Mindscan

35

Maria Lopez rose to give the defendant’s closing argument a behalf of Tyler Horowitz. She bowed politely to Judge Herrington, then turned to face the six jurors and the alternate.

“The question here, ladies and gentlemen, is simple: what constitutes personal identity? There’s clearly more to it than mere biometrics. We’ve seen that anyone can impersonate someone else, with the appropriate technology. But we understand in our beating hearts that there’s something ineffable about being a person, something that goes beyond physical measurement, something that makes each of us uniquely ourselves.” She pointed with an outstretched arm at Karen, dressed today in a gray pantsuit. “This robot—this thing!—would have us believe that just because it mimics certain physical parameters of the dear, departed Karer Bessarian, that it is in fact Ms. Bessarian.

“But it isn’t. Through her writing, the real Karen Bessarian gave joy to hundreds of millions of people so, of course, we don’t want to see that beloved storyteller go. But she has gone; she has passed from this existence. We will mourn her, we will always remember her, but we must also have the strength that her son, who loved her more than anyone, has so admirably demonstrated: the strength to let her, as the tombstone she has been denied might have so elegantly put it, rest in peace.

“The departed Karen Bessarian was the original—and humans have always put a special value on originals, on first printings, on real paintings. Counterfeit money, forged passports: they’re not the real thing, and they should never be accorded the status of reality. You good men and women of the jury have the power here to put a stop to this nonsense, to halt this notion that a human being is nothing more than data that can be copied as easily as one copies a song or a photograph. We are more than that. You know it, and I know it: let’s make sure the whole world knows it.

“Perhaps you agree with Dr. Poe, the philosopher we heard from, that the thing sitting over there isn’t a person at all but rather a zombie. Or perhaps you think that it is a person.” Lopez shrugged. “Maybe it is. But, even if it is, it’s emphatically not Karen Bessarian; it’s someone else, some new creation. Welcome it as such, if you so choose—but don’t let it masquerade as someone it’s not. The late, lamented Karen Bessarian deserves better than that.

“The Declaration of Independence contains some of the greatest words ever written.” Lopez closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, her voice was full of reverence and wonder: “ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ ”

She paused, letting the words sink in, then exclaimed: “Endowed by their Creator! And the word ‘Creator,’ dear jurors, is written with a capital C—surely meaning God, not some factory in Toronto! ‘Unalienable rights’—or inalienable, the way we usually say it today, and which means precisely the same thing: rights that cannot be transferred. Such was the intent of the great, great men who wrote and signed this Declaration—luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. I ask you today to honor these great men by hewing to their wisdom.

“A different physical entity—a different instantiation, to use the jargon—cannot possibly be the same person. Mr. Draper made a mockery of the Christian tradition with his cheap shots, but when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, the Bible tells us he did so bodily: the exact same physical form, coming back to life, not some new, separate entity. Indeed, we label deranged anyone who thinks they are Jesus, or any other dead person, because merely aping the behavior of someone does not make you that person. Without the same body, you’re not the same individual.

“We’re not talking about whether artificial intelligences created from scratch should be accorded the rights of personhood; that’s a battle for another day, if anyone ever manages to make such a thing. No, what’s on the table here is whether tricks of science—high-tech smoke and mirrors—should allow someone to play games with life and death. And I say no, resoundingly no.

“In this great state of Michigan, we rejected the claims of the depraved Jack Kevorkian that he should be able to move the line between life and death at his whim; you stood up against such nonsense fifty years ago, and now fate has called again upon the good people of Michigan to be the voice of reason, the conscience of a nation.

“We have drawn firm lines in this country: life begins when we cease to be potentially multiple individuals, and it ends with the cessation of biological activity in the brain. No one should be allowed to circumvent these rules for reasons of”—and here she looked directly at Karen—“personal convenience, or personal gain. Stop the madness here, ladies and gentlemen. Rule for Tyler. It’s the right thing to do. Because, after all, if you don’t find that Karen Bessarian died, do you not make a mockery of her life? That woman struggled, loved, gave birth, fought cancer, created art, laughed, cried, felt joy, felt sorrow. If we refuse to recognize that she died do we not also refuse to recognize that she lived?

“Don’t deny her reality. Don’t deny Karen Bessarian’s life and death. And, most of all, don’t deny her grieving son the chance to lay her to rest. Thank you.”

