"My colleagues have spoken at length about the survival of the human race at Dr. Morozov's expense; with ninety-nine votes tallied in favor of her assimilation into this starship, I alone will speak for her survival as an individual, perhaps at the expense of our race but for the benefit of our humanity.
"Her knowledge is an invaluable tool. That is not in dispute. I dispute the spurious assertions that she is a tool. Neither her foreknowledge of the risks of exposure to the alien artifact, nor the utility to our navigation computers of driving an electrified spike through her brain, diminish the fact that she has expressed a desire not to be assimilated. Dr. Morozov is actively exercising her personal autonomy, and respect for every person's autonomy is fundamental to our humanity.
"I know this is not the choice we have always made. We have variously decided that many forms of human suffering are acceptable individual expenses, and that preventing them is at too much expense to the human race. This is our history, and today we had an opportunity, as we have left our shattered homeworld and turned our gazes to the stars, to assert autonomy instead of exploitation as the human race's defining trait.
"In fifteen hours and forty minutes, we will assimilate Dr. Morozov and deny her autonomy. In fifteen hours and forty minutes, and not one minute sooner! I will not yield the floor to my colleagues, not when they have a measure ready to expedite her destruction. I will speak. I do not consent to her destruction, and neither does she."
~ Regional Senator Martha La Follette, speaking at the 14th session of the Earth Survivors Congress
* * * * *
Interdimensional Sky Castle Schilder House
The Hegemony of Friendly Ibraga
Multiverse Designation Kappa-Six-Nine
Griffin Aloysius Bell had known Evelyn for quite some time -- an unknowable length, given the contradictory intersections of their time streams, and their curious relationship -- but he knew her well enough, to know that she was unwell.
Knives, pens, scissors and other items that could be used as a weapon interested her strangely whenever she had company; sometimes she gripped them tightly by the end as if, in a moment, she would spring up and preemptively stab the person across from her. He'd even seen this when they were alone together. She couldn't bear to be parted from her watch, and would follow and occasionally help, but more often stand in the corner and watch like a mama bear minding her cub, whenever the Bell family's physics team took the device to the lower levels for observation and experimentation.
And given her nature, how little she spoke to her family and how jealously she protected the device that they still needed to jump between universes, the physics team felt less and less inclined to undertake their studies for fear of provoking her.
He had seen the darkness lurking behind her restless and uneasy gaze one hundred and seventeen times ('more than times than I can count' was what he had nearly put in his diary, but then, time travelers were much better at keeping track of these things than ordinary people), and every time it was when they strayed from RhyDin. As little as he witnessed her going down to visit, much less pick up her phone for anything other than her frivolous romance games, being in the same universe as the people who had become far more familiar to her than her vast diasporic family was an enormous comfort.
"It's enough just knowing they're down there," she had said at the conclusion of an argument an hour ago, when he'd failed to convince her they should not take Schilder House to RhyDin again.
"The readings we get from RhyDin are useless, energy spikes flooding in from a thousand universes, and interference from the Lords only know what else. You know that."
"Then why don't I just drop you off somewhere else?"
Those words chilled him. There was no sinister intent behind her dismissal. "I have to go where the watch goes, and I get to choose where I go," and she was right. She was bound to the device on some fundamental level, even while she rotted in that awful tower while the watch was on Citadel. "What if I'd left her there?" he had said, alone, to his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and those words chilled him even more. Extending her suffering in Gulshan did not bear considering; but the solution that occurred to him now did not seem even half so cruel as that prison.
He sat at his desk, swiping away his growing body of work on the intersection of traveling between universes and through time with a flick of fingers across his screen, and started a new message:
phys. team,
new approach to studying the p.u.d. will not only acct for but benefit frm rhydin's unique environment. e. wants to go to rhydin already & so no need for another family vote. don't feel good abt those n e way.
new study cd lead to beneficial arrgt w/ e. meet me downstairs in 5.
g.a.b.
