The judge looked at the papers and spoke. “Conservatorship and guardianship would fall to the Aurora Group of women concerned for Marie Celeste 112. I note you have put together a good package here but there are no compelling reasons to invalidate the original clone contract. Mr. Davies has already begun his meetings with MC 112. They appear to be happy together. What compelling reason can you put forward?”
“Under Amendment Fourteen she can’t be turned into a drone. Amendment Fourteen says, essentially, you can’t keep slaves or other forms of second-class citizens. Until she gets at least half and preferably all of her funds, she is being treated as a cat or dog pet that the court is doling out treats to in an effort to tame. Like ‘Mens Rea.’ She has the mind of a child.”
The judge looked over her papers and the glasses at the end of her nose. “Presently, Mr. Davies is guardian and conservator. I have seen many such contracts go well into middle age on the part of the funds recipient.”
Mary Case returned and said, “In the 1800s, your Honor, experiments were done on babies to test their native language. They were kept silent and not spoken to. The idea was to see if they would speak Latin. Instead of speaking Latin, they died. Without a truly comprehensive experience of membership in today’s women’s community, Ms. Celeste will wither and die educationally, politically, and emotionally. Her needs will not be met at the current rate. She may physically exist but intellectually she will wither and die.”
“Your Honor,” the Lotus Corporation lawyer spoke, “we have in place the memories of sixteen women and all that could be salvaged from the cerebrum of the donor, that donor being Ms. Anne Harrison, killed in a train wreck three years ago. Ms. Harrison left clear instructions as to the status of her wealth and to whom it may be given. It is presently an offshore portfolio in the free state of the Bahamas Islands and banked in Nassau. She said in her will that should the autonomy maximizer option be selected when cloning from her donor flesh, that the person initiating the clone be made guardian of the assets of Harrison Limited Corporation. What has been done meets with her will exactly.”
Mary Case, Esquire, walked to the judge’s desk and handed in a stack of papers. “In that case we will sue on behalf of the Aurora Group. We are contesting the status of Mr. Davies as guardian and conservator. We are done here for today.”
Chase Nelson, the lawyer for Lotus Corporation, handed his stack of papers to the judge. “Motion to dismiss and countersuit, your Honor.”
* * *
Jack said, “They can’t sue you directly, but a victory here would bode them well in court in Nassau. Getting Marie to voluntarily hand over a few million credits is what I expect their true aim to be.”
Marie spoke thus. “Then why did they try to sue in the first place? I remember being Anne Harrison and knowing about most of this stuff. Anne had a master’s degree in multinational finance.”
Jack Havens said, “There will be the veridicator to consider.”
“What’s a veridicator?”said Marie.
“It’s a judicial lie detector,” said Havens. “You probably remember it as just the phrase ‘lie detector.’”
“Oh yeah, it’s got a screen that flashes red for a lie and blue for the truth.”
“There is a problem with it. If we get one of their worker bees who believes you are being distressed, then the screen will go blue if we ask her where the money should go. The worker bees believe the dogma from the ones on top. We need someone from the steering committee who knows how jaded this whole process is. They’ll probably file a friend of the court brief with every women’s group from the YWCA to the Daughters of the American Revolution.”
* * *
They did just that. They scheduled a day before Judge Marilyn F. Hobart without a jury but with a room packed with people. For the first few witnesses the veridicator stayed an even cobalt blue. It wasn’t until the afternoon that Mary Case’s protégé, Faye Brooks, was brought to the stand to testify that things got interesting.
Chase Nelson opened up the questioning by asking Ms. Brooks a series of basic opening lines to present the veridicator as a valid instrument of law. When asked if her hair color was natural, Faye said yes but the veridicator flashed purple clouds for a moment, then settled into a crimson red, drawing giggles and sneers from the crowd.
Chase kept up and followed, “You began work on this case with the Maoist C.O. group, didn’t you?” The veridicator went brown and then swirled into purple like the previous question. Strands of red began to appear until the swirling screen was totally red.
