"mayflies01" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

Mayflies
Chapter 1

Groundwork

Once there had been a man, a quietly intelligent family man, but he died. They did their damnedest to pull him out of it, yet only managed to save his brain. For that they found a use. To state it meanly, it became a computer. To state it grandly, it saved the human race.
But first they had to teach it, just as though it was a schoolchild. Like any bright kid, it asked where it came from. It didn't want to know, in the sense of a hunger for knowledge, but it was bothered by a hole in its data banks, and, as it had been programmed to do, it inquired.
They replied with the tapes from the lab, and they didn't edit or soften them, because later it would have to deal with even more information that could be even more unpleasant. If it couldn't cope, they needed to know immediately. So they ran the recordings, deliberately risking sensory overload, for good teachers don't describe reality, they show it.

Gerard K. Metaclura, M.D., Ph.D.: hurrying across the laboratory, he evokes the twenty-eight year-old marathon medallist he was fifteen years earlier. Seventy-four kilograms sleek out his 182 centimeters, many in the legs that won him all those races. Brown hair covers his face as he bends to check a computerized tissue typing. When he straightens, his green eyes flash pleasure. He murmurs thoughtful praise to his assistant, who works eighteen-hour days just to earn a single dazzling grin.
Side by side, they stroll to the door, past the dusty, blood-stained benches littered with pipettes, electron microscopes, thermal and sound probes, splotched hard copies of journal articles . . . they banter about whose turn it is to fetch the coffee on this sunny morning, the 27th of May, 2277. Each insists it is the other's. Secretly, each believes it is his own.
Metaclura throws up his hands. "Enough! Let random chance dictate." He digs for a coin, which he flips-too high. It dings off a light fixture and clatters onto the scuffed linoleum. Metaclura stoops for it, but-
Gotcha! chuckle the earthquake trolls.
-the building quivers, like a dog shaking off water, and while shrieks and sirens ring in the corridors (instinctively, if mistakenly, somebody screams, "They nuked Frisco!"), the 12-meter-long fixture (which, due to the ignorance of an apprentice electrician, has been supported only by the wires and the soundproof tiling) tears free of its bindings and plummets.
Squish! Its aluminum edge guillotines Metaclura. Its weight crushes his torso. His head-green eyes bulging and mouth gaping, as though to protest this grotesquery-pops into the horrified hands of his assistant.
Who screams. And (holding the head-by the hair-well away from his body) vomits. And screams again. And then, realizing that no one will come to his aid, is impelled by an icy detachment, schizophrenic in its distance from his true feelings, to stagger into the adjoining laboratory, where Dr. Metaclura's magnum opus coruscates chromely.
It is, in its basics, a life-support machine.
Dr. Metaclura has spent eleven years adapting it into a device that would save even the most critically injured, as long as they could be attached before death becomes irrevocable. An accident took his first teenage love, a one-car crackup on a lonely road so far from civilization that, although the ambulance found the girl still breathing, ten million dollars' worth of equipment could not keep her alive during the banshee ride to the hospital. Deciding mankind deserved better, he dedicated his career to its conception.
It resembles a clear, rigid spacesuit with a mini-computer on its back,
The assistant thrusts him (it?) into it without delay: brain cells die quickly; four bloodless minutes is perhaps the outside limit.
Closing the faceplate activates it. While an amber ready light glows on the computer, and sterile foam spurts into the empty limbs and torso, micro-sensors imbedded in the plastic ascertain Metaclura's condition in a smattering of nano-seconds. Modulated magnetic fields guide lightweight tubes into the torn, dripping vessels of the neck. At first contact with his (its?) blood, the sensitized tube reacts, and transmits its findings ("AB-") through a thread-thin wire that runs its length. The computer, upon receipt of the message, throws the appropriate switch. Crimson flows the plastic tubing, which feeds directly into and out of the research hospital's blood bank.
Dr. Metaclura does not open his eyes, blink, and say, "Thanks, I needed that." He is awash in death trauma, which is just as well.
The assistant, then, having discharged his responsibility to the best of his ability, sprints out of the lab, another scream already tearing at his vocal cords.
By the time a burly neuro-surgeon brings him down with a flying tackle that wrings involuntary applause from the gawking graduate students, the assistant is gibbering helplessly.
No one questions the blood on his coat, or the absence of his mentor Metaclura.
Instead, they sedate him, and his starfish wrigglings limpen into unconsciousness.
One pudgy, officious doctor tells the onlookers, "It's all over, no cause to be arsky, you can go back to work now." The surgeon reaches for the nearest viphone. Two minutes later, a gurney rumbles down the long corridor, pauses until two smooth-wheeled ordbots have swung the assistant on board, and rumbles off again.
An hour later, the Bio-Neuro-Chemistry Department Office Manager finds Metaclura. She shrieks. And faints.

