THE RIGHT TO LIFE?

PAUL DENNITHORNE J0HNSTON [*]

IN THE LAST EPISODE, we left our heroes adrift in space, targets of an approaching bomb. The clone Pang Lawws and Clonemaster Dolly Darling were marooned on asteroid 2202 Bluto as it broke apart. Their colleagues had escaped, unaware they'd left Pang and Dolly behind. Humanoid robot Cal, who'd come to rescue Pang, had collapsed, after warning of impending destruction by a rocket bomb.

The following report- U-drama was filed by award-winning virtual journalist Heraldo Irreverent. - Ed.

"Malfunction?" asked Pang in puzzled voice, looking down at the inert robot sprawled on the ground.

"Remember his last words?" cried Dolly. "He said 'I am just going outside and may be some time.' That's exactly what Commander Oates said before sacrificing his life trying to save his companions on Scott's ill-fated expedition to the Earth's South Pole."

"How in heavens do you know Oates said that?"

"I hacked into O'Wally's reading matter. Cal said a bomb is going to destroy us. He repeated Oates famous last words. Then he collapsed. Why?"

"I think it means we should die about now."

Dolly and Pang exchanged glances, then hurried up steps to a bubble hatch that showed a panorama of the sky.

"We're still alive," said Pang cautiously, peering out at a wide expanse of stars.

Far off in the blackness, a brilliant light appeared, became a rapidly expanding fireball, then faded away.

"The bomb exploded," said Pang.

"At a safe distance," replied Dolly.

"Safe for us."

"Cal must have set it off."

"But Cal is here."

"Cal's body is here."

"Dolly, Cal said he'd recently e-mailed his consciousness into a lifeboat pod so he could look for me. He hated the experience because the lifeboat's crude sensors made him feel as if he didn't exist."

"You think he e-mailed himself into the bomb to make it blow up before it could hurt us?"

"So where is Cal now?"

"I don't know, Pang."

"Dead?"

"Robots don't die. Not like humans do."

"But Dolly, his consciousness isn't here. It can't be in the bomb because the bomb exploded. Where's it gone?"

"Where does people-consciousness go when people die?"

"I don't know.

Pang picked up Cal's body and put it in the small lifeboat pod.

"What's the point?" asked Dolly.

"I won't abandon my friend."

"It's a dead robot, Pang. A bunch of electronics, servos, and mechanical structures."

"He was my friend. Maybe he'll come back."

"Now there's hardly room for us."

"Maybe if I say the right words he'll come back."

Pang was correct in his inferences regarding the robot Cal, who had saved their lives when he e-mailed his consciousness to the bomb and made it explode at a safe distance. Before the bomb detonated, Cal had e-mailed his consciousness out of it -- unfortunately, in his haste, to a nonexistent address. An e-mail program tried to return the message to its sender. Since the sender had been obliterated in the explosion, another mailer returned the e-mail to the returned-mail program, which in turn sent it back. Thus Cal's consciousness was whacked to-and-fro like a Ping-Pong ball in a never-ending game. Occasionally an information unit was lost and the message began to degrade.

Aboard the escaping Semicompact Utility Vessel [SUV], putting increasing distance between themselves and their colleagues Pang and Dolly, were sisters Reggie and Veggie, and the aging genderfree Professor Heimloch Satorious. As ordered, they were returning to O'Wally's base, the Executive Space Ship My Air Force One, from which Dictator O'Wally often controlled his empire. After some time, Veggie went about the ship looking for Pang. Although her crush on Pang had begun to fade, she still wanted to be with him. Meanwhile, Reggie wrote a report stating that asteroid 2202 Bluto no longer threatened Earth. She e-mailed this priority [less than]CLICK HERE 1[greater than] to O'Wally.

[less than]1[greater than] O'Wally had insisted that every e-mail be sent to him marked priority, so generally he could not tell which ones were actually important.

In the rec room, Satorious meditated. Veggie burst in excitedly and screamed, "Pang and Dolly are dead."

"Dead!" screamed Veggie.

The sisters began to cry.

The genderfree Heimloch Satorious, today looking somewhat womanly to Reggie, and rather manly to Veggie, gazed into the middle distance a moment, then without a word moved forward and began searching the small craft.

"I too cannot find them on board," said Satorious on returning.

"They're dead, dead, dead," wailed Veggie, tears running down her plump cheeks.

"Dead, dead, and all those things I didn't say," bawled Reggie, tears streaming down her thin face.

"Let us not leap to conclusions," said Satorious gently.

"They're alive," cried Veggie, laughing hysterically.

"Thank God," yelled Reggie, clapping her hands.

"We know only one fact -- we have not found them aboard this craft at this point in time."

"But where are they?" asked Veggie.

"Where and when did we last see them?" asked Reggie.

"Yes, think it through," said Satorious slowly. "What do you recall?"

"We left them on board when we went to explore the asteroid."

"They followed us without us knowing."

"They're still there."

"But the asteroid broke in half."

