"Egan, Greg - Demon's Passage, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

do to get a response? Do you want facts? Do you want a long-winded argument? Do
you want a reason? When did you ever need a reason before? Come and do it for
me, people, it'll make your day, you'll wet yourselves with sexual fluids then
fuck each other senseless in broad daylight, it'll feel so good to chop me up.
Forget about compassion, forget about ending my pain: killing me will turn you
on. I know these things, so don't try to hide it.
You want what? My life story? Seriously? Oh, why not. It's certainly
well-documented. What movie star or politician could tell you their precise
weight, as measured at twelve midday, on every single day of their life?
Weighing me is no simple task. Where do I cease, where does my host begin? They
can't chop me off every time they want to weigh me; it's not that they'd mind
killing so many rabbits, but rather that it might disrupt my steady growth. So
instead they attach little springs to me, and they make me oscillate, to the
very small extent that the blood vessels I share with my host allow me
independent movement. They study the resonances of the system (me, the springs,
the tangled bridge of blood vessels and the anaesthetised, clamped
almost-motionless rabbit) by measuring the Doppler effect on laser light bounced
off a dozen small mirrors stuck onto my skin. A ninety-seven parameter computer
model is then fitted (by means of an enhanced Marquat-Levenberg algorithm) to
the data thus obtained, and from these parameters a plausible estimate for my
mass can be calculated.
The technical name for a procedure of such sophistication and elegance is, I
believe, "wanking".
What do they actually do with my weight, once all their ludicrous machinery and
lunatic confidence has fed them a figure that they're willing to swallow? The
number is passed from one computer to another, appended to a file containing all
the past values, and then this file is plotted on the latest-model laser
printer. Every day they screw up yesterday's graph and pin the new one to the
wall, although the only difference is that one extra point. You could paper
several houses with my discarded weight graphs.
Today I was found to weigh 1.837 kilograms (plus or minus 0.002). Ah, I remember
reaching the magic kilogram, it seems like only days ago. "Who would believe,"
one of my keepers marvelled when I crossed the decimal point, "that a few years
ago this was just a twinkling in the Chief Oncologist's eye!" Yes, of course
they call it oncology: the word is missing from many quite hefty dictionaries.
Every garbo and his dog has heard of cancer. "The Division of Cancer Studies"
would not, you might argue, be a label noticeably lacking in dignity, but "The
Division of Oncology" bears the name of the deity logos whom they all claim to
serve; to abandon this small homage could be a dangerous blasphemy. Or, looking
at the question from another angle: what else would you expect from a bunch of
pretentious arseholes who believe that knowledge of Greek and Latin is the
watermark of a civilised man, who tell their wives and husbands, straight-faced,
omnia vincit amor, and offer their lovers postprandial mints?
But back to my life story, back to the very beginning. My parent was a single
rat's neuron. It used to be thought that neurons could not divide, but the Chief
Oncologist had spent thirty years studying the kinds of infections, poisons and
traumas that manage to send normal cells into frenzies of reproduction, and had
ended up not only understanding and anticipating his mindless enemy's
techniques, but utterly surpassing them. After all, what virus has access to a
few thousand hours on a supercomputer to predict the tertiary structure of the