Faye wiped a tear from her eye and spoke. “We only meant to keep her in a community where she would be cared for, where her money would be put to good use. We don’t like this industry. We believe this in our hearts.” The veridicator began to swirl green for a while and then slowly it crept into turquoise green, then sky blue. The crowd briefly responded in approval with hand-clapping. Faye smiled, wiped her eyes, and stepped down. The case was over from that point on.
* * *
The court began to treat the various players with a different kind of respect. Judge Hobart ruled that Lawrence should stay on as guardian and conservator. The Davies couple stayed together for five decades until Lawrence died. They had children together and one of them grew to be so successful that she set up a fund for other women to go to school and gain an education. It was a fund for many young women to get schooling and better their lives.
But that is another story.
THE END
ALL JACKED UP IN 2070
“Hauser and O’Brian, get over here,” said the gruff police station commander, Captain Richter. His crew-cut hair was white as new-fallen snow and shorter than a buck private on the second day of boot camp. “We got a man down. He was linked. Took three gunshot wounds but they think he’ll pull through. You’re the only two detectives I’ve got with any experience on links.”
Hauser, the seasoned vet cop, answered first. “We may have worked a few link robberies but it’s never been a murder. Most hoods are afraid of being viewed by some tech in a morgue. We’ve only seen a half-dozen or so muggings, never a homicide.”
“Attempted homicide,” the captain said. “This one ain’t stiff just yet. Go check him out at Mount Sinai Hospital. His name’s Granger and his link is still active, so watch what ya say.”
* * *
“That ol’ boy is jacked,” said the skinny female drug addict. Her hair was jet black, as were her eyes. She pranced about the room. “Sure he’s got a link, but it’s fried now. I jacked him up with a thousand volts and almost a hundred amps. His circuit is fried and his memory is gone. When I shot him I had on my wig and fake nose so he won’t get us. Even had sunglasses for the pattern recognition software on the monitor cameras. Those computers ain’t got shit and Granger’s got his three shots of payback.” Sunny’s drug dealer friend, Tom, poured out a line of the drug “Heaven Seven.” She moved it about the mirror with a single-edged razor and put the line up her nose with a straw. She inhaled it deeply and pinched her nostrils shut while exhaling. Tom, a tall, blue-eyed man, patted the briefcase with the fifteen kilos of Heaven Seven. Then he leaned back into his suspension chair, smiling in satisfaction.
* * *
Hauser, the Kraut, and O’Brian, the Irishman, served on Homicide for the Minneapolis Police Department. A lot of bodies had been piling up with the Winnipeg connection, and it didn’t look like the flow of them was going to slow up anytime soon. Canada had a free medical system and relaxed attitudes toward maintaining drug addicts as they were: not going off on some fool crusade to cure them, but giving them just enough of the sauce that they wouldn’t be burglarizing the neighborhood to get their next fix.
This led to some problems with the United States, which was still in its vindictive “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” stance on illegal drugs. Hence, Canada was the haven for the traffickers on vacation, but the USA was the marketplace where one ounce of Heaven Seven was worth three ounc
es of gold. If you could get back to Canada to spend your cash, you could afford a fine living. If you didn’t get caught in the U.S., that is. That was the dilemma.
* * *
When Granger saw them enter the room, he was groggy from the pain medications and thought these nice men had brought him his briefcase of Heaven Seven. As he looked more closely, he began to realize they weren’t just hotheads with his stash but were police, and they intended to read his chip. They had the looks of fiftyish, overweight police detectives, one dark, going gray, one redhead. Each wore a suit and tie.
“Hugo Granger?” said the dark one. “I am Detective Hauser and this is Detective O’Brian. We are here with a warrant to read your chip. Let’s get started and jack-in, if you don’t mind too much. The warrant is sound. It is signed by Judge Litinsky, Hennepin County.”