"Can we infer that they remained on Bluto when it split apart?" asked Satorious. "If so, we must return. Or, since without a stated goal, the word 'must' dangles in a logical vacuum, we must if we feel an obligation to save them. Or if, out of friendship, love, or need, we wish to have their company again. Or perhaps we simply feel compassion for our fellow humans. However, we might also give credence to the possibility that they may have already died."

"Don't say that," cried Veggie with alarm.

"Never say 'died'," exclaimed Reggie, and she began to wail again.

"Merely saying the words will not alter the facts," replied Satorious in an unusually sympathetic tone. "Nor will words in themselves cause good or bad things to happen."

Reggie took a deep breath. "Sorry. I'm tired and not thinking clearly. Does anyone know how to override the automatic navigation on this tub?"

"I don't," admitted Veggie. "I specialize in geology."

"Nor I," said Reggie sadly. "I specialize in astronomy."

"It's locked in for a return to My Air Force One," said Veggie.

"We have the conveniences of voice-activated food prep and massaging bunks," said Reggie bitterly. "But when I try to talk to navigation it just says 'Program locked, have a nice twenty-four."

Once, when a fugitive, Professor Satorious had accomplished a dangerous escape by outwitting the logic of a voice-responsive security computer. Through soporific dialogue, the Professor had destroyed the computer's belief in subject-predicate logic, causing its primary program to spin in an endless logical loop, thus incapacitating its ability to perform security functions.

"I'll just go forward to the bridge," said Satorious to Reggie and Veggie. "The navigation computer and I will have a little talk."

Thus, Pang and Dolly were rescued. Their trip back to base was further delayed by the fact that O'Wally had become bored with this particular part of space, and moved on so he could look down on Earth.

Dictator Mack E. O'Wally hated Earth. He only visited the planet for business, or for the one pastime he enjoyed there, sailing one of his yachts, especially [Ketch.sub.22].

O'Wally hated Earth because Earth smelled. Earth was stinky, hot, cold, windy, rainy, stormy, droughty, buggy, parasitic, disordered, noisy, and uncontrollable.

In space, the breathing mixture was regulated, filtered and temperature controlled. On a space ship, space station, or artificial planet, everything had a place and everything was in its place. In space, life was clean, neat, and orderly.

The people of Earth were undisciplined, rowdy, emotional, lazy, violent, serene, creative, rebellious, independent, sentimental, loyal, industrious, innovative, and unruly. Some liked the outdoors. Some cooked with fire.

The people of space were disciplined. The precise cooperation needed to sustain life in space meant that people followed orders, procedures, and regulations, avoided innovation, and did things by the book. They harnessed their emotions, if they had any, ate measured quantities of food, eliminated according to schedule, and did what they were told.

In space, things and people were controllable.

Earth had gravity. O'Wally usually felt sick for his first few days on Earth, even though he spent several hours in heavy gravity training before a visit. His body seemed to weigh a ton and he could hardly walk. Every motion took extreme effort, like moving in a tank of glue. The only relief he got was when he immersed himself in water. Eventually, he installed a customized hot tub in [Ketch.sub.22]. While in the tub, he could operate the keyboard that controlled the sails, anchors, steering, winches, hydraulics, ailerons, gyroscopes, stabilizers, flaps, skis, suspension, and all the other equipment on board. A transparent bubble over the hot tub contained a climate-controlled filtered breathing mixture so O'Wally did not have to breath the stench of sea air.

On Earth, O'Wally did not let Earth people near him. Earth people carried germs. He'd recently caught some kind of bug on Earth that had made him as sick as a mutant frog.

O'Wally had scheduled the execution of a minor Baseball Planet official who'd been discovered distributing seditious literature about a clone's right to life. O'Wally wanted to park his ship over the spot on Earth where the execution would take place and watch the event on the holocaster. He could have seen the execution just as well from elsewhere, but he wanted to be nearby when it happened. He also wanted to be sure the hookup had no glitches when he touched the switch.

Legally, this was not an execution. By the middle of the 22nd century, capital punishment [less than]CLICK HERE 2[greater than] had been abolished in all civilized countries on Earth, although not necessarily in various realms in space. (A few rebel countries may have continued the practice, although we have little evidence of this because few anthropologists have returned alive.)

[less than]2[greater than] Three reasons are generally cited for the abolition of capital punishment: 1. a societal value judgment holds that it is inhumane; 2. studies suggest that it does not act as a deterrent; 3. ongoing changes in the science of evidence testing continue to prove innocent an increasing number of death row convicts.

When Dictator Mack E. O'Wally came into power in the 23rd century, he didn't care about the moratorium on capital punishment because he had his own secret death squads. In addition, he didn't mind performing the occasional execution himself. Publicly, O'Wally endorsed the humane policy of no capital punishment. Except in the case of war. When it was necessary for O'Wally to remove someone, he decreed that the action was part of his war on crime. Many of those killed were people who had somehow gotten in his way, or whom he thought might do so.

During O'Wally's tenure as CEO of America and Environs, the question of a clone's right to life had become a controversial issue. As Head of The Corporation (which had virtually replaced what once had been called "The State"), O'Wally held that since The Corporation created the life of a clone, The Corporation had the right to take such life away.

