Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

“You may call me Gabe.”

I thought about protesting. We weren’t buddies here. He was the enemy; I had to remember that. Still, calling him “Doctor” would give him an edge in status. “All right. Gabe,” I said at last. “I’m not crazy.”

“No one said you are,” Gabe replied.

“Then why are you the one talking to me?”

“We have no one on hand versed with dealing with these sorts of situations. Somebody has to do it, and the chef hardly seemed appropriate. And, after all, you do have Mr. Hades held—you have Mr. Hades detained.”

Interesting that he censored himself before he said the word ‘hostage.’ He probably had some hostage-negotiation handbook on screen in front of him, and it probably told him to avoid that word. Not a bad call; I didn’t like the word myself. But I needed clout .

“Now,” continued Smythe, “first things first. Does anyone with you have any special needs? Any medical problems?”

Yup: definitely working through a checklist.

“Everyone’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

I looked at the three of them, all craning in their seats to look back at me. “Is everyone okay?” I asked.

Akiko looked like she was going to say something, but ultimately didn’t. The others were silent. “Yes,” I said “Everyone’s fine. And I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“I’m very glad to hear that, Jake. Very glad. Now, do you I think we might open a video link? The families of the … the…” He must have found the approved word. “… d etainees would certainly like to see their faces.”

“I’m calling the shots here,” I said—choosing that word just to make him wince; it’s fun playing mind games with psychologists. If hostages was a verboten word, so too, doubtless, was shots .

“Of course,” said Smythe. “Absolutely. Now, what are … what can I do for you?”

Demands . He’d surely been about to ask me what my demands were, but again had stopped himself. We were negotiating here. Negotiating is about win-win, about shifting positions; it couldn’t work if there were inflexible demands.

I decided to tweak him again. “I have only one demand. I require my personhood back. Return me to Earth, and let me take up my old life. Grant that, and everyone is free to go.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Nice and vague; I suspect the manual told him never to commit to anything he couldn’t be sure of delivering. “Don’t humor me, Gabe. You can’t give me back my personhood. But there is one person who can: the other Jacob Sullivan, the duplicate of my mind inside a robot body, back on Earth.”

“And there’s the rub, Jake. Surely you see that. Earth’s far away. And you must know we promised never to contact your replacement. He needs to do his best to put the fact that the original is still extant out of his mind.”

Extant . Not living. Extant. “Make an exception,” I said. “Get the other me on the radio.”

“We’re on the far side of the moon, Jake.”

“And you can bounce radio signals off the communications satellites in synchronous orbit above the moon’s equator. I’m not stupid, Gabe, and I have thought this through. Call me back when you’ve got an answer.”

And with that, I closed the channel.

Karen was still shaking from having had to talk about her long-dead daughter. I held her for a while, out in the court-house corridor. The jury, of course, had been removed to their waiting room during the recess, so they didn’t get to see this—which was fine; it wasn’t for public consumption anyway. I found myself stroking Karen’s artificial hair, with my artificial hand, hoping somehow that the gesture was giving her comfort. Karen calmed down somewhat by the end of the recess. We went back into the courtroom. I took my seat in the gallery; Malcolm Draper was already there, and Deshawn was already back at his desk. I watched as Maria Lopez came in. She looked … I’m not sure exactly how to describe it. Frustrated, maybe. Or defiant. Things hadn’t gone the way she’d planned a few minutes ago. I wondered what she’d really expected to happen.

The door to Judge Herrington’s chambers opened. “All rise!” called the clerk, and everyone did so. Herrington took his place at the bench, rapped his gavel, and said, “On the record again in Bessarian v. Horowitz . Ms. Lopez, you may continue your direct examination of Ms. Bessarian.”

Lopez rose, and I could see her take a deep breath, still unsure of herself. “Thank you, your honor.” But she said nothing more.

“Well?” demanded Herrington after about fifteen seconds.

“My apologies, your honor,” said Lopez. She looked at Karen—or perhaps looked beyond Karen, and to the right a bit as if she were focussing on the Michigan flag rather than the witness. “Ms. Bessarian, let me rephrase my earlier question. Have you ever had an abortion?”

Deshawn was instantly on his feet. “Objection! Irrelevant!”

“There better be a point to this, Ms. Lopez,” said Herrington, sounding angry.

“There most certainly is,” said Lopez, some fire starting to come back into her, “if you’ll permit me a little latitude.”

“A little latitude is all your going to get—like from here to Warren; don’t take us clear across the globe.”

Lopez did her trademark bow. “But of course, your honor.” She repeated the question, giving herself another chance to make the jury hear the loaded word at its end. “Ms. Bessarian, have you ever had an abortion?”

Karen’s voice was small. “Yes.”

There was chatter in the courtroom. Judge Herrington frowned his small frown and banged his gavel.

“Now, we don’t want to portray you as a criminal here, Ms. Bessarian,” said Lopez. “We wouldn’t want the jury to think you had committed that act recently, would we? Will you tell the court when you terminated the life of a fetus?”

“In, um … it was 1988.”

“Nineteen Eighty-Eight. That would be—what?—fifty-seven years ago, no?”

“That’s correct.”

“So if you had not terminated that fetus, you would have another child—a son or a daughter—some fifty-six years old.”

“I—perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” said Lopez. “I think the answer is yes.”

Karen was looking down. “Yes, I suppose.”

“Fifty-six years old. A mature man or woman, quite likely with children of his or her own.”

“Objection, your honor,” said Deshawn. “Relevance!”

“Move it along, Ms. Lopez.”

She nodded. “The real point is that the abortion was executed in 1988.” She put a special emphasis on the verb executed . “And that was … let me see now … forty years before Roe v. Wade was overturned by Littler v. Carvey .”

“If you say so.”

“And Roe v. Wade was the case that temporarily legalized a woman’s ability to terminate the life she was carrying, isn’t that so?”

“It was not intended to be a temporary measure,” said Karen.

“Forgive me,” said Lopez. “My only point was to assure the court that you had terminated a fetus when it was in fact legal to do so in these United States, correct?”

“Yes. It was a legal procedure. Carried out in a public hospital.”

“Oh, indeed. Indeed. We don’t want to put a picture of back alleys and bent coat hangers into the jury’s mind.”

“You just did,” said Karen, defiantly. “This was a legal, moral, and common procedure.”

“Common!” said Lopez, with relish. “Common, yes. The very word.”

“Objection!” said Deshawn, spreading his arms. “If Ms. Lopez has a question for the witness—”