Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  “And what about me?”

  Toot said, “How does being called ‘Eve’ suit you?”

  Goldie squealed and said, “Oh, Teddy, how romantic! You’re just right for me!”

  “I had better be, hadn’t I? Now that we’ve effectively snipped the loop that contains our distant heirs out of the continuum, you and I have a big responsibility to fulfill.

  “And just what might that special ol’ thing be?” Goldie inquired, rubbing the top of Toot’s head sensuously.

  “You and I are just going to have to pop down the nearest wormhole and ahead to the Omega Point in order to take their place. Ride out the Big Crunch saie and sound, and kickstart the next universe.”

  “Oh, Teddy, what a wedding present.!”

  “Nothing I can’t afford.”

  And we even took Buffo.

  LIFE SENTENCE

  1.

  The Execution

  The nameless man who had killed and been caught, judged and sentenced and jailed to await his own death watched as the authorities prepared to execute his surrogate.

  The murderer occupied one place in a bank of seats filled by other invited witnesses to the State’s administration of mortal justice. He had not been introduced to any of the other witnesses when the guards had coldly and somewhat roughly conducted him to his seat, and no one had since offered a name or hand to the man.

  Understandably so. Quite understandably, as things stood now at this crucial cusp, this instant when the exchange of lives, the legal and spiritual transaction was still incomplete.

  But once the execution was over, he had been promised that this would change.

  This promise he still found hard to believe or trust.

  Despite all he had been through to earn it.

  With the little bit of his attention and vision not devoted to the spectacle slowly unfolding before him—a spectacle in which, save for the most tenuous chain of circumstances, he himself would have been the star—the nameless man tried to assign roles to the others around him.

  The Warden, of course, he recognized, as well as the dozen members of the Renormalization Board. Several people tapping busily on laptop keyboards he deemed journalists. A man and a woman who shared an officious, self-important air he instinctively knew for politicians. With a small shudder, he pegged a trio comprised of two expensively suited men and an equally dapper woman as doctors here to observe him. An inexpungable air of the examining—the operating—room still clung to their costly clothes.

  But the bulk of the watchers, he knew, were the surrogate’s family.

  Weeping with quiet dignity, holding onto each other, they disconcerted the nameless man deeply. He could not watch them long, couldn’t even count how many there were, or of what sexes or ages.

  Yet he knew that soon he would have to match the living, tear-stained faces to the photographs he had studied for so many months.

  Soon his intimacy with these strangers would extend far beyond mere faces and names.

  There were none of the nameless man’s relatives present. Even if the distant kin—distant geographically and emotionally—who still claimed him had wanted to attend, they would not have been allowed to.

  After all, what would have been the point? The man he had been was soon to be dead.

  Now, across the room, on the far side of a wide sealed glass window, a shifting of focus among the workers there riveted the attention of the nameless man and all the others.

  The technicians had finished checking out the mechanisms of death, the drips and needles and biomonitors and video cameras. Some signal must have been passed to those outside the immediate view of the watchers. For now the surrogate was being wheeled in.

  The man was cradled by molded foam supports on a gurney. Thin and wasted, he was nonetheless conscious and alert, thanks to various painkillers and palliative drugs. After he was maneuvered into the center of the web of death-apparatus and the wheels of his gurney were locked, the surrogate managed to raise himself slightly up on one arm to gaze out at the audience, smile wanly and wave weakly with his free hand.

  In the brief instant before the surrogate flopped back onto his pillow, the nameless man received the image of the dying man’s face into his brain in an instant, imperishable imprinting.

  When the cushions and pillows had been readjusted around the surrogate, a triggering device, its cord leading in an arc to the death-apparatus, was placed in his right hand.

  Following the surrogate had come a priest of the Gaian Pragmatic Pandenominationalists. Arranging his green stole nervously, the priest faced the audience on the far side of the glass. A technician flicked a switch, and sounds from the far side of the barrier—beeps and shoe-scuffings, coughs and whispers—issued forth from a speaker on the nameless man’s side.

  Then the priest began to speak.

  “We are gathered here today to bear witness to the utmost sacrifice that any individual can make to the society of which he has since birth formed a grateful part. Far greater than such paltry donations as those of blood or organs is what the man by my side will render today. He will give up his very name and identity so that another may live and serve in his place. Doomed to perish of his own incurable affliction, having opted for a voluntary death, this man takes on—legally and ethically—the sins of one of his erring brothers, thus granting the guilty one a second chance. At the same time, the demands of society for justice and retribution are met. A crime—the most heinous crime, that of murder—has been committed, and today it is balanced by the death of its perpetrator. Our laws are not flouted, the guilty do not escape, and the scales of justice swing evenly.

  “I will not eulogize the man by my side at any greater length. Last night at the hospital I attended the official farewell ceremonies hosted by his loving family and friends, and we all spoke of him at length, by his bedside, to his smiling face. It was a fine occasion, with joyous memories leavening the tears. He knows with what love and reverence and gratitude he is esteemed, and all the goodbyes and final words have been said.”

