Distress полностью

"But we have our own histories, our own problems, our own aspirations. We're not fully autistic—and excision of Lamont's area, in adulthood, won't render us the same as someone who was born that way. Most of us have learned to compensate by modeling people consciously, explicitly—it takes far more effort than the innate skill, but when we lose what little we have of that, we won't be left helpless. Or 'selfish,' or merciless,' or 'incapable of compassion'—or any of the other things the murdochs like to claim. And being granted the surgery we've asked for won't mean loss of employment, let alone the need for institutional care. So there'll be no cost to the community—"

I said angrily, "Cost is the least of the issues. You're talking about deliberately—surgically—ridding yourself of something… fundamental to humanity."

Rourke looked up from the floor and nodded calmly, as if I'd finally made a point on which we were in complete agreement.

He said, "Exactly. And we've lived for decades with a fundamental truth about human relationships—which we choose not to surrender to the comforting effects of a brain graft. All we want to do now is make that choice complete. To stop being punished for our refusal to be deceived."

Somehow, I whipped the interview into shape. I was terrified of paraphrasing James Rourke; with most people, it was easy enough to judge what was fair and what wasn't, but here I was on treacherous ground. I wasn't even sure that the console could convincingly mimic him—when I tried it, the body language looked utterly wrong, as if the software's default assumptions (normally used to flesh out an almost-complete gestural profile gleaned from the subject) were being pumped out in their entirety to fill the vacuum. I ended up altering nothing—merely extracting the best lines, and setting them up with other material—and resorting to narration, when there was no other way.

I had the console show me a diagram of the segments I'd used in the edited version, slivers scattered throughout the long linear sequence of the raw footage. Each take—each unbroken sequence of filming—was clearly "slated": labeled with time and place, and a sample frame at the start and end. There were a few takes from which I'd extracted nothing at all; I played them through one last time, to be sure I hadn't left out anything important.

There was some footage where Rourke was showing me into his "office"—a corner of the two-room flat. I'd noticed a photograph of him—probably in his early twenties—with a woman about the same age.

I asked who she was.

"My ex-wife."

The couple stood on a crowded beach, somewhere Mediterranean-looking. They were holding hands and trying to face the camera—but they'd been caught out, unable to resist exchanging conspiratorial sideways glances. Sexually charged, but… knowing, too. If this wasn't a portrait of intimacy, it was a very good imitation.

Sometimes we can even convince ourselves that nothing's wrong. For a while.

"How long were you married?"

"Almost a year."

I'd been curious, of course, but I hadn't pressed him for details, Junk DNA was a science documentary, not some sleazy expose; his private life was none of my business.

There was also an informal conversation I'd had with Rourke, the day after the interview. We'd been walking through the grounds of the university, just after I'd taken a few minutes' footage of him at work—helping a computer scour the world's Hindi-speaking networks in search of vowel shifts (which he usually did from home, but I'd been desperate for a change of backdrop, even if it meant distorting reality). The University of Manchester had eight separate campuses scattered throughout the city; we were in the newest, where the landscape architects had gone wild with engineered vegetation. Even the grass was impossibly lush and verdant; for the first few seconds, even to me, the shot looked like a badly forged composite: sky filmed in England, ground filmed in Brunei.

Rourke said, "You know, I envy you your job. With VA, I'm forced to concentrate on a narrow area of change. But you'll have a bird's eye view of everything."

"Of what? You mean advances in biotechnology?"

"Biotech, imaging, AI… the lot. The whole battle for the H-words."

"The H-words?"

He smiled cryptically. "The little one and the big one. That's what this century is going to be remembered for. A battle for two words. Two definitions."

"I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about." We were passing through a miniature forest in the middle of the quadrangle; dense and exotic, as wayward and brooding as any surrealist's painted jungle.

Rourke turned to me. "What's the most patronizing thing you can offer to do for people you disagree with, or don't understand?"

"I don't know. What?"

"Heal them. That's the first H-word. Health."

"Ah."