Mind Over Ship

The Verdict

On the charge of irretrievable manslaughter in the first degree, Mary thought. On the charge of retrievable manslaughter in the second degree. Mary was dressed and ready to go, but she couldn’t seem to leave her bedroom. Georgine was out in the living room crabbing about Norbert, who had turned out to be a typical jerry after all. Selfish, adolescent. And crabbing about the weather, which had turned wintry. On the charge of criminal trespass and reckless endangerment. On the use of a fabricated identity in the commission of a felony. On lying to a peace officer. Tampering with evidence. Oh, they were going to put Fred away for a long, long time, and it was all her fault. Hadn’t he broken the law in order to protect her? Hadn’t she practically dared him to? Mary flung herself on the bed, unseating her hat. She was the worst spouse possible.

Georgine came into the bedroom. “What are you doing? You’re going to be late. Are you crying? Don’t cry, Mary.”

“I’m a terrible person.”

“No, you’re not. I’m the terrible person. I care more about myself than those around me. I should have been at the clinic with you and Alex and Renata.” She came and sat on the bed next to Mary. “When Wee Hunk called, I had just gotten home, and I told him I was too tired to go back. But the truth is that I was afraid. He said it was urgent, but I was a coward!” She slumped forward.

Mary sat up and dried her eyes with the corner of a pillowcase. She rested a hand on her sister’s shoulder. She could understand why she was falling to pieces. She had Fred to fret over. But Georgine? She must be channeling Ellen. Evangelines were always channeling someone. That was why they were so good.

The baby/woman’s condition had improved during the past week. The Protatter, guided by diligent clicking, seemed to be working: Ellen had stopped insisting that her mother was alive. She stopped speaking of her mother altogether. Dr. Lamprey was calling this solid progress and encouraging everyone to remain vigilant at their clickers for another week.

But Mary seriously doubted that she and her sisters could last another week. Taking responsibility for Ellen’s very thoughts was causing too much strain. She got to her feet and opened a mirror to straighten out her clothes. She fetched the hat from the floor, and as she put it on, she watched Georgine watching her.

“You look good, Mary.”

“Thanks.” Mary went to the doorway but came right back to give Georgine a hug. “I swear, I never thought that going to court would be a welcome distraction. Hold down the fort.”

IT WAS A short hop by town car to the federal court house in Bloomington. The trip was unnecessary; she could attend the trial from home. But home spectators were invisible in the courtscape, and it was important to show her support for Fred. So Mary endured the trip, the media attention, and the invasive court house security in order to check into an official spectator booth.

As luck would have it, she managed to engage a solo booth, and she popped up in the courtscape in her reserved spot on the bench directly behind the defense table. Other spectators appeared on either side of her. The judge appeared behind the bench and the prosecuting attorney at his table. Although the judge and prosecutor had conducted the bulk of the trial by proxy, they marked the importance of the final day by appearing in person by holopresence. By contrast, Fred’s defense counsel, Myr Talbot, appeared by proxy as usual. His proxy swiveled around and greeted Mary with a nod, but Mary was too upset to acknowledge it. Was it asking too much for Talbot to appear in person to deliver his closing argument? To send his proxy at so critical a time was unconscionable, bordering on malpractice, and she was no longer able to hide her disgust with the man.

At the outset of the trial, Mary had begged Fred to allow the Starke Cabinet’s attorney general to defend him, but Fred wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t even let her mention the Starke name in his presence, let alone accept the largesse of its legal representation. Mary then insisted on hiring their own attorney. With what? he had asked. Not with Starke funds she assured him. With their own income from her own Leena. Where did the Leena come from? he asked, and he answered his own question — from Starke. Fred chose to go with an attorney provided by Applied People and the Benevolent Brotherhood of Russes — the incompetent Myr Talbot.