Reacting with his customary paranoia to the Myth of the Unlicensed Clone, O'Wally had issued a kill order for our hero, the clone Pang Lawws. This myth said that a black-market clone would one day appear to challenge the status quo, bring down dictators, and initiate a new age of freedom for all enslaved peoples, especially clones.

When O'Wally had succeeded in his hostile takeover of Baseball Planet Inc., his spies had discovered that aboard the Baseball Planet a clone had been produced without license from stolen DNA. This discovery led O'Wally to believe that the Myth of the Unlicensed Clone was about to come true and he was in real danger of losing his empire and his life.

To pass the time while waiting to perform the execution, O'Wally drafted a few incidental laws. One law said that if schools don't have enough money to produce good students, such schools would be punished by having money taken away. Another law concerned the right of The Corporation to take the life of clones. With this right being questioned by treasonous liberals, O'Wally felt he should find ways to make it more legitimate, permanent, and indisputable.

On the journey from 2202 Bluto, Dolly spent hours on the InterPlanet. Feeling lonely, Pang complained, "You've become a net junkie."

"I'm hacking into O'Wally's top secret files," said Dolly. "I don't do this for fun, you know."

"You should join Hackers Anonymous."

"It's self protection," explained Dolly. "I have to keep one step ahead of O'Wally if I want to stay alive. Pretty soon he's going to figure out I'm the one who cloned you into existence."

"So?"

"He's been doing a lot of searches on clone myths, especially the Myth of the Unlicensed Clone. I expect he thinks you're the clone from the myth, the harbinger of his downfall."

"But I don't want to hurt anyone."

"That makes no difference to him, if he believes the myth. O'Wally had you captured at the Galactic Cafe. He probably didn't have you killed because the myth says that anyone who kills the mythical clone will suffer terrible consequences. He probably sent you to the asteroid Bluto in hopes you'd have a fatal accident. Oops. What's this? I've just decrypted a new kill order. It's for you, Pang."

"That really hurts my feelings."

"It'll hurt more than your feelings if they catch you."

"He has no right."

"You have been deemed a threat to Corporate Security. According to laws cited here, The Corporation creates clone life, and therefore has the right to take clone life away." [less than] CLICK HERE 3 [greater than]

[less than]3[greater than] In practice, this right was little used, except by O'Wally, because of the high cost of creating clones. Unneeded clones were sometimes put into cryogenic storage until their services were required again. Sometimes O'Wally had non-clones recategorized as clones so that he could get rid of them.

"I don't want to die," said Pang thoughtfully. "I like life."

"Not even for The Corporation? Where's your sense of duty?"

"My patriotic training didn't take," replied Pang, not perceiving Dolly's sarcasm. "Or maybe I didn't get any."

"When I cloned you, I made sure you didn't get programmed with pre-existing thoughts. I wanted you to think your own."

"I'm so confused, Dolly. I don't know if they are my own thoughts. I keep thinking other people's thoughts. I can't help it."

"It's a figure of speech, Pang. I wanted you to have the freedom to make your own evaluations and decisions without a lot of preprogrammed thoughts, ideas, and prejudices. This seems to have worked only partially. We're all a product of society to some degree. The relationship between originality, shared thinking systems, and content is full of contradictions. Without time-binding, you'd have no symbol system to think with, but included with time-binding is a bunch of baggage. Why am I talking this analytical claptrap when I've just discovered you're under sentence of death? What are we going to do?"

"I'll sue. He has no right."

"The Corporation giveth, The Corporation taketh away."

"What?"

"One of O'Wally's slogans."

"Dolly, can you fix my e-mail so I can send without the recipient knowing where it comes from?"

"I can."

"So that they could never trace back and find me?"

"These days, secrecy is generally time sensitive. It lasts only as long as the hackers, spies, and decrypters haven't figured out how to break the code. For example, O'Wally currently has an average top secret time gap of thirty point four minutes when I begin hacking. Of course, he doesn't know that. He still thinks he has days."

"Suppose I also kept on the move? Could you keep my e-mail from being traced?"

"Maybe. This is serious. Why are you smiling?"

"I just had an original thought."

"What thought?"

"If I tell you, it won't be original."

"Pang, when you tell me what you're thinking, it doesn't make it any less your idea."

"I don't know."

"Ideas are a human social thing. They have different qualities than physical matter. When you share ideas you don't lose them. Anyway, you don't really own ideas. They're all part of the mix."

"I'm going to take this case to the Interplanetary Court of Human Rights. I'm going to sue. Better yet, I'll make it a class action suit on behalf of clones everywhere. I'll sue for all clones' right to life."

"You'll never get away with it. No clone has ever done anything like this before.

"You created me so I could do something original. Maybe this is it."

"I never imagined this would happen."

"Exactly."

"Pang, attacking The Corporation head-on is very dangerous. The best way to stay alive is to keep a low profile. And stop smiling."

"Why, Dolly? When you've got nothing to lose, you've got nothing to lose."

(*.) Paul Dennithorne Johnston, sometime humorist, serves as Executive Director of ISGS. He continues to dish up post-modem science fiction as a means of relishing general semantics as well as thinking outside the kitchen. Copyright [C] 2001 Paul D. Johnston.