Second Nature
The Bureau of Bio-iIdentity was one floor of a city designed by people who believed in glass and rectangles. Elena’s office contained a plant that had never learned resentment, a window oriented toward a bridge framed in cables like a harp, and stacks of paper because the city never abandoned paper. On one shelf were binders labeled with handwritten names of cases that had crafted small increments of the law.
Elena’s job—the one she had accepted after years in neuroscience labs and a second life as an ethics consultant—was to make law fit around new kinds of people without tearing. There had been no *Laws of Clonology* to guide them. There were instead statutes like the **Revised Authorship Act**, the **Identity Assurance Ordinance**, the **Derivative Personhood Clarification**. Each had paragraphs where complaint had been hammered into doctrine and doctrine filed into precedent. The problem with living minds in a legal system was that mind changed faster than code.
She took up the Echo Arts complaint again, read forever clauses corporate lawyers loved because forever was cheaper than renegotiation. There was a paragraph about derivative works and mindprints; a clause trying to bind future duplicates to old terms. If you squinted, you could call it a restraint of trade for a person not yet born and born with foreknowledge of his own jokes. But you also could say contract was contract, and Nathaniel had signed it when he still laughed.
The anonymous comics’ complaint was trivial in one sense—artists accusing another of theft is as old as paint—but serious in another. If audiences turned on NG-2 as a thief, then reputation could drown him faster than any injunction. Elena had seen careers end that way: not by law, but by consensus.
Original Nathaniel’s complaint was the tender one. It was not a lawsuit; it was a letter, scuffed and thoughtful. “There is a version of me **out there**—there is no other word for where he is—who is me but not me, who feels and thinks much as I did at a moment before a bad thing happened to me. He is doing what I used to do. If there is profit in that, am I not owed, even if he is owed also? I do not want to take his things. But I do not want to be erased by my own continuation.”
Elena read that paragraph three times and then once again, because when humans wrote like that about law, somewhere law could expand a little. She called her assistant, Mireya, who had a gift for bringing her the piece of information she didn’t yet know she needed. “I need a skeptical friend,” Elena said.
Elena drafted an email to Echo Arts requesting their contracts, prior uses of Nathaniel’s work, and their definition of *derivative* under the mindprint sections. She composed a note to Original Nathaniel asking to meet. She sent an open invitation for NG-2’s performance experiment to her own curiosity and waited as if she had set a flask on a lab bench and dropped in a reagent, to see what would precipitate.
The Experiment in a Dark Room
The late show was more volatile. The early audience on weeknights had eaten dinner at a sensible hour and come to be persuaded that laughter was good for them. The late audience had eaten in fragments and come to be persuaded of nothing. They were a tougher kind of honest. Theo was already in the second row, wearing a shirt the precise color of indifference. Mireya sat beside him, defensive and delighted. Elena sat three seats over, the aisle between her and escape. The Variance was full. NG-2 walked on without music. He let the PA’s noise fade not to silence but to *a listening quiet*. He did not greet them right away. He is going to use the quiet like a tool, Elena thought. And he did.
