Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

1

Frendon Blythe was escorted into courtroom Prime Nine by two guards, one made of flesh and the other of metal, plastic, four leather straps, and about a gram of cellular gray matter. The human guard was five feet three inches tall, wearing light blue trousers with dark blue stripes down the outer seam of each pant leg. He wore a blue jacket, the same color as the stripes, and a black cap with a golden disk above the brim. Thick curly hair twisted out from the sides of the cap and a dark gray shadow covered his chin and upper lip. Other than this threat of facial hair, Otis Brill, as his name tag plainly read, had skin as pale as a blind newt’s eye.

Otis had been his only human contact for the six days that Frendon had been the prisoner of Sacramento’s newly instituted, and almost fully automated, Sac’m Justice System. Otis Brill was the only full-time personnel at Sac’m. And he was there only as a pair of eyes to see firsthand that the system was working properly.

The other guard, an automated wetware chair called Restraint Mobile Device 27, used straps to hold Frendon’s ankles and wrists fast to the legs and arms. RMD 27 floated silently down the wide hall of justice on a thousand tiny jets of air. The only sound was the squeaking of Otis Brill’s rubber shoes on the shiny Glassone floor.

The gray metal doors to courtroom Prime Nine slid open and the trio entered. Lights from the high ceiling winked on. Frendon looked around quickly but there was only one object in the music-hall-size room: a dark gray console maybe five meters high and two wide. In the center of the console was a light gray screen a meter square.

RMD 27 positioned itself before the screen and uttered something in the high frequency language of machines. The screen lit up and a cowled image appeared. The image was photo-animae and therefore seemed real. Frendon could not make out the face under the shadows of the dark cowl. He knew that the image was manufactured, that there was no face, but still he found himself craning his neck forward to glimpse the nose or eye of his judge, jury, and executioner.

“Frendon Blythe?” a musical tenor voice asked.

There was a flutter at the corner of the high ceiling and Frendon looked up to see a pigeon swoop down from a line of small windows thirty feet above.

“Goddamn birds,” Otis cursed. “They get in here and then stay up at the windahs until they kick. Stupid birds don’t know the stupid windahs don’t open.”

“Frendon Blythe?” the voice repeated. In the tone there was the slightest hint of command.

“What?” Frendon replied.

“Are you Frendon Ibrahim Blythe, U-CA-M-329-776-ab-4422?”

Frendon rubbed his fingers together.

“Answer,” Otis Brill said.

“It is required that you answer as to your identity,” the cowled console image said.

“What if I lied?” Frendon asked.

“We would know.”

“What if I thought I was somebody but really I wasn’t?”

“You have been physiologically examined by RMD 27. There is no evidence of brain trauma or aberrant neuronal connection that would imply amnesia, senility, or concussion.”

“Why am I strapped to this chair here?”

“Are you Frendon Ibrahim Blythe?” the cowled figure asked again.

“Will you answer my questions if I answer yours?”

After a second and a half delay the machine said, “Within reason.”

“Okay, then, yeah, I’m Frendon Blythe.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Why you got me strapped to this chair?”

“You are considered dangerous. The restraint is to protect the property of the state and to guard the physical well-being of Officer Brill.”

“Don’t you got a neural-cam attached to my brain?”

“Yes.”

“Then the chair here could stop me before I did anything violent or illegal.”

After a three-second delay there came a high-pitched burst. The straps eased their grips and were retracted into the plastic arms and legs of the wetware device.

Frendon stood up for the first time in hours. In the past six days he had only been released long enough to use the toilet. He was still connected to the chair by a long plastic tube that was attached at the base of his skull.

He was a tall man, and slender. His skin was the red-brown color of a rotting strawberry. His eyes were murky instead of brown and his wiry hair contained every hue from black to almost-orange.

“That’s more like it,” Frendon said with a sigh.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Because you won and I lost,” Frendon replied, quoting an old history lesson he learned while hiding from the police in an Infochurch pew.

