In all, Miranda’s testimony went for a little over three hours. Senator Cohen’s turn to grill Miranda came toward the end, and when it came, he leaned forward eagerly.

“Mr. Miranda,” said Cohen. “Could you please reiterate your basic position with regard to creating a new category of person to grant legal status to ETIs?”

“Certainly. There comes a point where we have to admit that we can’t hold ourselves to some utopian ideal; we have to be realists. And in this case, we have two things to consider: how people react, and what the ETIs are capable of. If we give them unrestricted freedom, we give them the right to inject themselves into public spaces just as any human would.”

Miranda held up a photograph printed on a sheet of paper, one he’d entered into the record hours ago but kept coming back to. It was a photograph of Nikola from Pershing Square from before Oskar Halmoka had detonated the EMP, from before Kaveh had even shown up. Shrewdly, Miranda’s camp had also cut him out of the photo, so as to keep him from looking frightened or vulnerable. Cora knew amygdaline body language well enough to know that there was nothing aggressive in Nikola’s posture; his eyes were bright and curious, his hands curled up in that neutral mantid pose, the crest on the back of his head half-spread, neither on alert nor relaxed. But the untrained human eye didn’t see any of this; to the uninitiated, this was an eldritch horror invading a major city, a horrifying thing to behold in a photograph, let alone in person as Miranda had.

“This is a photograph of the ETI that caused a riot in Pershing Square on February 9, 2008.” Miranda had refused to call Nikola by his name the entire time he’d been questioned. “My argument is that it is immaterial whether or not this being had malevolent intent. An alien simply being present in a public space was enough to cause mass chaos and several deaths. And then are we supposed to blame ourselves when people have a very human reaction to something that looks like that? You can’t declare the crowd uncivilized for having a very rational fear response.”

“Mr. Miranda,” said Cohen, “let us assume for the moment complete neutrality on the part of the ETI Nikola Sassanian. It neither wishes us ill, nor wishes us well. It is simply an entity existing in a public space. It seems to me that you are arguing in favor of restricted freedoms on a basis that it is human nature to be discriminatory.”

“I think that having that discussion about a discriminated class of human is very different from having that discussion about an alien with potentially incredible destructive capabilities.”