“Answer my question,” Ralph Lacosta said.
“I believe in my soul.”
“How about Tyler Barnes? Did he believe in a soul?”
“He must have. He paid BioChem International one-point-one-three billion dollars to take his soul out of a cancer-ridden dying body and put it in a new model.”
“Move to strike, your honor,” Lacosta said to the judge. “Mr. Edgington’s dealings with BioChem have been sealed by the court.”
“Just so,” the lanky, bald judge agreed.
He instructed the jury to disregard any statements about Barnes’s dealings with BioChem.
The questioning of Morgan went on for six days.
“Did you kill the elder version of Tyler Barnes?” Fred Friendly asked Morgan on day five.
“No, sir, I did not. I left Tyler the younger alone in the room with himself. I told him how to turn off the life-support machine, but I gave no advice on what he should do. Why would I?”
“He claims that you brainwashed him.”
“My company copied his brain, but there was no cleanup involved.”
September 3, 2020
“I had no idea who I was or where,” Tyler Barnes said to the prosecutor’s associate, Lani Bartholomew. He’d been on the witness stand for the previous two days. “Sometimes I’d wake up in my mind, but I had no body. Questions came at me as images or sometimes words but not spoken. It was like remembering a question that was just asked a moment ago. Other times I was in my older body, but I was drugged and disoriented. Finally I came awake in a younger, healthy form — the way I had been as a young man. It was exhilarating. I was young again. I believed that my soul had been removed from my older self and placed inside the new man.
“Mr. Morgan brought me to the room where the old me was lying on a bed, attached to a dozen different machines. He, he told me that they had taken my entire being from the ailing husk on the bed before me and made the man I was now.”
“You’re sure that’s what he said?” Lani Bartholomew asked. She was young and raven-haired; a beauty dressed in a conservative dress suit, Carly thought. “That they took the soul from the body before you and placed it in your new body.”
“Objection.”
“Overruled.”
“Yes,” Tyler Barnes said. “I was given the definite impression that there was only one soul and that it was moved between bodies and the Macromime computer. I turned off the life support certain that what was lying before me was a soulless husk.”
“That’s what Morgan Morgan led you to believe.”
“Yes. Yes, it was. If I had known the truth, I would have never turned off the life-support system. Never. Mr. Morgan indicated that the man lying in that bed was already brain-dead.”
April 9, 2029
When the trial was finally over, the jury took only three hours to return a verdict: guilty of first-degree murder with extenuating circumstances. Fred Friendly managed to get the rider attached so that Morgan wouldn’t face the death penalty.
There had been two appeals that had failed to produce a retrial, but Friendly and Carly kept trying.
By 2027 legislation allowing suicide had passed in thirty-one states, and BioChem International was the richest entity that had ever existed; Macromime was the second wealthiest.
It was speculated that the cost of cloning and soul migration would come down to a million dollars per transfer by the year 2031, and banks had started advising their customers how to prepare for this expense. The phrase life insurance took on a whole new meaning, and religious zealots around the world were stalking BCI facilities.
Catholic terrorists especially targeted doctors and medical schools that worked in cloning and bio-based computer systems.
The world’s largest amusement park corporation bought a small island off the coast of Cuba to create a resort that would specialize in New Lease soul-transfer technology.
A movement of a different sort had begun in Europe. People there claimed that since the Macromime memory systems were eighty-five percent biological, the copies of individual personalities that dwelled inside them — for no matter how brief a time — were sentient beings, and so when the memories were erased it was the same thing as murder.
While all this was happening, Morgan Milton Morgan III made his residence at one of the oldest California state prisons. He’d lost two teeth in brawls, had been slashed from the left temple down to his right cheek by a razor-sharp blade fashioned from a tomato can, and he’d shed twenty-seven pounds.
Morgan refused every request to be visited or interviewed, until one day when Carly Matthews asked, for the twelfth time, to be granted a meeting.
Morgan was awakened at six on the morning of the meeting. He was taken to the assistant warden’s personal quarters, where he was allowed to shave, shower, and dress in street clothes that no longer fit. He had to ask his guard to poke a new hole in his leather belt and opted to wear his bright orange prison T rather than the white collared shirt that made him look like a child wearing his father’s collar.
After his morning toilet, Morgan was served a breakfast of steak and eggs, orange juice, and French roast coffee, along with sourdough toast with strawberry jam.
By 11:00 a.m., the appointed hour, Morgan felt like a new man in an old man’s body.
Morgan was brought to the warden’s office and ushered in. Carly stood up from the chair behind the warden’s desk. The warden, a copper-skinned black man, was already standing by the door.
“Mr. Morgan,” Warden Jamal said.
“Warden.”
“At Ms. Matthews’s request, we’re going to leave you two alone in here. I don’t want any trouble.”
“Then tell her not to hurt me, Jeff, because you know trouble is a runaway truck on a one-way street headed right at my nose.”
When Morgan said this and smiled, Carly got a clear look at his battered visage.
“If you want to smart off we can end this session here and now,” Warden Jeffry Theodore Jamal said.
“Please,” Carly interrupted. “Warden, Mr. Morgan and I are old friends. He won’t do anything to hurt me or jeopardize your possessions, will you, Mr. Morgan?”
“That’s what I said.”
When they were alone, Carly Matthews returned to the warden’s oak swivel chair, and Morgan sat in the leftmost of the three visitor seats. For a full two minutes the two sat appraising each other.
“You growin’ up, Carly,” Morgan said at last. “I hear you and that Adonis guy had twins.”
“We’ve separated.
“Heard that too.”
“That’s what I get for letting him hire the nanny, I guess. You look... well.”
“My face looks like a raw steak been pounded for fryin’,” he replied.
She smiled. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
“Somebody had to be. You cain’t do what we did and not have somebody got to pay for the shock alone.”
“But the rest of us are rich,” she said. “I’ve been to the White House six times this year, and I didn’t even vote for her.”
“That’s the blues, Mama.”
“You’re talking differently,” she said.
“The way I always spoke when I was on my side of town with my people. I hope you don’t think that a hip-hop promoter started out erudite and loquacious.”
“I guess not.” She was wearing a simple yellow shift that hid her figure somewhat.
“That lipstick you got on, girl?”
“I’m dating.”
“Damn, must be hard for the richest woman in the world to be datin’. You’d have to have fifteen phones and forty-five operators just to field the invitations.”