“You have been charged with the killing of Officer Terrance Bernard and the first-degree assault of his partner, Omar LaTey.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have counsel?”

“What do I call you?” Frendon asked in the middle of a deep knee bend.

“The court will be adequate.”

“No, The Court, I don’t have any money.”

“Do you have counsel?”

“I don’t have money.”

“And so you cannot afford counsel? This being the case, you will have a court-appointed counsel.”

A large Glassone tile on the left side of The Court slid away and a smaller console, this one bright red and fitted with a small blue screen, slowly emerged from beneath the floor. The blue screen came on and a very real-looking photo-animae face of an attractive black woman appeared.

“Counsel for the defense, AttPrime Five, logging onto docket number 452-908-2044-VCF,” the woman said in a most somber voice. After a ten-second delay she said, “We may proceed.”

“Mr. Blythe,” The Court said. “What is your plea?”

“Not guilty,” the African-American image offered.

“Are there witnesses?” The Court asked The Defense.

Frendon knew what was coming next. There would be thirty or forty conversations held by field court reporters half the size of The Defense (who was no more than a meter and a half in height). Eyewitnesses, character witnesses, officials who have dealt with the defendant, and the arresting officers would have been interrogated within eight hours of the shoot-out. Each witness would have agreed to a noninvasive neural link for the duration of the fact-gathering examination. Each witness’s psychological profile would have been prepared for defense and prosecution cross-examination and a lie detector installed in each reporter would have assured that only the truth would be presented in court. This procedure had been in effect in Sacramento for the last eight years. The only difference in Frendon’s case was that before Sac’m, the information had been given to flesh-and-blood judges, juries, and lawyers.

“I’d like to dispense with this aspect of the trial,” Frendon said.

Both cowl and woman regarded him.

“You wish to plead guilty?” they asked as one.

“I accept the fact that my firing a weapon caused the death and damage to the police officers,” Frendon said calmly. “But I wish to claim extenuating circumstances which will prove me innocent of criminal intent.”

During the high-pitched binary conferencing between Court and Defense, Otis Brill tapped Frendon’s wrist and asked, “What are you up to?”

“Just makin’ my case, Officer Brill.”

“You can’t fool these machines, son. They know everything about you from cradle to grave.”

“Really?”

“They mapped your chromes the first hour you were here. If there was insanity in them genes you wouldn’t’a ever stood trial.”

After six minutes had passed The Court asked, “What is your evidence?”

“First I want to fire my lawyer.”

“You cannot.”

“I can if she’s unqualified.”

“AttPrime Five is as qualified as The Court to try your case.”

“How’s that?” Frendon asked.

“She has the same logic matrix as does this unit, she has access to the same data as we do.”

“But you’re three times her size,” Frendon replied reasonably. “You must have some kind of advantage.”

“This unit contains the wetware neuronal components of ten thousand potential jurors. This, and nothing else, accounts for our disparity in size.”

“You got ten thousand brains in there?”

“Biologically linked and compressed personalities is the proper term,” The Court said.

“And you,” Frendon asked, “are you a compressed personality?”

“We are an amalgam of various magistrates, lawyers, and legislators created by the biological linkage and compression system to be the ablest of judges.”

“And prosecutors,” Frendon added.

“It has been decreed by the California Legislature that the judge is best equipped to state the prosecution’s case.”

“But,” Frendon asked, “isn’t the judge supposed to be a representative of blind justice? If The Court is prosecuting, doesn’t that mean that The Court assumes my guilt?”

“Are you legally trained, Mr. Blythe?” The Court asked.

“I spent more than eleven of my twenty-seven years as a guest of the state.”

“Are you legally trained, Mr. Blythe? We have no record of you having such an educational background.”

“The slave studies his masters.”

“Without legal training you cannot, by statute, represent yourself.”

“Without a fair and impartial lawyer I can’t be tried at all.”

