Corpsicle

“Your Honor,” Mario Raymond addressed the judge and then turned to a much larger audience, “despite what has been speculated wildly in the newspapers, on television, and throughout the entire global network--and beyond--my client is not seeking the reinstatement of his film company nor any portion of its television properties, nor any revenue from its major amusement parks, nor anything else of real value or substance from any of their related subsidiaries or from his descendants… with the exceptions that he would like their recognition that he is alive, and he would also like his name back. It has been--literally--a life and death and life again struggle for him. And this Incredible Journey--“

“Objection, reference to the 1960s’ movie adaptation.”

“Substained. Counsellor, please rephrase your statement.”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor. It’s difficult presenting Walter’s case--“

“Objection, use of any forename, particularly that one--“

“It may,” Mario corrected himself, “be difficult presenting my client’s case without accidentally mentioning some term or phrase that he created or made popular.”

“Objection.”

“What?” Judge Horgan glared.

“Presupposes actual previous existence and relationship with--“

“Overruled. Counsellor, please continue.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. It has been a death then life struggle for my client. But he is clearly alive now, and none of the Prosecutions’ expert witnesses have been able to prove otherwise. My client is human and with less than 90% Autonomatronic—“

“Objection.”

“Less than 90% advanced animatronic parts. Furthermore, my client has followed all of the misidentified-as-dead procedures. He has located the source for the original “mistake” made to his living status, he informed the credit-reporting companies as soon as humanly possible—“

“Objection, presupposes being human.”

“Substained. Reword, Counsellor. We haven’t proven that.”

“He informed the credit-reporting companies as soon as… possible regarding the error in his legal status. And he followed up with the source of the original news publication that reported his death. I submit Exhibits D and E. Exhibit D is his initial letter of inquiry, and Exhibit E is their radio broadcasted retraction. In addition, my client is not contesting the previous resolution of his insurance policies, annuities, stock holdings, pension plan, or his will. Likewise, he has agreed to wave all claims to lost Social Security benefits from between the date when he will once again be eligible and 1966--”

“Objection. We ask that that particular date be stricken from the record.”

Judge Horgan thumped his wooden hammer down. “Gentlemen, will you both please approach the bench? Leave your papers and briefs behind. Just come up here, please.”

Mario made an awkward gesture in the air with his open hands but then slowly walked around the table area set aside for the Defense. As he did so--more in show to the crowd than anything else--he patted and pressed his hand in assurance against his client’s shoulders. This was the first major, public trial to be held regarding the rights of a US citizen “having returned from the dead.” And Mario’s client was as famous as any dead man could be. This was not a simple, banking error or computer glitch. This was not a common case of identity fraud or a soap-opera criminal-plastic-surgery-and-lost memory ratings play. No. This was an actual resurrection and probably just the first of many.

The man-machine hybrid being referred to as “Walter” watched his Defense Attorney approach the bench. Beside Mario, Henry Smith the Third, the lead prosecutor, also made his way. Each man walked with a self-assured, almost defiant stride. They had squared off several times before and had had equal success against the other. Their court loses came not from any inadequacies or bad luck, but, ultimately, as it should be, from the actual evidence and circumstances of the cases. Both were in top form.

Neither man nor their personal assistants were easy to afford, but no other lawyers would do. The results of this case had the potential to be the most financially disruptive in all of human history. As Judge Horgan admonished and warned each man, Walter tuned his sensory equipment instead to the others in the courtroom and then to the throngs of people at the bottom of the stone steps leading up to the court house. Using a sonic isolator on their heart beats, Walter gauged the magnitude of the numbers who were cheering for him. More than two-thirds of the mob outside clearly were here in his support. He had easily won the court of public opinion, most of whom had grown up on a steady diet of his creations, his comic book characters, his breakfast cereals, and they loved him like a grandfather. He also had won over most of the anti-corporation crowd, the conspiracy-theory nuts, and many of the radical left who had spent their lives hating him and every evil his corporation represented. But now that that same corporation was seeking to destroy the recently resurrected man, many of these Progressive men and women had rekindled their childhood love affair with Saturday Morning cartoons, Sunday Evening adventure movies. And although Walter could not actually see them at the moment, he knew many in crowd were wearing the round black ears of Mortimer. Walter had appealed to his fans and had crowd-sourced more financial backing in one hour than most startups can manage in six months.

