"Simmons,.Wm.Mark.-.3.-.Habeas.Corpses.v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons William Mark)

The biggest problem is that most of everything believed or written about the afterlife or heaven or hell is based on hearsay or wishful thinking and very little in the way of eye-witness accounts. While there are those supposed "life after life" testimonials, who's to say it's not just a dream or hallucinationЧthe by-product of a brain starved for oxygen during that abbreviated time-out called "clinical death"? I'd prefer to hear from somebody who took the extended tour, not just the poke-your-head-in-and-glance-around-then-hurry-back-home-to-the-ICU anecdote.
Returning to Little Gidding, Eliot wrote: " . . . the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." But in my experience, if the long-dead dream of heaven, they don't seem to remember anything if they come back. Ditto for vampires. In fact, just thinking about the whole concept seems to wig them out. They say there are no atheists in foxholes but reopened graves are an entirely different matter. The Bible doesn't record Lazarus' thoughts on his three days in the tomb experience. But legend holds that, during those long years in which he was granted a second sojourn among the living, the brother of Mary and Martha never smiled again.
So a note to all televangelists: resurrection may not be all that it's cracked up to be.
Still, you have to believe in something, I thought as I looked up at the great sword that hung above the fireplace mantel. I do, anyway. I'd rather believe in something and, in the end, discover there was nothingЧthan believe in nothing and, when the end comes, discover that there was Something, after all. You may not agree but we all have some kind of judgment day, some day, and some time, some where.
I'd already had a couple, myself.
I walked over and pulled the enormous blade from its twisted oaken sheath. The blue-green metal refracted the room's track lighting in coruscating rainbows. So far I'd resisted the temptation to send the magnificent blade off for serious testing. The metal might be some unknown meteorite alloy: it was stronger and harder but lighter than steel. I had seen the edge slice through fossilized dinosaur bones like they were so much papier-mтchщ. Under a magnifying glass, however, the edge remained impossibly sharp, showing neither nick nor notch.
What could a lab tell me, anyway? That the test results were anomalous?
And what could I tell them when they came back with questions of their own? That it had been left behind by an angelЧpossibly an archangel?
For now, it continued to hang over the fireplace like a mildly curving question mark, another mismatched piece for the jigsaw puzzle of Faith.
I wondered if "Brother" Michael was ever coming back for his sword.
Maybe all of that was a dream, too; the by-product of a once human brain being slowly turned inside-out by the necrotic virus I'd inherited from Vlad Drakul Bassarab.
As if to punctuate that thought, my computer chimed and a digitized voice announced: "You've got mail! Let's count de messages! Vun! Two! Tree messages! Ah! Ah! Ah!"
Deirdre, in one of her many fits of boredom, had upgraded my messaging system with .wav files of "The Count" from Sesame Street. Having a heavily-accented Muppet announce the arrival of email was kind of cuteЧthe first couple of days. Forget haunted houses and graveyards; the scariest things inhabit the Internet.
I replaced the sword in its gnarled, wooden sheath and sat down to check my computer's inbox. Too bad she hadn't upgraded my spam filter. The first two messages turned out to be pleas from surviving relatives of assassinated African cabinet ministers who wished the temporary use of my bank account in order to launder millions of dollars from private government accounts. At least the virus hadn't sufficiently emulsified my brain for me to fall for scams like this. Sadly, there were people without hemophagic viruses ravaging their cerebral cortexes, who would.
The third message in my inbox was more problematical. As I scrolled down the virtual page, a pattern of Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared.
Familiar-looking hieroglyphs.
Followed by an even more familiar translation:

Oh! Amon Ra, Oh . . .
God of gods . . .
Death is but the doorway to new life.
We live today. We shall live again . . .
In many forms shall we return . . .
O mighty one . . .

The screen flickered.
It more than flickered; it ran through all 1,024 variations of the monitor's color settings in about twenty seconds.
I blinked and looked up from the monitor. And saw a stranger sitting across the room.
Except it wasn't my room.
A moment before I was sitting in my crowded little study. Now the room was cavernous. Panels of dark, gleaming wood replaced the bookshelves. The fireplace had grown into a giant, stonework affair that suggested the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: you could walk around inside without bumping your head.
An elderly man sat upon an antique chaise lounge across from me. His legs were elevated and hidden beneath a colorful stratum of quilts and comforters. He wore a maroon velvet smoking jacket with white edelweiss embroidered upon the lapels and a blue cravat or scarf that all but obscured his shirt. His white hair was sparse and his moustache wispy enough to be almost invisible. His head was round and vaguely he put me in mind of a Peanuts cartoon characterЧCharlie Brown some sixty years hence and waiting for a visit from his grandchildren. Snoopy's master grown sharp and crafty with age. . . .
"Mr. Csщjthe," the stranger began. I would have thought his speech without accent was it not for his pronunciation of the hard consonants in my name. " . . . please forgive this unorthodox intrusion but I simply must speak with you. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Pipt."
"What's up, Doc?" I growled, though I suspected that this was going to be a one-way conversation.
"As you may have already surmised, I am not actually here," the apparition explained.
As if to underscore the point a clown fish from my aquarium wriggled up to the old man as if in search of a handout. Finding none, it turned and disappeared.
"I have embedded this message in the code strings and algorithms of the computer message so that I might have a better chance of making my case," Pipt elaborated.
In other words, a pop-up mpeg that played inside your head. This was damned impressive!
He brought a slender hand from beneath the coverlets and smoothed a stray wisp of hair behind his ear. "I am a scientist who has spent his whole life unlocking the secrets of the human condition. I pioneered genetics research years before the discovery of the double helix ignited scientific curiosity in the rest of the world. I have devoted my entire life to one, great and overriding goal!"
As he paused to lean toward me, I considered how "have" sounded more like "haff" as it fell from his wrinkled lips.
"And do you know what that goal is?"
I went for the most obvious choice: "Creating microburst hypnotropic flash-spam on a global scale?"
"Immortality, Mr. Csщjthe!" he exclaimed.
Oh, too bad . . .
Tell me that you've invented the next big marketing technology of the twenty-first century and you've got my attention. But "Immortality"? Why not throw "World Domination" in and cackle like a demented madman?
Demented madmanЧnow there was a nice redundancy . . .
"Yes," he continued, "I know it seems quite the hoary clichщ. But clichщs are based upon universal truths and immortality has been the dream and desire of the human race since ancient times! The ideaЧthe IdealЧis so old that it is the basis of myths and stories from every proto-culture, every race and clime of recorded history. Science and technology may create this or invent that, but the motivation for every social, technological, and medical advance is rooted in the goal of extending life! Reducing the wear and tear on the human body so that it can last longer! AndЧ" He paused and seemed to gather himself. "But I rattle on like an old skeleton. My time is limited and I must make my point quickly and succinctly."
He straightened his spine, striking an almost regal pose. "How old do you suppose that I am?"
That's the problem with advanced age. Genetics and/or quality of lifeЧdiet, exercise, stressЧcould tweak the physical signs either way. There were fifty-year-olds who looked seventy and seventy-year-olds who could pass for sixty. Since Cyrus the Computer Virus was making the pitch for his immortality research, I could guess that he was probably older than he looked.
"I was born on March sixteenth . . ." He paused for dramatic effect. " . . . in the year 1911!"
The second pause for dramatic effect was far more effective. If I could believe what he was saying.