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

proteins that it codes for?
Once the electronic divinations seemed auspicious, he moved to the laboratory.
Step by step, month by month, he (or rather his instruments, human and
mechanical) assembled the molecule foretold in phosphor, presaged in printouts.
Like a tornado, the project would sweep in over-curious bystanders, extract
their vital juices by means of vibration and centrifugal force, and then spit
out the remnants. As the Chief Oncologist still boasts, with a chuckle, to those
who are paid to listen, nod, and screw him at out-of-town conferences, "We used
up more PhD students in the first year than rats!" He, of course, travelled at
the eye of the storm, in perfect safety, in perfect stillness.
Finally, inevitably, success. Their painfully contrived seducer burrowed its way
to the heart of a neuron, grasped and prised apart the virginal DNA (I imagine
the Chief Oncologist triumphantly waving a blood-speckled nuptial sheet from a
balcony, to the cheers of his drunken colleagues below), and perverted the
celibate thinker into a helpless, bloated breeding machine.
Thus I was begun.
The neuron donor was my first host. I suppose you could call her my mother. I
killed her in a month, and then they grafted me onto the brain of my next
victim. They call this technique "passaging", rhymes with "massaging".
Oncologists love it, they've been doing it for years. Although I'm certainly the
brightest passaged tumour in the world, I'm far from being the oldest; within
this basement there are twenty-five distinct communities of rats, apart from my
"birthplace", and all have legends of demons past. In fact, one is currently
cursed with an eighteen year-old obscenity which they call Spinecrusher.
The oncologist responsible for Spinecrusher does not call it Spinecrusher. You
think she calls it by a number? A date? A precise phrase of technical jargon?
Oh, no. She calls it "Billy" to her colleagues, and in her mind, "my baby". A
month ago, she addressed a gathering of scientists at the Biotech Playground on
the fascinating discoveries that bits of Billy had provided her, and then,
switching her voice into here-comes-some-light-relief tone, said:
"Billy turned eighteen last week, and so my team had a little birthday party for
him. We ate cakes and icecream, and pinned birthday cards to the wall, and I
gave him a key to the animal house. And do you know what? Just to show us all
what a healthy young thing he was, he finished off his two hundredth rat!"
They laughed. They loved it. They applauded. Through her eyes I saw row after
row of delighted, smiling faces. The tumour survives, flourishes, leaving two
hundred corpses behind; nobody would laugh if it could happen this way to
humans, but this is cancer on their side, cancer under their control. Slaying
two hundred rats is pretty virile for a pipsqueak five-gram tumour, and they
glowed inside at young Billy's achievement, shook their heads and grinned with
pride, like a gathering of parents hearing that a rebellious teenager had come
good after all (and beaten up the local undesirables at last, after years of
picking on nice boys and girls).
Billy's creator felt a deep, almost dizzying sensation of warmth, and recalled
the homecoming of her eldest brother, who'd reputedly killed two hundred Viet
Cong.
". . . finished off his two hundredth rat!" she said, and they all laughed. That
particular rat, number two hundred, had a theory about humans. He suggested that
perhaps, despite their obviously large heads, considerable manual and verbal
dexterity, their complex nesting and decorative structures assembled from