To Crush the Moon

Appendix A-1 Rights of the Dead

It was an interesting statutory question, still largely unresolved: if these interactive messages were the only remains of a legal individual, did they have the right to be played back indefinitely as holograms? Or to be burned into blank human bodies and treated as people? They couldn’t possibly hold all the memories of their original senders, all the nuance and subtlety of a lifetime’s experience. They were doppelgängers at best—superficial, hollow inside—and at worst they were shadows or caricatures of the original person, laughably incomplete.

And there was another question here, not so much legal as moral: these deceased persons had won their reincarnation at the expense of their fellow colonists. Pushing and bribing their way to the lifeboats, as it were. This didn’t warrant punishment per se, but neither did it encourage charity.

A few well-to-do families had claimed such messages as prodigal children returned to the fold, and had tried to give them their old lives back. But they’d had to hire teams of cognitive and cellular surgeons for weeks at a time, and the results were not encouraging: people who could hold a brilliant conversation on flowers but didn’t recognize one when they saw it. People who could barely feed or dress themselves, who behaved badly in public, who mistreated the unfamiliar flesh that housed them. And even in the famous “Smith and Jones” trial where two partials had been declared “legal and functional children with the hope of future maturity,” the families’ petitions for public assistance had been roundly and loudly denounced.