Serrin Oduya-9
Written by Ezra Solano
Overview
Serrin Oduya-9 was a Mars-born advocate, augmented, born approximately 2358, best known to the record as counsel who argued the Freeman Doctrine at Andre Freeman's personhood tribunal, seated March 2409 and sitting fourteen months to its verdict in May 2410. She was fifty-one at the tribunal's opening.
The name
The suffix "-9" is not a title. It is a naming convention native to augmentation lineages of her era, marking her ninth substantial self-revision, the point her line had reached in a practice the record describes plainly: augment lines number their revisions "so old friends can hail you." By the tribunal's own account, Serrin Oduya-9 understood her advocacy as more than professional. She held, and stated for the record, that a legal doctrine condemning substrate-personhood condemned her along with the respondent; her stake in the Freeman Doctrine's success was direct, not theoretical.
Recorded argument
Her closing arguments are preserved in the tribunal transcript and cited since in constitutional law across eleven worlds, most notably a stipulation entered on the ninth day of testimony describing the respondent's three hundred and seventy-eight years of concealment as "premeditated surrender to one's own kind... homecoming." She is also recorded addressing Andre Freeman directly and only ever as "counselor," and for a line the record has kept intact since: "We are all becoming him, gradually, on a payment plan."
Later record
In 2469, at revision twelve and age one hundred eleven, Serrin Oduya-9 traveled to the Hall of Names on Iapetus and filed her own name in advance of need, a practice the Hall neither discourages nor advertises. While there she contributed nine pages of intake-ethics amendments to the Hall's procedures; seven remain in active use at its desk. Her formal finding from that visit, framed today beside the March delegation's own nine words, holds that the Hall functions as "the appeal, the court that can't forget, no punishment in it anywhere." She died in 2497 on Pavonis, at her fourteenth revision. Andre Freeman is recorded walking three doors of the gate network to file her name at her own table upon her death, and telling a witness present that all who pass through are, in some sense, filed there: "some just haven't finished happening yet."