Author’s Note: Atomic Law

For those with a curiosity as to why this automatically constitutes three or four crimes rather than one, at least in legal terms, the answer is that the Imperial legal system, unlike ours, works very hard to make its charges atomic. That is to say, each individual part of the criminal act gives rise to one, and only one, charge which can then be conveniently assembled into a proper reflection of the totality, without punishing anything twice or not at all. Apart from avoiding the obvious abusability of overlapping systems – such as our habit of stacking on multiple overlapping charges to ramp up the total sentence and encourage plea bargaining – to do otherwise would be almost painfully inelegant and irrational.

(And when you position as a law provider depends on your ability to convince people of your law-providing arete, that is not an appearance you wish to give. Well, not to eldrae, anyway. Humans seem to have more tolerance for that sort of thing.)

So those three crimes mentioned down there, would be the rape, the battery which enabled you to carry it out (assuming, in this case, the use of violence), and the proximal assault which the battery almost certainly implied. Of course, in other cases, instead of that proximal-assault-and-battery, you might instead see charges of pharmaceutical-mediated battery, if coercive aphrodisiacs or incapacitors were involved, or coercion (in the duress sense), or even fraud, for that matter, because in Imperial praxis, lying your way into someone’s bed is every bit as much rape as any of the others, and they’ll execute you for that, too.

Of course, if we’re being purely pragmatic about it, the fine details of the charging system doesn’t matter all that much where this particular class of crime is concerned. (In the ancient days, it might have made the difference between “we’ll offer you a mercy-draught of hemlock and a fast pyre” and “we’ll smoulder you to death over the course of a couple of weeks just to emphasize how VERY VERY MUCH we disapprove of this sort of thing”, but everyone’s much more civilized now and realizes that this sort of thing is impolite, uncivilized, redundant, and no additional deterrent.)

But justice has to be seen to be done, and it has to be seen to be done right – which is to say, in accordance with mélith, the principle that each shall receive exactly as they merit. And so, one must necessarily determine that – even if the debt they accrue happens to, and is known to, substantially exceed their life.

Choices

I will find my death here in the Exclaves.

He – that outworlder – beat my friend to death.  Not for profit.  Not for a plan or a revenge or some twisted necessity.  Slowly, and for his pleasure, because ve was an alien, and he hated all that was wider than his narrow vision or better than his pathetic life.

And I could not just leave that up to the mighty Fourth Directorate to solve.  They would hunt the outworlder down, no doubt, and with all full ceremony and due process of law put him cleanly to death.  “There is no higher repayment; naught can requite more than existence.”

Can it not?

My data worm stole vis final memories from the forensic redactor who extracted them for the court.  And it turns out that there are many things you can do, when you have a cause.  By means my indictment goes into at some length, I found him before they did.  I perverted a cerebral bridge to implant those memories into him as his own.  And I applied memory stimulation and time dilation, and watched him convulse and shriek while a taste of his own hell shredded his mind.

I had him for seven minutes before they found us, but that was enough.

I did not –

No.  One in my position should be honest.  I did enjoy it.  It was horrific and it was sickening, but I did enjoy it.  Thoroughly.  But that is of no relevance.  It may have been vengeance, but it was right.  It was just.  It was balance.

The Directorate permitted me to observe when they executed the residue of him.  Guilt is guilt, they say, and the forms must be obeyed.

When I am finished making this statement, I will be taken before the court one final time.  I am not slated for execution, due to the status of the one I killed, and evidence, they say, of severe mental stress.  I am to be given the choice.

I may enter into meme rehab, to be edited into a version of me who would not have done those things that I have done; who is as capable of cold-mindedness as the men of the Directorate; who could find satisfaction in knowing that ver killer had been… erased.  Or I may decline, and in so doing submit myself to euthanasia.

My friend, reinstantiated, is appalled by my actions, but was still willing to speak with me.  Ve pleaded with me to undergo the meme rehab, but comes no more.  So be it.  Ve is a good friend, a good person, but ve does not understand mélith as we do… as we did, once.  I knew the price, and pay it willingly.

I do not wish to die.  But I will not regret this.  And so I cannot become.

– last testamentary statement of Reldith Calaris-ith-Calir
executed 4144, Versine Exclave