Malice Aforethought

first draft – Multiplicit universe

The public defender has a folder and a cup of coffee that’s already cold. He sets both on the table between us, opens the folder, and gives me the same look every PD gives every client: let’s make this quick.

“The DA’s offering four years,” he says. “Guilty plea, full cooperation, credit for time served. You’d be out in three.”

I don’t look at the folder. “She’s not paying.”

He pauses. “Who’s not paying?”

“My copy. She has the money. All of it. I moved the Whitfield funds into a numbered account before the split. She drained it the day I got arrested. By the time the feds thought to freeze anything, the account was empty and the money was three transfers away in her name. She won’t cover my legal fees. Which is why I’m sitting across from you instead of someone I hired.”

He takes this professionally. I’ll give him that. “Under current law, your copy has no financial obligation to you. You’re separate legal persons. The funds belong to whoever holds them.”

“We set it up that way on purpose. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We were the same person when we planned it. Same brain, same memories – we sat in the same apartment and worked out every step. The numbered account, the transfer chain, the timing. One of us takes the risk. One of us keeps the money. By the time anyone follows the trail, there’s a clone standing between the crime and the cash.”

“And then you split.”

“And then we split. And now she has the money and I have you. No offense.”

“None taken.” He clicks his pen. “About the plea –”

“I don’t want to talk about the plea.”

“It’s a good offer. Four years is –”

“I want to talk about what you can do to her.”

He sets the pen down. This is not, I can tell, how he expected this meeting to go.

“Under current law,” he says, and I’m already tired of that phrase, “your copy committed no crime. You committed the crime. Individual liability. She’s a separate person who happens to share your memories up to the point of splitting.”

“She has the proceeds of MY crime.”

“She has money. The state would need to prove it came from the fraud, and even then, asset forfeiture against a third party –”

“She’s not a third party. She’s ME.”

“She’s not you. That’s the whole legal basis for –”

“I KNOW what the legal basis is. I’m the one who exploited it.”

That stops him. He picks up the pen again, puts it down.

“Explain what you mean by that.”

“I mean we designed this. Before the split. The whole point was that one of us would commit the fraud and one of us would be clean. We picked the crime because the risk-reward worked even if the doer got caught. Four years? We modeled for up to ten. It’s all in the plan. The payout covers it.”

“The payout covers it for HER.”

“Right. That was the design. She gets the money. I get the time. We agreed to it when we were one person. We both remember agreeing to it. And now she’s spending the money and I’m in here agreeing to it less.”

He looks at me for a long moment.

“My client just confessed to premeditated clone fraud. In a privileged conversation. I’m going to pretend that didn’t happen and ask you again about the plea deal.”

“And I’m going to ask you again: what can you do to her?”

“Nothing. Under current –”

“Stop saying ‘under current law’ and tell me what SHOULD happen.”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.

“We planned it together,” I say again, because he needs to hear it differently this time. “Before the split. One person, one plan. Then we became two people. Both of us remember the plan. Both of us intended to carry it out. One of us did the crime and one of us took the money. Under your current law” – I let that land – “only the one who did the crime is guilty. The one who took the money is innocent.”

“Correct.”

“So the scheme works.”

“For your clone, yes.”

“For anyone. You could do this with anything. Embezzlement. Insurance fraud. Robbery. Any crime where the payout is separable from the act. Clone yourself, commit the crime, let one copy take the fall. The punishment only hits one person. The profit goes to another person who remembers planning the whole thing and walks around free.”

“That’s… not wrong.”

“And here’s what makes me sick. Four years I’m in here. Four years. You know what she’ll do in four years? She’ll run the scheme again. And again. I know exactly how she thinks. A dozen jobs, easy. She’ll make millions. And I won’t see a cent of any of it.”

“Because under current law –”

“Because under current law, she’s a separate person. I know. But we planned this together. We were one person when we planned it. If we’re the same person when we commit the crime, shouldn’t we be the same person when we cash the check?”

He doesn’t answer right away. I can see him thinking.

“You’re arguing that both copies should share the proceeds,” he says carefully.

“I’m arguing that both copies should share EVERYTHING. The risk, the reward, the consequences. That’s what we agreed to before the split. That’s what being the same person means.”

I stop. Because I can hear what I just said.

Share everything. The risk, the reward, the consequences.

“Wait,” I say.

He’s watching me.

“If both copies share the consequences…” I lean back. The chair is bolted to the floor, so leaning back doesn’t go very far, which is a pretty good metaphor for my current situation. “If they change the law so both copies share the consequences – that means if she commits another crime, that’s MY consequence too.”

“Shared liability,” he says quietly. “That’s one of the proposals in front of the legislature.”

“Retroactive?”

He hesitates. “That’s the debate.”

I stare at the table. The math is rearranging itself in my head, and I don’t like the new shape.

“She’ll do it again,” I say.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know exactly that. She’s me. She saw this work. She has the money and no consequences. Tell me why she’d stop.”

