I do not of course suggest that there are circumstances presently foreseeable in which an elected government might seek to prolong its own existence by subverting the people’s right to vote, or otherwise to effect fundamental and undemocratic changes in the nature of our governmental institutions. My thesis is that the citizen’s democratic rights go hand in hand with other fundamental rights; the latter, certainly, may in reality be more imaginably at risk, in any given set of political circumstances, than the former. The point is that both are or should be off limits for our elected representatives. They are not matters upon which, in a delegated democracy — a psephocracy — the authority of the ballot-box is any authority at all. It is a premise of elective government, where free people are the voters, that these principles be observed by whoever is elected.
Furthermore, between you immediately before the teletransport and each of these replicants immediately after, there would be very strong psychological connectedness.
The face which emerged was not reassuring. […]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls.
