Day One: The Ritual
The little movie they made them watch, what with its video-toaster-style star wipes and shadowy chroma key American Flag, was like an artifact from an earlier time, as far removed from today as pagers and cassette tapes. But Evan could tell it had been shot recently. The people hosting it, for example, were the current anchors of the local channel 8 news, and one of the people they interviewed was wearing a t-shirt advertising a currently popular podcast. So why did it look so cheap?
After a brief introduction explaining the check-in process, the movie found its groove as a series of testimonials given by people who had just completed their civic duty. It was clear the filmmakers had told these roobs what to say, and the roobs said it, verbatim, without the slightest sincerity. “I think it’s great that we get to participate in the justice system,” one woman said. “This really is the most important thing, short of voting, that you can do for your community.” This other guy nodded and said, “I know people joke about it, but I took it very seriously. I mean, Heaven forbid I might be on the other side of it, some day, and I’d like to think that the folks hearing my case wouldn’t just shrug it off.” A younger Mexican chick said she actually felt honored to have been selected. Honored. At this, Evan stopped giving the video his full attention.
Which is why he couldn’t be exactly sure he had heard correctly when the old man, who until now had been sitting quietly on the left side of the frame, looked directly into the camera and said, “If you have any survival instincts at all, you’ll get up from your chair right now, and run. Run as fast as you can, anywhere you can. Don’t look back, don’t listen when they yell. Just get out. Save yourself.” Evan heard the words, but they didn’t quite register. The old dude hadn’t screamed, or cried out, or anything. The only betrayal of his emotions came in the form of the words themselves, which, judging from the room, nobody else had totally heard, either.
From here, the news anchors started talking about the selection process. The audio for this part was out of sync, with the voices sounding a few milliseconds after the mouths moved. Evan became transfixed, not with the the content of the video, but with this brief interlude between sight and sound. He felt himself being pulled into the time of the video, not left and right, as we know it, but inward, along the z-axis, between the now and then. This sensation, however, was cut unfairly short by the screeching microphone feedback coming from the podium in front of all the prospective jurors.
The video was turned off mid-sentence, and a large robed man cleared his throat loudly into the mic. He was black, bald, and bearded, and of indeterminate age. Evan was prepared for a lecture, about responsibility, justice, and the like, but the robed man seemingly had nothing to say. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and made aggressive eye contact with a man who was sitting on the floor, despite the abundance of available seats. The man held out for a good thirty seconds, before finally relenting and sitting his lazy ass in a chair. The judge smiled and motioned to his right. “Thirty-five to one hundred and twenty,” he said. A couple people stood up, but most just looked around at one another, confused. The judge motioned again, more violently this time, and repeated, “Thirty-five to one hundred and twenty.” It took a while for people to realize that these numbers corresponded to the little slips of paper they had been sent in the mail, and that those falling within the set were to get up and head into the hall. Evan was number fifty-eight, so he shuffled that way.
The bailiff, a short woman in her mid-sixties, was waiting for them by the elevator. With her was a trainee, who was holding a large burlap sack. It went like this: you approached the trainee and accepted two things from his parcel: a blindfold, and a small vial of dark green liquid. You tied the blindfold around your eyes and waited for the elevator door to open. Once inside the elevator, you were to drink the contents of the vial. It was very important that the vial be empty before the doors opened again on the seventh floor, or else you would be made to go back down and try again. Thankfully, the vial was smaller than a shot glass (something with which Evan was fairly familiar), and the liquid was tasteless. Nobody seemed to have any problem drinking the whole thing on the journey up.
The seventh floor was a cold marble foyer, with vinyl-upholstered furniture one might expect to find in a pizza buffet, and the acoustics of a public shower at the YMCA. No conversation was private, but Evan was shocked to discover that this did not stop people from divulging personal secrets to one another. He didn’t know it, but this was the desired effect of the dark green liquid. The ritual required absolute honesty, and, sadly, the average citizen was less than trustworthy on that count.
They were still blindfolded, so, when it was time to enter the court room, they had to be herded in like cattle. Another subtle conditioning technique that went unnoticed by most. Their behavior was being molded, through the age-old method of bombarding one with rules as they apply to a new experience. This, you might recognize, is how the Nazis did it.
