Title:The Bone Thief
Author(s): Jefferson Bass
Publisher(s): HarperCollins
Pages: 352
Year: 2010
Format: MOBI
Language: English
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The random article:
He shrugged. “I think he’s underestimating the difficulties. Guys like him always do. They think they’re smarter than the rest of us. Smart enough to fix anything, solve anything. Smart enough to cheat death.” He picked at the edges of a fingernail. “You remember all the buzz about cryonics a few years back? Deep-freeze your way to immortality?”
“Vaguely. Wasn’t it Ted Williams, the baseball great, who had his head cut off and frozen when he died?”
“Right. Theory is, the brain—and memory, and personality, all that shit—can be preserved in liquid nitrogen and then thawed out and revived and spiffed up in a few decades or centuries and grafted onto a cloned body. Give me a break.”
I smiled. “It does sound like they’re selling water from a high-tech Fountain of Youth, doesn’t it?”
“Faust’s given money to those guys,” Sinclair said, studying my reaction as he played that card. “He’s funneled research funding to Alcor, the outfit in Arizona that has Ted’s head on ice. He’s on their scientific advisory committee, too.”
He was probably gratified by my look of surprise. “Well, that’s certainly interesting,” I said. “Plant enough seeds, some of them bear fruit someday. Probably not the cryonic immortality seeds, but maybe carbon-fiber bone scaffolds.”
He shook his head.
“So…clearly you’re not worried that the biomedical engineers are going to put you out of business.”
“Not a chance. People used to claim that the computer revolution would lead to the paperless office. Instead we use more paper than ever before. Same with human tissue. Even if Faust manages to create synthetic tissues—shit, especially if he manages to do it—the need for the real deal will always increase. Always.”
Our drinks arrived. I reached for my wallet, but Sinclair stopped me. “They’re running a tab for us,” he said. “We’ll settle up later.” As the waitress set his scotch down, Sinclair laid a hand on her wrist. “We’re trying to talk some business here,” he said, “and we’re having to shout over the music. Is there a quieter room where we could talk?”
“There’s the Archives Room,” she said. “Nobody’s in there right now.”
“Sounds perfect.” Sinclair slid out of the booth. “Lead on.”
She took us through a wide door and a short hallway at one side of the main floor and showed us into a smaller, curtained-off room, ten or twelve feet square, with leather couches lining three of the four walls. In the corners between the sofas, end tables held potted ferns, leather-bound books, and brass lamps with shades of deep green glass. A waist-high stand in the middle of the room held a massive volume, which I recognized as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. I revised my earlier opinion of The Library’s lame literary d?cor; originally I’d given it two stars, but now I decided it might rate three. Sinclair sank into the corner of one sofa, gesturing with his glass to the adjoining sofa for me. In the background I could still hear the relentless throb of the music, but the volume had dropped by three-quarters, and I felt sure the audio recording would be much clearer here than in the main room. I also felt far more comfortable in here, away from the nonstop parade of exposed breasts and buttocks.