Eastern Standard Tribe

There's an idea. Give them everything, all the notes I built for Fede and his damned patent application, sign over the exclusive rights to the patent for one dollar and services rendered (i.e., getting me a decent lawyer and springing me from this damned hole).

My last lawyer was a dickhead. He met me at the courtroom fifteen minutes before the hearing, in a private room whose fixtures had the sticky filthiness of a bus-station toilet. 'Art, yes, hello, I'm Allan Mendelson, your attorney. How are you?

He was well over 6'6', but weighed no more than 120 lbs and hunched over his skinny ribs while he talked, dry-washing his hands. His suit looked like the kind of thing you'd see on a Piccadilly Station homeless person, clean enough and well-enough fitting, but with an indefinable air of cheapness and falsehood.

'Well, not so good,' I said. 'They upped my meds this morning, so I'm pretty logy. Can't concentrate. They said it was to keep me calm while I was transported. Dirty trick, huh?'

'What?' he'd been browsing through his comm, tapping through what I assumed was my file. 'No, no. It's perfectly standard. This isn't a trial, it's a hearing. We're all on the same side, here.' He tapped some more. 'Your side.'

'Good,' Art said. 'My grandmother came down, and she wants to testify on my behalf.'

'Oooh,' the fixer said, shaking his head. 'No, not a great idea. She's not a mental health professional, is she?'

'No,' I said. 'But she's known me all my life. She knows I'm not a danger to myself or others.'

'Sorry, that's not appropriate. We all love our families, but the court wants to hear from people who have qualified opinions on this subject. Your doctors will speak, of course.'

'Do I get to speak?'

'If you really want to. That's not a very good idea, either, though, I'm afraid. If the judge wants to hear from you, she'll address you. Otherwise, your best bet is to sit still, no fidgeting, look as sane and calm as you can.'

I felt like I had bricks dangling from my limbs and one stuck in my brain. The new meds painted the world with translucent whitewash, stuffed cotton in my ears and made my tongue thick. Slowly, my brain absorbed all of this.

'You mean that my Gran can't talk, I can't talk, and all the court hears is the doctors?'

'Don't be difficult, Art. This is a hearing to determine your competency. A group of talented mental health professionals have observed you for the past week and they've come to some conclusions based on those observations. If everyone who came before the court for a competency hearing brought out a bunch of irrelevant witnesses and made long speeches, the court calendar would be backlogged for decades. Then other people who were in for observation wouldn't be able to get their hearings. It wouldn't work for anyone. You see that, right?'

'Not really. I really think it would be better if I got to testify on my behalf. I have that right, don't I?'

He sighed and looked very put-upon. 'If you insist, I'll call you to speak. But as your lawyer, it's my professional opinion that you should not do this.'

'I really would prefer to.'

He snapped his comm shut. 'I'll meet you in the courtroom, then. The bailiff will take you in.'

'Can you tell my Gran where I am? She's waiting in the court, I think.'

'Sorry. I have other cases to cope with-I can't really play messenger, I'm afraid.'

When he left the little office, I felt as though I'd been switched off. The drugs weighted my eyelids and soothed my panic and outrage. Later, I'd be livid, but right then I could barely keep from folding my arms on the grimy table and resting my head on them.

The hearing went so fast I barely even noticed it. I sat with my lawyer and the doctors stood up and entered their reports into evidence-I don't think they read them aloud, even, just squirted them at the court reporter. My Gran sat behind me, on a chair that was separated from the court proper by a banister. She had her hand on my shoulder the whole time, and it felt like an anvil there to my dopey muscles.

'All right, Art,' my jackass lawyer said, giving me a prod. 'Here's your turn. Stand up and keep it brief.'

I struggled to my feet. The judge was an Asian woman about my age, a small round head set atop a shapeless robe and perched on a high seat behind a high bench.

'Your Honor,' I said. I didn't know what to say next. All my wonderful rhetoric had fled me. The judge looked at me briefly, then went back to tapping her comm. Maybe she was playing solitaire or looking at porn. 'I asked to have a moment to address the Court. My lawyer suggested that I not do this, but I insisted.

'Here's the thing. There's no way for me to win here. There's a long story about how I got here. Basically, I had a disagreement with some of my coworkers who were doing something that I thought was immoral. They decided that it would be best for their plans if I was out of the way for a little while, so that I couldn't screw them up, so they coopered this up, told the London police that I'd gone nuts.

'So I ended up in an institution here for observation, on the grounds that I was dangerously paranoid. When the people at the institution asked me about it, I told them what had happened. Because I was claiming that the people who had me locked up were conspiring to make me look paranoid, the doctors decided that I was paranoid. But tell me, how could I demonstrate my non-paranoia? I mean, as far as I can tell, the second I was put away for observation, I was guaranteed to be found wanting. Nothing I could have said or done would have made a difference.'

The judge looked up from her comm and gave me another once-over. I was wearing my best day clothes, which were my basic London shabby chic white shirt and gray wool slacks and narrow blue tie. It looked natty enough in the UK, but I knew that in the US it made me look like an overaged door-to-door Mormon. The judge kept looking at me. Call to action, I thought. End your speeches with a call to action. It was another bit of goofy West Coast Vulcan Mind Control, courtesy of Linda's fucking ex.

'So here's what I wanted to do. I wanted to stand up here and let you know what had happened to me and ask you for advice. If we assume for the moment that I'm not crazy, how should I demonstrate that here in the court?'

The judge rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder, making glossy black waterfalls of her hair. The whole hearing is very fuzzy for me, but that hair! Who ever heard of a civil servant with good hair?

'Mr. Berry,' she said, 'I'm afraid I don't have much to tell you. It's my responsibility to listen to qualified testimony and make a ruling. You haven't presented any qualified testimony to support your position. In the absence of such testimony, my only option is to remand you into the custody of the Department of Mental Health until such time as a group of qualified professionals see fit to release you.' I expected her to bang a gavel, but instead she just scritched at her comm and squirted the order at the court reporter and I was led away.

I didn't even have a chance to talk to Gran.

26.

• ##Received address book entry 'Toby Ginsburg' from Colonelonic.

• ## Colonelonic (private): This guy's up to something. Flew to Boston twice this week. Put a down payment on a house in Orange County. _Big_ house. _Big_ down payment. A car, too: vintage T-bird convertible. A gas burner! Bought CO2 credits for an entire year to go with it.

• Trepan: /private Colonelonic Huh. Who's he working for?

• ## Colonelonic (private): Himself. He Federally incorporated last week, something called 'TunePay, Inc.' He's the Chairman, but he's only a minority shareholder. The rest of the common shares are held by a dummy corporation in London. Couldn't get any details on that without using a forensic accounting package, and that'd get me fired right quick.