"Peter Watts - Blindsight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

Theseus
Peter Watts 12 Blindsight


"Blood makes noise." тАФSusanne Vega

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:
You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-
shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days.
You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and
leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months
on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels
dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with
sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through
disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.
You'd scream if you had the breath.
Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for
them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They
could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that
absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of
civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after allтАФ
raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched
together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of
sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands
this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body
so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar
space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.
The pain begins, just slightly, to recede. You fire up your inlays
and access your own vitals: it'll be long minutes before your body
responds fully to motor commands, hours before it stops hurting.
The pain's an unavoidable side effect. That's just what happens
when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked
about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise
metabolic reactivation. Suck it up, soldier.
You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end.
But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and
concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities.
Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry.
You think: That can't be right.
Because if it is, you're in the wrong part of the universe. You're
Peter Watts 13 Blindsight

not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you're high above the
ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets
that only grace the sun every million years or so. You've gone
interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock) you've
been undead for eighteen hundred days.
You've overslept by almost five years.
The lid of your coffin slides away. Your own cadaverous body
reflects from the mirrored bulkhead opposite, a desiccated lungfish