"Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling - Junk DNA" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

web page. Pumpti dot-bio. You don't want to miss our IPO."
"Who's your venture angel?"
Janna shook her head. "That would be confidential."
"You don't have one, then." Kelso pulled his blanket over his grimy shoulders. "And boy, will you ever
need one. You ever heard of Revel Pullen of the Ctenephore Industry Group?"
"Ctenephore?" Janna scoffed. "They're just the biggest piezoplastic outfit on the planet, that's all! My
dad used to work for them. And so did I, now that I think about it."
"How about Tug Mesoglea, Ctenephore's Chief Scientist? I don't mean to name-drop here, but I
happen to know Dr. Tug personally."
Janna recognized the names, but there was no way Kelso could really know such heavy players.
However, he was cute and he said he'd dreamed about her. "Bring 'em on," she said cheerfully.
"I definitely need to meet your partner," said Kelso, making the most of a self-created opportunity.
Hoisting his grimy blanket, Kelso trucked boldly through the bank's great bronze-clad door.
Inside the ex-bank, Veruschka Zipkinova was setting up her own living quarters in a stony niche
behind the old teller counter. Veruschka had a secondhand futon, a moldy folding-chair, and a stout
refugee's suitcase. The case was crammed to brimming with the detritus of subsistence tourism: silk
scarves, perfumes, stockings, and freeze-dried coffee.
After one glance at Kelso, Veruschka yanked a handgun from her purse. "Out of my house, rechniki!
No room and board for you here, maphiya bezprizorniki!"
"I'm cool, I'm cool," said Kelso, backpedaling. Then he made a run for it. Janna let him go. He'd be
back.
Veruschka hid her handgun with a smirk of satisfaction. "So much good progress already! At last we
command the means of production! Today we will make your own Pumpti."
They unpacked the boxed UPS deliveries. "You make ready that crib vat," said Veruschka. Janna
knew the drill; she'd done this kind of work at Triple Helix. She got a wetware crib vat properly filled
with base-pairs and warmed it up to standard operating temperature. She turned the valves on the bovine
growth serum, and a pink threading began to fill the blood-warm fluid.
Veruschka plugged together the components of an Applied Biosystems oligosynthesis machine. She
primed it with a data-stuffed S-cube that she'd rooted out of the twine-tied plastic suitcase.
"In Petersburg, we have unique views of DNA," said Veruschka, pulling on her ladylike data gloves
and staring into the synthesizer's screen. Her fingers twitched methodically, nudging virtual molecules.
"Alan Turing, you know of him?"
"Sure, the Universal Turing Machine," Janna core-dumped. "Foundations of Computer Science.
Breaking the Enigma code. Reaction-diffusion rules; Turing wrote a paper to derive the shapes of
patches on brindle cows. He killed himself with a poison apple. Alan Turing was Snow White, Queen
and Prince all at once!"
"I don't want to get too technical for your limited mathematical background," Veruschka hedged.
"You're about to tell me that Alan Turing anticipated the notion of DNA as a program tape that's read
by ribosomes. And I'm not gonna be surprised."
"One step further," coaxed Veruschka. "Since the human body uses one kind of ribosome, why not
replace that with another? The Universal Ribosome -- it reads in its program as well as its data before it
begins to act. All from that good junk DNA, yes Janna? And what is junk? Your bottom drawer? My
garbage can? Your capitalist attic, and my start-up garage!"
"Normal ribosomes skip right over the junk DNA," said Janna. "It's supposed to be meaningless to the
modern genome. Junk DNA is just scribbled-over things. Like the crossed-out numbers in an address
book. A palimpsest. Junk DNA is the half-erased traces of the original codes -- from long before
humanity."
"From before, and -- maybe after, Wiktor was always saying." Veruschka glove-tapped at a
long-chain molecule on the screen. "There is pumptose!" The gaudy molecule had seven stubby arms,
each of them a tightly wound mass of smaller tendrils. She barked out a command in Russian. The