Continuity Clause

Operation Tally

By the second day the press smelled story. Duplication cases were catnip to opinion pages that specialized in outrage shaped into questions. The Commission closed the hearing room because the Commission had learned to love doors. Raina did not read the feeds. She read the Act again and found the clause she had half remembered and then forgotten: Clause Seven, drafted in a late-night session by tired minds who still knew the difference between an axiom and a crutch.

Clause Seven: In cases where immediate compliance with the single-bearer provision would result in loss of material obligations not yet transferred to the successor, the Commission may extend the overlap period to a maximum of seven days to permit transfer of obligations so identified, provided that the original shows no malicious intent to retain dual personhood and that the successor consents.

"Haroun," she said, too full of satisfaction to be smug, "we forgot our own escape hatch.” "It's designed for wills and contracts," he said. "Not for feelings.”

"Obligations are not feelings," she said. "They're the measurable consequences of feelings.”

"That is an ugly sentence, I love it," Haroun said, and brought Clause Seven to Mendel as if it were a birthday cake.

Mendel read it twice. "I remember this," he said, surprised. "We inserted it to cover cases where the successor could not name the beneficiaries of a trust because the original had not been asked to rehearse the relevant memory during capture. We were embarrassed by the sloppiness of human rehearsal. We should have been kinder to human conscience."

"Then we can extend the overlap," Raina said. "A week.

You two will live with yourselves for seven days and test this premise that responsibility discovered in overlap would otherwise be lost.” Anton-new looked relieved in a way that made Raina forgive him for a youthful paper whose prose had been pretentious. Anton-elder looked tired.

"A week," he said.

"Yes. And then we decide."

danzig-talk

Raina did not trust experiments designed by the subjects of those experiments unless the subjects were mathematicians. Even then, she placed a watcher in the room. A young associate named Danzig who, like most young associates, had chosen law because he liked rules and was learning to like people. Danzig would not intrude, he would tally.

”What am I tallying?" he asked, his stylus midair like a heron uncertain about a fish.

"Obligations discovered," Raina said. "Of three kinds: explicit duties with legal consequences; implicit duties that would reasonably be recognized by a decently socialized adult; and personal commitments that a rational person would not mock even if they would not share them.”

"That's a taxonomy.”

"It's an apology in a lab coat," Raina said. "Do your best."

The first day, Anton-elder wrote a letter he had avoided writing for twenty years to a brother he had avoided speaking to for thirty. He did not send it, He showed it to Anton-new. They argued about phrases. They agreed on a draft. They did not send it because sending it would satisfy obligation too quickly; they wanted to be sure the obligation was real and not nostalgia.

"Count as implicit duty," Danzig said, with the prim confidence of a young man who has never needed to apologize for a decade of silence.

"Count it as personal," Raina said. "Let the old men have their pride. We'll file it in implicit after they send it, if they send it.”

Anton-new called a former student to offer a fellowship recommendation that he had once promised in passing and then forgotten until recovery. The student had long since found a different mentor and a different path. The call was awkward and lovely.

"Explicit," Danzig said. "Promises that attach to career are not sentimental. They are infrastructure."

On the second day, Anton-elder asked the successor to let the original attend a meeting at which a small vote would nudge a grant toward a lab that had never learned to write the kind of proposal committees liked.

"You dislike committees," Anton-new said cheerfully. "You are indulging yourself."

"I dislike unjust outcomes achieved by committees," Anton-elder corrected. "There happens to be a committee in the way of a just outcome."

"You can go," Anton-new said. "I will go the next day and apologize to the committee for your manners. We will count that as an implicit duty to our colleagues.”

"You're charming," Anton-elder said. "I dislike that about you."

On the third day, they argued about a book they had meant to write and had not. They split it in half. The successor would write the proofs as explanation for working engineers; the elder would write the foreword and the epilogue as contrition for having not written it sooner.

"Personal," Danzig said. Raina made a face. "All right," he said. "Implicit, barely. The world does not need another book, but the successors of our younger selves do."

Raina watched the tallies with the satisfaction of a cook whose oven keeps temperature. At the end of five days, the list of obligations discovered and propagated to the successor was long enough to embarrass the Act into humility. They had not cheated. They had not inflated the count with niceties. They had found things that were part of Anton that would have been lost if they had killed him in the forty-seventh minute.

"Clause Seven suffices," Mendel said. "We can close. The Act is uninjured.”

"Not quite," Raina said. "What happens on day eight?"

Next Page >