Филип Керр - The Second Angel

It is hardly surprising that healthy whole blood is now the single most important and the most valuable commodity on Earth, and that societies everywhere should have divided themselves into two unequal parts: a privileged minority who remain uninfected with P2 and are part of an autologous blood donation program (in practice they are coterminous), and an unfortunate majority whose P2 infection permanently defers them from ever becoming part of any predeposit ABO program.

The author has read all of the principal dystopian or anti-utopian [25] ‘Utopia’ was a word coined by Sir Thomas More with his book of the same name (1516); it is derived from two Greek words: eutopia, meaning ‘good place,’ and outopia, meaning ‘no place.’ From this, the real ironic sense of the book may be derived, i.e., that an ideal society can exist nowhere, and to seek such a thing is no more than human folly. However, the term is commonly taken to mean an ideal society. Dystopian literature refers to societies that are just the opposite of ideal. They arc nightmare societies. That works of dystopian literature greatly outnumber works of utopian literature may simply be a function of the fact that the creation of a universally unappealing society presents the author with a much more challenging task than the creation of an ideal one about which everyone might agree. novels of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and considers the events described here to be as nightmarish as any described by Wells, Huxley, Koestler, Zamyatin, Orwell, Rand, LeGuin, Atwood, Theroux, Amis, Spence, or Saratoga. For all these apocalyptic warnings about the future of human society, it is the author’s view that the world is in an infinitely worse condition today than could ever have been imagined by any of these previous writers. As Lord Byron says, ‘ ’Tis strange — but true; for truth is always strange; / Stranger than fiction.’

The greatest irony is that man passed his day of judgment completely unawares. The nuclear bomb exploded in 1945, and again in 2017, and everything that has happened since has just been fallout. For most people this is old news, and no one is bothered very much. How can you be bothered by something that has already happened, that still exists beyond your control, that defines you? The future — any future, even one of the kind once described in fiction — no longer exists. There is the status quo and not much else. All of which perhaps explains why there is no imperative — social or scientific — to do anything about changing things. Armageddon, Apocalypse, End Time, Holocaust — call it what you will, it’s been and gone and nobody really cares.

From the window of Dallas’s gyrocopter, the Terotech Building looked like the profile of a giant lizard, perhaps a chameleon, since everything — from the external climate surfaces to the height of the three glass stories — was subject to change, according to whatever environmental factors were predominant at the time. The seamless interior, with hardly a post, beam, or panel in sight, was no less interactive with the intel [26] Intelligent. workers who inhabited the place. Self-regulating, continually adapting through electronic and biotechnological auto-programming, the Terotech Building’s dynamic framework was more than just a shelter for those, like Dallas, who were privileged to work there, more than the achievement of mere ecological symbiosis. For the building was the very symbol of Terotechnology and its business. From the Greek word terein, meaning ‘to watch,’ or ‘to observe,’ Terotech led the world in the conceptualization and construction of so-called Rational Environments — high-security facilities for digital cash and other financial institutions, and blood banks. And Dana Dallas was the company’s most brilliant designer.

It was a good day for flying, cold but sunny and clear all the way up to forty-five thousand feet with little or no traffic to impede Dallas’s four-hundred-mile-per-hour progress. Not that Dallas took much pleasure in the machine. His mind was already occupied with his latest project and the various calculations he had requested that his assistant spend the night working on. He dropped the last fifty feet onto the ground in three seconds, undid his seat harness, and switched the twin turbocharged engine off. But before jumping out under the diminishing steel canopy of the rotor blades, Dallas took a good look around from within the safety of the bullet-proof bubble. It was always a good idea to see who was hanging around the gyro park before stepping out of your machine. These days, with all the bloodsucking scum around, you couldn’t be too careful. Even inside the comparative safety of the Clean Bill of Health area — the so-called CBH Zone. Deciding that everything looked safe enough, he opened the gyro and ran toward the glass doors of the Terotech Building, though not quickly enough to avoid a cloud of dust, stirred up by the speed of his landing, from entering along with him.

‘Morning, Jay.’

‘Morning Mister Dallas, sir,’ said the parking valet, running to take charge of Dallas’s gyro and taxi it to the chief designer’s reserved parking space. ‘How are you today?’

Dallas grunted equivocally. He removed his sunglasses, stood for a brief moment in front of the security screen, and breathed carefully onto the exhalo-sensitive film. It was a simple but effective device, designed by Dallas himself. [27] The Marcus DNA Comparator, after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180), who once said: ‘Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part’ ( Meditations, Book II, Chapter 2). The device works thus: carbon dioxide is cleared from the blood by the lungs; during the pulmonary circulation process, small quantities of hemoglobin bind to the CO 2 ; when expirated this CO 2 shows minute traces of the hemoglobin protein, and the DNA molecule, unique to every individual, can then be matched with a computer record in less than a second. He liked to joke that you could enter one of America’s most secure buildings just by blowing softly on the doors.

Having gained admittance to those parts of the Terotech Building that were not open to the public, Dallas took the elevator down to the sixth level, which was also the most secret. Most of Terotechnology’s work took place below ground, in dozens of windowless offices, each made more congenial by the facility of a faux fenêtre screen offering whatever view the occupant required. Dallas liked to look out of his office into the depths of a computer-generated ocean that was home to limitless shoals of brightly colored fish displaying a host of realistic behaviors. This was the view he found most conducive to thought. But there were other times when his fluctuating mood dictated that he look at rivers of red-hot magma, snow-capped mountain ranges, or simply an English country garden.

The undersea view invested the brushed steel, polished wood, and soft leather finishings of Dallas’s office with the feel of a private submarine. But despite the obvious luxury of these surroundings — and Dallas knew how fortunate he was — it was not uncommon for him to wish that he could simply have propelled his sumptuous sanctuary into the faux fenêtre’s unfathomable azure, far away from Terotech and the man next door, who was in overall charge of the company — his boss, Simon King. Dallas’s assistant, Dixy, was fond of quoting at him — she had an inexhaustible memory for this kind of trivia — when you’re between any sort of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting.