Mindscan (28 page)

I stood at the back of the central aisle of the moonbus, and looked at my three hostages — damn, I hated that word!

"Honestly," I said, "I don't want to hurt anyone."

"But you will if you have to," said Brian Hades. "That's what you told Smythe."

"Smythe won't let it go that far," I said. "I know he won't."

But Hades shook his head, his white hair glinting in the recessed roof lighting. "He h
as
to let it go that far. Immortex has hundreds of billions invested in this uploading technology — and it's all predicated on the assumption that the durable copy becomes the real you. We can't let that … that
conceit
… be successfully challenged.

Not by you here, and not by anyone down there on Earth. Fortunes are at stake.

Lives
— uploaded lives — are at stake."

Hades got up out of his chair, but he seemed just to be stretching his long legs. He glanced at Akiko and Chloe, then turned back to me. "Look, there's no law up here — no police, no governments. So you haven't committed a crime. And I heard what Smythe said — there are extenuating circumstances. Your surgery—"

"Bet you wish you'd had me killed on the operating table!"

Hades spread his arms. "It's not your fault," he said. "You're not responsible. Just give me the piton gun, and walk away from this. Immortex won't do anything to you; there'll be no repercussions. You can end this right now."

"I can't do that," I said. "I'd like to, but I don't know any other way to get what I want — what I
deserve
."

"God, you are
so
selfish," said Akiko. "I can't believe they picked you."

I felt my eyes narrowing. "Picked me? Picked me for what?"

But Akiko ignored that. "What about us? Look at what you're doing to us!"

"They're not going to force a situation in which people might get hurt," I said.

"No?" said Akiko. "How long do you think they'll let you hold all of High Eden hostage? How long before the other residents start to panic? They have to put an end to this."

"It's going to be fine," I said. "I promise."

Now Chloe was speaking: "You promise? What the hell is
that
worth?"

I moved a bit closer to the two women; I so wanted to calm them, to reassure them.

Suddenly, Hades leapt. It's a myth that people move in slow motion on the moon: objects
fall
in slow motion, but if you kick off the floor with all your strength, you'll go flying like a bat out of Philadelphia. Hades was five meters away, but his leap easily carried him that distance, and when he collided with me, I went flying backwards, ramming against the moonbus's rear bulkhead.

Suddenly, the two women were in motion, as well. Akiko was out of her chair and also leaping toward us. Chloe grabbed a metal equipment case and came bounding at us, looking as though she intended to brain me with it.

I still had the gun held tightly in my right hand. But Hades had pinned that arm against the bulkhead, keeping me from getting a shot at him or either of the women.

Desperate times call for desperate deeds…

I swiveled my wrist as much as I could and fired a piton. Here, in the cabin, the report of the gun was deafening. Almost instantly, the piton hit its target. I'd wanted to just drill a hole through the outer hull, but I hadn't been able to aim well. The piton hit a window, going through the vinyl shade in front of it as if it were tissue paper, and breaking the glass beyond. Air started hissing out of the cabin, and a w
hoop-whoop-whoop
alarm began to sound. The shade, with a small hole in it was puckering outward. From the sounds of it, the tempered glass behind it had shattered completely, and the only thing that was keeping the atmosphere from rushing out in a torrent was the little hole in the shade that it had to go through.

We were all looking at the vinyl shade now, watching it bow outward more and more. Any moment now, it would be torn loose by the rush of escaping atmosphere, exposing the whole empty window pane; when that happened, the cabin would lose all its air in a matter of seconds.

Hades looked totally furious, and his pony tail was whipping out horizontally behind his head in the breeze. He still wanted to keep me pinned, but he knew if he didn't do something soon, we'd all die. With a frustrated shout of "Damn it!" he let go of me and called to the women, "Hurry! Find stuff to cover the window with!"

The vinyl shade was visibly tearing at its edges, and air was pouring out even more rapidly. Chloe, momentarily hesitating between beating me to death with the metal box she was holding and saving herself, dropped the box, which obligingly fell in slo-mo before clanking against the floor and bouncing up half a meter, then falling again. She moved over to the nearest chair, and tried pulling up the seat cushion — but, of course, moonbuses never flew over water; their cushions weren't removable flotation devices.

Akiko, meanwhile, had gone for the first-aid kit, hanging on the wall next to the entrance to the cockpit. She scrambled to get it open, and found a package of gauze.

It was doubtless less solid than she'd have liked, but she rammed some of it into the hole in the vinyl shield.

