I could only boggle at this latest intelligence. The advanced automated care offered by AIsource Medical was expensive enough to be well outside the reach of some entire planetary civilizations. If whoever bankrolled this particular research project had been willing to underwrite a system that would only be used for the benefit of four people, then the need for secrecy here went beyond profound into the realm of the obsessive.
Bengid tapped her tapered green nails against the tabletop. “al-Afiq’s murder took place fourteen months into their contracted tour of duty, and for a long time went unreported in any of the station’s communications with the people in charge. His name was still among the appended signatures on every progress report the others sent home until just about one month ago, which was when the Diyamens deigned to inform the authorities that he was dead.” She grimaced. “The bastards actually invited us to come and arrest them. Or, if you prefer, ‘dared.’”
“Go on.”
“When we got here, The Diyamens identified themselves, presented us with the holo and other forensic evidence, and stopped talking. Harriman waived counsel and provided us with a full confession confirming that he had with total premeditation and complete malice aforethought flattened his colleague’s skull.” She massaged the bridge of her nose. “If not for his assurances that he went into the lab that day fully prepared to commit the murder, I’d entertain arguments that it was a crime of passion. The holo we have documents over a hundred blows, most of them long after al-Afiq’s skull shattered to pieces.”
I winced. “That’s not a crime of passion. That’s a total psychotic break.”
“I’m inclined to agree. And, under the circumstances this should have been an open-and-shut case. But then we have our complication: the Diyamens being sufficiently protective of Harriman to make special arrangements for him to remain beyond our reach.”
“Something they could do because there just happened to be an AIsource Medical kiosk on board.”
Bengid saw my fury. “Right.”
The picture she’d painted was almost a thing of beauty. It buried the simple geometry of the crime beneath a tangle of metaphysical questions about how much guilt could still be ascribed to an individual after that individual no longer continued to exist.
Bengid brushed a blond lock away from her eye. “I guess it’s no news to you that the procedure takes about five months.”
“It’s actually a few hundred separate procedures,” the Porrinyards explained, “that must be completed at the rate of one or two a day. But yes, five months is about right.”
Bengid studied their faces. “It sounds like an ordeal.”
“The time investment is so negligible that it can be countered by just waking up fifteen minutes earlier every day.”
Bengid seemed skeptical about this too. “And what happens at the end? Somebody just flicks a switch?”
“You could look at it that way, Counselor. But it’s not traumatic at all. It feels more like waking up than being born.”
She nodded. “In any event, they had the time and the privacy they needed to get it done. But when the procedures were completed, there was no Harriman and there were no Diyamens. There was just this new entity bearing their names, an entity who could remember what it had been like to be both Harriman and the Diyamens but who was now a composite of both.”
“Carrying the weight,” I murmured, “too heavy to be borne by one.”
It was several seconds before I registered that everybody in the room was staring at me; the Porrinyards because they knew me and Lyra Bengid because she still did not know me quite well enough.
Bengid looked puzzled again, but soldiered on anyway. “So that’s the problem we’re faced with. If we charge Harriman alone and throw his ass in prison, then it’s no real punishment for him. He could languish in the most subterranean dungeon in existence and still continue to enjoy freedom by proxy, as long as Diyamens are out in the world, living however they want.” She addressed the Porrinyards. “I am right about that, yes? That there’s no way to cut the link and shield him off from their experiences?”
“No legal way,” the Porrinyards said. “There is only one person in there, even if their separate bodies are doing different things.”
Oscin spoke alone: “The two of me have been thousands of kilometers apart at times.”
Now Skye: “Sometimes more than that.”
Oscin: “My two bodies operate independently all the time.”
Skye: “If they couldn’t, my enhanced condition would offer no net gain.”
They concluded as one: “But in real-world terms, it still amounts to a left hand and a right hand, operating under the control of a mind that is equally adept at using both. Unless one of my bodies is sleeping or, as happened a few months back, seriously incapacitated for some reason, I am always aware of what both Oscin and Skye are doing. And you’re right: You could imprison one of me and it would be little prison at all as long as I could still see and hear and enjoy a full life via the experiences of the other.”
Bengid blinked multiple times. After a second or two, she managed, “That’s a hell of a cabaret act you two have got there.”
“I think so too,” they said. “Unfortunately, Skye’s the only one with a decent singing voice.”
Bengid’s smile was polite but false. “So you see what I’m talking about. It makes no sense to prosecute Harriman alone. And neither can we prosecute all three because if we did, we’d be prosecuting the two-thirds of the collective who were not even present at the time of the murder. I don’t know what to do.”
They asked her, “Are you afraid of being overturned by the appellate court?”
“No,” Bengid snapped. “I’m afraid of being wrong.”
The Porrinyards considered that. “You could always charge Harriman with murder and the Diyamens as accessories after the fact, for keeping the crime a secret for so long. They’d all receive equivalent sentences and no individual body’s sensory input would be capable of providing the gestalt with any significant relief from an incarceration they’d all share.”
