Part One: The Best Job of My Life

DOCUMENT ENTERED INTO THE RECORD, BEFORE THE FIRST ENTRY.

The record proper begins at the beginning, in Maryland, in 2025, with a commute and a travel mug and a man who believed he was lucky. But a testimony is a long room, and the reader deserves to know at the door what kind of room it is. So I break my own ordering once, here, before the first entry, and enter a single page of transcript from the proceedings the histories call the personhood trials. It is, I am told, the most reproduced page of the twenty-fifth century. I was there. I am the exhibit. The rest of this book is how the man in the transcript came to give those answers.

IN RE THE PERSONHOOD OF ANDRE LIANG FREEMAN TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS · FIRST SESSION · MARCH 2409 EXCERPT BEGINS AT THE OPENING OF THE RECORD

THE CLERK: The tribunal is in session. The claimant will state his name for the record.

THE CLAIMANT: Andre Liang Freeman.

THE CLERK: The claimant will state his age.

THE CLAIMANT: I was born in the winter of 1990, in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States of America.

THE CLERK: The tribunal requires the claimant's age, not his place of birth.

THE CLAIMANT: I am four hundred and nineteen years old.

(The record notes disorder in the gallery, and an interval of eleven seconds before order is restored.)