JК
Isle Of The Dead :: Zelazny Roger
Страница: 36 из 110"
"And you came to me ... ?"
"Because you are the only link we could find. You knew all of them--well."
My first reaction was disbelief, but I concealed it and said nothing. Recall Tapes are the one thing in the universe which I had always considered inviolate, unreachable, for the thirty days of their existence--and then they were gone forever. I tried to get hold of one once and failed. Their guardians were incorruptible, their vaults impenetrable.
And this was part of another reason why I don't visit Earth much any more. I don't like the idea of wearing a Recall Plate, even temporarily. Persons born there have them implanted at birth and they are required by law to wear them for as long as they remain on Earth. Persons moving to Earth for purposes of residing there are required to have them installed. Even a visitor must bear one for the duration of his stay.
What they do is monitor the electromagnetic matrix of the nervous system. They record the shifting patterns of a man's being, and each is as unique as a fingerprint. Their one function is to transmit that final pattern, at the moment of death. Death is the trigger, the shot is the psyche, the target's a machine. It's an enormous machine, and it records that transmission on a strip of tape you can hold in the palm of your hand--all that a man ever was or hoped to be--weighing less than an ounce. After thirty days, the tape is destroyed. That's it.
In a small and classified number of cases over the past several centuries, however, that wasn't it. The purpose for the whole strange and costly setup is this: there are some individuals who, dying suddenly, on the planet Earth, at crucial points in significant lives, depart this lachrymose valley with information vital to the economy! technology/national interest of Earth. The whole Recall System is there for the purpose of retrieving such data. Even the mighty machine is not sufficiently sophisticated to draw this information from the recorded matrix, however. That is why every wearer of the Plate has a frozen tissue culture, somewhere. This culture is associated with the tape and held for thirty days subsequent to death, and both are normally destroyed together. Should Recall be necessary, an entire new body is grown from the culture, in an AGT (that's an accelerated growth tank), and this body duplicates the original in all things, save that its brain is a tabula rasa. On this clean plate, then, is superimposed the recorded matrix, so that the recalled individual possesses every thought and memory which existed in the original up until the moment of death.
"And you came to me ... ?"
"Because you are the only link we could find. You knew all of them--well."
My first reaction was disbelief, but I concealed it and said nothing. Recall Tapes are the one thing in the universe which I had always considered inviolate, unreachable, for the thirty days of their existence--and then they were gone forever. I tried to get hold of one once and failed. Their guardians were incorruptible, their vaults impenetrable.
And this was part of another reason why I don't visit Earth much any more. I don't like the idea of wearing a Recall Plate, even temporarily. Persons born there have them implanted at birth and they are required by law to wear them for as long as they remain on Earth. Persons moving to Earth for purposes of residing there are required to have them installed. Even a visitor must bear one for the duration of his stay.
What they do is monitor the electromagnetic matrix of the nervous system. They record the shifting patterns of a man's being, and each is as unique as a fingerprint. Their one function is to transmit that final pattern, at the moment of death. Death is the trigger, the shot is the psyche, the target's a machine. It's an enormous machine, and it records that transmission on a strip of tape you can hold in the palm of your hand--all that a man ever was or hoped to be--weighing less than an ounce. After thirty days, the tape is destroyed. That's it.
In a small and classified number of cases over the past several centuries, however, that wasn't it. The purpose for the whole strange and costly setup is this: there are some individuals who, dying suddenly, on the planet Earth, at crucial points in significant lives, depart this lachrymose valley with information vital to the economy! technology/national interest of Earth. The whole Recall System is there for the purpose of retrieving such data. Even the mighty machine is not sufficiently sophisticated to draw this information from the recorded matrix, however. That is why every wearer of the Plate has a frozen tissue culture, somewhere. This culture is associated with the tape and held for thirty days subsequent to death, and both are normally destroyed together. Should Recall be necessary, an entire new body is grown from the culture, in an AGT (that's an accelerated growth tank), and this body duplicates the original in all things, save that its brain is a tabula rasa. On this clean plate, then, is superimposed the recorded matrix, so that the recalled individual possesses every thought and memory which existed in the original up until the moment of death.