"Sean Williams - The Perfect Gun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

I resolved to dig some more, later, and scrolled through the remainder of the
file. The coroner's preliminary report on the body of the suicide was next,
and last. Much of it was dull and involved a high percentage of medical terms
I had to look up in a dictionary. It wasn't until the end that I found
 something unexpected.
Somehow, the police had succeeded where Marilyn had failed and located an ID
for the dead man. His name matched that on the car-rental contract: Wallace
Derringer. No other information was given, apart from an approximate age:
mid-forties. No bruises, no wounds apart from a single, self-inflicted gunshot
wound to the head and a slight scratch on his left wrist (where I'd taken the
tissue sample). The lack of injury suggested that he had not been coerced;
flash-burns from the muzzle of the gun further corroborated my eye-witness
account.
Suicide. On the surface of it, nothing could have been simpler--except no one
committed suicide any more. Not even in C20. If life in the city didn't agree
with you, you moved elsewhere, to C19 or any of the other habitats. Failing
that, you rejoined the rest of humanity and travelled to the stars. Failing
that, you might then blow yourself away. But not here, not at the beginning of
your journey.
Unless . . . The germ of a thought nagged. Perhaps it wasn't the beginning of
the journey after all, but the end.
I had barely thought this when I spotted something odd. Halfway down the tenth
page, in the middle of a long discussion about the dead man's physical
condition, was a cross-section of Derringer's skull.
If I hadn't seen similar scans before, before I moved to C20, I wouldn't have
noticed it. I would have glanced at the picture and moved on, missing one
crucial piece of evidence that either had been overlooked as unimportant by
the coroner, or deliberately buried in the data.
Wallace Derringer's skull had been empty, even before the gunshot. Mostly.
Apart from a thin, outer layer of cerebrum and the central walnuts of
cerebellum, pons varolii, thalamus and corpus callosum, his brain had
contained little more than fluid. Much like severe symptoms of
encephalitis--except that that possibility could be ruled out. Even in C20,
although only just, medical technology was able to regrow the tissues of the
brain. Had he been truly encephalitic he would have been treated here; for a
severe case he would have been shipped elsewhere. And a severe case of brain
damage would not have gone unnoticed. Which could mean only one thing.
Wallace Derringer wasn't a man at all. He was a savant.
I skimmed through the rest of the report, hoping to find further evidence but
not really expecting to. The scan of the skull must have been required by law
in the case of a gunshot wound to the head, or else it wouldn't have been
there at all. If the coroner had deliberately covered up the abnormal data,
any other potential evidence would be omitted, or similarly fudged.
And sure enough, I found nothing further.
The suicide had been a savant then, not Wallace Derringer--which changed things
dramatically. The growing and training of organic robots was outlawed in C20,
the required technology being way too advanced. Cloned from the host's donor
cells, fast-bred in a vat reactor, then modified to ensure a minimal
intelligence, it would have been identical to the host in almost every
respect, trained to follow a few rudimentary routines--like simple phrases,