“Okay, okay,” said Granger, his lanky six-foot frame still laced with stitches and bandages. “I may have some surprises for you, though.”
“What could surprise us?” inquired O’Brian.
“For one, I’m a cop.”
“You’re shitting us. You sure ain’t local. And I didn’t see no badge in your property.”
Granger rose a bit and tapped his right forefinger on his temple. “It’s in here. I got no amygdala. It’s been replaced with a fearless chip.”
“I know they all just chat with each other like they got a cell phone in their head. You’re gonna have to explain yourself a bit more. Links are out of my price range. What’s an ‘amygdahla,’ anyway?”
“That’s the part of your brain that creates the fight-or-flight mechanism. It’s like this,” said Granger. “I got no fear cuz I’m a no-amygdala person. It was removed and a bio-neural chip replaced it five years ago in Quantico, Virginia. I’m Department of Defense Intelligence. I watch out for drugs on Air Force aircraft traveling from the heroin fields of Afghanistan or cocaine from Colombia.”
“What’s this amygdala thing?” said O’Brian.
“I got a bio-neural chip where my fear mechanism used to be. It makes me very cool under threat. I don’t get scared the way normal folk do. Let’s get this main cerebellum chip read. I got two. My link chip and my fear chip. The fear chip is D.O.D. and the link chip is commercial. It’s just a Sendai Chronoscope. I want a look at my own shooter. For the moment I can’t remember what she looked like.”
“She?” asked Hauser.
“It was a girl who did the shooting. She had heavy makeup, I expect a wig, and dark glasses. I’ll show you as soon as we jack in,” said Granger as he ran his fingers through brown, long-cut hair. He came to the square port installed at the back of the skull, just above the muscular connections to the neck. Hauser opened the case and handed the slender cable to Granger, who inspected the square connector and slid it into the jack plate at the back of his head. The chip reader’s screen flickered into life. The pixels swirled into a face and arms extended, holding a pistol, dark scarf, sunglasses, red lips, Middle Eastern hook nose. There was little for a computer to use. Almost all pattern recognition software was disabled by the nose and eyes being obscured.
Was the nose real or fake? thought Hauser. Probably fake, he thought.
“This equipment can only do so much,” said O’Brian. “Who were you working with?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” Granger grinned. “It’s a joke, dammit. You guys are going to get your security clearances raised by this, though. The briefcase of Heaven Seven is a designer tweaking of Heaven Seven. It was made by Department of Defense chemists. Heaven Seven works on the brain receptor for phencyclidine. Years ago at the turn of the century, a drug called angel dust made a big dent in the business. Very nasty. It was used commercially as a tranquilizer for swine. The vets used it to chill out twelve-hundred-pound pigs for medical care. Heaven Seven uses the same drug receptor in the brain. I got shot over some bait made to trap a trafficker group. Almost got them.”
They all watched the girl shoot three times, then pick up the briefcase and run away.
“She has a discriminator chip,” Granger added. “One that can’t be involuntarily linked. I have one too, but mine is government. Hers is probably from Hong King. We can trace it. She’s dressed as a man, but her gait is female. Perhaps the mainframe computers can track that.” He smiled. The very precautions taken to keep her anonymous would perhaps give her secrets away.
* * *
“We can get across the border by boat or air,” Tom said to Sunny. “All we have to do is get this to Winnipeg and we can retire. Kiss me, lover, and let’s plot our exit.”
Tom and Sunny poured themselves into each other like water into a thirsty animal.
Afterwards Sunny frowned. “What if he IDs you? Granger has seen me but he doesn’t know I am the one who fingered him for you to hit. He might have me in his files but he won’t know for sure who to choose. So, shall we cross the border as motorists, fliers, or boaters?”
* * *
“How did you fit all that crap into your head anyway?” asked Hauser.
