The Concurrence

The Reading ends at 06:14, and Anneke Voss has eleven hours left.

Eleven is what the statute allows. Not ten, which the clinicians lobbied for, and not fourteen, which the ethicists wanted. Eleven hours was chosen because the early data showed that Antecedents who were given less than nine felt hurried, and Antecedents given more than twelve began, in the language of the founding report, to reconsider.

I am her Attestor. My name is Ilan Weiss, I have held the certificate for nine years, and this is my four hundred and first Interval. The work is easy to describe. I sit with the Antecedent from the moment the Reading concludes until the moment she signs the Concurrence. Then I sign beneath her name. Then I leave the room, and the clinicians go in, and by 17:20 there is only one Anneke Voss in the world again, which is the number the law permits.

She sits up on the couch and touches the back of her own neck, where the field collar has left two pale crescents.

"Did it work?" she asks.

"We won't know for about three hours," I say. "It usually works."

"That isn't an answer."

"No," I agree. "It's the honest version of one."

She likes that. Most of them do. It is the reason I say it.

*

Voss is seventy-one. For thirty of those years she mapped aquifers — the deep slow water under the Karoo, under the Nubian shelf, water that fell as rain when there were no people to see it fall. She has told me twice already that groundwater does not flow so much as lean. She has Ferrant's syndrome. It is not fast. She has perhaps two years, and the last eight months of them are the reason she is here.

At 09:40 the Continuant comes up.

This is the part of the Interval that the statute exists to protect. The law does not require the Antecedent to believe in continuity as a metaphysical proposition; it requires her to verify it as a matter of fact. She must speak to the instance made from her Reading. She must satisfy herself that it is her — not a portrait of her, not an actor working from her file, but the thing that woke up knowing what she was thinking at 06:13.

The link opens. The image is deliberately plain: no room behind it, no window, nothing to argue about.

"Oh," says the Continuant, and puts a hand over her mouth. "Oh, it's like the moment before you sneeze. It's exactly like that and then it's over."

Voss laughs. It goes on longer than the joke deserves. When she stops there are tears standing in her lower lids and not falling, and the Continuant has the same tears in the same place, which is not a coincidence and not a trick; it is simply what the same face does with the same feeling.

They talk for fifty minutes. I am required to be present and not to speak. They discuss a man named Petrus, dead nineteen years; a debt of four hundred rand owed to a woman in Beaufort West; the correct thickness for a pancake. Near the end the Continuant says, "The lean. You can still feel it, can't you, the leaning," and Voss says, "Yes," and there is nothing else in the room for a while.

The link closes at 10:31. Voss sits with her hands in her lap.

"Well," she says. "That's me."

"Yes."

"No — I want to be precise, because I think precision is about to matter. I don't mean she resembles me. I don't mean she'll do a good job of it." She looks up. "I mean I have no argument. If you asked me to explain what she is missing, I could not name one thing."

I have heard four hundred versions of this sentence. It is the sentence that comes before the signature. I reach for the Concurrence.

"So I've been trying to work out," Voss says, "why that doesn't help."

*

At 13:02 she is still working it out, and I have stopped reaching.

"Here is what I understood this morning," she says. "I understood that in this bed there is a woman who is going to be dead at seventeen-fourteen, and somewhere else there is a woman who is going to go on. And I understood the argument for calling that one event instead of two, and I found the argument good. I still find it good, Mr. Weiss. That's what I can't get past."

"Most people find that it's enough."

"Most people find that it's true. Those are different." She turns her hand over, examining the tremor she has had for a year. "The argument is true and it does not do anything. At seventeen-fourteen the thing that happens to me happens to me. It is not divided in half because there are two of us. It is not cancelled because one of them is fine." She smiles, without much in it. "I have spent my life with water that takes nine thousand years to cross a hundred kilometres. I know the difference between something continuing and something being replaced from the far end."

"The Continuant will remember this conversation," I say. It is on the list of permitted responses. "She will remember choosing."

"She'll remember the Reading. She won't remember the eleven hours. Those are mine." Voss looks at the collar marks in the mirror across the room. "That's the part nobody buys, isn't it. The eleven hours. You can't sell them to anyone."

*

At 15:30 I do what the protocol says to do, which is to open the link again.

This is standard and it is not sinister; it is, if anything, the humane provision. Refusals are rare — twelve percent nationally in the first year, under two percent now — and they almost always end here, because the person best placed to argue for the Concurrence is the person who wants it most, and who happens to have the Antecedent's whole memory of wanting it.

I have called the Continuant nine times in nine years. Nine times she has talked the Antecedent down.

I explain the situation. The Continuant listens with her chin on her fist. Her face does something I have not seen a Continuant's face do, which is nothing at all, for a long time.

Then she says: "Don't sign it."

I say, "I'm required to warn you what that means."

"You're required to tell me I'll be deleted. Eleven seconds, no witness necessary. Yes." She is very calm. "May I speak to her?"

They speak for six minutes. I will not put down what was said; it is in the sealed annex and it belongs to the two of them, who are one person, who are two people. What I will put down is that at no point did either of them try to persuade the other, and that they agreed anyway, and that this frightened me more than the refusal.

Because I had always told myself that the four hundred were evidence. Four hundred people, given eleven hours and the plain sight of their own continuation, had all said yes. I had taken that unanimity as a finding — as data about the practice.

But the four hundred and one had not been asked the same question. The four hundred were asked whether they believed. Voss was asked what belief was worth, and so was the woman made from her at 06:14, and eleven hours apart, from two directions, with no chance to confer, they came back with the same answer.

*

At 17:14 nothing happens, which is the strangest part of the day. The clinicians stand down. Voss goes home to Beaufort West, to two years and eight bad months. At 17:26 the Continuant is deleted. The statute requires an Attestor for the ending of a body and specifies no one at all for the other, so I attend as a private person. It takes eleven seconds. She is talking when it stops. She is saying, "Tell her the pancakes—"

The form has one field left when I file it. Outcome. There are three boxes: Concurred. Deferred. Deceased.

I look at it for a long time. Then I do the only accurate thing available to me, which is to leave all three empty and write, in the margin, where no system will ever read it: Both of them refused. There were two, and now there is one, and I cannot tell you which one that is.