“I’m told there are people here tonight who think stand-up is beneath them,” he said, and looked with perfect courtesy at an invisible dot in the second row. Theo shifted and did not smile. “I can understand the attitude,” NG-2 went on. “On the list of professions that rescue humanity by running into burning buildings, stand-up is near the bottom. We’re somewhere between ‘influencer’ and ‘professional pet psychic.’ But you may be misunderstanding what the profession is.” He paced exactly one step and turned towards them. “There are two kinds of jokes. The first kind you could write down and examine. You could study the syllables, the rhythm, the way the misdirection works.” He told a simple joke about a man buying a bag that turned out to be a Cloak of Partial Invisibility, and how it only made him disappear from responsibility. Laughter warmed the room. “You can diagram that; you can put it in a book called **Comedy for Engineers** and it will sell well at holiday time. “The second kind of joke is not a joke.” He tilted his head. “The second kind is a **measurement**.” He pointed at Theo. It wasn’t crude or combative. It was like a professor inviting a student to look through a lens. “You,” he said. “You are wearing a shirt that says, ‘I have ambitions that could be mistaken for disdain.’ If I make you laugh, it is not because I constructed a joke. It is because I measured the phase state of this room, introduced energy, and observed how it organized.” Theo did not move, which was movement of a kind. “I said last night to a woman from the Bureau that I had an experiment,” NG-2 said. “May I walk you through it? If you dislike science, don’t worry: the math will do you the courtesy of remaining implied.” The audience actually leaned in, as if the stage had tilted toward them. The staff dimmed the bar light without being told. “We’re going to proceed in three parts. First I will tell what you will insist are jokes. Second we will adjust the room without telling you how. Third we will observe what jokes become true, that were not true before.” Someone whistled the whistle of a skeptic who also wants to be a participant. “Part the first,” he said, and told what seemed to be a routine about self-checkout lanes accusing humans of theft. But he focused on the phrase *unexpected item in the bagging area* as if it were cosmic doctrine. He took the audience through the tiredness of being asked to classify oneself for every transaction: *Select fruit type.* *Select ticket class.* *Select favorite identity from the curated shelf.* He riffed on the idea of a human being an unexpected item in the bagging area that is reality. The laughter changed color—not louder, but deeper. He abandoned the bit at precisely the moment a lesser comic would have milked it. He stepped to the side. “Part the second. If you are sitting in the aisle seats, please swap places with the person three seats inside. Don’t worry, I’m not going to collect your wallets.” He waited without impatience as the room shifted. Elena saw Theo roll his eyes and move, passing in front of Mireya, who did not hide her amusement. The room redistributed.
He continued without comment, as if moving people around in a paying audience were normal. He told now a bit about city signage. *This door to remain unlocked during business hours.* *No left turn 3–5 PM except school buses exits only do not back up.* He described being a clone reading those signs for the first time, trusting words too much and then exactly enough, and the line between **instruction** and **law** and **polite suggestion**.
As the bit built, he did another strange thing: he snapped a small elastic band on his wrist. The sound was soft, lost in laughter. He did it again later, after an applause spike. Elena, who distrusts coincidence in experiments, leaned forward. He was measuring his own measurement—keeping track of his audience as a mechanics student tracks the slide of a block on an incline.
“Part the third,” NG-2 said, and then he went quiet again. The quiet had a different flavor now. It tasted like attention that had been *shaped*, like metal that had been worked and knew it.
He told a story now that Elena could not have predicted from the earlier set. He told of going to a coffee shop after his activation, the way the barista said, “Name?” and he had said “Nathaniel,” and she had said, “We’ve got one of those,” and he had almost laughed then. But the part that was not a joke was when he described hearing, in the corner, a comedian holding court with three friends, trying out new material. “He was testing an idea about identical twins switching places for exams,” NG-2 said. “When you listen with the part of your mind that reads weather, you hear where a bit is going to go.”
There was a rustle, the rustle of **oh, so you do steal**. He let it rustle. “And then he saw me,” NG-2 said, “and the room invented a story that I had stolen—preemptively—the twin-switch bit from a man whose name I did not know. Do you see the experiment? I am not telling jokes. I am showing you how a room creates *accusations* out of clay that was meant to be *laughter*.”
He told now a joke that had something to do with identical twins and exams, except it had become a bit about identical laws and examiners, about how law tries to test a person to prove that the person is the person they promised to be. He put Theo in it without cruelty: “And then the proctor says, ‘Sir, your shirt is a plagiarist; it has clearly copied the color of the exit sign.’” Theo laughed then, one honest burst that he tried to turn into a cough.“There it is,” NG-2 said softly. “Measurement complete.”
He ended not with a closer but with a kind of equation: “Originals and copies, drafts and revisions, the version you intended and the version that shows up late. If you insist that only the first instance is the real one, you are saying that life is a mistake. If you insist that the second owes everything to the first, you are saying that progress is theft. If you insist there is only one you, you will be very lonely when you succeed.” He bowed, left. No music, only the argument of what he had done, vibrating.
Theo turned to Elena with reluctant respect. “All right,” he said. “That wasn’t beneath me. It was over my head and I liked that better.” Mireya said, “He moved you.” “He moved the whole room,” Elena said. “And he moved it in a way that I can document.” She opened her notes. She had once thought she left science for law; she realized now she had only changed rooms.
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