Back inside, his trial momentarily paused while restrictive guidelines were being made clear to the lawyers, Walter turned his attention back to the files he had made during his Preliminary hearing. At that time, the prosecution had had an easy time showing probable cause. A puff of air rattled and escaped from Walter’s lips. Hell, he thought, anyone even half squinting at $50 billon dollars has probable cause. The main case against him now was a mishmash stew of fraud, intellectual property rights, and trademark violations. And it was expected to run, at a minimum, of three weeks.

On the 12th day, cross examinations continued with Walter, himself on the stand. Henry Smith thumped his hand on a folder containing a printed report. “Sir, we have evidence on file and every expert in the field has stated that Dr. James Bedford was the first human to undergo the cryopreservation process. This occurred in January of 1967, clearly one month after your supposed death. How do you account for this?”

“Terminology. You’re speaking of cryonic preservation.”

“And…?”

“By law—and you really should know this—cryonic procedures may not be implemented until a person is legally dead. And… as I never truly died, never surrendered my personhood, the procedures performed on me obviously were not cryonic. Also, I’m no law breaker. I strongly believe in law, as Aristotle is quoted as saying, ‘At his best, man is the noblest of animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst.’”

“Many would contend that you, nature, and man have long since parted ways. But we are speaking now of cryonics.”

“I’m sorry. You called me ‘Sir,” earlier and I thought we had gotten past all that ‘Less human than thou” formality. As for being cryonics or not, we have a different name for the procedure I underwent. However, as that is another pending court case now, I am not allowed to speak the name of that process at this time. Just realize that I knew well in advance that I was dying of cancer. Also, know that one of my space-exploration teams had already been working with NASA on suspended animation techniques. Another of my biological teams was completing its research on freezing and reanimating tree frog tissue. I merely brought these two teams together, increased their staff sizes, and promised them significant bonuses for an immediate solution to my need. And, it was a cryoprotectant solution, one which could replace the liquid in my body, help to mitigate the direct damage to my brain cells from ice crystal formation, the cellular membrane stress and crushing, and the eventual concentration of the solute itself.”

“None of these advanced techniques existed in 1966.”

“They did indeed, only they were not widely known. Some of them became available over the decades as others discovered them or when the non-compete clauses in my employee contracts expired. Unfortunately, of the few team members who are still alive today, all of them are still under company and government legal obligations not to discuss these techniques. Your employers are well aware of these employee contracts, and we have asked them to surrender them to help destroy their case against me.”

The laughter in courtroom at this momentarily flustered the prosecutor, but Smith was one of the best in the business, and he easily recovered. “These records do not and have not ever existed.”

The tiny servomotors in Walter’s arms and wrists whirled as he raised both of hands, his fingers splayed and palms upright in a mocking shrug. His head did not twitch much as he nodded and winked at the men and women in the crowd. “Do you see what I’m up against?” The voice was eerily reminiscent of a cartoon mouse.

“Objection.”

Before the Prosecutor could qualify his objection and the judge respond to it, Walter’s forehead creased, his eyelids and jawline pulled back mechanically to expose large, overly white teeth. And Walter spoke, “I too object! I object to this whole farce. The company knows the important parts of me were frozen, not cremated. They know most of the process and the principles behind it. They just didn’t know where I was being stored.

“Objection.”

“And,” Walter was standing now, most of his body’s framework quivered and jerked itself upright. “they never expected me back! But with so much money— they couldn’t risk it. ‘Urban myth!’ they said. ‘Corpsicle,’ they joked!”

Judge Horgan was pounding his hammer while also shouting, “The defendant will be seated.”

Walter heard him, and he began to lower himself back upon his chair. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. That’s not who I am. I was momentarily--”

Those were the words he had intended to say, but, as he was trying to enunciate them, Walter realized that his voice subroutines, or the output hardware in his mouth speakers, or something else was malfunctioning. The noise coming out of him was almost a snarl. And, above this growling, liquid-anger sound, the judge was hollering, “Sit down! Sit down! Bailiff!”

