Mitigation

*Documents pertaining to Case 4471-T, State Council on Temporal Compliance.*

I.

[REDACTED CASE SUMMARY — APPENDIX A]

The defendant, Dr. Marigold Sayre, is charged with one (1) count of unauthorized retrocausal intervention, in contravention of Statute 42-A, paragraph 3, subsection (vii). Specifically, on 14 March of the present year, the defendant operated a Class III temporal capsule, registered to her institution, and traveled to 12 July 1953, where she removed the minor child Lila Quintero (age 6) from a swimming pool in Anza-Borrego, California, in which Quintero, in the original timeline, drowned at 14:47 local time. The defendant then returned the minor child to her family alive.

It is the position of the Council that the defendant did not file a Form T-9 (Application for Provisional Modification of the Historical Record) prior to her intervention.

It is the position of the Council that the consequent reweighting of the timeline resulted in three thousand four hundred and seventeen (3,417) preventable pediatric deaths between 1959 and 1971, primarily attributable to the absence of one Dr. Esmeralda Voorhees from the Brookhaven Vaccine Trial of 1957, due to that subject's marital reassignment in the modified timeline.

The defendant has acknowledged the intervention. She has not acknowledged the harm.

II.

[DEPOSITION OF DR. SAYRE — EXCERPT]

Q. Did you understand, at the time of your intervention, that any modification of the timeline would propagate forward in ways that you could not predict?

A. I understood it.

Q. And you proceeded.

A. I proceeded.

Q. Why?

A. Because Lila Quintero was six years old. Because she was, in the original timeline, drowning, alone, in a swimming pool, while her mother had stepped inside to take a phone call. Because I had attended her funeral, in the original timeline, when I was nine. Because I had held her mother's hand at the funeral and her mother had not stopped crying for the duration of the service.

Q. Dr. Sayre, you have, by your own admission, caused the deaths of three thousand four hundred and seventeen children.

A. I have.

Q. Was Lila Quintero worth more than those children?

A. No.

Q. Then why did you intervene?

A. Because she was the one I could reach.

III.

[EXPERT TESTIMONY OF COMMISSIONER R. HALLE — EXCERPT]

… The principle at issue is not, your honors, the value of the saved life. The principle at issue is the asymmetry of moral attention. The defendant could see Lila Quintero. She could not see — she could not, at the moment of decision, see — the three thousand four hundred and seventeen children whose lives she was trading. This is the persistent moral failure of all retrocausal interventions: the saved life is concrete; the lost lives are statistical.

It is the position of the Office that this asymmetry is not a defense. It is the very thing the law was written to correct.

We do not, your honors, prosecute the defendant for caring about Lila Quintero. We prosecute her for not caring, sufficiently, about the children she could not see.

IV.

[LETTER FROM L. QUINTERO TO THE COUNCIL, READ INTO THE RECORD]

I am Lila Quintero.

I am sixty-two years old. I have spent my career in pediatric medicine. I have, by my own count, treated approximately twenty-eight thousand children, and I have lost, by my own count, eighty-three.

I would like the court to know that I would, if asked, return.

I would have the court send me back to that pool, in 1953, and remove me from it, and let me drown there, as I was meant to drown.

I have raised this with Dr. Sayre. She has refused, on grounds I do not understand and have stopped asking her to explain.

Whatever you do to her, please understand that you are doing it to a person who was, in her own way, also drowning, and could not say so.

— L. Q.

V.

[FINAL STATEMENT OF THE DEFENDANT]

Your honors:

I will not contest the facts. I knew the law. I knew the math. I went anyway.

I want to say one thing, and only one thing, in mitigation.

When I was nine years old, I attended Lila Quintero's funeral. I remember the dress I wore. I remember that the priest, who had not known Lila well, mispronounced her name three times during the homily, and her mother flinched each time. I remember that the body in the small white casket did not look like Lila. I remember thinking, with the clarity of a child who has not yet been told that some things are impossible: *Someone should fix this.*

I became, in part because of that thought, a temporal physicist.

I worked for thirty-one years on the technology that would let me fix it.

I do not say this to justify what I did. I say it because I want the court to understand that the law you are about to enforce against me is a law that was written by people who had not, themselves, ever attended such a funeral.

If they had, they would not have written it.

Or if they had written it, they would have, at least, written into it a single line acknowledging that the defendant — like all of us — was, in part, nine years old.

I will accept whatever sentence you impose.

VI.

[RULING]

The defendant is found guilty on all counts.

She is sentenced to permanent revocation of temporal access, and to fifteen years of confinement in a non-temporal facility.

The court further notes, in the matter of mitigation:

*Dr. Sayre is, in part, nine years old. So are we all. The law, as currently written, does not contain a provision for this. The court recommends, with respect, that the legislature consider one.*

[END OF DOCUMENTS]