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

S-cube-enhanced Applied Biosystems unit understood, and an amber bead of oily, fragrant liquid oozed
from the output port. Veruschka neatly caught the droplet in a glass pipette.
Then she transferred it to the crib vat which Janna had prepared. The liquid shuddered and roiled, jolly
as the gut of Santa Claus.
"That pumptose is rockin' it," said Janna, marveling at the churning rainbow oil-slick.
"We going good now, girl," winked Veruschka. She opened her purse and tossed her own Pumpti into
the vat. "A special bath-treat for my Pumpti," she said. Then, with a painful wince, she dug one of her
long fingernails into the lining of her mouth.
"Yow," said Janna.
"Oh, it feels so good to pop him loose," said Veruschka indistinctly. "Look at him."
Nestled in the palm of Veruschka's hand was a lentil-shaped little pink thing. A brand-new Pumpti.
"That's your own genetics from your dirty fork at the diner," said Veruschka. "All coated with trilobite
bile, or some other decoding from your junk DNA." She dropped the bean into the vat.
"This is starting to seem a little bent, Veruschka."
"Well... you never smelled your own little Pumpti. Or tasted him. How could you not bite him and
chew him and grow a new scrap in your mouth? The sweet little Pumpti, you just want to eat him all up!"
Soon a stippling of bumps had formed on the tiny scrap of flesh. Soft little pimples, twenty or a
hundred of them. The lump cratered at the top, getting thicker all around. It formed a dent and
invaginated like a sea-squirt. It began pumping itself around in circles, swimming in the murky fluids.
Stubby limbs formed momentarily, then faded into an undulating skirt like the mantle of a cuttlefish.
Veruschka's old Pumpti was the size of a grapefruit, and the new one was the size of a golf ball. The
two critters rooted around the tank's bottom like rats looking for a drain hole.
Veruschka rolled up her sleeve and plunged her bare arm into the big vat's slimy fluids. She held up the
larger Pumpti; it was flipping around like a beached fish. Veruschka brought the thing to her face and
nuzzled it.
It took Janna a couple of tries to fish her own Pumpti out of the vat, as each time she touched the slimy
thing she had to give a little scream and let it go. But finally she had the Pumpti in her grip. It shaped itself
to her touch and took on the wet, innocent gleam of a big wad of pink bubblegum.
"Smell it," urged Veruschka.
And, Lord yes, the Pumpti did smell good. Sweet and powdery, like clean towels after a nice hot
bath, like a lawn of flowers on a summer morn, like a new dress. Janna smoothed it against her face, so
smooth and soft. How could she have thought her Pumpti was gnarly?
"Now you must squeeze him to make him better," said Veruschka, vigorously mashing her Pumpti in
her hands. "Knead, knead, knead! The Pumpti pulls skin cells from the surface of your hands, you know.
Then pumptose reads more of the junk DNA and makes more good tasty proteins." She pressed her
Pumpti to her cheek, and her voice went up an octave. "Getting more of that yummy yummy wetware
from me, isn't he? Squeezy-squeezy Pumpti." She gave it a little kiss.
"This doesn't add up," said Janna. "Let's face it, an entire human body only has like ten grams of active
DNA. But this Pumpti, it's solid DNA like a chunk of rubber, and hey, it's almost half a kilo! I mean,
where's that at?"
"The more the better," said Veruschka patiently. "It means that very quickly Pumpti code can be
recombining his code. Like a self-programming Turing machine. Wiktor often spoke of this."
"But it doesn't even look like DNA," said Janna. "There's scraps of it in all the labs at Triple Helix. I
messed with that stuff every day. It looks like lint or dried snot."
"Pumpti is smooth because he's making nice old proteins from the ancient junk of the DNA. All our
human predecessors from the beginning of time, amphibians, lemurs, maybe intelligent jellyfish saucers
from Mars -- who knows what. But every bit is my very own junk, of my very own DNA. So stop
thinking so hard, Janna. Love your Pumpti."
Janna struggled not to kiss her pink glob. The traceries of pink and yellow lines beneath its skin were
like the veins of fine marble.