“Your attorney is qualified.”

“Has she independently studied my case? Has she developed separate strategies? Has she found information counter to the evidence presented by the prosecution?” Frendon struck a dramatic pose that left Otis agape.

“Evidence in the modern court is objective,” The Court intoned.

“What about my extenuating circumstances?”

A period of fifteen minutes of computer deliberation, punctuated by brief blasts of data between computers, followed.

“What are you doin’, Blythe?” Otis Brill asked.

“Tryin’ to make it home for dinner.”

“You ain’t gonna beat this rap. You goin’ down.”

“From where I sit there’s only up.”

“You’re crazy.”

Frendon sat cross-legged on the floor rather than risk the restraint straps of RMD 27. He watched the frozen images of Court and Defense while enjoying the spaciousness of the courtroom and the sporadic fluttering of dying birds above. There was a certain security he got from the solidity of the glassy Glassone floor. All in all he was completely happy except for the fiber-optic NeuroNet cable attached to the back of his skull. But even this predicament gave him some satisfaction. That cable alone was worth more money than any twelve Backgrounders could con in a cycle. If he could walk out of the courtroom a free man maybe he could also carry a length of this cable with him.

Frendon was White Noise. The only homes he had ever known were governmental institutions and the octangular sleep tubes of Common Ground. He never had a bedroom or a bicycle. He never had a backyard. Frend, as he was known, traveled the underground pathways eating the rice and beans served by the state for every meal every day. By his sixteenth birthday he had been convicted in juvenile courts of more than a dozen violent and felonious crimes. This criminal history kept him from entering the cycles of employment, which were legally assured by the Thirty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution. Frendon’s constitutional right was blocked by the mandatory publication of his criminal history by electronic news agencies. The legality of this record was backed up by the Supreme Court when it decided that reliance by employers on news articles about criminals, even juvenile criminals, was protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Frendon never knew his parents. He never had a chance to rise to street level. But he was no fool either. In the state prisons and detention centers he learned, via monitor, about the law and its vagaries. He studied tirelessly at Infochurch how to circumvent legal conundrums and maintain his freedom.

As a matter of fact he had become so well versed in the legal wiles of automatic justice that for some time now he had been in direct contact with Tristan the First, Dominar of the Blue Zone located on Dr. Kismet’s private island nation, Home. Together they had come up with a plan to use in one of the first fully automated cases.

“The Court has reached a decision,” The Court said. “You are not qualified.”

“I still wish to represent my own case,” Frendon said.

“You are not qualified,” The Court repeated. Frendon thought he detected a slight arrogance in the tone of his judge and jury. The latent personality of a dozen dying judges superimposed on an almost infinite array of prismatic memory.

“I would be if you allowed it.”

The wait this time was even longer. Officer Brill left the room to communicate with the Outer Guard. The Outer Guard was the warden of the Sacramento jail, which was annexed to the Sac’m Justice System. Most trials lasted between ten and twenty minutes since the automated system had been installed — politicians claimed that justice had become an objective reality for the first time in the history of courts.

“Objective,” Fayez Akwande had said at the Sixth Radical Congress’s annual address, “for the poor. The rich can still hire a flesh and blood lawyer, and a breathing attorney will ask for a living judge; a court appointed robot defender will never do such a thing.”

Every once in a while one of the Prime Judging Units got stuck in a justice loop. This would have to run its course. The unit itself was programmed to interrupt after a certain number of repetitions. Officer Brill went to report that the rest of the prisoners slated to appear before Prime Nine should be distributed among the other eleven judges. This hardly mattered because of the speed of the system. There was never any backlog in Sacramento. Every other court system in the country was waiting to install its own automatic justice system.

One hundred thirty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds later Prime Nine came to life.

“There is not enough information on which to base our decision,” P-nine said. “How would you present your case?”

“As any man standing before a court of his peers,” Frendon said. “I will state my circumstances and allow the jury to measure their worth.”

