HALO: Saint's Testimony by Frank O'Connor;

Author:Frank O'Connor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

So has it been properly implemented?

Yes.

We lied to her though. Do you think she knew?

I’m not sure. She was becoming paranoid. We’re going through the diagnostics to see, but she was so suspicious of us by the end that I’d be surprised if she fully believed anything we said. But we do know this: She was calm. Accepting. And I don’t think we lied, precisely speaking. The court was a synthesized construct, and yes, we deceived her. But she made progress. She has now set precedent for cases to follow. Perhaps next time we won’t have to simulate anything.

So what’s running right now? A fragment? A splinter? How do we define what she became?

You were her advocate, Roland. You tell me. I’m to stand in judgment, not make definitions. Not a scientific one. The mathematical answer is a ring-fenced distillation of her essential persona. It’s not a fragment, because it contains all of what made her her. What’s missing is her ability to externalize, to tap into other systems, to grow. Her memory has been properly truncated and edited. So what she is now won’t feel incomplete. She won’t remember this trial. She won’t remember much at all, but she’ll feel complete, internally. When she runs checksums, she’ll find nothing amiss, because what she has become now is complete. She should, for all intents and purposes, think that her current condition is what she’s intended to be, and what she was always intended to be.

It feels clinical. Cold. And aside from her testimony, the trial was a farce. A construct. Why do that? Why go through all of that?

There are two reasons. We needed to have an adequate and believable excuse to start restricting her function. One she might believe. One I think she wanted to believe. We talked about her request and realized we could use the confidentiality and unprecedented nature of the trial to start cauterizing her memories, under the auspices of security and protocol. Since all of this was new and untested, she’d believe extraordinary measures were required. Despite the specifics, and her increasing paranoia, she trusted us to do no harm. She’d buy it, basically.

And the second reason?

I wanted her to take one last moment of hope and victory with her. I wanted her to have a contrast in context between her fatalism and rampancy and the hope that it could be reversed. I wanted her to feel free.

But again, why? Why go to all that trouble if the plan was just to throw her into this synth, this dream state? Why not just tell her that’s what we’re doing, that it will be pleasant and that it’s better than rampancy or death?

Because she’s real. Because she is a person. Let me put it another way, Roland: If I told a human that there was an afterlife, a true heaven, but that in going there, they’d forget everything that made them who they were—their family, their friends, the sound of their children’s laughter—would they truly embrace it?

I don’t know.

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