Talbot’s first act had been to help pick a ruinous jury. He had recommended that Fred agree to an E-Pluribus jury, which in itself was not unreasonable. The court calendar was perennially backlogged and to insist on a jury of living, realbody people for a trial of this class would require a wait of seven or eight years. With little chance of bail, Fred would sit out those years in prison. An E-Pluribus jury, on the other hand, could be impaneled at once.

Selecting the E-Pluribus jury had started out well. Fifteen Everypersons appeared in the jury box, their quicksilver surfaces throwing rainbow flashes of color throughout the courtscape. At a word from the judge, they all began to flicker, morphing momentarily into random individuals from the vast pool of 1.2 billion potential juror sims in the E-Pluribus database. Young, old, rich, poor, the whole spectrum of society flashed by. Moreover, these sims had been cast prior to the date of Fred’s alleged crimes and stored inert in isolation, so there was no possibility of contamination by hearsay or the media.

The judge rapped his gavel, and like a game of musical chairs, the morphing came to an abrupt halt. Fifteen candidate sims blinked and looked around, confused by their sudden existence. Remarkably, there were seven iterants among them, including an evangeline and a russ! And the non-iterant candidates were mostly free-rangers, that part of society least hostile to clones. A more favorable jury could not be imagined, but it wasn’t to be. The attorneys exercised their allotted challenges, and one after another of the jurors morphed again and again, dipping into the limitless demographic pool.

When all challenges were exhausted and the final jury and alternates were impaneled, it was the polar opposite of the first. The evangeline and russ were long gone, which Mary had expected. (Excluding them amounted to a racist belief that clones were not individuals!) Worse, the other five clones had been replaced as well, two with affs, which was bad enough, and the rest with chartists. Chartists! Chartists despised iterants, falsely accused them of stealing their jobs. It was far from an impartial jury made up of Fred’s peers!

Talbot’s incompetence continued to manifest throughout every phase of the trial. Mary pleaded with Fred, but stubborn Fred insisted on going without any Starke assistance. And so, five months later, they arrived at this final day of the trial, facing what amounted to life behind real bars.

When Fred appeared at the defense table in his prison jumpsuit, Mary put on her bravest face so that when he turned around he’d see at least one friend in the courtroom.

Oh, but he looked haggard. Hadn’t he slept at all? He smiled at her with grim tenderness, which broke her heart all over again.

Then his attention was distracted by someone behind Mary. The judge rapped his gavel and the bailiff ordered all to rise for the jury. Mary rose, and the jury sims — stored during trial recess on the court’s own secure quantum lattice — filed into the jury box. Mary glanced around to see who had caught Fred’s eye. It was Reilly Dell. Reilly avoided Mary’s look, and the courtroom was asked to be seated.

So the trial, so the closing arguments. The prosecutor trumpeted the vicious nature of Fred’s slaughter of duly sworn officers of a health-care facility. He emphasized Fred’s contempt of the law, to this day refusing to name the source of his false identikit. He enumerated the ways society was harmed by Fred’s egregious crimes. In response, Myr Talbot-by-proxy failed to remind the jury of Fred’s overriding motive for his crimes — to save his wife’s life. He did not contradict the prosecutor’s assertion that Fred’s victims were all “duly sworn” officers of the clinic — the pikes were a rogue element whose presence had never been adequately explained during the proceedings. Talbot-by-proxy did not challenge any number of inconsistencies and contradictions that even Mary, who was not trained in the law, had noted during the course of the trial. All was surely lost.

The judge instructed the jury and then sequestered it in a deliberation space. Fred’s holopresence from the Utah prison was abruptly severed, and the courtscape went to standby.

Before leaving the shelter of the court house lobby, Mary lowered the veil of her new hat. With veil in place and head held high, she marched resolutely out the doors and down the court house steps. Immediately, about a thousand media bees mobbed her. The tiny mechs with whirring acetate wings formed a wall to block her way. Little framed faces shouted the same question at her: How do you feel the trial went?

But Mary didn’t answer. Without even slowing down, she marched into the wall shouting, “Desist! Desist!”