to the screen, shaking her head. "It always amazes me how much better it looks with the helmet on."
"That's the idea." Jamie smiled.
"Imagine," Maggie said. "To be so active, and to have that taken away from you. If I ever get into an accident and become a quadriplegic, you have my permission to shoot me."
Reflexively, Jamie's arms tightened around her. "You shouldn't even joke about that," he said. "And you don't really mean it."
Maggie raised her eyebrows. "You'd want to live as a vegetable?"