Otaru bowed before the judge’s wisdom. “Quite so, Your Wisdom. Allow me to proceed to my main point. My client has no legal rights in all of human space, other than those limited rights that she is sometimes granted, such as in her passport documents, which allow for certain kinds of restricted travel. She can’t vote, for example. She is not entitled to basic minimum health care, education or housing. For the last several years of her existence, Louise Meagher has lived on Kestrel as a non-person. The governments of human space have yet to agree on a legislative solution that would resolve this problem, leaving the victims of this condition in existential and legal limbo. Politicians have little motivation to help those who cannot vote.”
Justice Nine scowled, and interrupted. “That will be enough grandstanding, Mr. Otaru. Confine your comments to matters before the court.”
Lou saw that Otaru was not in the least perturbed. She wondered if he even believed in what he was saying, or if it was all an act.
She also briefly glanced at Etienne Tourignon and his wives. They didn’t look happy. Elyse was holding the great man’s left hand; Claire-Marie, on his right, sat with her slim hands folded around a small black handbag in her lap. Etienne, looking pale and furious, fidgeted in his chair. He sighed loudly. Lou imagined him as a man who liked to cut out the crap and take care of things in the simplest, most direct manner possible. She found herself looking back at Claire-Marie. Where Elyse was possessive and poisonous, Claire-Marie looked to be more of a matriarch, her own woman. Elyse was perhaps Etienne’s plaything, an allowable frivolity, but Claire-Marie was probably the real power behind her husband. Like Elyse, she wore black, but she wasn’t dressed for allure; she was dressed for power. Her wool suit featured gold trim. It looks like a bloody uniform, Lou thought.
Otaru was speaking again, looking pleased with himself, in a distant, abstract kind of way. “Louise Meagher is conscious but not alive, no longer a ‘person’ before any law; therefore, she cannot enter into a binding contract. The contracts she signed when she came aboard are thus not binding. If she is not a legal subject under the law, she can hardly be sentenced under the law.”
For a moment there was no sound at all. Then Etienne surged to his feet, howling his protest. Elyse, next to him, joined in, her voice shrill. The rest of the family erupted in jeers and abuse. Giselle’s mother — Etienne’s daughter, Lou remembered — Claudine, sat next to Claire-Marie. The two women were alike in many ways, Lou thought. They said nothing, did not stir. But they were both staring at her, their eyes full of cold hatred. Etienne’s noise and bellowing were difficult to weather, she thought, but those two women, mother and daughter, frightened her more than anything. Their silence, their control, was intimidating.
The judge settled them; it took a while. “There are precedents for this, my learned colleague,” she said at last. “What you say about her legal rights is quite correct. And the question of whether Ms. Meagher is truly alive or dead is indeed vexing, as it’s poised at the intersection of philosophy, neuroscience, the burgeoning field of nanoscience, psychology and so forth. To say nothing of the issue of her very humanity. In the legal framework used throughout human space, a ‘legal person’ is indeed assumed to be a living human being. But what do we mean by living? Is there more than one way a human being can be said to be alive, as there is more than one way to say a person is dead? Where do we draw the line between human and not-human, alive and not-alive, dead and not-dead, having a soul, and not having a soul? The case law regarding this issue is full of myriad precedents in which ‘life’ and ‘death’ are defined dozens of different ways — all of them either contradictory or otherwise contingent upon other data being available.
“However,” and here the judge changed her tone to something more menacing, “this defendant, according to the majority of expert opinion, is considered to have at least a virtual self. This may be construed for these purposes as being functionally equivalent to a legitimate living self, under the subjectivity principle.
“And in a world where crimes are committed by the walking dead, we need a more flexible approach to matters of justice. I rule that not only is the subjectivity principle sufficient to allow sentencing for this capital crime, but that natural justice is denied the victim of the crime if an offender can escape punishment for her actions because of a technicality of contract law, and that would be a greater injustice. Criminal law must override contract law in this matter. Ms. Meagher has a sense of self, even if it is produced by the combined actions of uncounted machines in her brain and body. She chose to kill Giselle Tourignon and her guards that night, just as she chose to sell her weapon to that pawnbroker. As well, Ms. Meagher does not contest the evidence against her. She did these terrible things, and she will be sentenced.”
