《Kidnapping 》作者：- Greg Egan【EPUB】

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A KIDNAPPING By Greg Egan The office’s elaborate software usually fielded my calls, but this one came through unannounced. The seven-metre wallscreen opposite my desk abruptly ceased displaying the work I’d been viewing — Kreyszig’s dazzling abstract animation, Spectral Density — and the face of a nondescript young man appeared in its place. I suspected at once that the face was a mask, a simulation. No single feature was implausible, or even unusual — limp brown hair, pale blue eyes, thin nose, square jaw — but the face as a whole was too symmetrical, too unblemished, too devoid of character to be real. In the background, a pattern of brightly coloured, faux-ceramic hexagonal tiles drifted across the wallpaper — desperately bland retro-geometricism, no doubt intended to make the face look natural in comparison. I made these judgements in an instant; stretching all the way to the gallery’s ceiling, four times my height, the image was open to merciless scrutiny. The ‘young man’ said, ‘We have your wife/Transfer half a million dollars/Into this account/If you don’t want her to/Suffer.’ I couldn’t help hearing it that way; the unnatural rhythm of the speech, the crisp enunciation of each word, made the whole thing sound like a terminally hip performance artist reading bad poetry