"Peter Watts - Flesh Made Word" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

This was my second sale, to a small Canadian mag called "Prairie Fire" back
in 1994. Think "Max Headroom" meets "Terms of Endearment". A lot of
people seem to like it, although I keep wondering if it isn't a teeny bit wet. It
does, after all, involve a dead cat; so I post it here in memory of the recently-
departed Cygnus T.




Flesh Made Word
Peter Watts

Wescott was glad when it finally stopped breathing.
It had taken hours, this time. He had waited while it wheezed
out thick putrid smells, chest heaving and gurgling and filling the
room with stubborn reminders that it was only dying, not yet dead,
not yet. He had been patient. After ten years, he had learned to be
patient; and now, finally, the thing on the table was giving up.
Something moved behind him. He turned, irritated; the dying
hear better than the living, a single spoken word could ruin hours
of observation. But it was only Lynne, slipping quietly into the
room. Wescott relaxed. Lynne knew the rules.
For a moment he even wondered why she was there.
Wescott turned back to the body. Its chest had stopped moving.
Sixty seconds, he guessed. Plus or minus ten.
It was already dead by any practical definition. But there were
still a few embers inside, a few sluggish nerves twitching in a brain
choked with dead circuitry. Wescott's machines showed him the
landscape of that dying mind: a topography of luminous filaments,
eroding as he watched.
The cardiac thread shuddered and lay still.
Thirty seconds. Give or take five. The qualifiers came
automatically. There is no truth. There are no facts. There is only
the envelope of the confidence interval.
He could feel Lynne waiting invisibly behind him.
Wescott glanced at the table for a moment, looked away again;
the lid over one sunken eye had crept open a crack. He could
almost imagine he had seen nothing looking out.
Flesh Made Word 2

Something changed on the monitors. Here it comes...
He didn't know why it scared him. They were only nerve
impulses, after all; a fleeting ripple of electricity, barely detectable,
passing from midbrain to cortex to oblivion. Just another bunch of
doomed neurons, gasping.
And now there was only flesh, still warm. A dozen lines lay flat
on the monitors. Wescott leaned over and checked the leads
connecting meat to machine.
"Dead at nineteen forty-three," he said into his recorder. The
machines, intelligent in their own way, began to shut themselves