The Whisper Man

by Alex North

How long does it take, and how much does a person have to change, before the person you hated is gone, replaced by someone new? Pete was someone else now.

This is something that has always interested me, and this particular passage comes from the philosophical problem commonly referred to as the Ship of Theseus: the idea that a famous ship might be tied up at a dock for many years, its steadily rotting planks replaced one by one over time until the ship is entirely new. At what point does it stop being the original ship? If you took all the rotting planks you'd removed and made them into a new ship, would *that* have more of a claim to be the original ship? It's different with people, of course. Pete has slowly changed from the man he once was, even if a few of the original rotting planks still remain. So is he still - now - responsible for the things he did back then? It's a difficult question. But most important of all, of course, is the fact that even if he is different in the present, that still might not matter so much to the people who knew him in the past...