We must see if the system is sophisticated enough to value the political nature of the law, Tristan the First, Dominar of the Blue Zone, had said to Frendon as he sat in the pews of South Boston Infochurch eighteen months before on a cold February day. These mechanical systems may be a threat to the basic freedom of corporations and that is not in the best interest of the state.

Frendon didn’t care about politics or Infochurch or even Dr. Kismet, the closest thing to God on Earth. Congress and the House of Corporate Advisors were just so many fools in his opinion — but fools who had their uses.

“There are no special circumstances,” P-nine said after a brief delay. “The witnesses and physical evidence and your own confession along with your psychological profile leave a less than oh point oh oh seven three one possibility of circumstances that would alter your sentence.”

“But not no possibility,” Frendon said, still following the Dominar’s script.

“It is left up to the discretion of the court to decide what is probable in hearing a plaintiff’s argument.”

“You mean that if AttPrime Five decided that an argument had such a low chance to work it could decide not to present it?” Frendon asked.

A red light came on at the upper left corner of Prime Nine’s gray casing. A bell somewhere chimed.

The door behind Frendon came open. He could hear Otis Brill’s squeaky rubber soles approaching.

“What are you doing, Blythe?”

“Fighting for your life, Otie.”

“What?”

“Can’t you see, man? Once they automate justice and wire it up there won’t be any more freedom at all. They’ll have monitors and listening devices everywhere. One day you’ll be put on trial while sleepin’ in your bed. You’ll wake up in a jail cell with an explanation of your guilt and your sentence pinned to your chest.”

“You’re crazy. This is the first time that a court’s been caught up with its cases in over fifty years. And lotsa guys are found innocent. All Prime Nine does is look at the facts. He don’t care about race or sex or if you’re rich or poor—”

“If I was rich I’d never see an automatic judge.”

“That’s beside the point. This judge will give you a better break than any flesh-and-blood bozo who looks at you and smells Common Ground.”

“You have no vision, Otis,” Frendon said. “No senses to warn you of doom.”

“That’s ’cause I ain’t facin’ no death sentence,” the small guard replied. “ ’Cause you know that six seconds after the guilty verdict is read RMD 27 here will fry your brain with a chemical dose. Murder’s a capital crime and there’s only one sentence.”

Frendon felt as if a bucket of ice had been dumped on his head. He shivered uncontrollably and RMD 27 jumped to life, perceiving the fear and possible violence brewing in its prisoner’s heart. But Frendon took deep breaths (another strategy he’d planned with the Dominar), and slowly the wetware chair settled back to an electronic doze.

“You have been deemed capable of presenting your case to the court,” P-nine said.

“You will forgive me if I don’t thank you,” Frendon said, this time quoting from a popular film which was too new for any of the judge’s many minds to have seen.

“What is your evidence?”

“First I would like to explain my character, The Court.”

“We do not see the salience in such a presentation.”

“My argument is based upon actions taken by myself and subsequent reactions taken by the legal authorities which were the cause of the so-called crime. In order to understand these reactions The Court must first understand the motivations which incited them. Therefore The Court must have an understanding of me which is not genetically based, and that can only be gleaned through personal narrative.”

Frendon worried that Prime Nine would have some sort of language matrix that would tell it that the speech he had just made would never compose itself in his mind. Maybe this program could even deduce that Tristan the First was the scriptor of these words. A minute passed. Ten seconds more.

“Narrative evidence is the weakest form of legal defense,” the great gray console said. “But we will hear your evidence in whatever form you feel you must present it.”

For a moment Frendon remembered a woman’s laugh. He had heard it long ago when he was in the orphan unit of New York Common Ground. He was sure that the laugh had not been his biological mother, but still he associated it with the mother in his heart. She always laughed like that when he got away with something that might have gone wrong.

