Continuity Clause
Day eight mattered because the Act had been drafted with fear and cleaned with reason. The week was a grace period, not a loophole. At the end of seven days, duplication must end. Raina did not need the press to tell her that any compromise would be read as cowardice by people who need the world to be strict in order to be kind. She also did not need Haroun to tell her that cowardice and mercy sometimes wear each other's cloaks.
They convened. The hearing room smelled like paper and old coffee because even in a rational bureaucracy paper and coffee bring comfort. Anton-elder looked older than a week should make a man look. Anton-new looked older in a different way: the age that caring imposes when a mind decides to pay attention beyond convenience. Raina kept her voice even.
"Consider a final argument," Anton-new said. "It is not metaphysical, it is procedural. Continuity is not only a vector of memory and personality. It is also a vector of reputational capital and trust. People trust Anton to do certain things. One of us will do more of them if both of us exist long enough to share the load, we have seen it this week. Our combined capacity exceeds the single capacity the Act presumes. Killing one of us reduces the trust the world may place in Anton--not the trust of individual friends, which is sweet and trivial. The trust of institutions that rely on Anton to keep picking up specific pieces of the world and holding them in place.” "That is an argument for keeping useful people alive," Mendel said, not unkind. "We cannot privilege the famous.” "You can privilege the role," Raina said. "The Act already does, it preserves roles across flesh. It is not about love for the famous, it is about love for the work.” "Even so," Haroun said, "the law requires a single bearer.” "It does," Raina said. She lifted her tablet and displayed a graph, because graphs fetishize truth, and sometimes the fetish helps. "But here is a curve the Act did not model. Call it the Responsibility Accretion Rate, RAR. For most transitions, RAR is flat after capture; responsibilities are documented well; the successor inherits them; no loss occurs; duplication is dangerous and unnecessary. For a class of transitions--the class of people with distributed obligations that cannot be enumerated without lived rehearsal. RAR spikes during overlap and declines after propagation. In such cases, Clause Seven is mandatory." "We have used Clause Seven," Mendel said. "Yes," Raina said. "And here is the second curve, the Responsibility Capacity Curve, RCC. It measures not the number of obligations but the ability to fulfill them without degradation. For most transitions, RCC is roughly equal between original and successor. But there is a transient maximal window during overlap when RCC_total exceeds RCC_single due to complementary attention patterns. The two versions of a person do not attend to the same cues. For a week, they see more together than either would alone. If the work tied to a role is brittle. If failure during that week cracks something, then the rational act is to maintain duplication until the brittle interval passes." "You are proposing a safety exception," Haroun said. "Temporary duplication when RCC_total is demonstrably higher than RCC_single and the cost of failure is high.” "Yes," Raina said. "We do this with bridges and servers. We should do it with selves.” Mendel tapped the table with a careful finger. Morning light made a slow stripe across the felt. “The Act allows duplication for a week. You propose that we add a second exception for critical roles, extending overlap until brittleness subsides." "A narrow exception," Raina said. "Hard to claim. Easy to measure. Mandatory reporting. Daily audits. The public can tolerate nuance when we quantify it and when we appear ashamed of our own cleverness.” "You are ashamed?" Mendel asked, amused and tired. "I am pleased," Raina said. "And I am humble before the fact that we missed the term until a man insisted on not dying and embarrassed us into honesty.”
They wrote the exception in language dull enough to survive courts. They required the Commission to publish a daily RCC differential if it invoked the clause. They required the subjects to forswear property tricks and fame games; they limited public appearances and prohibited book contracts until unification. They offended nobody who wasn't already offended and comforted nobody who needed comfort to accept reason.
The brittle interval in Anton's case turned out to be thirteen days. During that time, a grant committee bent toward fairness; an old brother agreed to meet for coffee; a former student opened an email and cried in a way that complicated men hate being seen to do; a lab that did not write good proposals learned to write better ones because Anton-old agreed to teach, and Anton-new agreed to be patient.
On the fourteenth day, RCC_total equaled RCC_single to within epsilon. They held hands (which made the press salivate) and signed the unification consent. Anton-elder died that afternoon with the calm of a man who has arranged his desk. Anton-new walked home and made tea and answered three letters with the gentleness of a man who has no need to prove he is the only one who can answer.
The feeds acted mercifully for a day and vicious the next, as is their custom. Raina did not read them. She read a stack of petitions instead: people who had decided, in the shock of anesthesia lifting, that they loved their originals too much to let them go. Most were ordinary sentiment. Some were grief in search of a technical flag to wave. A few were like Anton's: people whose roles were brittle, whose capacities in overlap were truly higher, whose obligations, if dropped, would crack something beyond repair.
The Commission used the clause four times in the first year. Twice it saved something nobody outside a narrow band of practitioners noticed, and that was precisely why it mattered. Once it was invoked and then rescinded when RCC_total stubbornly refused to exceed RCC_single because the two versions of a person hated one another in a way that turned obligation into a game. The fourth time it was invoked for a school principal, which made the feeds foam until the Commission published the numbers and the school sent a quiet thank-you on lined paper that smelled like chalk and oranges.
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