Continuity Clause
In the hour between hearings, Raina walked the narrow garden between the Commission buildings. It was a strip of bright stubborn green in a city that had accepted its climate and planted accordingly. She thought with her legs, sometimes the only honest way to think. She rehearsed the Act's axioms like a catechism and found, to her irritation and delight, that something had shifted. Not in the law, language does not mutate without help but in the premises. The world changes and the words sit where they were put and pretend not to notice.
Haroun caught up to her with the look of a man who enjoys argument more than victories.
Raina stopped beside a bench made of some synthetic that pretended to be wood and refused to splinter. "The Act presumes that a person is a pattern plus a position. We measure the pattern. We fix the position by allowing only one bearer. We do not allow the pattern to persist in two positions because that would create fraud," Haroun supplied. “And fragment responsibility," Raina said. "Anton says the second part runs the other way. That if he kills the elder, the continuity of responsibility is injured. We can dismiss that as poetry. We can also ask whether our accounting misses a term.” Haroun's mouth did that thing it did when his mind changed without wanting to. "Find me a term," he said. "But find it with a number attached.”
Raina called the engineer who had supervised the transfer. Engineers disliked hearings because hearings made engineers speak to people who lived by words. Raina disliked people who disliked speaking to people. She forgave the engineer in advance. "Ms. Kumar," she said over the bead. "The logs show the capture proceeded normally. The successor body accepted the engrams and stabilized. Then the original woke, that is abnormal.” "It is rare," Kumar said. Engineers are accurate before they are helpful. "It is within statistical expectation. It happens in two percent of cases. We bring the subject back under quickly.” "You failed to do so.” "I succeeded to misjudge his metabolism," Kumar said, not insulted. "The waking itself is not consequential.” "You are wrong," Raina said, and smiled so Kumar would know she meant no unkindness. "Sometimes the interface between process and policy is where consequences hide.” Kumar made a sound that might have been a chuckle. "You are the Commission's exception cell, Dr. Abara. You want mechanisms? I can give you one that will not help you as much as you'd like.” "Please." "The Lattice writes personality as a set of weights on decision networks. We record the subject rehearsing memories; we measure reward and aversion structures; we extract the parameters--the biases and utilities--into a vector. When we instantiate the successor, we install the vector. The successor is continuous because the mapping is continuous. The original, meanwhile, retains his vector. For a short period, two identical vectors exist. That is the duplication the Act forbids.” "Except they do not remain identical," Raina said. She had read enough of the literature to know. "They diverge.” "Immediately," Kumar said with professional pride. "Tiny drifts--milli-epsilon--within minutes, larger by hours. Choice perturbs the network, experience perturbs it more. In twenty-four hours, the vectors are measurably distinct though they still map to the same legal person." And in forty-seven minutes?” "Still a micro-drift. Nothing you can hinge a statute upon unless you are ambitious.” "Chair Mendel is not ambitious," Raina said. "He is careful. Counsel Haroun is ambitious on behalf of care. I am ambitious on behalf of truth. Drifts matter because we chose an epsilon. We could have chosen a smaller epsilon or a larger one. We chose an epsilon that preserves sanity and reduces litigation. Maybe we need a second epsilon.” "For what?” "For duty," Raina said.
She reconvened the parties after lunch because food makes law more bearable and because Anton had once written a paper about the utility of breaks in proof search. It had been a good paper and nobody had read it because it had not contained a joke. "Dr. Myles," she said to the elder, "you argue that euthanasia now would injure continuity of responsibility. Can you explain in a way that would satisfy a dull accountant?” "The dull accountant and I are allies," Anton said mildly. "Let me try numbers. Before transition, there exists one bearer of my obligations. Call him A. After transition, there's A and A'. The Act says: A dies; A' continues. The total obligation carried forward should be the same as if A had merely continued in a healthy body. Now suppose that during the overlap A discovers a new responsibility that A' does not yet know about. Or suppose A' discovers one A does not know about. If one dies immediately, the new responsibility may be lost." "Responsibilities are not secrets in a legal sense," Haroun said. "They can be documented.” "Some are secrets in a psychological sense," Anton said, turning his hands palm up as if to show no concealed coin. "A promise made and almost forgotten, revived by the smell of a book in recovery; an intention to apologize to a colleague at a conference next month. An intention not strong enough to be written as a task, but strong enough to be part of me, a pattern of care. If I die in the forty-seventh minute, that drops. The successor does not carry it unless he independently re-derives it. He might or he might not." "You are saying the overlap is a filter," Raina said, interested despite herself. "New obligations discovered in the overlap must be propagated to the successor before the original dies, or they are lost to continuity. Therefore, killing the original too soon injures the continuity the Act is meant to preserve.” "Yes," Anton said simply. "We wrote a law to prevent fraud and forgot to audit duty.” "And if the two of you disagree?" Mendel asked. "Suppose you both discover obligations and they conflict. Who decides which duties attach to the continuant?" "We do", the Antons said together, elder and new. They shared a small smile that was not planned and therefore trustworthy. "We would argue like mathematicians and arrive at a minimal set that satisfies both. Or we would flip a coin and let the loser borrow the winner's conviction." "Amusing," Haroun said. “Unreassuring." "Reassuring," Raina said. "Mathematicians are better at conserving obligation than committees."
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