Michael Remembers Book 3

MICHAEL REMEMBERS

(A Novel in Three Parts)

By V. W. Smith

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MICHAEL REMEMBERS

Copyright © 2010 by V. W. Smith

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BOOK III

May 1, 2386—April 30, 2416

Chapter 1

Then I fell. Not nearly as fast nor as far as Satan when he plummeted from Heaven, but almost as hard. I wasn’t exiled, either. I was ambushed. How bitter and ironic that my happy, productive life was changed forever because I left a heavenly place—autonomous Mars—to visit the troubled and corrupt world of my birth!

My departure was supposed to be only temporary, a one-month excursion. Two of these weeks were for the voyage and return trip, the middle two weeks for academic research and seeing a few people and places for social and sentimental reasons. I would have dearly loved to see my Aunt Xana, or Mark Logan and Rita... But my Aunt had passed away in 2381, Mark and Rita the following year. They had all died of natural causes and about as peacefully as one can. Though I had not traveled to Earth since emigrating here, both Aunt Xana and the Logans had made trips here, to Mars, and had stayed with us on long, leisurely, thoroughly enjoyable visits—a treasured memory for us and our children.

The purpose of my taking this trip was to accept a prestigious award and make a speech at the ceremony and banquet at Stanford on the evening of the second Friday in May, 2386. My Economic History of the Martian Federation had won me the coveted Emmons Award. Alas, though neither with any foreknowledge on the part of my academic colleagues nor by any design of theirs, the prize intended as the highest recognition for my scholarly achievements turned out to be a veritable Trojan Horse.

The 60,000,000 km. voyage from Mars to Earth’s Moon went without a hitch. So did the shuttle flight from Lunar Base B to San Francisco Airport. Sophia’s cousin Ted Teternikov, now a librarian at Stanford, met me at the gate. We had just picked up my luggage at the Baggage Claim—when two detectives approached us and, upon verifying my identity, arrested me for manslaughter.

It still seems totally insane, but in fact it’s no crazier than hundreds of laws and thousands of other criminal cases in the People’s Republic of California. In 2364 an ultraconservative State Legislature passed a law stating that any convicted felon whose crime demonstrably precipitated a suicide could be charged with and tried for manslaughter, a crime long exempt from the Statute of Limitations. The thing is, the following year, shortly after I had emigrated to Mars, a man named Martin Stubblefield killed himself in Palo Alto. He was suffering from—or so he claimed— insuperable depression. Of course he left a note, in which he blamed his heartache and malaise on me—because he had been unable to recover the fortune which he had lost as a result of the misleading information disseminated by me in the financial prospectus published in 2349.

So, then, nearly two decades later, when he had misinvested and lost the rest of his inherited money, the silly sod offed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills—unfortunately not before writing and leaving behind that detailed letter blaming me for his troubles. Boo-hoo! God knows, I’m anything but a heartless bastard. I care as deeply as anyone can—usually. In this case, though, I felt and still feel anything but sympathy for Stubblefield.

I have my reasons. First, I never bankrupted anybody. None of my alleged victims lost more than he could afford to lose. This Stubblefield still had hundreds of thousands of UPs (Universal Planetary Credits). Yes, he still had a tidy bit of capital long after his losses attributed to my advice. That he couldn’t generate any growth to his assets just goes to prove what a bumbling idiot he was. That’s the second reason. Stubblefield was a case in point that people can blame anyone for anything, but they shouldn’t be accorded any credibility when none is due.

An honest prosecutor would have refused to pursue this case. Unfortunately, it was assigned to Jane McCrary, who possessed neither a shred of honor nor a scintilla of compassion. She saw and seized a huge opportunity for professional advancement if she could obtain a conviction in a case against a despicable career criminal. This vicious harpy simply dinned into the jurors’ vacuous heads the point that I had already been retrogressed not once, but twice. After that, they all looked at me as though I were dirt. Both the trial judge and the appellate court dismissed my lawyer’s objection to empanelling a jury with no retrogressees not only among its members but even among the relatives and friends of the jurors.

The case against me was absurd and outrageous—all the more so, my counsel argued, since I had already served in full the maximum sentence administrable under the law, namely retrogression. It didn’t matter. They didn’t even care that in the nineteen years since Stubblefield’s suicide, no charges had been filed against me—until I (oh-so-conveniently for them) showed up on Earth again.

There might not be any genuinely poor people left in Palo Alto or most of the rest of the Peninsula, but there were still plenty of dirt-poor people in Alviso, and these were about the only folks nowadays who either could not or would not find some excuse to get out of jury duty. Unbiased? Well, they all disliked rich people. They distrusted intellectuals. They all resented Mars colonists (principally because they themselves lacked the means to pay for the passage to Mars, and they were thus, for economic reasons, denied the opportunity that so many others were finding on the New World). And guess how they felt about retros!

What other outcome could there have been under the circumstances? The jury convicted me. The judge refused to grant me any measure of clemency. Emergency appeals were heard expeditiously, and then just as expeditiously denied. Now I was doomed to the same agonizing ordeal again—with no end of indignities and maddening uncertainties.

Chapter 2

Constitutionally, one could argue—and he would be right—that the case against me applied double jeopardy, an ex post facto law, and other egregious violations of one’s guaranteed civil rights. Unfortunately, this was California, where prosecutors, judges, and juries were blithely indifferent to Constitutional niceties. Likewise the tribunal of judges on the appeals court. They were my only hope, but a forlorn one. For as long as anyone could remember, this tribunal had simply rubber-stamped the lower courts’ verdicts, no matter how outrageous. The outcome was disgraceful, but predictable: I had been convicted; my appeal was denied; I was retrogressed for the third time.

Unlike the capital punishment cases years ago, when the death penalty was still imposed, with sentences of retrogression a stay of execution was usually granted only until the appeal had been heard and decided at the first appellate level. Libertarians and humanitarians centuries ago bewailed the fact that by the Twenty-First Century over 15% of those convicted and incarcerated in America were later proven innocent and released after serving years, in some cases decades in prison for crimes that they did not commit. While the lives of many of those people were ruined beyond recovery, at least some of them were able to get their old lives back together to some extent, or they managed to move on to a fairly decent new life. They were a lot older, sadder, wiser... But at least they were still adults. The absurd state of the laws today in the USNA allows states to retrogress convicted felons even though—indeed even while—their cases are still being appealed at the Federal levels through writs of Habeas Corpus. My appeal was eventually heard by the Federal Supreme Court—in a tandem ruling on my civil suit against California. In one vital respect, though, the Highest Court’s ruling was moot: It came over a decade after I had been subjected to my third Retrogression Procedure.

Psychiatrists and psychologists are fascinated by the phenomena affecting both the brain and the mind during and after the Retrogression Procedure. Of course, the brain, like the rest of the body, is rejuvenated to its state at one tenth of the subject’s present chronological age. This provides a striking exception to the generally valid observation that the brain is the one organ incapable of growing new tissue. As a result of the RP, all those brain cells that have died in one’s head over the years are literally restored to their former quantity and quality. However, if what happens on the biophysical level seems miraculous, what happens on the psychological level is anything but good.

To call it a nightmare would be accurate if only it weren’t such an understatement. Despite the anesthetic, the body is so widely and radically affected, that neurons all over it are firing distress signals to