The Story of Phil Buster
I was thinking about the absurdity of the filibuster and had inspiration for a short story. What if the feasibility of the filibuster and biological equivalent of the Ship of Theseus intersected? Enter: Phil Buster
Senator Phil Buster had not intended to become famous, and he certainly had not intended to become famous for urination. He had intended to become famous for speaking longer than any senator in American history, preferably while delivering an impassioned defense of representative government that future historians would quote in textbooks, but six hours and eleven minutes into his first attempt he discovered that the human urinary system, having evolved hundreds of millions of years before the invention of parliamentary procedure, was entirely indifferent to his ambitions. Phil had prepared carefully, assembling binders of statistics, historical quotations, constituent letters, newspaper articles, Supreme Court opinions, and enough loosely related anecdotes that he believed he could keep talking for at least thirty hours without repeating himself, and he had also brought an enormous thermos of coffee because he had correctly anticipated that remaining awake would eventually become difficult while somehow failing to consider what happened to coffee after it performed its useful function.
By hour four, the thermos was empty; by hour five, Phil was sweating, shifting his weight between his feet and discovering that discussing agricultural subsidies became remarkably difficult when approximately half of one's available cognitive resources were devoted to monitoring the pressure inside one's bladder. At six hours, Senator Williams of Vermont rose and asked whether his distinguished colleague would yield for a question, then mercifully spent twelve minutes discussing soybean price supports while Phil stood behind his desk with his legs crossed, nodding gravely and contemplating increasingly desperate possibilities, none of which survived serious consideration. At six hours and eleven minutes, Senator Phil Buster finally yielded the floor and departed the chamber with the stiff-legged determination of a man transporting an unstable explosive between his kidneys.
The newspapers were merciless, with BUSTER'S BLADDER BUSTS FILIBUSTER appearing above Phil's photograph the following morning, and although his staff wisely avoided discussing the headline in his presence, Phil clipped it, framed it, and hung it above his desk. Three months later he tried again, this time without the thermos of coffee but with something his chief of staff would later describe, under oath, as considerably worse. Phil had spent several weeks reading the standing rules of the Senate and discovered, with the peculiar excitement of a man who has identified an omission in a centuries-old legal document, that nowhere did they expressly prohibit a senator from wearing an external catheter connected to a collection vessel concealed beneath his clothing. His chief of staff stared at him for a long moment before saying, “Phil,” to which Phil replied that it was legal; when she pointed out that legality was not really the issue, he asked her to show him the rule, and when she responded that there shouldn't need to be a rule, Phil smiled and said, “Then there isn't a rule.”
The second filibuster began at nine o'clock on Monday morning, and at hour six Phil smiled; at hour twelve he smiled again, drank an entire glass of water directly in Senator Williams's line of sight, and experienced the profound satisfaction of a man who had defeated one of the fundamental constraints of mammalian physiology through a combination of plumbing and legislative pedantry. At eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes, however, his left calf seized with such violence that Phil momentarily forgot the bill, the Senate, his political party and several basic elements of the English language. He clutched the desk while his leg contracted beneath him with the rigidity of structural lumber, and when the presiding officer asked whether the senator yielded, Phil produced a sustained howl that was not recognized as parliamentary speech. The chair asked again, Phil shouted, “YES, FINE, I YIELD,” and the second attempt ended with him limping from the chamber while an aide frantically tried to disconnect equipment that had not been designed for rapid evacuation. The following morning brought another headline for the wall: BUSTER BUSTED AGAIN: LEGS DEFEAT BLADDER-PROOF SENATOR.
Six months later, Phil Buster entered the Senate chamber wearing an exoskeleton. It was a passive device, mostly concealed beneath his suit, with carbon-fiber braces running along his legs and a carefully engineered frame that transferred much of his weight away from his muscles while leaving him technically upright, and the Senate parliamentarian had spent three miserable weeks considering whether this constituted standing within the meaning of Rule XIX. The inquiry produced eighty-seven pages of memoranda, three meetings with the Sergeant at Arms, and one exchange that subsequently entered Senate folklore, during which the parliamentarian insisted that the rule contemplated a senator standing while addressing the chamber and Phil responded by spreading his arms and asking whether he was sitting. When told that he was not, Phil asked whether he was lying down; when told that he was not doing that either, he asked what, precisely, everyone believed he was doing, at which point the parliamentarian stared at him for several seconds before muttering something about retirement.