Bengid shook her head as she got up to pour herself some of the noxious bruj. “They were well ahead of us there too. The first thing Diyamens showed us was a station log entry, time-stamped only three hours after the murder. In it, they report that they’ve placed Harriman under arrest for murder. They confirm that they’ve collected all pertinent evidence, and placed it in storage for safe-keeping. They also say that while they will let Harriman continue to work on the project, it will only be under very close supervision, to ensure that he doesn’t escape. All of this was entirely above-board—and while it was highly irregular to then not report the crime for months and months, the delay is not out of the question given the ground rules that had been established for them. If they hadn’t done what they also did, arrange to link minds with the murderer, the delay wouldn’t even have been remarked upon, and we wouldn’t be here in this room having this conversation.”
I’d been listening, silent and heavy lidded, for a while, letting the Porrinyards contribute for me, but I stirred now. “I’m sure you also considered just giving up and declaring Harriman, the original singlet Harriman, dead and beyond your reach . . . in effect solving the problem by abdicating it.”
Bengid sipped her bruj, made a disgusted face, and sipped again. “That’s been suggested, at levels higher than you even want to think about. After all, that individual committed personality suicide at the moment he linked with the Diyamens. The man he was, the man who bludgeoned al-Afiq, no longer exists. And I’d almost endorse that judgment myself, just to wipe my hands of this impossible situation. But I can’t live with letting that. . . letting those . . .”
“Freaks?” the Porrinyards suggested.
She shot them a poisonous look, enraged that they would accuse her of such bigotry. “Please. Murderers. I refuse to let that murderer, those murderers, however the hell you choose to parse the sentence, get away with killing al-Afiq, just because t
heir superiors equipped their workplace with the means to change an I to a we. That would be an obscenity.”
The Porrinyards glanced at each other, a gesture I’d long since come to recognize as, not a moment of consultation it would be for any two singlets, but rather a moment of deep self-examination. When they spoke again, it was with soft humility. “I’m sorry, Counselor Bengid. I misjudged you. You’re right, of course. But not just for the reasons you think.”
“What other reason is there?”
“I don’t know how much you knew about cylinking before this incident,” they told her, “but deciding to join your soul, your self, to another human being’s, and become part of what is in effect an entirely new person, is the ultimate act of faith. In many ways, it is more profound, more life-altering, and to me more sacred, than any known form of matrimony. It requires total sublimation of the prior self, and permanent commitment from every mind contributing to the intended gestalt.”
“So?”
“So reducing that sacred communion to a legal trick, to nothing more than a loophole the unscrupulous can seize for expediency, is as much an obscenity to me as your killing. It lessens everything I am, everything the singlet versions of Oscin and Skye made the conscious decision to become. That gestalt personality in there cannot be allowed to get away with it. I will not let them . . . and neither will Andrea, for exactly the same reason.”
It was the last phrase that clued Bengis in. Until that, she had registered but not quite felt their meaning, as their condition was far too alien to her experience for her to see it as anything but an abstraction.
Her reaction was the same one I expected to experience from others in a few short months. She blinked, narrowed her eyes, sensed the size of the leap she was being asked to make . . . and then, with stunned shock, made it.
She struggled to reject the epiphany, as if it were some substance her body had identified as poison. And then she stared at my shaved head, and put it together. “Andrea? Are . . . are you . . . ?”
I offered her one of my rare smiles. “No. I’m still alone in this skull, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“B-but you’re . . .”
“That’s what my sabbatical was for. We were about to start the treatments when you sent for me. We only put it off until we can get back to New London. Within a few months, all three of us will be parts of somebody new. Somebody better.”
Her mouth hung open. Her expression was a mixture of shock, amazement, horror, sadness . . . even a degree of hurt and loss that surprised me, coming from someone I had never allowed into my life.
I would likely have to address that before I left here.
But not now.
“Now,” I said, standing, “with your permission, I’d like to talk to your prisoners.”
* * *
Harriman and the Diyamens had been returned to separate cells for the duration of our briefing. Now, with me already sitting at the questioner’s side of the table, they trudged in again, walking with an exaggerated geriatric gait enforced by the neurological inhibitor collars around their respective necks.
I normally don’t require prisoners called before me to be restrained, as I have enough weaponry hidden on my person to overcome almost anybody. But I appreciated it in this case. Linked pairs—and, by inexorable extension, triads—are known for their extraordinary grace, and are almost impossible for a singlet of any training to defeat in a fight.
Without those collars reducing their physical coordination to the level of an unrejuvenated ninety-year-old, these three would have had no trouble killing me in a single moment of anger.
I allowed myself a moment of grim amusement at the realization that if this trio did manage such a thing, it would at least offer the benefit of solving that pesky prosecution problem.
Once again, the three positioned themselves in what seemed to be their preferred orientation, with Harriman in the center and the two silent women at his sides.
He said, “You’re a new one.”
“Yes, sir, I am. I’m Counselor Andrea Cort. Prosecutor At Large, for the Judge Advocate’s office of the Confederate Diplomatic Corps.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of that title, ‘Prosecutor At Large.’”
