“The only reason I’m here,” she said, “is because my former professor Dr. Lawson asked me, as a favor to him, to meet with you. I’m in the middle of three very important experiments, and I have to be back by no later than nine o’clock tonight.”
“What reason did Rinehart give you?” Morgan asked.
“Dr. Lawson told me that I would be amazed by what you had to say. It is for that reason alone I left Stanford to come down here.”
“I paid Rinehart three hundred and seventy thousand dollars to say that to you. One hundred thousand for his second family in West Virginia, two hundred to cover gambling debts in Atlantic City, and seventy to end the annoyance of a blackmailer who has been collecting money from him for twelve years. I don’t know how he plans to spend that seventy, but I doubt he’ll use it for payment.”
Young Dr. Matthews tilted her head and peered blankly at the ex-hip-hop manager and impresario. For a full minute she couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Well?” Morgan asked, managing not to smile. “Are you amazed?”
“Yes. But I don’t see why Dr. Lawson would want me to come down here to learn about his, his indiscretions.”
“He didn’t.” Morgan allowed. “I’ve already told you that the work we’re doing has to do with the transmigration of the human soul. Our work in that field is truly astonishing.”
“What’s astonishing is so much money being spent on this rubbish,” she said.
“Two years at Oxford, right?” Morgan pointed at her and smiled, knowingly.
“Yes, but why do you ask?”
“Rubbish,” he said, with an almost boyish grin. “Americans don’t really use that word, even though it’s a very good one.”
“I didn’t come here to dig up dirt on my mentor or to listen to your opinions on the nationality of language.”
“No,” Morgan said. “You are here because I paid your mentor good money to make sure you came.”
“And the question is, why?”
“The same reason the board of directors of BioChem International opted to give me a free hand in this soul business — sales.”
“Sales?”
“We have, as I’ve already told you, all the theoretical and technical knowledge to read and therefore copy the contents of a human brain into electronic data storage and from storage back into that mind or another. But because of the complexity and mathematical nuances of this process, there isn’t enough memory in our facility to contain even a fraction of a normal adult’s experience and intelligence, learned and inherited instincts, and conscious and unconscious memory — at least that’s what the experts tell me. The amount of data attached even to a simple phrase in a human’s mind could take up trillions of bytes in memory. The experience of a single day would fill up every storage device the Defense Department has.”
“Oh,” Carly said, the light dawning behind her eyes.
“Yes,” Morgan agreed, nodding. “I realized your macromolecular studies trying to simulate DNA development would give us a way to store information that is only a thousand times the capacity size of the human brain and naturally compatible with human physiology. If we could harness your bio-storage methodology with our neuronal I/O systems, we could combine them with the cloning process to transfer the human soul from one body to another.”
“But Mr. Morgan, what you have to understand is that I do not believe in a soul.”
“No,” the director agreed. “You don’t. But you’re an American citizen aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You believe in the freedom of religion, do you not?”
“Certainly.”
“And all religions believe in the human soul.”
“So what?”
“So if I offer to sell a customer a new, younger version of himself, then he has to believe that it is not only his consciousness but his actual soul that will inhabit the new body.”
“But it isn’t,” Dr. Matthews argued. “Even if the new body contained his memories when the old body dies, the origin, the sense organs that recorded and experienced those memories will die with it.”
“Not the originals,” Morgan Morgan noted. “My scientists tell me that our physical body is completely replaced by new materials every seven years; our memories, if material, are therefore not original.”
“That’s just sophistry.”
“But what if we copied Mr. X’s memories into the macromolecular computer your research postulates, talk to Mr. X in that form, and then copy those memories back into his old body?”
“His brain will remember the experiences his mind had as a machine.”
“Yes,” Morgan said happily. “We copy him back and forth a few times like that and then, with no warning, move these memories into the new body. His mind, his experiences, and his thoughts will be indistinguishable from the three storage units he’s experienced. Therefore the new man and the old man will be the same — exactly.”
“It’s kind of like three-card monte,” Carly said.
“Kind of,” Morgan agreed, pursing his lips and shrugging slightly.
December 3, 2019
Dr. Carly Matthews was remembering this first meeting with Morgan Morgan as she sat in the witness box in a pine and cherrywood California state courtroom, seven blocks east of the ex-impresario’s former office.
“You believed that Mr. Morgan was a huckster,” Ralph Lacosta, the prosecuting attorney, said. He was a short man in a black suit that seemed to call attention to his small stature. He wore glasses, as Carly did. At their last meeting, in preparation for her testimony, he had asked her out for dinner.
“Objection,” Melanie Post, the defense attorney, said. “Leading the witness.”
Melanie was buxom, around forty, and Carly found her intimidating, though she didn’t know why. The defense lawyer never raised her voice or bullied a witness. It was something about the way she looked at and listened to people — with unrelenting intensity.
“Reword, counselor,” a seemingly bored John Cho, the presiding judge, advised.
The judge was sixty-nine, Carly knew from Wikipedia’s newly instituted public official bio-repository. He had presided over some of the most important murder cases in recent years and had survived three bouts with liver cancer.
“How did Mr. Morgan impress you when you first met?” Lacosta asked Carly.
“He told me that he planned to migrate souls. I thought he was joking.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
“He was a music producer who was all of a sudden at the head of the subsidiary of a major medical corporation. That alone was ridiculous.”
“But you went to work for him the day you met,” Lacosta claimed. “Why is that?”
“Five million dollars.”
“Say again?”
“He paid me five million dollars and promised over a hundred million in capital to design and build a macromolecular computer for New Lease Enterprises. He also offered to let me retain copyrights and patents on the theory and the physical device.”
“And you accepted?”
“I didn’t believe in the existence of a soul, but to have the funds to build a new bio-based computer system was too good to pass up.”
“And did you accomplish this goal?”
“Yes.”
“And did NLE’s other researchers manage to copy the contents of a man’s mind, completely, from a human brain into an analogous synthetic construct?”
At the defense table, over Lacosta’s left shoulder, Carly could see the codefendants, Morgan Morgan and a young man named Tyler Edgington Barnes IV. Morgan reminded her of her father. Not her biological dad, but Horace Granger, the black man that married her mother after Thomas Matthews had abandoned them.