But Walter could not return to his chair. He was no longer in control of most of his systems. His interwoven metal spine spiked him up to almost seven feet tall, his arms popped and locked back, his fingers hooked outward like wild claws. He lunged violently to and fro as a dark lubricant began oozing around his teeth and sploshed over his lips.

The photosensors in his faceplate reddened as he staggered over the wooden railing and into the screaming crowd, many falling over themselves scrambling for the back exits. “Something is happened to me,” he tried to say to an older woman who had been pushed to the ground by a strong, young man as he had bounded over her for his own survival. But Walter’s words came out as a savage, wet crackling. As he reached over to the woman, tried to help her up, he saw she was flailing against him for all her life, her mouth wedge as far as it could go mouthing an inaudible, abject desperation. Walter plucked her off the floor as if she were made of cardboard, and he, though he fought his limbs from doing so, tore her and slammed her down again. Then, all 350 pounds of Walter’s frame and quasi-muscles meant to rotate, expand, and reversibly contract his advanced animatronic limbs—in the most convincingly-human way possible—stomped upon the frail stitch work of her bones. And after this snapping and popping, Walter saw what hammering fists of titanium could do to human meat, what the atoms of a relatively light metal, atoms with a moderate electron shell, could do after having been packed into the volume space of human hands—his hands—now awash in her blood.

An electronic pulse spiked through his head, and, for the briefest of moments, Walter found himself—his memory registers assisted his surviving brain cells—remembered himself—back onto a farm in Marceline, Missouri. As a child there, a foolish, bored child who had no one else to play with, he had grabbed an owl, an owl who he had surprised from behind, and he had beaten it to death when it had clawed him, struggled to free itself from his childish, playful, crushing grasp.

An emulsifying mixture of saline and aqueous humor meant to moisten and support Walter’s ocular components became unstable, lost hydrostatic pressure. His eyes began deflating. As they leaked away their spherical shape, an onboard redundancy sequence of electronic gates in his chest booted a first-stage loader. The bootstrap code brought Walter’s consciousness solidly back into the courtroom, a room that moments earlier had been packed with over 200 people and now held less than five dozen. As Walter regained control of his motor skills, especially in his head movements, he scanned the scene, his software isolating a man off to the far left, a smaller man, who, earlier in the day, he had seen delivering papers to the Lead Prosecutor. But, unlike the others in the courtroom, this man noticeably had been slow in making for his escape. He was staring directly at Walter, not fleeing away from him, was frantically tapping at a wristwatch interface.

“Bastard!” Walter shouted, and he saw—echoing across the man’s facial expressions—that this damning word actually had been spoken aloud—and correctly—the noise directed at and piercing into this tiny corporate toady, this shit-filled speck of humanity.

This man, later identified from dental records as Eugene Francis Gilcovi, had been wearing a highly-specialized, short-ranged intrusion system. The watch had very little functionality in it other than what was needed to penetrate Walter’s defenses and to deliver a disruptive payload capable of momentarily controlling him. Amazingly, though, it was the watch’s surface components—the ones designed to allow it to pass easily through the courtroom entrance checks—the obligatory, self-esteem-boosting and self-gratifying features that all normal personal devices have built into them that later provided some evidence linking Gilcovi to the corporation that had hired him. These automatic recording and automatic disseminating features had captured his and Walter’s final moments. Walter had continued shouting his accusations at Gilcovi and against the corporation who hired him as he grabbed and began dismembering the tiny man. “Money,” Walter had decried while flexing the man apart, “Damnable money… Greed.” On the digital recording, a rapid sequence of guns firing can be heard at this point, and Option-8, electromagnetic pulse projectiles can be seen tearing through Walter’s upper body. And, for a few moments more at least, Walter is shown, crumpled to his knees, weeping over Gilcovi. And although there is considerable debate over the audio enhancement techniques used on the recording, he appears to say, “Love and fellowship is all I wanted. I have strangled the lovely, the innocent as it slept—” And, as more shots resound and Walter’s head slumps to the floor, his quavering lips mouth around these words, “an empire… out of swamps… a utopia… fair, freed from-- Hell, choke on me.”