“We may not have bred animals or plants for food, but we did domesticate wolves to help us in hunting. I have a dog named Pabo that I am very fond of. Wolves were quite susceptible to controlled breeding; the results were obvious.”
Mary nodded; that sounded reasonable enough. “You said the sterilization had a twofold effect on your society?”
“Oh, yes. Besides directly eliminating the faulty genes, it gave families a strong incentive to make sure none of their own members ran seriously afoul of society.”
“I suppose it would at that,” said Mary.
“It did indeed,” said Ponter. “You, as a geneticist, surely know that the only immortality that really exists is genetic. Life is driven by genes wanting to ensure their own reproduction, or to protect existing copies of themselves. So our justice was aimed at genes, not at people. Our society is mostly free of crime now because our justice system directly targeted that which really drives all life: not individuals, not circumstances, but genes. We made it so that the best survival strategy for genes is to obey the law.”
“Richard Dawkins would approve, I imagine,” said Mary. “But you were speaking of this … this sterilization practice in the past tense. Has it ended?”
“No, but there is little modern need.”
“You were that successful? No one commits serious crimes anymore?”
“Hardly anyone does so because of genetic disorders. There are, of course, also biochemical disorders that cause antisocial behavior, but those are eminently treatable with drugs. Only rarely does sterilization still need to be invoked.”
“A society without crime,” said Mary, shaking her head slowly in amazement. “That must be …” She paused, wondering how much she wanted to let her guard down, then: “That must be fabulous.” But she frowned. “Surely, though, a lot of crime must go unsolved. I mean, if you can’t figure out who did something, then the perpetrator must go unpunished—or, if he had a biochemical disorder, untreated.”
Ponter blinked. “Unsolved crimes?”
“Yes, you know: crimes for which the police”—bleep–“or whatever you have for law enforcement, can’t figure out who did it.”
“There are no such crimes.”
Mary’s back stiffened. Like most Canadians, she was against capital punishment—precisely because it was possible to execute the wrong person. All Canadians lived with the shame of the wrongful imprisonment of Guy Paul Morin, who had spent ten years rotting in jail for a murder he didn’t commit; of Donald Marshall, Jr., who spent eleven years incarcerated for a murder he, too, didn’t commit; of David Milgaard, who spent twenty-three years jailed for a rape-murder he also was innocent of. Castration was the least of the punishments Mary would like to see her own rapist subjected to—but if, in her quest for vengeance, she had it done to the wrong person, how could she live with herself? And what about the Marshall case? No, it wasn’t all Canadians who lived with the shame of that; it was white Canadians. Marshall was a Mi’kmaq Indian whose protestations of innocence in a white court, it seemed, weren’t believed simply because he was an Indian.
Still, maybe she was thinking now more like an atheist than a true believer. A believer should hold that Milgaard, Morin, and Marshall were eventually going to receive their just, heavenly reward, making up for whatever they’d endured here on Earth. After all, God’s own son had been executed unfairly, even by the standards of Rome; Pontius Pilate didn’t think Christ guilty of the crime with which he’d been charged.
But Ponter’s world was beginning to sound worse even than Pilate’s court: the brutality of forced sterilizations with an absolute belief that you’d always correctly found the guilty party. Mary suppressed a shudder. “How can you be certain you’ve convicted the right person? More to the point, how can you be sure you haven’t convicted the wrong person?”
“Because of the alibi archives,” said Ponter, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“The what?” said Mary.
Ponter, still seated next to her on the couch in Reuben’s office, held up his left arm and rotated it so that the inside of his wrist faced toward her. The strange digits on the Companion winked at Mary. “The alibi archives,” he said again. “Hak constantly transmits information about my location, as well as three-dimensional images of exactly what I am doing. Of course, it has been out of touch with its receiver since I came here.”
This time Mary didn’t suppress the shudder. “You mean you live in a totalitarian society? You’re constantly under surveillance?”
“Surveillance?” said Ponter, his eyebrow climbing over his browridge. “No, no, no. No one is monitoring the transmitted data.”
Mary frowned, confused. “Then what’s done with it?”
“It is recorded in my alibi archive.”
“And what, exactly, is that?”
“A computerized memory archive; a block of material onto whose crystalline lattices we imprint unalterable recordings.”
“But if no one is monitoring it, what’s it for?”
“Am I misusing your word ‘alibi’?” said Hak, in the female voice it used when talking on its own behalf. “I understood an alibi to be proof that one was somewhere else when an act was committed.”
“Um, yes,” said Mary. “That’s an alibi.”
“Well, then,” continued Hak. “Ponter’s archive provides him with an irrefutable alibi for any crime he might be accused of.”
Mary felt her stomach flutter. “My God—Ponter, is the onus on you to prove your innocence?”
Ponter blinked, and Hak translated his words with the male voice. “Who else should it be on?”
“I mean, here, on this Earth, a person is innocent until proven guilty.” As the words came out, Mary realized that there were many places where that, in fact, wasn’t true, but she decided not to amend her comment.
“And I take it that you have nothing comparable to our alibi archives?” asked Ponter.
“That’s right. Oh, there are security cameras in some places. But they’re not everywhere, and almost no one has them in their homes.”
“Then how do you ascertain someone’s guilt? If there is no record of what actually happened, how can you be sure you are going to deal with the appropriate person?”
“That’s what I meant about unsolved crimes,” said Mary. “If we’re not sure—and often we have no idea at all—then the person gets away with the crime.”
“That hardly seems a better system,” said Ponter slowly.
“But our privacy is protected. No one is constantly looking over our shoulders.”
“Nor is anyone in my world—at least, not unless one is a … I do not know the word. Somebody who shows all for others to watch.”
“An exhibitionist?” said Mary, raising her eyebrows in surprise.
“Yes. Their contribution is to allow others to monitor the transmissions from their Companions. They have enhanced implants that sense at a higher resolution and to a greater distance, and they go to various interesting places so that other people can watch what is happening there.”
“But surely, in theory, someone could compromise the security of anyone’s transmissions, not just those of an exhibitionist.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?” asked Ponter.
“Well—um, I don’t know. Because they can?”
“I can drink urine,” said Ponter, “but never have I felt the urge to do so.”
“We have people here who consider it a challenge to compromise security measures—especially those involving computers.”
“That hardly seems a contribution to society.”
“Perhaps not,” said Mary. “But, look, what if the person who is accused doesn’t want to unlock his—what did you call it? His alibi archive?”