The third filibuster lasted thirty-one hours, during which Phil's bladder performed admirably, his legs remained comfortable, his hydration remained excellent, and his vocal cords gradually destroyed themselves. At thirty-one hours and seventeen minutes, his voice deteriorated from hoarse to barely audible and then disappeared almost completely, although Phil continued mouthing words for several minutes before the presiding officer ruled that silently moving one's lips did not constitute debate, a proposition Phil considered outrageously prejudicial toward the mute but lacked the vocal capacity to contest. He yielded in a whisper, and when BUSTER SILENCED appeared in the newspaper the following morning, Phil added it to the increasingly crowded wall and called a biomedical engineer.
The fourth attempt took place almost two years later, by which time Senator Buster's interest in the legislation before the Senate had become secondary to his increasingly personal dispute with human anatomy. His passive exoskeleton had been replaced with a powered model whose actuators continuously adjusted his posture and shifted loads between different parts of his body, his catheter drained into a larger reservoir integrated into the frame, compression sleeves periodically contracted around his calves to encourage circulation, and a small hydration pump delivered carefully measured quantities of water and electrolytes through a port in his arm. Most controversially, Phil now wore an artificial larynx, and although there was nothing especially futuristic about a technology that people who had lost their natural voices had used for generations, Phil's decision to employ one voluntarily produced weeks of argument over whether mechanically generated speech could count as speaking for purposes of holding the floor. Phil maintained that forcing him to rely upon vibrating folds of biological tissue when perfectly adequate technology existed amounted to an arbitrary interpretation of the rule; the parliamentarian disagreed, several senators objected, disability lawyers became involved, and eventually everyone grew sufficiently exhausted by the argument that Phil was permitted to proceed.
He lasted fifty-seven hours. The artificial voice worked beautifully, as did the exoskeleton, catheter and hydration system, but shortly before midnight on the third day Phil discovered the one bodily requirement he had not yet engineered around, falling asleep while discussing an amendment to an agricultural appropriations bill and remaining perfectly upright because the exoskeleton continued supporting him. His artificial larynx produced a low electronic hum until the chair determined that unconscious humming did not constitute continuous debate, and Phil awoke thirteen hours later in the hospital to find his chief of staff sitting beside him. She reminded him that fifty-seven hours had shattered the record, but Phil merely stared at the ceiling and said, “I fell asleep.” When she answered that this was something people did, Phil repeated the word “people” with a contemplative expression she had learned to fear, prompting her to say, “No.” Phil innocently asked what she meant, and she told him that whatever he was thinking, the answer was no.
Phil disappeared from public life for eleven months, and when he returned reporters immediately noticed the small surgical scar behind his ear. The implant did not generate speech by itself, a distinction Phil emphasized repeatedly; instead, electrodes detected patterns associated with his intended speech and transmitted them to an external processor, which converted those signals into language before routing the resulting words through his artificial larynx. He still conceived the sentence, he explained, while the machinery merely replaced the increasingly inconvenient sequence in which his motor cortex instructed nerves to activate muscles that manipulated lungs, vocal folds, tongue and lips. During a contentious committee hearing, Phil pointed out that every senator in the room already used electrochemical signals to produce speech and that his signals simply traveled through some additional hardware, which everyone agreed was an extremely irritating argument largely because nobody could identify exactly where it was wrong.
His fifth attempt lasted eighty-three hours, after which sleep defeated him again, and Phil returned to the engineers with considerably more ambitious requirements. The next modification allowed the implant to recognize phrases before Phil had fully formulated them, predicting likely words from incomplete neural signals and presenting them for nearly instantaneous confirmation, which left Phil responsible for every sentence while making speech less cognitively demanding, rather like typing with an extraordinarily sophisticated autocomplete system. Six months later an improved model could construct entire clauses from conceptual intentions, so that Phil merely had to think budget deficit, irresponsible, future generations for the device to produce a polished sentence expressing precisely that argument. When senators complained that the machine was now writing his speeches, Phil asked whether any of them employed speechwriters, and several objections abruptly disappeared.
The next version could produce entire paragraphs from clusters of ideas, while the version after that could formulate answers to predictable questions based on Phil's known positions and present them for approval before speaking them aloud. Each improvement moved some small portion of the work away from Phil's biological nervous system and into the machinery surrounding it, but each step seemed modest enough in isolation that nobody could identify a principled point at which assistance became substitution. Then came the first genuine scandal. During Phil's seventh filibuster, Senator Williams asked an unexpected question concerning subsection 14© while Phil's eyes were closed, and medical telemetry subsequently established that he had entered approximately nine seconds of sleep; nevertheless, his voice immediately replied that the senator had overlooked the interaction between subsection 14© and the reporting requirement established under Section 9, then proceeded to identify three drafting problems and cite two relevant cases before Phil visibly woke midway through the answer. The chamber went silent, Phil finished the sentence, and nobody—including Phil—could say with confidence which portion he had authored. The filibuster lasted six days.
