"Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

How could I have done such a thing? How could I, of all people, have been
naive enough to Get It from a meatwhore? As the ancient saying has it, a stiff
dick knows no conscience, and they don't call a fool a stupid prick for nothing.
For my fortieth birthday, I got royally drunk and righteously stoned, and
I demanded a special birthday present from Marge. Was it really too much to ask
from one's own wife on the night of the rite de passage of my midlife crisis?
Tender loving meat for my Fateful Fortieth? We were both blue-carders. Marge
had hardly any sex life at all. The only times I had been unfaithful to her
were with radiation-sterilized sex machines.
I was loaded and raving, but she was entirely irrational. She refused.
When I attempted to get physical, she locked herself in the bedroom and told me
to go stick it in one of my goddamn sex machines.
I reeled out into the streets, stoned out of my mind, aching with despair,
with a raging fortieth-birthday hard-on. But I didn't slink off to the usual
sex machine parlor, oh no; that was what Marge had told me to do, wasn't it?
Instead, I found myself one of those clandestine meatbars. To make the
old long story modern and short, I picked up a whore. We inserted our cards in
the bar's reader and of course they both came up blue. Off I went to her room
and did every kind of meat I could think of and some that seemed to be her own
inventions.
I staggered home, still loaded, and passed out on the couch. The Morning
After. . .
Oh my God!
Beyond the inevitable horrid hangover and conjugal recriminations, I awoke
to the full awfulness of what I had done. In my present sober and thoroughly
detumescent state, I knew all too well how many phony blue cards were floating
around the meat-bars. Had I . . . . ?
 I ran the standard tests on myself in my own lab for six days. On the
sixth day, they came up black. When I cultured the bastard, it turned out to be
a Plague variant I had not yet seen.
By this time I had prepared myself for the inevitable. I had made my
plans. As fortune would have it, I had ten weeks before my next ID update, ten
weeks to achieve what medical science had failed to achieve in twenty years and
more of trying.
But I had motivation. If I failed, in ten weeks I would lose my blue
card, my job, my mission in life, my wife, my family, and with no one to blame
but myself. At this point, I wasn't even thinking about the fact that I was
under sentence of eventual death. What would happen in ten weeks was more than
disaster enough to keep me working twenty hours a day, or so at least it seemed.
And, crazed creature that I was, I had a crazy idea, one that, in
retrospect, I saw I had been moving toward all along.
My work on cassette vaccines was already well advanced, so might it not be
possible to push it one step further, and synthesize an automatic self-
programming cassette vaccine? It might be pushing the edge of the scientific
possible, but it was my only hope. A crazy idea, yes, but was not madness just
over the edge from inspiration?
I stripped a Plague virus down to the harmless core in the usual manner.
But I didn't start hanging on the usual series of antigen coat variants. I
started crafting a series of nanomanipulators out of RNA fragments, molecular
"tentacles."