“Miss Matthews,” Judge Cho said.
“I cannot say that the data transfer was complete,” Carly said. “But the responses from the various I/O devices on Micromime Six were exactly the same as the subjects gave with their own bodies and minds.”
A woman in the courtroom began to cry. That, Carly knew, was Melinda Greaves-Barnes, the seventy-six-year-old self-proclaimed widow of Morgan Morgan’s codefendant.
“So you communicated with these synthetic memories?” Prosecutor Lacosta asked.
“Yes. For many months, in over a hundred test cases.”
“And where were the original patients while you conducted your experiments with the synthetic device?”
“Each was placed in a medically induced coma. That was the only way we could assure an even transfer of information, by lowering the metabolism to a catatonic state.”
“Like death,” Lacosta suggested.
“Objection.”
“Withdrawn. Those are all the questions I have for this witness, your honor.”
“OK,” John Cho said. “Let’s break for lunch and reconvene at two p.m.”
“It’s all so crazy,” Adonis Balsam was saying at the Hot Dog Shoppe across the street from the courthouse. He was demolishing a chili-cheese dog with onions. Carly ordered a soy dog on whole wheat. “I mean, they’re trying Tyler Barnes for murdering himself. That’s insane.”
“But the man in the defendant’s chair,” Carly said, “is just a clone, a copy of the original man.”
“An exact copy, with all of the original guy’s feelings and memories,” Adonis said. He was black-haired and rather stupid, Carly thought, but he was a good lover, and he seemed devoted to her. She didn’t mind that he was probably after her money. After she started her own line of Macromime computers and computer systems, everybody was after her money — everybody but Morgan Morgan.
“No,” she said. “To be exactly the same, you have to be the original thing, the thing itself. Morgan and Tyler murdered the original Tyler Barnes.”
“OK, baby,” Adonis said. “You’re the scientist, not me.”
He took her hand and kissed her cheek. She always smiled when he called her baby and kissed her. She didn’t love Adonis and didn’t care if he loved her or not. All she wanted was a word and a kiss.
“What defines a human being?” was Melanie Post’s first question when Carly sat down in the cherrywood witness box that afternoon.
“Objection,” Prosecutor Lacosta chimed. “The witness is not an expert in philosophy, medicine, or psychology.”
“Ms. Post?” Judge Cho asked, a friendly and expectant smile on his lips.
“Your honor,” the defense said. “Ms. Matthews has designed a memory device that is almost indistinguishable from the structure, capacity, and even the thinking capability of the human brain. I would argue that there is not a human being on the face of this Earth more qualified than she.”
The judge’s smile turned into a grin. Carly wondered how well the two knew each other.
“I’ll allow the question,” Cho said, “as long as the answer remains within the bounds of the witness’s expertise.”
“Ms. Matthews?” Melanie Post said.
“It’s, it’s mostly the brain I suppose,” Carly said. In all their pretrial sessions, the prosecutor’s team had not prepared her for this question. “But there are other factors.”
“The soul?”
“I don’t believe in a soul.”
“Man is soulless?”
“The brain is an intricate machine that functions at such a high level that it feels as if there is something transcendent in the sphere of human perception.”
“But really human beings are just complex calculators,” Melanie Post offered.
“Objection.”
“Overruled.”
“I don’t know,” Carly admitted. “Emotions are real. Dreams are not real, but they arise from biological functions. So even dreams are physical entities; they exist as one thing but are perceived as something else. It is a very difficult question to answer.”
“Are the defendants men?” Melanie asked.
“Yes.”
“No more questions. You may step down, Ms. Matthews.”
August 15, 2020
Carly Matthews sat in the back row of the courtroom. She’d attended the trial every day it convened for more than half a year, having left the running of Macromime Enterprises to her stepfather. The day after Carly’s testimony, Melanie Post presented John Cho with a request from Tyler Edgington Barnes to separate his trial from Morgan Morgan’s. Barnes was now claiming that he had been brainwashed by the NLE director and was not responsible for any criminal act he might be blamed for.
Ralph Lacosta, after meeting with Tyler and his former body’s wife, Melinda, had decided there was merit in the billionaire’s claim and withdrew her accusations; she now admitted that the young Tyler was truly innocent of the murder of his earlier iteration. The crime was, in the state prosecutor’s opinion, solely the responsibility of Morgan Morgan.
For his part Morgan did not protest the decision, but in the transition it turned out that he was broke. BioChem International, which had been paying Melanie Post’s steep fee, withdrew their support for their former VP, saying that they too had been convinced of his perfidy. That’s when Carly stepped in and hired Fred Friendly to represent Morgan.
Carly didn’t feel any guilt for what had happened at NLE, but neither did she think that Morgan alone should shoulder the burden.
Ralph Lacosta approached Morgan after he was seated in the witness box.
“Mr. Morgan,” the prosecutor said, as a kind of greeting.
The ex-VP, ex — music mogul nodded.
Morgan wasn’t a particularly handsome man, Carly thought. He was only five seven, at least twenty pounds overweight, and his features were blunt, with no hint of sensuality. But despite these shortcomings, his smile was infectious.
“What is your education, Mr. Morgan?” the prosecutor asked.
“Degree in general studies from Martin Luther King High School in Detroit, Michigan.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“But still you were at the helm of the most advanced biological research company in the world.”
“Only the sales arm of the NLE branch of that company,” Morgan corrected.
“Excuse me?”
“They made the science,” Morgan said. “I provided the marketing context.”
“In other words, you’re a huckster,” Lacosta said.
“Objection,” Fred Friendly cried.
“Overruled,” Robert Vale, the new presiding judge, intoned.
“What do you sell, Mr. Morgan?” Ralph Lacosta asked.
“Dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“That depends on the marketplace,” Morgan replied easily. “When I worked in music, I repped a rapper named Johnny Floss. He’d been a paid escort who dreamed about being a star. I facilitated that dream.”
“And he fired you.”
“Yes.”
“What were the circumstances of your dismissal?”
“Johnny let me go when he’d gotten what he wanted. It hit me pretty hard. He was my only client. I went into social media, found out that there were all kinds of kid geniuses out there who designed platforms to get the word out on anything from toothpaste to fortune telling. With that I took a skinny pop singer and made him the highest-paid musical act of 2016. That’s when BioChem reached out and asked me to help them merchandise their work in cloning and soul transmigration.”
“Soul transmigration?” Lacosta said.
“Moving the human soul from an old body to a new one.”
“Do you believe in the soul?”
“I’m from Detroit, Mr. Lacosta, that’s the home of soul.”
Laughter came from a few quarters of the courtroom. Carly found herself smiling.