Second Nature
The warrant turned up one activation. A clinic technician had been bribed; the audit falsified. There was a man in a jar for sixteen days, spun up from Nathaniel Grey’s neurograph but not registered, with an accelerated imprint and a list of “training” objectives that read like the itinerary of a spy: observe NG-2; collect and seed rumors; test audience responses to calibrated bits; report to Echo Arts under a cover company. The man had been released five weeks ago into a safe-house with a gym and a wall of screens. He was at the gym doing something with ropes that resembled an argument with gravity when the Bureau knocked.
He turned and Elena saw the face again, the face you trust because it trusts you. He looked at Elena, then at NG-2, who had insisted on coming, then down. “All right,” he said, without drama. “Who am I?”
Darcy Lin did not spend the night in jail because her lawyers were good. Echo Arts went on the offense in the press because their PR people were better than their ethicists. Elena responded with a tactic she disliked but understood: she arranged for the court to set an early hearing on the question of **derivative identity and ownership of improvised performing arts by mindprint actors**. Courts do better than press at turning the heat down enough to see what color the metal is.
The Hearing
Courtrooms are like clubs without alcohol. They have lights and stages and performers and hecklers and an audience whose laughter is suppressed by social norms and law. The judge is a special kind of host who does not applaud. Judge Amalfi was good. He had ruled wisely in a case about a woman who had refused to let an algorithm decide her parole. He had the face of a man who had found a way to sit up straight his whole life without scolding anyone else for how they sat.
“Counsel,” he said, “I expect brevity unless length is called for.” Elena outlined the skeleton: NG-2 was a person with a legal identity, performing new work in an improvisational context; Echo Arts claimed ownership of his outputs based on a contract with Original Nathaniel that used the phrase *derivative mindprint actor*; the anonymous comics’ allegations about theft had been seeded by proxies acting for Echo Arts; a third mindprint actor had been illegally created and used in a campaign to undermine NG-2’s reputation.
“None of which finally answers the question,” Judge Amalfi said. “If I write in my will that my children must give a tenth of their jokes to a corporation, that doesn’t bind them. But if I assign my notebooks to that corporation and pay them to publish my jokes, perhaps I have affected what the second generation may do with my style. Is a **duplicate** of me my child? Or my notebook?” “Neither,” Elena said. “A person.” “Do not pander,” the judge said without heat. “You know I favor that answer but it is not a law.” Elena put up a display. “This is an excerpt from the **Revised Authorship Act**.” She highlighted the section that recognized spontaneity in performing arts as exerting authorship at the moment of performance, when that spontaneity crossed a threshold of intention and structure. “The law knows improvisation. It knows that the person who made the thing is the person who made the thing, not the person who made the person.” “But the person who made the person sometimes owns the person,” Echo Arts’ counsel said, smiling a smile that had been filed until smooth. “In law. For a term, by consent.” Elena did not say **slavery** because she did not need to; sometimes you don’t say a word because the court hears it even louder if you do not. “Persons can assign their labor and their outputs, not their *selves*,” she said. “We do not manufacture persons in a factory with toaster ovens.” “And yet you register them,” Echo cried, “as if they were trucks.” “Because the city likes to know which trucks are on which roads,” the judge said mildly. “Do not pretend to be offended by systems you profit from.” Elena called Original Nathaniel to the stand. He did not perform. He answered with the careful plainness of a man who knows words are precious. “I signed the contract,” he said. “I signed too broadly. I do not want what my younger self would have wanted for my older self. I want to work with him.” “Why did you sign?” the judge asked gently. “Because I wanted to be on television,” he said, and the room chuckled and then flinched for having chuckled. Elena called NG-2. “Do you think you owe Original Nathaniel for your success?” she asked. “I think I owe him gratitude,” NG-2 said. “Without him there is no me. Without my work there is no me now. That is not an either or proposition.” “Do you think Echo Arts owns your jokes?” “No,” he said. “I think they would like to own my audience.” “So would you,” the judge said kindly, and NG-2 smiled in true acknowledgment. “Your Honor,” Elena said, “the best way to see the matter is to understand what happens at the moment of performance. May we demonstrate?” “Court is not a club,” the judge said, but he did not stop her as NG-2 stepped down and stood at the rail. “Proceed with caution.” NG-2 looked at the gallery with a gaze that did not judge. “We are now, by statute and healthy fear, very serious,” he said. “Let us try something unserious enough to help.” He pointed gently at a man in the second row with a mustache that underestimated its own flamboyance. “Sir, your facial hair is in love with a future you that owns a motorcycle. Does your future self owe you money for that?” The room laughed, all but the court reporter, who smiled invisibly. NG-2 went on: “If I make that observation, which I just did, I have made something new. If my original wrote me a note five years ago that says, ‘Someday if you see a man with a mustache that makes you think of motorcycles, say something about it,’ that would be assistance. It would not be ownership. Echo Arts wants to own my reflexes. They cannot. They can only rent events.” The judge held up a hand. “That, startlingly, is the first concise encapsulation we have had all morning.” He looked at Echo’s counsel. “If what he does is dependent on **unreproducible environmental inputs**, how does your contract cover it?” “It covers the persona that metabolizes those inputs,” Echo said. “It covers the instrument.” “The instrument lives,” the judge said. “We do not assign violins’ agency but we do not own violinists.”
The judge recessed, because judges like to think without performance. The ruling came two days later. The court held that in the case of a mindprint actor certified as a person, whose performance requires the integration of unreproducible inputs at the moment of performance, outputs are the property of the performer unless expressly assigned by that performer **after** certification. Echo Arts’ claims under the prior contract failed to attach. The court recommended mediation for a revenue-sharing arrangement between Original and NG-2 for specifically enumerated premises that were demonstrably originated in O-NG’s notebooks.
It was not the beginning of a new era. It was an adjustment to it.
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