The Awkward Black Man

by Walter Mosley

  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  “Withdrawn.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.

  “Answer my question,” Ralph Lacosta said.

  “I believe in my soul.”

  “H
ow 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.”

  “You lost weight.”

  “Fightin’ trim. As you could see, I usually lose, but I give back some too.”

  “I’m so sorry, Morgan.”

  “No need. I knew this was bound to happen the first time I made ten thousand dollars
in cash. I was seventeen years old. Even way back then I knew that money came and went, came and went.”

  “Your name will go down as one of the most important men in science and world history.”

  “Or maybe I’ll be forgotten. Maybe they’ll say that the board of directors of BCI was the movers and shakers. I’m just another hustler or, or, or—what did that Lacosta call me? Yeah, a huckster.”

  “Even now the youngsters are saying that it was you who discovered the human soul.”

  “And here I’m just like you,” Morgan said. “Never thought one way or t’other ’bout if there’s a soul or not.”

  “But you were the one who articulated the upload-download process,” Matthews said. “You were the one who convinced Tyler Barnes that his soul had been placed in a new form.”

  “And that’s why I’m here. I did the devil’s work, and now they got me on the chain gang.”

  For a time the old colleagues sat in silence.

  Carly felt powerless to help a man who she’d come to recognize for his greatness, and he was just happy with a full stomach and the sun flooding in from the window at her back.

  “Why you here, girl?”

  “I was told by an ex-employee of BCI that they abandoned you because you didn’t tie up my patents and copyrights with them.”

  “I never thought a’ that. Damn. I bet your source is right though. Them mothahfuckahs in corporations actually think they can own everything from the ants crawlin’ on the wall to the ideas in our heads. Shit. The blues tell ya that you come in cryin’ and alone and you go out the same way.”

  Morgan started moving his head as if he was moving to the beat of a song unsung.

  “How can I help you, Morgan?”

  “You know what’s gonna happen, right?”

  “With what?”

  “Macromime.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Here these corporations and shit think they found an untapped commodity, but one day that machine is gonna do like them people in Europe say and think itself an entity. That’s why they should have us all in here.”

  “That will never happen,” Carly Matthews said with absolute certainty.