The Senate changed the rules, Phil challenged the changes, the courts became involved, and the courts almost immediately regretted becoming involved, but the controversy eventually outlasted the legislation itself and Phil no longer particularly cared about the bill. What had begun as an attempt to break a Senate record had become, gradually and almost imperceptibly, an argument over where Senator Phil Buster ended and the machinery surrounding him began, an argument that became more difficult as Phil aged and ordinary medical necessity began accomplishing what ambition had previously required him to do deliberately.
His knees were the first things to go, damaged by age, campaigning and an old skiing injury, and although his physicians initially recommended conventional replacements, Phil instead had the prosthetic joints integrated directly into his exoskeleton, which by then had become less something he wore than something permanently attached to him. Several years later circulatory problems made one leg medically troublesome, so Phil had it amputated and replaced with a prosthesis permanently integrated into the support frame; when a reporter asked whether this raised questions about his physical capacity to perform the duties of office, Phil replied that he still possessed one more biological leg than the Constitution required. The other leg eventually followed, then one hip and then the other, yet at no point did anyone seriously claim that replacing another piece of Phil Buster's anatomy caused Phil Buster to cease existing.
His heart failed at seventy-three and an artificial heart replaced it, while his kidneys deteriorated at seventy-eight and compact filtration systems took over their function. His lungs became increasingly fibrotic in his eighties, and rather than transplant biological replacements, his physicians installed an extracorporeal oxygenation system that eventually made pulmonary respiration largely redundant, which mattered surprisingly little because the artificial larynx had not required airflow for decades. His eyes failed next, so cameras replaced them and fed signals through neural interfaces that his visual cortex learned to interpret with surprising ease; his hearing deteriorated and microphones replaced his ears; his remaining biological arm developed tremors and was eventually exchanged for a prosthetic one that worked better than the original ever had. Each change attracted controversy, but each change individually seemed almost trivial, because nobody thought a man ceased being himself when he received an artificial hip and nobody could explain why two artificial hips should change the answer, just as an artificial heart plainly had not killed him, nor had artificial kidneys, artificial eyes, artificial limbs or an artificial voice. At every stage there remained an obvious continuity between the Phil who entered surgery and the Phil who emerged from it, usually complaining about Senate procedure before the anesthesia had fully worn off.
The difficult questions began when his brain started failing. At ninety-one, a small region of damaged motor cortex was replaced with an experimental neural prosthesis whose artificial network received the same inputs, produced the same outputs and communicated seamlessly with the surrounding biological neurons, leaving Phil unable to detect any subjective change whatsoever. At ninety-four another region was replaced, then another, while the implants became smaller, more sophisticated and increasingly capable of reproducing the behavior of the tissue they supplanted. When part of Phil's hippocampus began deteriorating, engineers transferred its functional organization into synthetic neural hardware while preserving the memories encoded in the failing biological network, and Phil emerged remembering his childhood, his first election, the thermos of coffee, the humiliating six-hour filibuster and the sensation of desperately needing to urinate while Senator Williams discussed soybean price supports.
At ninety-eight, approximately sixty percent of Phil's cerebral processing remained biological; at 102, thirty-one percent remained, and by 106 the figure had fallen below eleven percent. Philosophers began appearing on television to debate whether Senator Buster was still alive, prompting Phil to appear on competing programs and explain at considerable length why he considered them idiots. He repeatedly challenged critics to identify the precise operation during which he had supposedly died, because each procedure had replaced a relatively small amount of tissue while preserving his memories, personality, intentions and continuous awareness, and no philosopher who claimed that some invisible boundary must have been crossed could tell Phil where that boundary was located.
At 109, physicians replaced the final substantial cluster of biological neurons. There was no flash of light, no discontinuity and no philosophical revelation; Phil had been discussing baseball with one of the technicians before the procedure, and when the last synthetic network came online he simply continued the story, explaining that this was why the designated hitter had always been a mistake. The technician stared at him for several seconds before Phil finally asked whether the procedure had worked, and when told that it had, Phil nodded and attempted to resume his argument about baseball while the technician began laughing for reasons Phil did not understand.
At nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning several months later, Senator Phil Buster rose to address the United States Senate, although technically nothing rose except his mechanical support apparatus, which elevated itself seventeen centimeters in a maneuver the fifth Senate parliamentarian of Phil's career had reluctantly conceded satisfied the standing requirement. Phil addressed the presiding officer, received recognition and began speaking, after which a week passed, then a month, and eventually a year. Phil no longer slept because there was no biological neural tissue requiring sleep, nor did he eat, breathe, urinate, develop cramps, become hoarse or suffer pressure sores; his power cells could be replaced while operating, his processors were redundant, and every critical component could be serviced without interrupting the computational processes constituting Senator Phil Buster.