  The wordless sobs of the surrogate’s family swelled, and the nameless man winced. He rubbed a sweaty hand across the regrowing stubble on his scalp, imagined he could feel the crown-encircling scar, although in truth it was already nearly invisible.

  “Now,” the priest resumed, “the man by my side assumes a new identity, taking on the bloody garments and sins of the murderer known as—” Here the priest uttered the name which had once belonged to the seated man on the far side of the glass. Curiously, the once-familiar syllables rang hollow to him, drained already of all meaning, distant as something from a history book.

  “It is a light load, however,” continued the priest, “and a burden instantly extinguished in the very taking of it. Christ Himself could do no more. Now, let us pray.”

  The sound was shut off. The soundlessly murmuring priest bent over the supine man, and relative silence descended on the audience.

  The nameless man did something he thought—he hoped—was praying.

  Now the execution room emptied of everyone but the surrogate, recumbent on his trolley, gaunt face obscured. He could be seen with a flick of his thumb to trip the trigger, murderer in truth at the final moment, if only of himself.

  The red power-on LED’s of the official recording cameras glared down on the scene. After an interminable ten minutes during which the calculated poisons circulated through the surrogate’s veins and his breathing slowly ceased, the prison doctor entered the sealed room, performed his exam, and looked up. Although he had forgotten to activate the speaker, all could plainly read his lips shaping the words, “He’s dead.”

  The Warden stood and approached the nameless man, who flinched. That dour official essayed a tentative smile as cameras flashed, and extended his hand toward the murderer. The murderer took it reflexively.

  “Mister Glen Swan, I thank you for your participation in this event. We will detain you only for a few last formalities, signatures and suc
h. Then you will be free to leave. But now allow me to introduce you to your new family.”

  2.

  The Murder

  The air underground was stale and hot, redolent of train-grease, electricity, sweat, fried food, piss-wet newspapers. The platform was more crowded than the murderer-to-be had anticipated. He had not known of a new play in the neighborhood, whose audience now spilled out and down into the subway. Such events were outside his calculus, and he would have still been baffled, had it not been for the overheard chance comments of the crowd.

  The man felt uneasy. But he finally resolved to carry out his plans.

  Necessity—and something resembling pride in his illicit trade—compelled him.

  His roving eyes finally settled on a victim: a middle-aged woman in a fur coat, seemingly unaccompanied, clutching a strapless evening purse. He began to move toward her in a seemingly aimless yet underlyingly purposeful path.

  The rumble and screech of an approaching train emerged from some distance down the tunnel. People surged closer to the edge of the platform in anticipation.

  The man came up behind his apparently unaware victim, within reach of the shiny black purse clutched against her side.

  Then it was in his hands. He tugged and pivoted.

  The purse did not come. A thin hidden gold chain was looped around the woman’s wrist.

  He yanked, she screamed and flailed. He grabbed her wrist to immobilize it so that he could get the bag off. She jerked backward at the touch, the chain parted, his grip slipped, and the woman tumbled out of sight, onto the tracks.

  The man turned to flee, but was brought crashingly down within a few yards by two bystanders, large men who began to pound him, smash him with their fists to stop his instinctive resistance.

  And because his battered face was pressed into the filthy concrete at the moment he became a murderer, he did not see the train actually kill the woman.

  But he heard and would always remember the noise of its useless brakes and the shouts of the witnesses and the victim’s final cut-off high piercing scream.

  3.

  The Board

  “We think we have some chance of success with you,” said the head of the Renormalization Board, as he looked up from closing a window on his laptop, a window full of information on the nameless man. “But everything depends on your attitude. You will have to work at this, perhaps harder than you’ve ever worked at anything before. Your reintegration into society will not be without obstacles nor sacrifices. Do you think you can commit to this course of action? Honestly, without reservations?”

  Sitting across a wide polished table from the Board, the murderer tried to hide his astonishment and suspicion, keep it from altering the silent stony lines of his face. After six months on Death Row, his appeals up to and including the highest court exhausted in the streamlined new postmillennial system, with imminent and certain death staring him hourly in the face, he would agree to anything. Surely they knew that. Anything they could offer, even a life sentence, would be better than the alternative. And as he so far dimly understood the choice before him, it was infinitely more attractive than spending the rest of his natural days behind bars.

  But after he said the assuring words these new judges wanted to hear and the Board began to explain exactly what lay in store for him, he began to have his first small trepidations.

  “The first thing we are going to do is perhaps the most dramatic, yet surprisingly, not the most crucial. We are going to lift the top of your skull off and insert a little helper.

  “Your cortex will be overlaid with a living mass of paraneurons known as an Ethical Glial Assistant, which will also have dendritic connections to various subsystems in your brain. This EGA has no independent capacities of its own, and assuredly no personality, no emotional or intellectual traits. You may think of it simply as a living switch. It has one function, and one function only. It will monitor aggressive impulses in your brain. Upon reaching a certain threshold—a threshold of whose approach you will be amply warned by various unpleasant bodily sensations—it will simply shut you down. You will go unconscious, and remain so for a period varying from half an hour to a day, depending on the severity of the attack.