But, although the roar of escaping air diminished somewhat, that didn't do anything for the fact that the vinyl was still tearing loose at its edges. I thought about getting everybody to cram into the cockpit; the door to it looked air-tight. Indeed, Hades had already gone in there. For a moment. I was afraid he was going to lock the door shut behind him. saving himself while leaving us to suffocate. But he emerged a moment later — with a large, laminated moon map! He rushed to the window, and — just as the vinyl blind blew out — spread out the map, and held it as tightly as he could against the curving bulkhead. It was being sucked up against the wall, but the fit wasn't exact; air kept hissing out.

Akiko found adhesive tape in the first-aid kit, and started sealing the edges around the map. Meanwhile, I got all the tubes of suit-repair goop, and tossed them to Chloe, who started squirting that around the map's edges, too. Hades still had his arms spread out, holding the map.

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.

"Indeed, it's getting on to three hundred years since the Declaration was signed, and, unlike the Constitution, of which we jurists minutely examine each and every word and nuance, we've all come to recognize that the Declaration is an artifact of its times — a litany of long-ago grievances against George III, then-king of Great Britain.

"No, we must filter the Declaration through our modern sensibilities. For instance, when we hear the words 'All men are created equal,' we believe today — even if the authors of the Declaration back in the eighteenth century did not — that all
people
, not just men, are created equal; women are just as much entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

"More: when Jefferson signed that document, by men, he meant
white
men. Blacks like me were not men in his eyes; after all, he owned slaves, and therefore was directly responsible for denying them their liberty. No, it's not to the Declaration that we should look for answers; indeed, I'm sure the judge will instruct you that the Declaration of Independence has no judicial weight.

"But I
do
believe history has much to teach us. So, let me invoke another set of great words from our past that comment on the issue of personhood." Deshawn's voice rang out, in a credible imitation of the original. " 'I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' "

Deshawn smiled at each juror in turn. "
That
is what should count! The content of one's character. And, as we have shown, the content of the plaintiff's character is identical to that of the biological original.

"Still, we would be wrong to dwell too much on the past — for what we have here is a question of the future. The Mindscan process that Karen Bessarian has gone through was hugely expensive … but all new techniques are. None of you on the jury are over sixty years of age, and several of you are much younger. By the time you are facing the difficult decisions that Karen Bessarian recently had to face, uploading will be inexpensive — it'll be an option available to
you
. Don't close that door. Your life can continue, just Karen Bessarian's has.

"The woman sitting over there — and she is a woman, in every sense of the word —
is
Karen Bessarian, to the very life. She remembers being a little girl in the 1960s in Georgia. She remembers her first kiss in the 1970s. She remembers giving birth to her son Tyler, there, and feeding him at her breast. She remembers the thrill of seeing her first book published. There's a concept in the law known as
scienter
— it refers to the knowledge that a person possesses, the awareness. This Karen Bessarian has the knowledge of the original; she
is
the same person.

"More than that, she has the same feelings, the same hopes, the same aspirations, the same creativity, and the same desires she always did. And you
should
give considerable weight to her desires — for this is
exactly
what she wanted. The biological Karen Bessarian intended for this continuation to be the real her, to control her assets, to live in her house, to go on enjoying her life, to continue telling stories of the characters the whole world loves.
That's
what Karen Bessarian wants: it's her decision, and it hurts no one except greedy relatives. Who are we to gainsay it?

"When you retire to deliberate, you'll hold not just Karen Bessarian's fate in your hands, but that of everyone else like her. including" — suddenly he was pointing at me — "that man there, Karen's boyfriend Jake." He shifted his aim slightly. "And that man, next to him, my own father — an upload whom I accept with every fiber of my being as being my dad.

"What will happen to these warm, loving, caring people if you rule for the defendant?

If you believe that the woman over there is not Karen Bessarian, then she will have n
othing
. No money, no reputation, no identity, and no rights. Do we want to go back to the days when there were people among us without rights? Do we want to return to the days of yore, when the definition of who was endowed with rights was narrow — men, not women, and only white men at that?

"No, of course not. We live in an enlightened present, and want to make an even better tomorrow." He walked over to the plaintiff's table and put his hand on Karen's shoulder; Karen brought her hand up and interlaced her fingers with his. "Do the forward-thinking thing," continued Deshawn. "Do the moral thing. Do the correct thing. Recognize that this woman is Karen Bessarian. Because, ladies and gentlemen, as you've surely seen during these proceedings, she truly
is
."