Excerpts from The Unauthorized Autobiography of Benjamin Brick

This week, John P. Murphy brings us a terrifying look at identity, and ownership, in the not so distant future.

~ Julian and Fran, Oct. 26, 2025

For October, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you sparkling new stories by William Alexander, A.D. Sui, Alan Smale, and John P. Murphy. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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Excerpts from The Unauthorized Autobiography of Benjamin Brick

by John P. Murphy

It is a strange and unsettling thing to read a book with your name on the front cover and your smiling face on the back, full of your own quirks of word choice and comma use, and to have no memory whatsoever of writing it. I thus read my new novel,Mortmain, in a hospital bed. To my chagrin, it isn’t bad.

My recovery had kept me busy. I’d researched hospitals when I wrote March Hare, so I expected to be got up and out of bed quickly, but never to be run so ragged. If anything, I had the notion that a hospital stay might be a bit of luxury: nothing to do but heal and sleep and catch up on my reading. Ha.

The “healing” consisted of being frog-marched around the ward by a succession of overachieving nurses. Nor does one sleep in hospitals: those same nurses watch for signs that one might be finally dozing, for their opportunity to push pills, draw blood, and ask innocently how one is sleeping.

The reading . . . At first I had no brain for it; I watched the hospital’s curated streaming feed in all its anodyne, antiseptic glory. At some point, however, luxuriating in a drug haze, it caught my attention.

“Here’s a fresh catch, friendos! You’ve heard of books being published posthumously, sure. But written posthumously? That’s exactly what happened when an AI clone of recentlydeceased author Benjamin Brick—”

I’m told I ripped out four sutures.

—From chapter 33

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“It’s easy, Ben. Some brain scans and legalese. Then you live forever.”

“I won’t live forever, though, will I?”

The gentleman in the too-expensive puffer vest and blue button-down shirt shrugged, affirming and denying my point at the same time. “Did you ever watch Star Trek? With the teleporter?”

I did.

“Well. You’ve got Mr. Spock getting vaporized on the ship,then reconstructed on the planet. Some people would say he died and a new Spock was born. But Captain Picard works with the new Spock and neither one thinks anything’s wrong.”

“I could object that this was a television show,” I said. “And that the teleporting business was more about saving money than about making a serious philosophical statement about continuity of identity.”

My host had the good grace to chuckle.

“You’re telling me,” I went on, “that someone who has all my memories might live forever. So when you promise me immortality, you’re speaking to that prospective customer through me.”

“Someone who remembers being you will live forever.” He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. “My team picked you because achieving immortality through art is a consistent theme in your work.”

“Mmm.” I doubted he’d read more than some AI’s half-hallucinated summary of my books, but he was paying for lunch. “I think I have had important things to say, and I flatter myself that I’ve said them in authentic and clever ways.”

“But you’ll stop saying them when you die, Ben. Isn’t that exactly when you’ll have the most to say?”

“You tempt me with the ultimate l’esprit de l’escalier?” I joked, but I had to admit the point. “What are these legalities?”

He looked smug then, and with his fish on the hook he had every reason.

—From chapter 24

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Their lawyers constructed a Frankenstein’s monster, which in a terrible joke they termed a “trust.” It amounted to nested walls and moats of contracts and legal entities all devoted to defending a critical vulnerability at the center: a computer.

Computers had no right yet to own property or sign contracts. Law, however, was accustomed to dealing with immortal, disembodied beings: we call them “corporations” and talk of Exxon and Apple like people. So upon my death, I would become a corporation run by a trust that owned a computer that thought it was me.

There would be trustees and attorneys and so forth, constrained to faithfully execute the commands of computer-me. All until the law permits that computer to own itself, when the whole thing would be rolled up.

That legal fiction would hold all my possessions and “intellectual property” (ghastly phrase). Our Frankenstein of a trust would own it all ahead of my death, in fact, so that challenges to my estate couldn’t snarl matters up.