"Ringo, John - Council Wars 1 - There Will Be Dragons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

did have were all nongenetic. She had enough problems fixing other people's
lives without screwing up her own code.
The hologram was not running at the actual speed of the program; it was just a
graphic representation of a process that was going on much faster than the eye
could see. Computations and comparisons were going on across the Net, looking
for a combination of genes that would eliminate a particular problem in the
current patient's code.
The result of that problem was sitting on a chair across from her, twitching and
watching her earnestly. Herzer Herrick had been born with a genetic condition
with symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease. It had gone undetected in standard
genetic scans and only started to manifest itself when he was five years old as
hidden retrogenes broke loose and began randomly encoding. In the last ten years
it had progressed to the point that he was losing vision because of inability to
control his eyes, had occasional epileptic fits and had to be transported most
of the time. The prognosis was that if his condition continued to be untreated,
and up until now it had been untreatable, he would shuttle off this mortal coil
before his twentieth birthday. Or about four hundred and seventy-five years
before he should.
Despite these problems he was in fairly good physical condition. Up until
recently, exercise had tended to reduce the worst effects of the disease, so he
had exercised assiduously. Now, though, his physical condition was starting to
deteriorate along with his nerves.
To make matters worse, he was a friend of her daughter. It was one of the
reasons Daneh had avoided contact with his treatment; she knew that so close a
relationship was asking for trouble. Furthermore, she and Herzer's parents did
not get along. From the first sign of Herzer's "spasms," his parents, Melissa
and Harris, had begun shunning him as if the genetic damage was infectious. It
was not until they had "given him his freedom" at the ripe age of fourteen and
Herzer had personally approached her, that she was willing to take the case.
Now, given his deterioration, she reproached herself for waiting so long.
But an end might be in sight. If Dr. Ghorbani had anything to do with it.
"It's like a jigsaw puzzle, Herzer," she said, watching the double helix form
and reform. "Some genes won't go with other genes, no matter how you cram them
together. Sometime in your family's history somebody decided to cram a couple of
your genes together. And they don't fit. The result is your nerves can't
regulate your neurotransmitters anymore."
"Ye', doct'or," the boy said with a sigh. " 'H know."
"Yes, you do know," she said with a smile. "I'm trying to think of a way to fix
it. A way the autodocs wouldn't."
"Trie' docs 'fore," the boy said, trying and failing to focus on the hologram or
even the doctor across from him. His head, though, steadfastly twitched out of
line and he couldn't get his eyes to compensate. "They can' fin' uh promem."
"Oh, they can find the problem," Ghorbani corrected. "You didn't know that?"
"N-no," Herzer replied. "Uh 'ought 'ey couldn' fi' it."
"Those are two entirely different things, son," she said softly. "The problem is
that fixing it the normal way would kill you."
"Whuh? Whah?"
"The problem is in neurotransmitter regulation," Daneh said. "To fix it would
require changing your DNA and then changing out all of your regulatory proteins.
Since while that's going on, none of your neurotransmitters are going to work at