Once they sat down on the court room pews, they were allowed to remove their blindfolds. There were two tables, facing the gallery, and what appeared to be a stone alter in the center of the floor. A judge sat on the bench, but he was clearly disinterested. Evan, having seen his fair share of “Law and Order,” understood that the two tables were for the two opposing sides in the case: the plaintiff and the defendant. The plaintiff’s lawyer stood up and addressed the crowd.
“Welcome, one and all. The hour is upon us, the time is nigh. We will now begin the ritual of Voir Dire.”
“Voir Dire,” the bailiffs, judge, and legal representatives all chanted in concert.
The lawyer continued. “You will each be tested. Most of you will fail. Some of you, a select few, will be chosen. Do not be ashamed if your name is not called; some are just more worthy than others. Do not lie. We will know, and the punishment will be severe. Open your lives to me, to us, to one another. Trust the stranger next to you. Reveal your deepest, darkest secrets to the world. That is the only way forward. That is the purpose of Voir Dire.”
“Voir Dire,” the chant repeated, slightly louder this time.
The ritual involved a participant lying down atop the stone alter and answering a series of deeply probing questions for about five minutes. No two people were asked the same questions, except for the basic identifiers. At first Evan found this process intriguing, but he lost interest after the third or fourth participant. He nearly missed it when his own name was called.
The stone was warm where the others had laid, but on the perimeter it was as cold as death. Evan held his arms to his sides. He closed his eyes, told them his name, age, and occupation, and anxiously awaited his interrogation.
The lawyers conferred among themselves, apparently deciding on what to ask. Finally, the defense attorney approached the alter and said, “What is your earliest memory?”
Evan responded without hesitation. “I am young, very young. Not quite a newborn baby, but not able to walk yet. This was when we still lived in Florida, so it was like 1986, maybe early ‘87. I had gotten pretty good at crawling, and I liked to try to fit under things.”
“Things?” the lawyer asked. “What kind of things?”
“The couch. The TV stand, dining table, stuff like that.”
“Very well. Continue.”
“I remember the carpet in our apartment was brown. It wasn’t a shag, but it did tend to knot up in places. There were these two old guys sitting in my living room, watching me crawl around on the floor.”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you ever asked anyone?”
“Yeah. My mom just said there were always old people around that apartment, so she didn’t remember them specifically.”
“Did you find that bizarre?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“Okay, Evan. Lemme ask you this: were they actual old dudes, or did they just seem old because you were a baby?”
“No, they were old. They were bald and wrinkled. Anyway, I decided to crawl under the television. Remember, this was decades before LED screens, so TV’s were no joke. It definitely would have crushed my little bones if it had fallen on me. I remember those two old men just sitting there watching me, and I remember thinking, ‘they should stop me from doing this.’ But they didn’t. And I didn’t stop myself. I crawled around under the TV stand, until my dad got me out from there. And that’s my earliest memory.”
“Why didn’t you stop yourself?”
“Didn’t feel like it.”
“Do you only do things you feel like doing?”
“Not only, but mostly.”
“Do those old men represent authority, and do your actions indicate a purposeful shirking of responsibility to the establishment?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you still like to try and fit under things?”
“Yeah. But I don’t fit as easily any more. And I know when it’s a good time to try and when it isn’t.”
“Should you be chosen?”
“Probably not.”
He was chosen.
Day Two: Opening Statements
They had told him to be back here at 8:30 in the morning, but had neglected to specify just exactly where “here” was, so he got there an hour early and wandered aimlessly until he saw a familiar face. It belonged to Juror Number Seven: a brash, imposing woman of about thirty-five, who during the ritual had seemingly given her best effort to supply the lawyers with the precisely wrong answers. Had Evan been selecting the jury, he would have disregarded her immediately, as she clearly did not want to be there. If even one of her supposed biases were real, the prospect of her employing objective judgment was nothing short of a fairy tale. But here she was, despite the logic, just like him. And she was clearly irritated.
“Where the fuck are we supposed to go?” she asked by way of a greeting.
“I don’t know,” Evan said. “I’ve been walking around for a while, and I can’t find anybody who can tell me.”
“Well, come on. We can’t get in trouble if we’re looking together.”
Evan had his doubts concerning this line of reasoning, but he had to admit it felt better to be lost with a companion. “Yeah,” he said.
“Did you follow the signs when you were walking around?” Juror Number Seven asked.
“I tried, but they were kinda confusing.”