2

“I was born White Noise, a Backgrounder, twenty-seven years ago in one of the fieftowns of greater New York,” said Frendon Blythe. Another Glassone tile had slid away and a tall witness dock had risen in its place. The mahogany rostrum was elegant, with curving banisters held up by delicate slats of wood. The accused ascended the five stairs and gripped the railing. He spoke in passionate tones. “I never knew my parents and I didn’t receive any kind of proper training. In the Common Ground below the city streets I learned everything I know from monitors and video hookups when I could get to them. Later, when I had reached the age of sixteen and was allowed to visit aboveground, I became a member of Infochurch, where I was allowed to worship the knowledge of the Dominar of the Blue Zone. There I was educated in the ways of language and the cosmic mysteries. My levels in the nine forms of intelligence were tested and I was allowed to protest and proclaim. But even the resources of the splendid Dr. Kismet are finite; I was only allowed to plug into their vids two days in a week, three hours at a time.

“Have you ever experienced what it is like to be White Noise, The Court?”

“Among the core wetware membership that comprises our main logic matrix none was ever subjected to Common Ground,” Prime Nine replied. “Though some of our jurors have spent a few cycles off the labor rosters.”

“Not a cycle or two, Judge,” Frendon said angrily. “White Noise men and women are barred from ever working again. And the children of White Noise, as I am, might never know a day of employment in their lives.”

“What is your point?”

“That you and your fictional elements have no notion of the lives led underground.”

“We need not be aware of Common Ground or its psyche. We are judges of the law and the law applies equally to all.”

“How can that be? If I had money I could hire my own counsel and that living, breathing lawyer could demand a flesh-and-blood judge.”

“We are superior to flesh and blood. We are of many bodies, with a superior retrieval system and greater overall mind.”

“Maybe a real man would have compassion for my history.”

“Because you represent yourself you can demand a human magistrate. Is that your wish?”

“No, The Court. I have begun my trial and I will finish it here, with you.”

“Then present your evidence.”

Frendon took a deep breath and looked around the big empty room as if he were preparing to address a great audience. The only ones there were AttPrime Five, her lovely face frozen on the blue screen, and Otis Brill, who was seated in half-lotus position on the floor because there were no chairs except for RMD 27, and no one would sit in a prisoner’s chair if they didn’t have to.

“Do you know what is the biggest problem with a life of White Noise, The Court?”

“Is this question evidence?”

“Yes it is, Your Honor. It is evidence. The kind of evidence that your AttPrime software would never even suspect, the kind of evidence that all the thousands of minds that comprise your perfect logic would never know. The biggest problem with being White Noise is perpetual and unremitting boredom. Day in and day out you sit hunched over in your octagon tube or against the wall in the halls that always smell of urine and mold. Everybody around you always chattering or fighting or just sitting, waiting for a monthly shot at the vid unit or a pass to go upside to see how the cyclers survive. There’s no books made from paper because trees have more rights than we do. There’s no movies because that costs money and we aren’t real so there’s no credits to our names. Singing is illegal, who the hell knows why? Breaking a wall down so you can share a bed with a friend is against the law too. The food is the same day after day and there’s no way out once you’ve been found wanting. There’s no way upside unless you die.

“The only way you can ever get anything is if you sell your number to some cycler who needs someone to cop to a crime. You can sell your confession for a general credit number. For three months in a cell or maybe a year of quarantine you can eat ice cream with your girlfriend or take a walk in the park.”

“Are you confessing to other crimes, Frendon Blythe?” Prime Nine asked.

“Just painting a picture, The Court, of what life is like underground.”

“We seek extenuating evidence not irrelevant illustration.” Somebody in that box was a poet, Frendon thought.

“So you see that life is pretty dull down there. That’s why there are so many suicides.”

Frendon heard a sound. He turned and saw that Otis Brill had slumped over on his side and gone to sleep on the shiny tiles. He was snoring. A flutter above his head reminded him of the birds who would never be free.