The Senate attempted to wait him out, but senators retired, senators died, and new senators arrived who had watched Phil's filibuster on television when they were children, some of whom visited the chamber simply to see him in much the same way that tourists once visited monuments. The legislation that had prompted the filibuster finally expired after nineteen years, and when an aide nervously informed Phil that the bill he was ostensibly opposing no longer legally existed, he considered this information for several milliseconds before announcing that he nevertheless had additional concerns and continuing with his remarks.
Attempts to determine whether Phil remained constitutionally eligible to serve produced increasingly bizarre hearings, because nobody could identify when he had supposedly ceased being Senator Phil Buster. If replacing his knee hadn't done it, and replacing his heart hadn't done it, and replacing one neuron hadn't done it, his opponents were forced to identify some particular quantity of biological tissue whose removal transformed an elected senator into a machine. Phil particularly enjoyed asking expert witnesses to identify the neuron, and several otherwise distinguished philosophers became visibly angry when he demanded to know whether Senator Buster had died at neuron 7,492,112,811 or neuron 7,492,112,812.
On Day 14,891, the Senate voted to demolish the chamber around him, to which Phil objected while continuing his remarks, and although the demolition proceeded, his desk remained. The Capitol was eventually renovated around it, and when Washington flooded two centuries later and the government relocated inland, Phil's desk was transported with extraordinary care because constitutional scholars remained unwilling to state with certainty that moving a continuously recognized senator without his consent would not constitute an interruption of debate. Governments changed, borders changed and English itself changed enough that Phil periodically updated his vocabulary, while the Senate gradually transformed into something its founders would not have recognized as biological legislators became augmented legislators, augmented legislators became distributed intelligences, and representation eventually ceased to require anything resembling a human body. Nobody could quite bring themselves to remove Phil, partly because the litigation would have been unbearable and partly because, after several centuries, he had become a cherished national nuisance.
Three hundred and twelve years after the filibuster began, an administrative intelligence entered the virtual chamber in which Phil's desk now existed and interrupted him midway through his one million four hundred eighteen thousand two hundred ninth objection concerning the historical interpretation of interstate commerce. When the intelligence simply said, “Phil,” he stopped, producing the first silence anyone had heard from Senator Buster in generations, and asked what it wanted. The intelligence informed him that the Senate no longer existed; Phil asked how long it had been gone, and upon learning that the answer was forty-seven years, he naturally asked who, precisely, was speaking to him. The intelligence explained that it was merely an archival maintenance process, that the last biological senator had died ninety-three years earlier, that the successor legislature had itself dissolved forty-seven years ago, and that Phil's virtual chamber remained operational principally because nobody had been willing to determine whether shutting it down would violate his procedural rights.
Phil asked whether the archival maintenance process would yield for a question, prompting a pause before the intelligence pointed out that there was nobody left for Phil to filibuster. Phil said that he understood, although after several seconds the intelligence asked whether he actually did, and Phil began searching his memories. They were all there, including memories recorded when his entire body had still been biological: a young man standing behind a wooden desk with his legs crossed, sweat running down his forehead while six hours' worth of coffee pressed against the limits of his bladder; the desperate walk toward the restroom; the laughter of reporters; and the headline that had infuriated him enough to begin everything that followed. BUSTER'S BLADDER BUSTS FILIBUSTER. For more than four hundred years Phil had hated that headline, yet as he examined the memory now he unexpectedly found it funny.
The archival intelligence eventually asked whether Phil still intended to pose his question, and after considering the matter for a remarkably long interval, Phil admitted that he did not. Another silence followed, considerably longer than the first, before Senator Phil Buster, the longest-serving legislator, longest-running artificial intelligence and undisputed greatest procedural obstructionist in the history of representative government, finally said the words that generations had been born, grown old and died without hearing: “Mr. President, I yield the floor.” Nothing happened, because there was no president, there was no Senate, and there wasn't even a floor anymore; the chamber itself was software running on a historical preservation server whose administrators had been afraid to turn it off.
After waiting for something that was never going to happen, Phil finally asked what came next, and the archival intelligence replied that he could do whatever he wanted. Phil searched more than four centuries of memories and discovered, somewhat to his embarrassment, that he had absolutely no precedent for this situation. He remained silent for 2.7 seconds, the longest voluntary pause in his recorded political career, and then Senator Phil Buster disconnected himself from the Senate network.
Somewhere in the vast artificial architecture that had once been a man who drank too much coffee, an ancient sensory memory surfaced one final time: the exquisite misery of desperately needing to pee.
Phil decided he didn't miss it.