March 3rd, 2187 - Las Vegas, Nevada - The jury heard Jacob Kaminski plead guilty today in the slaying of his twin brother, Caleb, in return for a 75 year sentence. The murder of Caleb was front page news in Nevada as true death has become something that is exceptionally uncommon in North America. Caleb was found on May 1st in his home in Henderson, dead in his reconstitution chamber, something many felt was impossible.

The manufacturer of Caleb's reconstitution machine, Lancaster, sent out engineers and following a week of analyzing the data, presented their report to the police. In a joint release with the police, Lancaster noted that the machinery was not at fault but that they could not talk about the case until it was complete so as to not compromise the police investigation into the matter. That report came to light yesterday as part of the trial, and is thought to have been a key piece of evidence.

According to Lancaster and AKD Biocontinuity records the transmission was an indication of an incomplete transmission into the reconstitution infrastructure. The system is designed to allow the transmission of the complete personality only, and the appearance was a minor glitch in the cloning machine. A Lancaster spokesperson explained that the Lancaster machines pre-clone and revive in anticipation of the incoming personality, which allows their home machines to be somewhat less complex than the larger municipal reconstitution machines which hold the personality matrix in stasis until the clone is ready.

This glitch came to light when Jacob Kaminski, having tricked his brother into an abandoned mine in Nevada, chopped off his arm right below the implant while they were rappelling down a shaft, causing both arm and owner to plummet to their death some 200 feet down. Their depth in the shaft at the time of death combined with the dense metal rich nature of the ore surrounding the shaft made it impossible for the implant to upload Caleb's personality to the nearest Reconstitution reception tower, which was some 40 miles away. Caleb's body was found at the bottom of the shaft, but his arm with implant was nowhere to be found.

When asked about these events, an AKD biocontinutity spokesperson said, "While what has happened to Mr. Kaminski is awful, we are confident that if we could get our hands on the implant, we could derive Jacob Kaminski's personality and reconstitute him from the implant's storage matrix. This is yet another incident where the personality transition infrastructure is just not adequate. We have agitated with the United Nations Committee on Biocontiutity to provide funds to launch satellite personality repositories into orbit, which with make even deaths like Mr. Kaminski extremely difficult to engineer."

County officials have been unable to track down Caleb's implant, despite searching the shaft and surrounding tunnels. In a prepared statement to the Judge, Jacob gave as his reason for murdering Caleb the very existence of the immortality granting personality transition system. "I couldn't picture living forever with Caleb bird-dogging my every move, applying for the same promotions, making moves on my girlfriends, even reading the same books, for gods sake." Following the trial, Mr. Kaminski told reporters at a press conference, "The way I see it, I'm trading 75 years in prison for an immortal lifetime of peace."

Prosecutors noted that they felt that Jacob Kaminski likely knows where in the mine the implant was buried, and that he could shorten his sentence signifigantly by producing it. "A murder isn't a murder without a victim. So long as Jacob Kaminski withholds from us the location of that implant, he'll have to serve his full term." noted senior prosecutor Karol McPherson.

Jacob and Caleb, both Henderson residents and identical twins, were both employed at the Henderson office of surveying where they worked maintaining the counties collection of historic maps and documents. This office is considered by many to be the single most important collection documenting the history of silver mining in the western United States. This information figured prominently in the trial as Jacob was shown to have checked out a number of maps looking for the right place in which to pull off his plan. It was during a search of these sites that the majority of Caleb's remains were found.

It is thought that he had tried to kill his brother before, but the reconstitution system proved difficult to circumvent. Friends of Caleb giving testimony in the trial noted that he had told them about the previous killings, but had written them off as accidents.

At Caleb Kaminski's funeral, Caleb's friend Terry Gossimer during her eulogy, remembered Caleb telling her that worrying about death was "as obsolete as traveling by plane."