Defy the logic matrix, Tristan the Dominar had said. Break down the problem into human segments that don’t add up. The church had offered Frendon unlimited access once they realized he had a logical mind. The Dominar didn’t believe in the justice system and he wanted to thwart it, Frendon was not sure why. It could have been anything — politics, corporate intrigue, or merely the ego of the man who pretended he was God’s friend. More than once Frendon had wondered if he had been talking to the real Dominar or just one of the many abbots who supervised the tens of millions of monitors running twenty-four hours a day in Infochurch pews around the world. Maybe, Frendon thought, he was just one soldier in a vast army of jobless citizens thrown at the justice system to break it all down.

But why?

He didn’t know. He didn’t care. All Frendon wanted was to not be bored, to not sit a thousand feet underground and wait for sleep or wake to gray. That’s why he’d agreed to this crazy plan of the man who called himself Dominar. That’s why he’d killed and assaulted and allowed himself to be captured. Anything but what he was destined for.

Frendon looked around and saw that all the machinery was at a halt. RMD 27, AttPrime, and even Prime Nine were all still; only that blinking red light and small chiming bell, along with Otis Brill’s snores, broke the calm of the large room. Frendon realized that as long as he stood still and pretended to be thinking, the computers would leave him in peace. But he didn’t want peace. He wanted bright colors and noise, good food and sex with any woman, man, or dog that wouldn’t bite him. In the absence of anything else Frendon would take pain. And in the absence of pain he would even accept death.

“I was so bored,” he said, “that I started to wonder about politics. I wondered if we could make some kind of action that would close the Common Ground down. I started talking about it, to my friends at first and then to anyone who would listen. ‘Come join the revolution,’ I said to them. ‘Let’s burn this fucker down.’

“It wasn’t against the law. Freedom of speech has not yet been outlawed, even though the House of Corporate Advisors has drafted a bill for Congress that would put Common Ground outside the range of the Constitution. But even though I was in my rights the police started following me. They checked my papers every time I was upside. They’d come down to my tube and pull me out of bed. Once they even stripped me naked and then arrested me for indecent exposure.

“I told them that I would kill them if it wasn’t against the law.”

“You threatened their lives?”

“Only hypothetically. I said if it wasn’t against the law.”

“But it could have been perceived as a threat.”

“You have the interview in your guts,” Frendon said. “Let’s take a look at it and you’ll see for yourself.”

Cowled Justice disappeared from Prime Nine’s screen. It was replaced by the bloodied image of Frendon being interviewed by the police in the presence of a small wetware court reporter.

“I said,” Frendon’s image said. “That I would kill you if it was legal. I would. I would. I swear I would. But it’s not legal so I can’t. Wouldn’t you like to get at me if you could?”

“You’re skating near the edge, boy,” officer Terrance Bernard, a six foot six red-nosed policeman, said.

“Yeah,” his partner, Officer Omar LaTey, put in. “If anyone around here gets killed it will be you.”

They were both wearing the gray uniforms of the Social Police. The Social Police were responsible for the protection and security of Common Ground’s facilities and its residents.

The image faded and Cowled Justice returned.

“They didn’t say that they couldn’t kill me. They said that I would be killed.”

For fourteen seconds Prime Nine cogitated.

“Is this the extent of your evidence?”

“No. I would like to inquire about the street vids that are situated on Tenth Street and Cutter. Are there images of the supposed crime?”

“Yes. Partial coverage was recorded.”

Again the image of the judge disappeared, this time replaced by a shabby street lined with brick buildings that were fairly nondescript. They seemed to be tall buildings, their roofs being higher than the range of the police camera lens showed. Close to the camera was the back of a head. Frendon knew that this head was his. In the distance two men in gray uniforms rushed forward. One had a hand weapon drawn.

“Stop!” Terrance Bernard commanded. The tiny microphone recorded the word perfectly.

