“— and the niece of Nils Ortega’s sister, Luciana Ortega, who has worked at ROSA for the last five years. Ms. Sabino has worked in an undisclosed capacity in conjunction with ROSA in recent months. Welcome to you both.”

“It’s a pleasure,” said Miranda.

“Um,” said Cora. “Thanks.”

“In some ways, this is an extremely philosophical topic. We have to truly examine what personhood even means. Mr. Miranda, how do you define personhood?”

Miranda chuckled as if they were sharing a joke. “I think the answer to that is obvious. We could get philosophical, but we don’t need to. We can just use common sense. A person is a human.”

“Ms. Sabino?” said Satomi.

This was one she felt ready for, at least. “A person is an individual, but personhood is also a function of being social creatures. So a person is a sentient, autonomous, conscious being capable of language and problem-solving, but a person can only evolve in the context of a species capable of forming societies. All humans are persons, but not all persons are human. The two terms are not interchangeable.”

“And in your opinion,” said Satomi, “do you feel that the ETIs that you have had direct access to would meet the definition of personhood, as most humans would define it?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “In terms of autonomy, in terms of being conscious, in terms of having both spoken and written language— they’re not that dissimilar from us. This could be a genuinely complicated question, like maybe they didn’t have consciousness as we understand it, or maybe it’s one big hive mind, but that’s not the case. In most ways, they think and reason like we do, they are social creatures like we are, they form social bonds like we do, and they fit any meaningful definition of personhood except for the fact that they are not human.”

“Mr. Miranda,” said Satomi, not missing a beat. God, this was moving so fast. “How does the idea that ETIs may not be too dissimilar from humans fit into Third Party doctrine?”

“I would argue that it’s immaterial,” said Miranda, “and no one who is a proponent of the Third Option would deny the, for lack of a better word, humanity of any individual ETI that showed the same signs of being a person that any human would. But we must also be realists, and we must learn from the mistakes of our own history. My ancestors in Cuba survived unspeakable cruelties at the hands of the Europeans, and many of these exploitations happened because the natives took the Europeans in good faith, assuming that treaties would be upheld.