“I have some of it hardwired into my memory and speech centers,” Granger explained. “That way I have recall powers that are playback type and I can use my speech centers to send and compose reports to my boss. Normal linking allows you to do that the same way, but once in awhile you link with someone you don’t want to and it can get ugly. My implant is protected by the mainframes in Virginia and Colorado, so I am secure, but someone who has a Hong Kong implant can assault a person telekinetically who has a regular link chip. They don’t mention the dark side of chipping when they talk to recreational senders. They just send them e-mail until they think they want a chip installed.”
“Okay, so you got the bulletproof version and so do they. How about you read up on your little toy radio and get us some suspects, how’s about that, eh?” said O’Brian.
“I can do better than that. The briefcase of Heaven Seven was chip-linked. Here’s where you can raid my attempted murderers.” He reached over to the keyboard of the chip reader and typed in a series of numbers and letters.
The screen burst to a pale-gray background with black letters. A map and a blueprint design appeared. An address on the map flashed from bold type to regular type and a schematic drawing of the building showed a pulsing dot on the thirteenth floor.
* * *
Hauser and O’Brian sat in the gull-winged police cruiser as the Special Assault Team went into action on floor thirteen. The two seasoned vets had earned the right to watch from the ground floor as the team’s helmet cameras recorded the home invasion. The team systematically broke down the door, cleared every room, then used a probe to detect the briefcase. They found the case, but the only thing living there was a cat.
The briefcase was empty. But the fingerprint evidence was rich. The Arab nose and sunglasses turned out to be Marina Anne Parker, and her accomplice a man who was identified as Thomas James Dale. Both files had extensive photos, school records, medical implants, and histories. Dale was ex-military and Parker listed her trade as “entertainer.”
The data also showed an airplane belonging to Dale had been fueled that morning and was taxiing to a take-off just as the raid was occurring.
“We can call Air Force out of Duluth and get them intercepted,” said Hauser. “Maybe even get someone from around here to take them down. Doesn’t Special Assault have an aircraft? Tell them to launch immediately with all they’ve got. Get back to us with what’s proposed, and don’t let that airplane get across the border.”
“Can you let me observe, Detective?” said an unexpected voice on Hauser’s radio.
“Who is this? You’re on a government line, buddy, whoever you are,” said Hauser.
“It’s just me, Granger. This is what advanced linking can do, Detective. I understand your suspects have tried to escape but are finding your air power to be as good as their attempted egress. They are at Holman Field in St. Paul, near downtown. I’ll meet you there.”
Hauser pu
t down his radio and said to O’Brian, “Remember when I said when pigs fly I’ll talk to the dead? That Granger guy was half dead this morning and now he’s giving us phone calls from his hospital bed. I have just seen hell freeze over.”
* * *
Hauser got to the field with O’Brian and a team from Special Assault. They saw a cordon of guards around a small twin-engine airplane with its engines running, propellers whirling. It must have been a hundred years old if it was a day. Hauser spotted Granger at the terminal and slowed in the van as the gunshot victim bounded to the open door.
“Get in or you’ll miss out on the takedown,” said Hauser to Granger as the former hospital resident climbed into the moving vehicle.
They gunned the engine and accelerated down the runway. When they got to the circle of National Guardsmen with rifles and pistols, they checked in with the commander of the troops.
Hauser was given a bullhorn. “Shut down your engines and come out with your hands out where we can see them.”
The two engines slowed and stopped sputtering. The propellers slowed and came to rest.
The two occupants of the Grumman Cougar airplane emerged from the door with their hands held aloft. They were met by guardsmen who restrained them with handcuffs and led them to the rear of Hauser and O’Brian’s car.
When Granger began to walk toward the woman, she began to scream. “Stop him. No-oo-oo-oo. Don’t let him do this. He’s gonna blank my link. He’s gonna steal all my memories. Stop him,” she pleaded with Hauser and O’Brian.
Granger pulled a cord out of his pocket and walked up to Sunny. He slipped the jack end of the cord into his hand and moved it toward the base of her skull.
“You can’t do that, Granger, she still has local charges here,” said O’Brian.
Surrender Aurora Page 19