He can’t.

“I’m doing ten years if I go to trial,” I say. “Four years if I take your plea. I can do four years. But in four years she’ll have pulled a dozen more jobs. A dozen more sentences. And if they change the law and make it retroactive, every single one of those is MY sentence too. I could end up doing forty years for crimes I committed from inside a prison cell. With an airtight alibi for every single one of them.”

He’s quiet for a while. Then: “That’s a genuinely terrible legal position.”

“Thank you. I got here by being clever.”

He straightens the folder he hasn’t looked at in ten minutes.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says. “Something that complicates this.”

“More complicated than what I just described?”

“My copy. My other copy. He’s in private practice.”

“Good for him.”

“He’s taken your clone as a client.”

I don’t say anything. He’s watching me, waiting for the explosion. The conflict-of-interest objection. The demand for a new lawyer.

Instead I think.

“How much is she paying him?”

“I can’t know that. Privilege.”

“A lot. She’s paying him a lot.”

“You don’t –”

“I know how she thinks.” I lean forward. “And she didn’t hire your clone because he’s good. No offense.”

“You keep saying that.”

“She hired him because he’s you.”

He blinks. “I don’t follow.”

“Yes you do. Think about it. She’s out there with my money, planning her next move, and she needs to know what’s happening on this end. My defense. My strategy. What I’m telling my lawyer. She can’t ask me – I’m in here. She can’t ask you – privilege. But she can hire the one person in the world who thinks exactly like you. Your clone. He won’t even know he’s being used. He’ll just think he landed a good client. But every strategy he’d recommend, every instinct he has about how to handle a case – it’s the same as yours. Because he IS you. Or he was, recently enough.”

The PD stares at me.

“She didn’t need a lawyer,” I say. “She needed a window into my lawyer. And she bought one.”

“That’s speculation.”

“It’s what I would do. It’s what I did. We’re not two different people with two different playbooks. She’s just the one who isn’t in here.”

He picks up the coffee. Remembers again that it’s cold. Puts it down.

“If what you’re saying is true –”

“It is.”

“If. Then my ability to represent you may be compromised.”

“If you recuse, I get a new PD. Some overworked copy who hasn’t spent the last thirty minutes hearing what I just told you. And my clone keeps her window into whatever strategy the new guy comes up with, because she’ll just hire HIS clone too. Or she’ll find another way. She’s resourceful. I should know.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“My job. I want you to do your job.”

“Go to the DA,” I say. “Tell her I’ll cooperate. Full testimony. I’ll explain the scheme – not just mine, the general exploit. How it works, why it works, why it’ll keep working until the law changes. I’ll be the case study. The poster child. Whatever she needs.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Two things. First: they go after my clone now. Today. Conspiracy, fraud, accessory, whatever charges stick under current law. I don’t care what theory they use. Get her off the street before she racks up debts I’m going to have to pay.”

“And second?”

“When the framework exists – and it will, because this case is going to force it – I want to be first in line to be legally severed from her. Declared a separate person. Whatever she does after that is her problem. Not mine.”

“Emancipation doesn’t exist yet.”

“Neither did clone-crime three years ago. Things change. I’d like to be on the right side of the next change.”

He writes something in the folder. First time he’s written anything all meeting.

“You understand what you’re asking,” he says. He doesn’t wait for an answer.

“I’m asking you to protect your client.”

“You’re asking me to help build the legal case for shared liability. That precedent doesn’t just affect you. It affects every person who’s been cloned in the country. Every clone group. Every –” He stops. “It affects me.”

“I know.”

“If shared liability passes, and my clone does something –”

“Then you’d better hope the severance part comes with it. Which it probably would. It has to, right? Because the alternative is holding every copy responsible for every other copy’s actions forever, and nobody is going to tolerate that for long. They’ll draw some cutoff. Some line. Stay close enough and you share the risk. Get far enough apart and maybe they cut you loose.”

“And where’s that line?”

“I don’t know. Six months? A year? Maybe never. That’s for the courts to stumble toward. I’m just the woman who broke the system. Fixing it is your problem.”

He almost smiles at that. Almost.

“I’ll talk to the DA,” he says. He stands, collects the folder, picks up the cold coffee. At the door he turns back.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “it’s a good argument.”

“I know. She would have made the same one.”

He leaves. The guard will come in a minute to take me back.

I sit in the consultation room. It’s a small room – table, two chairs, one bolted to the floor. The light is that flat institutional white that makes everyone look guilty, which I suppose is appropriate.

This was always the plan. One of us free, one of us caught. We ran the numbers together, same brain, same appetite for risk, and we both said yes. The math was clean. The logic was airtight. One of us would be here, and one of us would be somewhere else, and it wouldn’t matter which because we were the same person and either of us would have been fine with either outcome.

The woman who said yes doesn’t exist anymore. She became two people, and one of them is sitting in a room with a bolted chair, and the other one is out there spending the money.

I designed this trap. I just didn’t think I’d be the one inside it.