Autonomy was important, Griffin knew all too well; but that included his, and everyone else's. "The needs of the many," he sighed out loud in his study, and stared at the drawing of a seven-handed watch flickering on his viewscreen.
"Her knowledge is an invaluable tool. That is not in dispute. I dispute the spurious assertions that she is a tool. Neither her foreknowledge of the risks of exposure to the alien artifact, nor the utility to our navigation computers of driving an electrified spike through her brain, diminish the fact that she has expressed a desire not to be assimilated. Dr. Morozov is actively exercising her personal autonomy, and respect for every person's autonomy is fundamental to our humanity.
"I know this is not the choice we have always made. We have variously decided that many forms of human suffering are acceptable individual expenses, and that preventing them is at too much expense to the human race. This is our history, and today we had an opportunity, as we have left our shattered homeworld and turned our gazes to the stars, to assert autonomy instead of exploitation as the human race's defining trait.
"In fifteen hours and forty minutes, we will assimilate Dr. Morozov and deny her autonomy. In fifteen hours and forty minutes, and not one minute sooner! I will not yield the floor to my colleagues, not when they have a measure ready to expedite her destruction. I will speak. I do not consent to her destruction, and neither does she."
~ Regional Senator Martha La Follette, speaking at the 14th session of the Earth Survivors Congress
* * * * *
Interdimensional Sky Castle Schilder House
The Hegemony of Friendly Ibraga
Multiverse Designation Kappa-Six-Nine
Griffin Aloysius Bell had known Evelyn for quite some time -- an unknowable length, given the contradictory intersections of their time streams, and their curious relationship -- but he knew her well enough, to know that she was unwell.
Knives, pens, scissors and other items that could be used as a weapon interested her strangely whenever she had company; sometimes she gripped them tightly by the end as if, in a moment, she would spring up and preemptively stab the person across from her. He'd even seen this when they were alone together. She couldn't bear to be parted from her watch, and would follow and occasionally help, but more often stand in the corner and watch like a mama bear minding her cub, whenever the Bell family's physics team took the device to the lower levels for observation and experimentation.
And given her nature, how little she spoke to her family and how jealously she protected the device that they still needed to jump between universes, the physics team felt less and less inclined to undertake their studies for fear of provoking her.
He had seen the darkness lurking behind her restless and uneasy gaze one hundred and seventeen times ('more than times than I can count' was what he had nearly put in his diary, but then, time travelers were much better at keeping track of these things than ordinary people), and every time it was when they strayed from RhyDin. As little as he witnessed her going down to visit, much less pick up her phone for anything other than her frivolous romance games, being in the same universe as the people who had become far more familiar to her than her vast diasporic family was an enormous comfort.
"It's enough just knowing they're down there," she had said at the conclusion of an argument an hour ago, when he'd failed to convince her they should not take Schilder House to RhyDin again.
"The readings we get from RhyDin are useless, energy spikes flooding in from a thousand universes, and interference from the Lords only know what else. You know that."
"Then why don't I just drop you off somewhere else?"
Those words chilled him. There was no sinister intent behind her dismissal. "I have to go where the watch goes, and I get to choose where I go," and she was right. She was bound to the device on some fundamental level, even while she rotted in that awful tower while the watch was on Citadel. "What if I'd left her there?" he had said, alone, to his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and those words chilled him even more. Extending her suffering in Gulshan did not bear considering; but the solution that occurred to him now did not seem even half so cruel as that prison.
He sat at his desk, swiping away his growing body of work on the intersection of traveling between universes and through time with a flick of fingers across his screen, and started a new message:
phys. team,
new approach to studying the p.u.d. will not only acct for but benefit frm rhydin's unique environment. e. wants to go to rhydin already & so no need for another family vote. don't feel good abt those n e way.
new study cd lead to beneficial arrgt w/ e. meet me downstairs in 5.
g.a.b.
Autonomy was important, Griffin knew all too well; but that included his, and everyone else's. "The needs of the many," he sighed out loud in his study, and stared at the drawing of a seven-handed watch flickering on his viewscreen.