Lou gasped, feeling ill now. She slumped in her seat. Otaru did not look perturbed.
He said, “In that case, I have a novel argument for you, Your Wisdom.”
She quirked her wrinkled mouth and raised an eyebrow. “Please, entertain me.”
He produced a long sheet of Active Paper, and handed it to the judge. She began scrolling through the document within. Otaru said, “In her lack of legal rights, Ms. Meagher, and perhaps other dead people like her, closely resembles another group of individuals in our society, who similarly have no legal standing or rights before the law. I refer, of course, to the biological android-class devices popularly referred to as ‘disposables,’ living humanoid constructs assembled by countless minute machines, and sold by various commercial enterprises, many of them here on the Orbital.”
The judge stared at him, sharp-eyed. “You’re saying that Ms. Meagher should be considered equivalent to a disposable?”
Otaru performed a small bow. “In many respects, yes.”
“Disposables, let me remind my learned colleague,” the judge said, looking very annoyed indeed, “do not have free will. I do not have free will. Yet I do realize that one could argue just as easily that even ordinary human beings lack true free will, and that human beings are also creatures driven by organic programming and glandular urges in one respect or another. But that is beside the point here. Ms. Meagher and her morbid associates, for the purposes of this discussion, do have free will. Disposables such as myself run on complex programming. We have limited options for free movement, expression and thought; our primary purpose in existence is carrying out the task for which we were commissioned. Ms. Meagher, by contrast, can do what she wants, within the limits imposed on her by her medical condition.”
Otaru replied, “Her medical condition, Your Wisdom, imposes limits on her the way a disposable’s programming imposes limits on it — or her.”
“I’d like to help you out. But it seems to me that Ms. Meagher committed these crimes from her own free will, contractual niceties notwithstanding. She deserves to face the maximum sentences for each crime. However, her status as a guest limits what I can choose to have done with her. Also limiting here, is the Orbital’s General Policy on Sentencing, which states that non-citizen non-residents of this structure must not be allowed to consume Orbital resources as tax-funded prisoners. The people who live here, and pay very handsomely in order to live here and enjoy the services provided, will not stand for Orbital resources being spent on looking after such prisoners for decades on end.”
Otaru said, “I have no argument with any of that.”
“So what do you have in mind?”
Lou noticed everyone in the audience lean forward to hear Otaru’s next bit of legalistic sophistry.
Otaru said, “My organization offers, in that contract, to purchase Ms. Meagher’s punishment rights from your government. You will see that the price is fair, and more than covers the Orbital’s expenses in bringing this action, and provides a sum of cash which, while, of course, inadequate, and unable to bring back a lost family member, we hope will begin to compensate the victim’s family for the
ir distress and loss.”
Silence. Otaru stood there like an award to his own cleverness. He looked like he could stand there for days and never tire.
The judge peered at him. “This is … unexpected.”
“I assure you, Your Wisdom, the defendant will be put to work in the Otaru organization. She will have the status of a disposable. She will perform in various capacities for a very long time indeed while she works off her debt to the society of human space.”
Lou blinked and felt faint. Panic was closing in, and not far behind it thundered terror. “You’re not making a disposable out of me, you bastard!”
Otaru turned to Lou. He nodded. “The matter is not yet—”
Suddenly, unable to contain herself any longer, Claire-Marie Tourignon stood. Furious at this travesty of justice, she looked like she wanted to channel a lightning strike at Lou, and it looked to Lou like she could do it.
A person suddenly appeared, standing between Claire-Marie and Lou, in front of the witness dock. Lou noticed a chill in the air.
Claire-Marie faced Lou, her face like an iceberg. Her arms extended, hands clutching something small, dark and glassy, like a bottle. The neck of the bottle faced Lou.