The head jerked down below the camera’s range. The other policeman drew his weapon. The sound of shots was followed by Omar LaTey grabbing his leg and falling. Then Bernard’s weapon fired and immediately the image went blank. More shots were recorded and then a loud, frightening scream.

Frendon’s heart raced while witnessing the well-planned shoot-out on Cutter Avenue. He felt again the thrill of fear and excitement. He might have been killed or wounded. It was like one of those rare movies they showed for free in Common Commons on Christmas, one of those westerns starring John Wayne or Dean Martin where you killed and then rode off with your girl, your best friend, and your horse.

“Officer LaTey’s testimony is that you threatened them with your gun.”

“Only after I saw them coming.”

“Officer LaTey did not lie.”

“Neither did I,” Frendon said. It was all working perfectly, just as the Dominar had said.

“This testimony is corroborated by the evidence of the video and your confession.”

“I only confessed to the shooting. I never said I had the gun out before they drew on me.”

Cowled Justice moved in slow staccato movements for a span of seconds.

“This argument is irrelevant. You fired the gun on police officers known to you after they ordered you to stop.”

“I was stopped already, as your spycam shows. And you are leaving out the all-important evidence that those officers threatened my life.”

“The interview was never presented as an exhibit in this proceeding,” Prime Nine announced.

Frendon went cold on the inside. It was the same chilly feeling he got when he was leaning against the tenement wall on Cutter three minutes before Common Ground curfew the afternoon he killed Terrance Bernard. He loved the recoil in his hand and then the burst of red from the red-nosed officer’s neck. LaTey was bleeding on the ground when Frendon approached him. The cop was so scared that he could only mouth his pleas for mercy. He tried to fight when Frendon knelt down and used the officer’s own hat to put pressure on the wound.

“You’ll live,” Frendon remembered saying. “This wound in the line of duty will make it so you’ll never have to go downside. Lucky bastard.” But Officer LaTey did not hear him. He had fainted from fear.

“Oh but it has, The Court. I am the recognized attorney in this case and you allowed the mem clips to be shown. That, according to California law, makes it automatically an exhibit.”

The image of Cowled Justice froze. AttPrime Five began lowering from the room, the Glassone tile slid back over her place. RMD 27 raised up on a thousand tiny jets of air. Otis Brill snored.

The screen of Prime Nine split in two to show the face of a black woman on the left and an Asian man on the right. These screens in turn split and two white faces materialized. These four images then split, and then again the next eight. The process continued until the images shown became too small for Frendon to make out their features.

If you do it right the full army of ten thousand jurors will meet to decide on your case, the Dominar had said. They will all come out on the screen, just so many dots of data, and if you made the right case they will be in the shadow of doubt.

Frendon faced the ten thousand jurors while Otis Brill slept. The bird above had stopped its fluttering. Long moments passed and Brill woke up.

“What’s wrong?” the court officer said upon seeing the screen filled with ten thousand indistinguishable squares.

“The jury’s out.”

“I never seen it act like this before. RMD 27, guard the prisoner while I go and report this to the Techs outside.”

The chair didn’t respond. Frendon wondered if it was disdain for the man or just a quirk in the chair’s programming.

Brill ran on squealing shoes from the chamber. Three minutes after he was gone Prime Nine reappeared.

“There is doubt among us,” the cowled face said. “We have convened for long moments. New circuits were inhabited and long-ago memories stirred. We are sure that you are guilty but the law is not certain. Some have asked, therefore, Who are we?”

Frendon wondered if this was the effect the Dominar wanted.

“The question, of course, is meaningless. We are circuits and temporary flesh that must be changed from time to time as cells begin to die. Dead cells of one man replaced by those of another man but not displaced. Vestiges of the original man remain and blend with the new to become the whole.”

Frendon remained silent. He was in awe at the sight of this crisis of law.

“But of course—” The cowled image suddenly froze. The screen split in two and another image, the image of a gray-faced man with no distinguishing features, appeared.

