Second Nature
In law and life, a rule holds: the simplest explanation isn’t always true, but it’s a good place to put your coffee while you test a more complicated one. The simplest explanation for a second NG-2 was an illegal copy. But clones were tracked closely. The city required **activation attestation** under penalty; the clinics were audited; the Bureau had teeth, and Elena knew where each tooth had bitten. But the simplest explanation was walking around the city watching comedy and writing on his palm. He met her in a park in daylight, which is where you meet people to whom you are about to say, “I need you to trust me while I say something surprising.” “There is an NG-3,” he said without ceremony. “I do not know who made him or why, but I have seen him twice. The first time he was behaving like a study of me. The second time he was watching an open mic and writing on his hand. The way he wrote was—arrogant. You don’t learn that in the jar.”
“You’re sure he is a clone of Nathaniel.” “His gait,” NG-2 said. “The way he scans a room. We learned a lot from the same machine before we diverged.” “Why didn’t you report it immediately?” “Because I am a comedian,” he said, and looked ashamed. “I wanted to write a bit about it first. I also wanted to be sure I wasn’t tired or flattered by the idea that someone would make me. I followed him and he disappeared into a building with a badge reader I could not bypass without becoming a punchline with legs.” “Do you know where?” He gave her an address not far from Echo Arts’ building but not the same. She did not smile. The world is never as neat as you want it to be; it is sometimes neat enough for jurisprudence. “Do you think NG-3 is stealing jokes?” “I think he might be paid to collect the impression that I steal,” NG-2 said. “The best way to make someone look like a thief is to put fingerprints on things they never touched and then throw those things at them.” “Echo Arts claims they could build a response-curve performer,” Elena said. “The timeline suggests a rehearsal,” NG-2 said gently. She put a hand to her forehead as if it would help it think. “All right,” she said. “We will do this by the book. We will get a warrant for the records of that building; we will obtain any CCTV we can. We will ask you to perform an experiment again, but this time with the control I want.” “What control?” “You’ll see,” she said. “Bring your elastic band.” “I wore it for show,” he said. “I don’t believe you,” she said. He smiled the smile that was not sad now but **companionable**. “That makes two of us.”The Elastic Band
Elena had once studied *laughter* in a lab, before she discovered that it misbehaved in laboratories and saved its best work for bars and funerals. She knew the reflex had a refractory period, a pattern of contagious spread, an unpredictability that resisted canned stimuli. Some media companies had not learned that yet.
She asked NG-2 to wear three sensors sewn into his sleeves, silent devices that measured muscle micro-movements and fingertip temperature changes. She placed two microphones in the air above the stage to capture laughter with high temporal precision. She asked The Variance to allow a shifting arrangement of seats among the first three rows, and to accept that the experiment would look like a social dance.
“It won’t hurt my tip jars?” the club owner asked, one eyebrow raised to the possibility of respectability. “If it does, I’ll pay the difference,” Elena said. She did not say with which part of her salary.
For the control, she asked something riskier. She asked Original Nathaniel to do five minutes of material, cold, before NG-2 walked out. He looked as if she had asked him to climb into his own photograph and wave. “I don’t know that I can,” he said. “You won’t be alone,” she said. “It’s five minutes. You can read from your notebook and the room will know they are part of something precise. It will not embarrass you. I will not let it.” “Lawyers don’t get to say that,” he murmured. “Scientists have to,” she said, and he nodded as if that were the kindest thing anyone had told him in a year.
The nightclub was full before the doors opened because rumors swarm more efficiently than anything with a skeleton. Elena spotted Darcy Lin from Echo Arts at the back, wearing neutrality like perfume. Good. Let her watch.
Original Nathaniel walked out at eight-oh-five. The applause was oddly tender, like the sound a crowd makes when a long absent musician steps onto a stage and they remember the version of themselves that sang along. He read some lines. A word stuck in his mouth and he waited for it, patient as a parent waiting for a child to tie a shoe. It came; the room cheered the word, as if language had just arrived here from a long trip.
He did his bit about all traffic lights turning yellow at once. It had not aged; it had matured. He was not the comic he had been, but he was a different instrument now: a low woodwind. He closed, and when NG-2 came on there was a feeling as if music had discovered a harmony with itself.
The experiment proceeded. Elena signaled the seat swap, measured the laughter latencies, watched NG-2 snap the elastic after peaks. He was flagging the peaks to keep from riding them to hard; he was using aversive stimulus to maintain his own calm. He did not laugh, and the room did not care. Then Elena triggered the part no one expected, though she had told NG-2 to be ready. The control of a different sort. From the back, a man in a cap stood up and shouted, “Thief!” Heads turned. Incredibly, from three other corners of the room, three other voices shouted the same. The club seemed briefly like a nest of birds with a call that had been learned. A chaos you could rent by the hour blew through the place. NG-2 did not flinch. He put a hand up. The gesture was transparent. “Thank you,” he said mildly. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Elena said into her microphone, and men turned because the authority was woman-shaped, “you have just watched a demo.” On the back screens of the club, which used to show drink specials, the CC feed from last week’s open mic at The Chasm appeared. It showed a man in a cap in the back row, writing on his palm during the mirror bit. “This is Exhibit A,” Elena said. “Exhibit B will be from the cameras outside this venue tonight in approximately ninety seconds.” There was a rustle that is the expensive garment of fear. Lin looked to the exit with an expression that said she had to slow down without looking as if she were slowing down. “Please, continue,” NG-2 said calmly, to the room, to Elena, as if he could ride any wave you put him on. “Part the fourth,” he said, “is the part where we watch how accusation tries to become entertainment and fails the audition.”
Elena does not love arrest as a performance, but sometimes the most educational thing a city can watch is the moment when consequence enters the room. Two minutes later the screen showed the lobby as men in caps tried to leave and were politely asked to wait and then not politely required to. One of them, the one with the angular arrogance NG-2 had noticed, had a face that the law would find familiar. “Good evening, Mr. Wayne Collar,” Elena said into the microphone. “You work for Echo Arts as a contractor. Your job title appears to be ‘Talent Assessment and Early Influence.’” The room made a sound that is not laughter but related to it, mixed with blood. “To be clear—not to the comedians in the room; to the lawyers,” she said, as Lin’s face controlled itself beautifully, “this does not prove that Echo Arts created NG-3. It proves only that Echo Arts sent employees to plant accusations.” “What about the third Nathaniel?” someone called. “We are searching records as we speak,” Elena said. “I do not do drama. I do warrants.”
NG-2, who did drama, did the merciful thing comedians do when the crowd’s attention has been broken. He told a story about the first time he realized he might be good at something that had previously only hurt him. “I watched a room go from resentful to participatory,” he said. “It was like watching a classroom realize the test was take-home all along.”
He closed with a bit about stolen laughter. “If I steal your wallet,” he said, “I have a wallet. If I steal your laugh, I do not have a laugh; I have a recording of an absence. Laughter is a function that resolves in a mind. You cannot take it with you. You can only coax it out of people, which is not theft; it’s gardening.” He bowed. The room stood. Elena sat, because she had to write things down that would become the way other rooms behaved.
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