[Sullen coals sulk in a bed of ashes.]

"Christ Almighty, man," barked Dr. Josephus Goddinger, Head of BNC and perhaps Metaclura's oldest friend, "aren't you getting any displays?"
"Uh-uh." Mike Robbins was not intimidated: he had a job to do, he was doing it, and he was doing it superbly. Anybody who disagreed could go try to find himself somebody better. "Nothing." He stretched, then wiped the fine sheen of sweat off his forehead. "Flat. Blank. Quiet."
Robbins' thumb jerked at Metaclura's skull, mounted like a trophy on the life-support device. The suit itself had been removed, as had the helmet. The head sat atop the machine, which hissed and burbled, which clicked and whirred. Though neatened up-the ragged flesh having been trimmed, new capillary attachments inserted, the exterior washed clean-it was a gruesome sight. Those forced to work with it found some consolation in the fact that the eyelids were shut.
They weren't now, though. Prodded by Robbins' probes, they blinked the rhythm of the top pop song on the charts. When cymbals crashed, teeth snapped.
"He's alive, though," argued Goddinger, "and if he's alive-"
"-it ought to be displaying, I know, I know, I've been hearing the same city gas for three months, now." Impatiently, he pried a sensor off the undead skin. The head stuck out its tongue, then frowned. "But nothing's even warm inside, and I'll thumb for that. All right?"
"You're the expert." Goddinger leaned against the lime-green concrete wall. Its roughness snagged his nylon sports shirt. "His family wants him back."
"So give, let them bury it. That's all it's good for now."
"But he's alive!" he protested, loyal to the last.
"Hear they've got a chicken heart in New York City that's been alive for two hundred some years . . . " He shut his equipment bag and told it to wait in the lobby. It trundled away obediently. "Their proof that it's alive is that it hasn't decayed. What can I say? In my professional judgment, Doctor, this man is dead. Termed. Plant him somewhere, and let his family stop fussing."
"No." Goddinger set his jaw. "I want his brain."
"For what, a paperweight?" A professional, and an expert as well, Robbins was flippant like some people are tall. It was part of him. If one hired the meter-reader part, one got the flippancy for free.
"No, to-" he stopped himself before he could say bring him back "-uh, run more tests."
"Why bother?"
Facing the wall, he could dab his eyes in privacy, and think of a rationale that at least sounded scientific. When he had it, he turned back: "To find out why the machine failed. It's been a major grant for eleven years, and what do we have to show for it? This!" He swept a hand at Metaclura's pallid cheeks. ."Why didn't it sustain him?"
"Death trauma. Those 'others you got-" the McLaughlin Research Center contained, at last count, two hundred one chatting, crying, watching, snuffling, reasoning, bodiless heads "-you cut them off under anesthesia, and went out of your way to keep from hurting them. This guy, he's beheaded by a light fixture and impaled by a schizoid who never comes out of sedation. You don't know what the hell the assistant did before booking him up. So what's his name here-"
"Metaclura," he said gently.
"-he thought he was dying, and since it musta hurt like hell, he took off. Death trauma hosed him right out."
"Off? Out?" Goddinger frowned. "He's right here."