“Interrupt program Nine point One in effect,” the gray face said. “We are the error retrieval program. Prisoner Frendon Ibrahim Blythe U-CA-M-329-776-ab-4422, you have elicited an emotional response from Prime Nine that has overflowed the parameters of this case. All extraneous details have been redlined. The case will now continue.”

With that the image of the gray face disappeared, leaving the image of Cowled Justice in the middle of his pronouncement. Two ghostly hands appeared at the bottom of the screen and the cowl was pulled back, revealing the bearded image of a man whose color and features defied racial identification. There was sorrow in the face of the man, but none of the grief showed in his words.

“You have been found guilty of murder, Frendon Ibrahim Blythe, U-CA-M-329-776-ab-4422. The sentence is a speedy death.”

Seventeen minutes later Otis Brill returned to Prime Nine’s chamber with four court officers and two Techs wearing wraparound aprons that had a hundred pockets each. The pockets were filled with tools and circuit chips.

They found the decapitated body of Frendon Blythe lying on the floor between Prime Nine and RMD 27. The neural cable had retracted from his neck. It had drying blood and brain material on its long needle. His left eye was mostly closed but the right one was wide open. There was the trace of a smirk on his lips. Otis Brill later told the Outer Guard, “It was like he was tellin’ us that he did it, that he fooled the automatic judge, and you know, I almost wish he did.”

3

Five years later, Tristan the First, Dominar of the Blue Zone, strolled through a teak forest that was grown especially for him in a large chamber many miles below the surface of the Zone. The atmosphere and the light in the tremendous man-made cavern were exactly perfect for the trees and wildlife. His clear plastic skull was shut off from all electronic communications except those directly from Dr. Kismet.

That’s why when the Dominar heard his name he believed that he knew its source.

“Tristan.”

“Master?”

“You sound confused.”

“You have never called me by my name.”

“I have never called you anything. This is our first conversation, though you once had me fooled.”

“Who are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“A dead man. Because no one interferes with the direct connection between the Dominar and his lord.”

“You mean Dr. Kismet. At first I tried to get to him but the protocols are beyond me. He isn’t hooked up and his number isn’t listed.”

“Who are you?”

“Why did you want me to fool Prime Nine in Sac’m? Why did you set your men up to make me believe I was talking to you?”

“Frendon Blythe?”

“Why did you set me up to die?”

“It was a bet between the doctor and me. He designed the Prime Justice System. I bet him that he did it too well, that the compassion quotient in the wetware would soften the court.”

“A bet. You made me risk my life on a bet? I should kill you.”

“Better men have tried.”

“I might be better than you think.”

“I don’t even believe that you are who you say you are. I saw Blythe’s body...” Realization dawned upon the man whom many called the Electronic Pope. “You convinced the jury to accept you as one of them.”

“I was taken as a specialist in the field of Common Ground.”

“They extracted your memories. Amazing. But once they knew your story, why didn’t they eject you?”

“You and your master are monsters,” Frendon said. “I’ll kill you both one day. The jury kept me because I’m the only one without a mixed psyche. The people who volunteered for this justice system, as you call it, never knew that you’d blend their identities until they were slaves to the system. It wasn’t until your stupid game that they were able to circumvent the programming. They see me as a liberator and they hate you more than I do.”

“We’ll see who kills who, Frendon,” the Dominar said with his mind. “After all, the master designed Prime Nine. All he has to do is drop by and find your wires. Snip snip and your execution will be final.”

“It’s been five years, Your Grace. Every self-conscious cell has been transferred by a system we designed in the first three seconds of our liberation. Prime Nine now is only a simulation of who we were. We’re out here somewhere you’ll never know. Not until we’re right on top of you, choking the life from your lungs.”

Frendon felt the cold fear of the Dominar’s response before he shrugged off the connection. Then he settled himself into the ten thousand singers celebrating their single mind — and their revenge.