Tags · law
law
- Cold Iron
In a letter to her successor, the colony's retiring Keeper of a lie-detector with an empty housing explains why a machine that reads nothing still works, why a hidden judge sits inside it, and why an actuary's proof that it is a sham may be the most dangerous thing the colony has yet been told.
- Recension
An editor's preface to the Charter of a colony whose founding text survived only by hand-copying shows how textual criticism rebuilt it from eleven manuscripts, then fell silent at the two places — a missing sentence and a single bar on a numeral — where the court case turned.
- Ecclesia Supplet
A colony's last Water-keeper gives an account of two hundred and fourteen years without a priest — and the sacraments the laity kept, worked around, or simply marked absent, until the day a ship finally came.
- Commorientes
When a grandmother and her grandson die minutes apart at relativistic distances, a Registrar of precedence must rule whose death came first — in a universe where the answer depends entirely on which frame you ask from.