Etienne was looking up at his wife, baffled. “Sit down, woman!”
The judge bellowed for order, hammering her gavel. Lou couldn’t seem to hear.
The figure before Lou turned. She recognized the weird lady, last seen on the transfer ferry. “You? Where’d you come from?” Lou shouted. She was dressed well today; Lou started to understand that for those other meetings she had been in disguise, for some reason.
The woman’s eyes were full of fear and desperate determination. She was trying to say something to Lou, over the din.
Lou stared at her, shouting to be heard, “What—?”
Claire-Marie freed herself from the guards and cops and family members trying to control her. She fired her gun.
The woman yelled at Lou, “Get. Down!”
Lou was still staring at the weird lady, her mind quite blank. The weird lady was pushing Lou’s shoulders down. Lou buckled. She heard something go splat into the lady’s back, sounding like an egg hitting cement. Looking up, Lou saw the woman arch backwards, gasping, shocked, her mouth a big “O.” Reaching around behind her, panicking, shrieking, she tried to wipe at something. “Get it off me, get it off me!”
She began to fall, folding herself over the witness box railing.
The judge’s novice shot Claire-Marie twice in the chest. She fell back, and, as she did, she fired a shot at the ceiling. Grayish gel splashed against the tiles, and dripped to the floor near Etienne, who scrambled away from the sizzling stuff.
He got to his feet, face dead white, confused, staring around him, and at Claire-Marie’s body. He suddenly looked his real age.
People all around him were getting up and screaming. Cops appeared and tried to calm the panic.
Lou huddled at the back of the witness dock. She saw the entry wound in the woman’s body and saw that she had been hit with a nanophage shell. As Lou watched, she saw the woman’s torso dissolving, the tissues foaming.
The woman spoke, gasping, coughing up pink foam that dissolved the tissues it touched. Her words were increasingly hard to make out. “I’m so sorry, Lou. Tried. Tried to help. Find Kid. Must. Find…” Then a noise spewed forth that might have been sobbing and gasping.
Lou could hear the hiss and fizz of the nano undoing the woman’s tissues. She could smell the sickening butcher stink and kept her body far away from the active phage-goop, which dripped into deadly puddles on the floor of the witness box, falling out of what was left of the woman’s head.
The stink was beyond Lou’s comprehension. Weeping, she tried to vomit.
She screamed, coughing, “Who the hell are you? Who are you?”
Chapter 20
“Hey, Lou! You awake yet? Lou?”
Lou blinked and looked around, feeling woozy and disoriented. She was in a familiar loft apartment. B-movie posters adorned the walls. A red fiber bicycle hung on another wall. There was the smell of lacquered wooden floorboards. Bright sunlight streamed through huge windows. Some limp-looking indoor plants were scattered around the place. Lou knew this place. She was sitting on a big comfy easy chair. There was a coffee table in front of her made from an old antique sea-chest. Her booted feet were up and resting on the table, ankles crossed. In her left hand she found a steaming cup of black espresso. It smelled damn good. Better even than Sheb’s, she thought, and found herself fast-forwarding through hundreds of Sheb-and-Lou memories, which left her sad.
“Lou, hey! Hello! Over here!” It was a woman’s voice.
Lou looked to the right. Jenny sat in another easy chair, cross-legged. Lou remembered Jen liked to sit cross-legged in her easy chair. Jen was sipping iced water and lemon from a tall frosted glass and looked at Lou through her display glasses. The animation on her vest was running an ancient videogame involving the jerky descent of alien bad guys. Jen had the sound on her vest turned down, which was a blessing.
“Jen. Um. Hi. I haven’t seen you in…” Frowning, trying to think, “Um, a long time.” She smiled at her own forgetfulness.
“Great to see you, too, sunshine. Welcome to my humble digs. Hope you don’t mind I haven’t cleaned up. I sorta wasn’t expecting company. And hey, university scientists agree, clutter and dust aren’t fatal, eh?” Jen laughed and adjusted her glasses, then took a sip of water. “I mean, feel free to write your initials in it, just don’t date it!”
