Continuity Clause
Impossible cases were Dr. Raina Abara’s passion rather than merely difficult ones. It was a taste she could admit to in private if not in minutes of the Continuity Commission, the treasured clarity. It produced position papers dense with syllogisms and graphs, and fields of numbers that assumed feelings only to bound them, never to indulge them. The Commission did not like tastes, Raina was its exception. Every bureaucracy, like every brain, kept a handful of cells that did not fire on schedule.
She walked the corridor to Hearing Room Three with a thin brief tablet under her arm and the contented dread of a mathematician approaching a conjecture that had refused to be proved for too long. The door recognized her without show; the room greeted her with the amicable neutrality of engineered wood and very old air. Chair Mendel sat already, hands folded on the green felt that reminded Raina that even rational people cling to traditions. Counsel Haroun adjusted the recording beads behind his ear and nodded once. On the far side: two men with the same profile.
Anton Myles sat near and behind Anton Myles. The older one, older by thirty years, if that meant anything, he had the parchment pallor of a mind that had survived too many committee meetings. The younger--grown to match the elder in all visible details but just 33, had slept better. They both watched Raina with the same patient curiosity.
”Dr. Abara," Chair Mendel said. He had an honest voice. "You requested the matter be heard informally before we open it to the full Commission.”
She turned to the Antons. "Good morning, Dr. Myles.” "Good morning," said the one on the left. "And good morning," said the one on the right.
Their cadence was identical and their eyes were identical. Their recorded engrams, Raina had verified, were identical to the tolerance set by the Transition Protocol: drift less than epsilon across all autobiographical networks. The Lattice file, captured as usual under anesthesia and rehearsal, had cloned not only Anton's declarative knowledge but the way he preferred tea to coffee when he felt he ought to prefer coffee to tea. It had captured his annoyances, his fondness for a student who had once argued cleverly and incorrectly, and the exact timbre of his laugh when presented with a problem that yielded too easily. It had captured his fear of dying. That had been the point.
"Chair," Raina said, "before we recite the Continuity Act, I want to be sure we agree on the facts.” Haroun tapped his bead. "Stipulated: The subject, Dr. Anton Myles - the elder, age sixty-three, mathematician by profession, applied cognitive systems by trade, executed a standard Transition. The mnemonic capture was clean. A clone body, grown to physiological parity and inoculated for immunological mischief, received the transfer.” "Whereupon," Chair Mendel continued, because he could not resist finishing sentences when they offered themselves as proofs, "the original elected the customary euthanasia per contract and consent.” "And then elected to withdraw consent," Raina said, "in the forty-seven minutes after the successor woke but before the legal interval closed."
Both Antons watched her. The older Anton's hands were folded. The younger's fingers rested against one another as if preparing to make a cupboard of thought. "You were not supposed to do that," Mendel said to the older Anton. He spoke without rancor. "The Act presumes a single continuant.” Anton, the elder, nodded. "The Act presumes many things, most of them useful and some of them unexamined.” Anton, the newer, tilted his head. "If you kill him," he said in a tone so calm it sounded like reason, "you kill me again. That is the first thing I knew after 'hungry'."
Raina had testified for the Act ten years before, and had meant every word. The Continuity Act had been written after the first experiments made a hole in ordinary grief. If a person could pass their memories and personality to a successor body, what was lost when the original died? If the successor was continuous, why keep the original? The law had answered with a compromise of rigor and mercy. It permitted legal survival through continuation so long as duplication did not persist. The original would be offered painless euthanasia after transfer; the successor would inherit rights and duties; assets and obligations would move with the pattern rather than the meat. The law was not cruel. It was scrupulous. It had prevented abuses the press had loved to speculate about. It had prevented families from being held hostage by two people claiming to be one. It had kept continuity from becoming a pyramid scheme. It had not met Anton Myles.
"Doctor," Raina said to the elder, "you signed the consent like everyone else.” "I did," he said. "I signed it cheerfully. I had prepared for the end with a rational patience. But I woke in recovery after sedation. At first a surprise, to wake at all and I knew something was extremely wrong." "You woke?" Mendel asked. "The original is kept sedated to remove the distress of witnessing self-continuation and to prevent interference with protocol.” "I woke," Anton said simply. "The nurse panicked and called for a technician. They attempted to adjust the drip. I was not confused, I was not delirious. I was... present, in a way that I have not been since I was thirty. I asked to see my successor before I made a final decision. They refused. I refused to die.” "That deviation is recorded," Haroun said. "It triggered a legal hold while we reviewed."
Raina turned to the successor. "And you?” "I woke hungry," Anton-new said, "and then curious, and then I demanded tea. I wanted to tell Dr. Saito that her proof was beautiful and ugly. I wanted to email a former student and ask whether he had forgiven me for a curt remark I made in 2079. I knew the terms of the Act and I found them reasonable; I also knew that if the other me consented to die for me I would inherit not only his rights but his courage. I felt a love for him I cannot describe without insulting it.” "Yet you are here to argue that he should not die," Mendel said. "Because I felt something else," Anton-new said. He glanced at the other Anton with the tenderness one might reserve for a parent or a ghost. "I felt that if he died now, the continuity would be injured. Not the continuity of memory. The continuity of responsibility.” Haroun frowned. "That's rhetoric.” "It's accounting," Raina said. She had liked Anton's papers more than she had liked the man, before today. The papers were meticulous. The man had been impatient with committees. "I know what he means.”
Next Page >