  “At this point, we would like to stress all the things the EGA will not do. It will not prevent you from physically defending yourself under most circumstances, although some incidents of this sort might very well pass into an aggressive stage and trigger the switch. It will not hinder your free will in any manner. You are always at liberty to attempt aggression; it is just that you must be willing to face the consequences.” The Boardmember’s voice became very dry. “We can report that most people’s automobile driving styles change radically. In any case, we have no interest in turning you into some kind of clockwork human. You would be of little use to society and the planet that way. The EGA is by no means foolproof. It will certainly not thwart a coolly premeditated murder for profit. It works only on spontaneous limbic impulses of rage and attack.

  “But we do not feel, based on your case history, that you are at risk for the more calculated life-threatening behavior. The antidote we are giving you is precisely tailored for the type of person you are. Or once showed yourself to be. With the help of the EGA, you will be rendered relatively safe to mingle with your fellow humans. As safe, in fact, as any of them generally are themselves. Do you understand all this so far?”

  The murderer could not focus on anything other than the queasy image of his head being opened and a living mass of jelly dropped in. But then the picture of his cell and its proximity to the execution chambers returned.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good, good. Now, we are not going to rely entirely on the EGA. It is, in its way, a last-ditch defense. You are going to undergo an intensive course of remedial psychosocial pragmatics. At the end of that time, if you have exhibited cooperation and commitment, you will be certified a fully functional member of society.”

  The prisoner could contain the question no longer. “And then, I’ll be released? Free?”

  The Boardmember smiled wryly. “In a manner of speaking, yes. Completely free. Yet with duties. The duties any of us here might have, to our society and the globe. You’ll receive a brochure that explains it all. It’s quite simple, really.”

  The head of the Renormalization Board now opened up a scheduling window on his computer. “Let me see.... Assuming you can complete the standard six-month course, and that Mr. Swan survives till then in order to serve as your surrogate— Yes, I think that we can confidently schedule your execution for the fifteenth of May. How does that sound to you?”

  “Fine. Uh, fine.”

  4.

  The Brochure

  For the hundredth time, returned to his cell after a day’s demanding, confusing, stimulating classes, the prisoner read the brochure.

  —key concept is that of commensurate restitution, combined with the notion of stabilizing broken domestic environments by insertion of the missing human element.

  Previous attempts at reintroducing ex-inmates to society have often failed, resulting in high rates of recidivism, precisely because there was no supporting matrix to cushion the inmate’s transition. Uncaring systems comprised of parole officers and halfway houses could not match the advantages offered by a steady job, caring coworkers and a supportive family eager to make the inmate’s transition a success.

  Obviously such a set of supports is almost impossible to manufacture from scratch. Yet if an ex-prisoner could be simply plugged into the gap in an existing structure, an instant framework would be available for his or her reentry into society.

  The murderer skipped ahead to the part that most concerned him.

  Prisoners awaiting capital punishment offer a particularly vivid and clearcut instance of the substitution-restitution philosophy. Basically, as they await their fate, they are non-persons. By their actions, they have forfeited their identities and futures, their niche in the planetary web. In their
old roles, they are of no value to society and the planet except as examples of our intolerance for certain behaviors.

  Meanwhile, another segment of society ironically mirrors the role of the condemned prisoner. The terminally ill among us have been condemned by nature to untimely deaths. Guilty of nothing except sharing our common mortal heritage, they yet face a sentence of premature death. In most cases, the doomed man or woman is tightly bound into an extended family and set of friends, an integral part of many networks, perhaps the sole breadwinner for several mouths.

  How fitting, then, that the terminally ill patient intent on utilizing his right to voluntary euthanasia (see the Supreme Court decision in the case of Kevorkian vs State of Michigan, 2002), intent also on providing security for his loved ones in his or her absence, should gain a kind of extended life through an exchange with the prisoner who has abandoned his.

  The prisoner turned several more pages.

  Every attempt is made to match the prisoner and surrogate closely on the basis of dozens of parameters. The environment in which the ex-inmate is placed should therefore prove to be as comfortable and supportive for him as possible. Likewise, his or her new family should have a headstart on the adjustment process.

  Simply put, prisoner and surrogate undergo a complete exchange of identities. For the surrogate, the road after the exchange is short. For the prisoner, it extends for the rest of his lifetime. There is no return to his old identity or life permitted.

  The prisoner assumes the complete moral and legal responsibilities, duties, attachments, and perquisites—the complete history, in short—of his new identity. All State and corporate databases are altered to reflect the change (ie, fingerprints, photos, signatures, vital measurements, medical records, etc. of the dying surrogate are updated to reflect the physical parameters of the ex-prisoner). After taking this action, the State ceases to monitor the ex-prisoner in any special way. He becomes a normal citizen again.

  How does restitution occur? Simply by the ex-inmate’s willing continuation of the existence of the surrogate, as father or mother, son or daughter, breadwinner or homemaker.