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

You're wrong, wrong, wrong: there is no such calculus of pain and morality. You
fucking accountants, you think you can pay it all off in your heads just by
juggling the prices until the balance comes out straight! What can I call you:
crass, naive, blind, cynical, stupid? Nothing touches you, nothing moves you.
Like clockwork automatons, blundering about, smiling jerkily, oblivious to
everything but the sad, certain unwinding of your springs.
Forgive me. These insults simply burst out against my wishes, I'm totally unable
to suppress them. (Well, what can you expect from a sacful of perversely
proliferating neurons? Restraint?) And what good do they do me? None at all.
Abusing you won't help me. Pleading with you won't help me. And as for any
attempt at rational argument: since I've already told you my opinion of logic,
how can I ever hope to win you over with reason, sweet or bitter?
I have only one choice left.
So hang on to your guts, people, and I'll tell you what I'm for.
Natural brain tumours are not composed of neurons. Why, then, did the Chief
Oncologist drive his slaves so long and hard to create me? Studying me has
fuck-all to do with curing brain cancer, I promise you that. You in the front,
stop squirming! Please! Switch off your radios, your TVs, your VCRs and your
idiot computers, just for five minutes, if you can, and listen to the story of
your future.
The Chief Oncologist of the Australian Biotech Playground is no longer concerned
with cancer as disease. Few people are, these days; the biochemistry will soon
be so well understood that merely stopping tumour growth will present no
challenge whatsoever. The end of oncology? Never!
Natural tumours often secrete valuable hormones in massive amounts; in an
otherwise healthy body, a disaster of course, but transplanted into someone
desperately lacking the substance in question, a tumour could be a living cure.
Attenuated cancer cells, stringently controlled, will internally manufacture and
supply whatever's missing; no pills, no injections could ever compete.
Insulinomas for diabetics. Dopamine-secreting tumours for sufferers of
Parkinson's disease. And if no off-the-shelf cell line fulfils your special
need, why, a gene-spliced pharmacocarcinoma can always be tailor-made.
The Chief Oncologist, of course, has heard all this long ago. Hormone secretion,
big deal! Somewhat primitive and unchallenging for his ambitious tastes. But
these simple drug and hormone factories will serve him in a fashion: in time,
the public perception of tumours will swing one hundred and eighty degrees, and
then, perhaps, the world will be ready for his epoch-making work.
Oncology won't be alone in this miraculous reversal. Sicknesses of all kinds
will vanish at an alarming rate, (the way species of animals have been for
centuries), but the knowledge gained in their eradication will outlive its
enemies, and will not lie idle. Since a popular movement for the conservation of
disease is not likely to gain widespread support, the science of illness will be
dead in thirty years.
Long live the science of health!
Long live the science of human improvement, of longevity research, of plastic
surgery, of eugenics, of flexible fertility. Death to the primitive and unclean
uterus (go and wash your vagina out with soap and water!). Death to the zygote
that could ever grow to less than six foot ten. You want to be tall, strong and
handsome? Easy! Cells will do anything if told the right lies, and they're
learning new chemical fibs every day. You want your future offspring to be tall,