Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

The videophone was signaling an incoming call. God knows how long it had been doing that; until the roar of escaping atmosphere abated, we couldn’t have heard it. Keeping the piton gun leveled at Hades’s back, I moved over and accepted the call. “Sullivan.”

“Mr. Sullivan, my God, is everyone all right?” It was Smythe’s voice, panic edging the cultured tones.

Chloe had almost finished sealing the edges of the map. Hades relaxed his crucifixion pose, and turned around to face me. His gray eyebrows went up as he saw the gun aimed directly at his heart.

“Yes,” I said. “Everything’s fine … for the moment. We, ah, sprung a leak.”

Another voice—one I knew—came on. “Jacob, this Quentin Ashburn. You’re still plugged into High Eden’s life-support system. It’s not designed to rapidly repressurize a moonbus, but your air pressure should return to normal in about an hour, assuming the leak is contained.

I looked past Hades. Chloe had finished, and the map seemed to be holding in place.

“It is,” I said.

I heard Quentin exhaling noisily. “Good.”

Smythe came back on the line. “What in God’s name happened?”

“Your Mr. Hades tried to rush me, and I had to fire my gun.”

There was silence for a time. “Oh,” said Smythe at last. “Is—is Brian all right?”

“Yes, yes, everyone’s fine. But I hope you know now that I do mean business. What the hell’s happening with getting the other me up here?”

“We’re still trying to reach him. He’s not at his home in Toronto.”

“He’s got a cell phone, for Christ’s sake. The number is—” and I recited it.

“We’ll try that,” said Smythe.

“Do that,” I said, rubbing my temples. “The clock is ticking.”

Maria Lopez rose to give the defendant’s closing argument a behalf of Tyler Horowitz. She bowed politely to Judge Herrington, then turned to face the six jurors and the alternate.

“The question here, ladies and gentlemen, is simple: what constitutes personal identity? There’s clearly more to it than mere biometrics. We’ve seen that anyone can impersonate someone else, with the appropriate technology. But we understand in our beating hearts that there’s something ineffable about being a person, something that goes beyond physical measurement, something that makes each of us uniquely ourselves.” She pointed with an outstretched arm at Karen, dressed today in a gray pantsuit. “This robot—this thing!—would have us believe that just because it mimics certain physical parameters of the dear, departed Karer Bessarian, that it is in fact Ms. Bessarian.

“But it isn’t. Through her writing, the real Karen Bessarian gave joy to hundreds of millions of people so, of course, we don’t want to see that beloved storyteller go. But she has gone; she has passed from this existence. We will mourn her, we will always remember her, but we must also have the strength that her son, who loved her more than anyone, has so admirably demonstrated: the strength to let her, as the tombstone she has been denied might have so elegantly put it, rest in peace.

“The departed Karen Bessarian was the original—and humans have always put a special value on originals, on first printings, on real paintings. Counterfeit money, forged passports: they’re not the real thing, and they should never be accorded the status of reality. You good men and women of the jury have the power here to put a stop to this nonsense, to halt this notion that a human being is nothing more than d ata that can be copied as easily as one copies a song or a photograph. We are more than that. You know it, and I know it: let’s make sure the whole world knows it.

“Perhaps you agree with Dr. Poe, the philosopher we heard from, that the thing sitting over there isn’t a person at all but rather a zombie. Or perhaps you think that it is a person.” Lopez shrugged. “Maybe it is. But, even if it is, it’s emphatically not Karen Bessarian; it’s someone else, some new creation. Welcome it as such, if you so choose—but don’t let it masquerade as someone it’s not. The late, lamented Karen Bessarian deserves better than that.

“The Declaration of Independence contains some of the greatest words ever written.” Lopez closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, her voice was full of reverence and wonder: “ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ ”

She paused, letting the words sink in, then exclaimed: “Endowed by their Creator! And the word ‘Creator,’ dear jurors, is written with a capital C—surely meaning God, not some factory in Toronto! ‘ Unalienable rights’—or inalienable , the way we usually say it today, and which means precisely the same thing: rights that cannot be transferred. Such was the intent of the great, great men who wrote and signed this Declaration—luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. I ask you today to honor these great men by hewing to their wisdom.

“A different physical entity—a different instantiation , to use the jargon—cannot possibly be the same person. Mr. Draper made a mockery of the Christian tradition with his cheap shots, but when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, the Bible tells us he did so bodily : the exact same physical form, coming back to life, not some new, separate entity. Indeed, we label deranged anyone who thinks they are Jesus, or any other dead person, because merely aping the behavior of someone does not make you that person. Without the same body, you’re not the same individual.

“We’re not talking about whether artificial intelligences created from scratch should be accorded the rights of personhood; that’s a battle for another day, if anyone ever manages to make such a thing. No, what’s on the table here is whether tricks of science—high-tech smoke and mirrors—should allow someone to play games with life and death. And I say no, resoundingly no.

“In this great state of Michigan, we rejected the claims of the depraved Jack Kevorkian that he should be able to move the line between life and death at his whim; you stood up against such nonsense fifty years ago, and now fate has called again upon the good people of Michigan to be the voice of reason, the conscience of a nation.

“We have drawn firm lines in this country: life begins when we cease to be potentially multiple individuals, and it ends with the cessation of biological activity in the brain. No one should be allowed to circumvent these rules for reasons of”—and here she looked directly at Karen—“personal convenience, or personal gain. Stop the madness here, ladies and gentlemen. Rule for Tyler. It’s the right thing to do. Because, after all, if you don’t find that Karen Bessarian died, do you not make a mockery of her life? That woman struggled, loved, gave birth, fought cancer, created art, laughed, cried, felt joy, felt sorrow. If we refuse to recognize that she died do we not also refuse to recognize that she lived?

“Don’t deny her reality. Don’t deny Karen Bessarian’s life and death. And, most of all, don’t deny her grieving son the chance to lay her to rest. Thank you.”

The jury was visibly moved by Lopez’s words. I’d seen two of the women and one of the men nodding repeatedly, and, although Herrington had quickly stopped it with a sharp rap of his gavel, the two men had conferred briefly once Lopez was finished.

Deshawn Draper was wearing a white rose in his lapel today, apparently a little ritual of his when giving closing arguments. “The lawyer for the defendant,” he began, nodding at Maria Lopez, “made much of the Declaration of Independence. Not, you’ll note, of the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights, which are the documents that actually form the basis of law in this country. Ms. Lopez could not invoke those hallowed souls the ‘Founding Fathers,’ or the ‘Framers of the Constitution,’ because those terms don’t apply to the authors of the Declaration of Independence, which was written more than a decade before the Constitution.