“I’m not surprised. It was invented just for me.”
The infuriating grin tugging at the corners of his lips was not echoed on the pale faces of the Diyamens, who remained impassive beyond their façade of catatonia. “Impressive. But if you’re Dip Corps, you’re also a little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? As far as I understand it, there’s nothing about this case that involves any sovereign government other than New London’s.”
“There isn’t,” I said. “Counselor Bengid just called me in to offer my own take on some of the more troubling points of law here. Once they’re resolved, I’ll likely never see you again.”
He glanced at my scalp. “I see. And since it doesn’t take legal expertise of any kind to know that premeditated murder is a crime, I assume that you’ve been called in as an expert on linked personalities.”
“Hardly an expert, sir.”
“I presume that the rest of the sentence would be, ‘not yet.’ But soon enough, eh, Counselor? I thought I sensed the aura of the pilgrim about you. Have you scheduled your treatments yet?”
I’d already learned what it was like to live with lovers who had twice the normal human capacity for forging rapid connections, but the Porrinyards had never used it for anything more threatening to me than puncturing my more dishonest emotional pretenses. I’d encountered one other pair with a somewhat deeper and darker agenda, but they hadn’t been interested in using it against me either. This would be the first time I’d ever have to out think and out-maneuver a criminal who amounted to a human being cubed.
I decided on a strategic retreat. “Yes. We’ll be starting very soon.”
His smile would have been easy to take for genuine warmth. “I envy you your journey. I promise you, it’s not at all what you expect.”
“Oh, really. How so?”
“I can only repeat, not at all. I’m sure that you think you’re just adding yourself to whoever you chose as your partner. But when you forge all those new neural connections, you’re not really adding personalities together; you’re multiplying them. You’re creating the equivalent of a new molecular compound with properties entirely different from those of the individual basic elements that went into it.”
“Like guilt,” I suggested, in an effort to bring this back around to the crime.
He chuckled, almost paternally. “I’ve always been more than willing to admit what I’ve done, and that I remain fully subject to any legal penalty the authorities consider appropriate.”
“You do recognize, of course, that the authorities are having some trouble determining what’s appropriate.”
“Yes, I do. And I’ll even admit that I expected them to. After all, it was Harriman who wielded that spanner, Harriman whose hands were stained by blood. But I’ll abide by whatever the prosecutorial conclusions might be.”
Had there been a hint of sarcastic arrogance in that answer? “I hope you recognize that your future is not a question of what you’re willing to accept. It’s a question of how your case is decided.”
“Still,” he said, “a guilty plea would make that easier for everybody, wouldn’t it?”
I was sure of it, now. This wasn’t remorse or expiation. The bastard—no, the bastards; the Diyamens were so withdrawn for some reason that it was difficult to remember that he was speaking for all three of them—the bastards were running a game on us. But to what end?
“Tell me about it, then.”
He sighed, glanced at the shut-down transparency of the wall behind me, and faced me again. Throughout, the women remained blanks, lost behind their apparent shield of catatonia.
He said, “What would you like to know, Counselor? Why I loathed the toxic son of a bitch with every fiber of my being?”
“Aman al-Afiq was a brilliant man, but he was also a terribly sick one, incapable of relating to other human beings, except to hurt them any way he could. Outside dry shop talk, his sole interest in social interaction seemed to be psychological dissection through verbal cruelty. He reveled in finding the most sensitive exposed nerves and then inserting needles, to maximize any emotional agony he could cause. Within one week of their arrival on this station, the singlet Harriman had already had one screaming match with him; within two, there had already been a fistfight; within three, Harriman was already suffering in silence, struggling to endure long hours of abuse without giving in to the impulse to strangle the unholy prick.”
I’d been accused of being like al-Afiq more than once, myself. “Go on.”
“When the Diyamens threatened to report his behavior, or even quit the project in protest, al-Afiq countered with promises to destroy their own reputations with false counter-charges. He bragged that he had done this many times before, on projects before this one, and went so far as naming the names of those whose careers had been destroyed by lies he’d started.”
“And you didn’t know al-Afiq was like this before you signed on?”
Harriman shook his head. “Harriman had never heard of him before. Neither had the Diyamens.”
“How was that even possible, if they were colleagues?”
“They didn’t initiate the project. It involved a certain cross-fertilization of al-Afiq’s preferred way of looking at a fundamental problem, and Harriman’s take on another. The entire crew consisted of hired guns, previously unknown to each other, and assigned their tasks by a greater mind too busy to participate in the project herself.”
It hurt so much not to know the purpose of all this that I almost had to physically restrain myself from pursuing that line of questioning any further. “And what were the Diyamens there for?”
“Their key responsibility was the maintenance of the station. Also,” he shrugged, “given the years of expected isolation, as morale officers. After all, everybody was going to be locked together for a long time: five years, by the most conservative estimate. The powers that be decided that with four people instead of two—even if two of them were really just different vehicles for one personality—there were more chances for friendships, fewer for poisonous stress.”
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