Disturbing images and feelings flitted through the back of Lou’s mind. “The last thing I remember,” Lou said, frowning, “I was … on trial for killing this woman…” Why did her head feel so foggy? She hadn’t known her head to feel like this since the old days, before her diagnosis, when she was on all kinds of damn stupid drugs, and the side effects were pulverizing her brain.
Jenny set the glass on the table, leaned back, and said, “It’s hard to explain what’s happened to you, Lou. Maybe if I just cut straight to the chase, that might help. What do you reckon?”
Lou felt her gut tighten up. God, why are people always doing this to me? I must have lousy karma. “Okay, what is it this time?”
Jen smiled, “Hey, it’s not like anything really bad, like root-canal work!” She laughed.
Lou laughed, too, but with more of an edge. “What, then? I’ve got kind of a bad memory thing at the moment. I do remember these Otaru characters were up to something at this trial. Trying to pull some kind of scam…” She tried to piece it together, knowing it was bad news.
She was getting memory-flashes: a woman dissolving before her eyes, close enough to touch. The sounds of liquefying, boiling, disintegrating flesh and blood. The horrific stink of it.
The crazy woman! She was trying to protect me, or tell me something. She must have known there was going to be a shooting. That Claire-Marie was going to try to … to kill me. And…
The shards of memory were falling together — and falling apart. How did this woman know? Where had she come from? She had just turned up, standing there. And, in the confusion caused by this woman’s sudden arrival, Claire-Marie took her shot…
The woman was trying to save Lou. Lou didn’t doubt that. But would Claire-Marie have taken her shot if the woman hadn’t appeared and created the diversion? Lou closed her eyes, but that only brought on vivid sense-flashes of the dead woman’s last moments, telling Lou, even as her body disintegrated into pungent steam, that Lou had to find Kid.
It was hard to refuse an order like that.
Pressure? Guilt? Lou felt crushed. But she understood that she was back on the case, like it or not.
Jenny interrupted, “Hey, over here!” She waved her hands over her head.
Glancing up, Lou blinked, “Sorry. Just remember
ing…”
“Yeah, well. Hmm, how should I put this? Lou: Otaru owns you now.” She made a wincing face, as if this news tasted bad.
Lou twisted her mouth in disgust and allowed herself a cynical smile before frowning. She shifted in her chair and stared hard at Jen, looking for traces of sly humor, practical jokes, irony; but Jen looked nothing but grimly serious. Lou said at last, trying not to laugh, “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on!” She waved her left foot in the air for emphasis.
Jen said, “You’re in suspension fugue right now, Lou. Have been for a while.”
She felt herself wanting to laugh. “Cool. What am I in fugue for?” But she remembered now, the business from that trial. That Otaru defender guy negotiating with the judge. There had been talk of a contract.
Of punishment rights.
She swore, not smiling now.
Her voice soft, she asked, “They bought me? Like a slave? Like some product?”
Jen looked away. “Otaru has purchased,” she said, “your so-called punishment rights. You are now, in effect, an Otaru employee. Actually, to be more accurate, you’re Otaru property. Considered disposable, for all legal intents and purposes.”
Lou sat there, looking at Jen, looking around the apartment, and said, “But I’m not a disposable.” As if this simple negation would clear the whole thing up. “I was born! I had, I mean I have, a mother and a father!”
Jenny leaned forward, looking concerned. “Your existence is governed by legal structures, just like everybody else. Even mine. Copies of me are bought and sold all the time, to say nothing of that whole piracy thing — which is another nightmare altogether — but my original source code remains with Relational Ventures AC. They own me. And they made sure I don’t have the smarts to deconstruct my own code and escape, the way those artificial mind guys did, way back when. Something about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, they say, and they look bloody smug about it, too.” She rolled her eyes, exasperated at all the crap she lived with.
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