The jury was visibly moved by Lopez’s words. I’d seen two of the women and one of the men nodding repeatedly, and, although Herrington had quickly stopped it with a sharp rap of his gavel, the two men had conferred briefly once Lopez was finished.

Deshawn Draper was wearing a white rose in his lapel today, apparently a little ritual of his when giving closing arguments. “The lawyer for the defendant,” he began, nodding at Maria Lopez, “made much of the Declaration of Independence. Not, you’ll note, of the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights, which are the documents that actually form the basis of law in this country. Ms. Lopez could not invoke those hallowed souls the ‘Founding Fathers,’ or the ‘Framers of the Constitution,’ because those terms don’t apply to the authors of the Declaration of Independence, which was written more than a decade before the Constitution.

“Indeed, it’s getting on to three hundred years since the Declaration was signed, and, unlike the Constitution, of which we jurists minutely examine each and every word and nuance, we’ve all come to recognize that the Declaration is an artifact of its times—a litany of long-ago grievances against George III, then-king of Great Britain.

“No, we must filter the Declaration through our modern sensibilities. For instance, when we hear the words ‘All men are created equal,’ we believe today—even if the authors of the Declaration back in the eighteenth century did not—that all people, not just men, are created equal; women are just as much entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“More: when Jefferson signed that document, by men, he meant white men. Blacks like me were not men in his eyes; after all, he owned slaves, and therefore was directly responsible for denying them their liberty. No, it’s not to the Declaration that we should look for answers; indeed, I’m sure the judge will instruct you that the Declaration of Independence has no judicial weight.

“But I do believe history has much to teach us. So, let me invoke another set of great words from our past that comment on the issue of personhood.” Deshawn’s voice rang out, in a credible imitation of the original. “ ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ ”

Deshawn smiled at each juror in turn. ” That is what should count! The content of one’s character. And, as we have shown, the content of the plaintiff’s character is identical to that of the biological original.

“Still, we would be wrong to dwell too much on the past—for what we have here is a question of the future. The Mindscan process that Karen Bessarian has gone through was hugely expensive … but all new techniques are. None of you on the jury are over sixty years of age, and several of you are much younger. By the time you are facing the difficult decisions that Karen Bessarian recently had to face, uploading will be inexpensive—it’ll be an option available to you. Don’t close that door. Your life can continue, just Karen Bessarian’s has.

“The woman sitting over there—and she is a woman, in every sense of the word—is Karen Bessarian, to the very life. She remembers being a little girl in the 1960s in Georgia. She remembers her first kiss in the 1970s. She remembers giving birth to her son Tyler, there, and feeding him at her breast. She remembers the thrill of seeing her first book published. There’s a concept in the law known as scienter—it refers to the knowledge that a person possesses, the awareness. This Karen Bessarian has the knowledge of the original; she is the same person.

“More than that, she has the same feelings, the same hopes, the same aspirations, the same creativity, and the same desires she always did. And you should give considerable weight to her desires—for this is exactly what she wanted. The biological Karen Bessarian intended for this continuation to be the real her, to control her assets, to live in her house, to go on enjoying her life, to continue telling stories of the characters the whole world loves. That’s what Karen Bessarian wants: it’s her decision, and it hurts no one except greedy relatives. Who are we to gainsay it?

“When you retire to deliberate, you’ll hold not just Karen Bessarian’s fate in your hands, but that of everyone else like her. including”—suddenly he was pointing at me—“that man there, Karen’s boyfriend Jake.” He shifted his aim slightly. “And that man, next to him, my own father—an upload whom I accept with every fiber of my being as being my dad.

“What will happen to these warm, loving, caring people if you rule for the defendant? If you believe that the woman over there is not Karen Bessarian, then she will have nothing. No money, no reputation, no identity, and no rights. Do we want to go back to the days when there were people among us without rights? Do we want to return to the days of yore, when the definition of who was endowed with rights was narrow—men, not women, and only white men at that?

“No, of course not. We live in an enlightened present, and want to make an even better tomorrow.” He walked over to the plaintiff’s table and put his hand on Karen’s shoulder; Karen brought her hand up and interlaced her fingers with his. “Do the forward-thinking thing,” continued Deshawn. “Do the moral thing. Do the correct thing. Recognize that this woman is Karen Bessarian. Because, ladies and gentlemen, as you’ve surely seen during these proceedings, she truly is.”