"Paul J. McAuley - Gene Wars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

“There are ways around that. We have lease arrangements with five countries that have ... trade
imbalances similar to your own. We lease the genome as a loss-leader, to support governments who look
favourably on our other products...”

***

6

The gene pirate was showing Evan his editing facility when the slow poison finally hit him. They were
aboard an ancient ICBM submarine grounded somewhere off the Philippines. Missile tubes had been
converted into fermenters. The bridge was crammed with the latest manipulation technology, virtual
reality gear which let the wearer directly control molecule-sized cutting robots as they travelled along
DNA helices. “It's not facilities I need,” the pirate told Evan, “it's distribution.”

“No problem,” Evan said. The pirate's security had been pathetically easy to penetrate. He'd tried to
infect Evan with a zombie virus, but Evan's gene-spliced designer immune system had easily dealt with it.
Slow poison was so much more subtle: by the time it could be detected it was too late. Evan was
thirty-two. He was posing as a Swiss grey-market broker.

“This is where I keep my old stuff,” the pirate said, rapping a stainless-steel cryogenic vat. “Stuff from
before I went big time. A free luciferase gene complex, for instance. Remember when the Brazilian
rainforest started to glow? That was me.” He dashed sweat from his forehead, frowned at the room's
complicated thermostat. Grossly fat and completely hairless, he wore nothing but Bermuda shorts and
shower sandals. He'd been targeted because he was about to break the big time with a novel HIV cure.
The company was still making a lot of money from its own cure: they made sure AIDS had never been
completely eradicated in third-world countries.

Evan said, “I remember the Brazilian government was overthrown-the population took it as a bad omen.”

“Hey, what can I say? I was only a kid. Transforming the gene was easy, only difficulty was finding a
vector. Old stuff. Somatic mutation really is going to be the next big thing, believe me. Why breed new
strains when you can rework a genome cell by cell?” He rapped the thermostat. His hands were shaking.
“Hey, is it hot in here, or what?”

“That's the first symptom,” Evan said. He stepped out of the way as the gene pirate crashed to the
decking. “And that's the second.”

The company had taken the precaution of buying the pirate's security chief: Evan had plenty of time to fix
the fermenters. By the time he was ashore, they would have boiled dry. On impulse, against orders, he
took a microgram sample of the HIV cure with him.

***

7

“The territory between piracy and legitimacy is a minefield,” the assassin told Evan. “It's also where
paradigm shifts are most likely to occur, and that's where I come in. My company likes stability. Another
year and you'd have gone public, and most likely the share issue would have made you a billionaire-a
minor player, but still a player. Those cats, no one else has them. The genome was supposed to have
been wiped out back in the twenties. Very astute, quitting the grey medical market and going for luxury