"John Varley - The Phantom of Kansas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

I decided I'd do it, for as long as I could. And to make sure that no future Fox would ever have to go
through this again, I'd have one made today. Fox 5, if she was ever born, would be born knowing at least
as much as I knew now.

I felt better after the recording was made. I found that I no longer feared the medico's office. That fear
comes from the common misapprehension that one will wake up from the recording to discover that one
has died. It's a silly thing to believe, but it comes from the distaste we all have for really looking at the
facts.
If you'll consider human consciousness, you'll see that the three-dimensional cross-section of a human
being that is you can only rise from that table and go about your business. It can happen no other way.
Human consciousness is linear, along a timeline that has a beginning and an end. If you die after a
recording, you die, forever and with no reprieve. It doesn't matter that a recording of you exists and that
a new person with your memories to a certain point can be created; you are dead. Looked at from a
fourth-dimensional viewpoint, what memory recording does is to graft a new person onto your lifeline at a
point in the past. You do not retrace that lifeline and magically become that new person. I, Fox 4, was
only a relative of

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that long-ago person who had had her memories recorded. And if I died, it was forever. Fox 5 would
awaken with my memories to date, but I would be no part of her. She would be on her own.

Why do we do it? I honestly don't know. I suppose that the human urge to live forever is so strong that
we'll grasp at even the most unsatisfactory substitute. At one time people had themselves frozen when
they died, in the hope of being thawed out in a future when humans knew how to reverse death. Look at
the Great Pyramid in the Egypt disneyland if you want to see the sheer size of that urge.

So we live our lives in pieces. I could know, for whatever good it would do me, that thousands of years
from now a being would still exist who would be at least partly me. She would remember exactly the
same things I remembered of her childhood; the trip to Archimedes, her first sex change, her lovers, her
hurts and her happiness. If I had another recording taken, she would remember thinking the thoughts I
was thinking now. And she would probably still be stringing chunks of experience onto her life, year by
year. Each time she had a new recording, that much more of her life was safe for all time. There was a
certain comfort in knowing that my life was safe up until a few hours ago, when the recording was made.

Having thought all that out, I found myself fiercely determined to never let it happen again. I began to hate
my killer with an intensity I had never experienced. I wanted to storm out of the apartment and beat my
killer to death with a blunt instrument.

I swallowed that emotion with difficulty. It was exactly what the killer would be looking for. I had to
remember that the killer knew what my first reaction would be. I had to behave in a way that he or she
would not expect.

But what way was that?

I called the police department and met with the detective who had my case. Her name was Isadora, and
she had some good advice.

"You're not going to like it, if I can judge from past experience," she said. "The last time I proposed it to
you, you rejected it out of hand."