“For you, maybe. But I adjust insurance claims for a living, so I think I’ll be able to figure it out.”
Evan very nearly asked her what the hell insurance adjusting had to do with hallway wall signs, but thankfully he stopped himself before he formed the words. Her answer was not likely to be satisfactory, as it would probably just be a treatise on her own intelligence. He was happy to let her think whatever she wanted; they were never going to be friends. Besides, she would learn soon enough just how confusing the signs really were.
“What is this shit?” she said, after ten minutes of fruitless wandering. “There’s a sign on every corner saying the cafeteria is to the right, but we’ve done a complete circle and we haven’t passed it yet. This stupid elevator has buttons that say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ instead of ‘up’ and ‘down.’ And I’m not even going to guess what that means.” She pointed to a sign that simply said, “worms,” with an arrow pointing left. Truth be told, Evan kind of wanted to follow the worm sign, but he had long since given in to Juror Number Seven’s boisterous gravity.
Finally, the short bailiff from the day before appeared from around the corner. “Cool, you’re all here,” she said, motioning more behind Evan than to him directly. Evan turned around and saw that all twelve jurors now stood single file in the hall, with him at the front. He hadn’t heard any of them walk up, but his hearing wasn’t so good, since he never wore ear plugs when he played music with his friends.
The bailiff led them back to the court room from yesterday, though now they sat in the jury box, as opposed to the gallery. On each of their chairs was a three-ring binder, filled with loose-leaf paper, and a ball point pen. On the cover of each binder was a picture and name of a judge, but not the judge who was presiding over this case. Evan would spend the entire week wondering who the woman on his binder was, and he would never find out.
The first few minutes in the court room reminded Evan of the first week of his freshman year of college: in an entirely new environment, confronted by numerous strangers, and having to learn a litany of obscure rules as he went. And, apparently, he was going to have to take notes, which had never really been his thing. He generally stuck to the broad strokes, writing down obvious buzzwords and underling them multiple times to give the illusion of importance. He foresaw a relatively blank set of pages in his future.
The woman seated to his right, however, Juror Number Eleven, clearly lived by a different philosophy. She was already taking painstaking notes, and the court proceedings hadn’t even begun yet. Annoying. It didn’t help that they were seated so closely that Evan could read everything she wrote.
The plaintiff’s lawyer got up to speak first. As he approached the podium, he removed from his jacket pocket a pair of reading glasses and a small stack of index cards. He smiled at the jury and began to read from the cards slowly. “Hello and thank you, members of the jury, for your service. I understand and appreciate the sacrifice you have made to be here today. I want to talk to you about…”-he turned to the next card- “…justice. Justice is good, wouldn’t you agree? I would. You are here to serve justice. My client was done a great injustice by that man sitting over there at that other table. No, don’t look at him! Don’t sully your eyes with his unholy visage. I want you to promise me, right now, that you will not look at the defendant a single time during the course of this trial. This is very important.”
Evan thought this to be a ridiculous request, as the defendant was seated perpendicular to the jury box, and everyone in the room had already seen him. The lawyer didn’t seem too worried, though, as he turned to his next card. “The defendant is a dirty trash face. His name is Brent, but I would like for you to refer to him, in your notes and amongst yourselves, as ‘Stupid,’ or ‘Loser.’ “
“Um, counselor,” the judge interjected, “I’m not exactly positive, but I’m fairly certain you can’t say stuff like that in you opening statements.”
“I’m sorry, your Honor, but I have to read what’s on the cards.”
“Okay, I’ll allow it.”
The woman next to Evan had written the words, “Loser,” “Unholy,” and “Trash Face,” in gigantic block letters in her notebook.
The lawyer continued with his next card. “To me, the defendant seems like someone I would avoid at a party. I mean, just look at him. No, wait, don’t! Shit. I object. Don’t look at him. But you can imagine, right? Over the next few days, I will prove that you will have to rule in favor of my client, who is very old. Thank you.” He sat down. Evan wrote “WTF?” in his notebook. Juror Number Eleven wrote down “Client is old.”
It was the defense’s turn to speak, but, instead of walking to the podium, the lawyer walked straight to the judge’s bench and handed over a note. The judge read it, squinted his eyes, and read it again. He looked at the lawyer, who was still standing in the same spot, and said, “Is this real? Like, actually true?” The lawyer nodded.
“Okay,” the judge continued, “it appears that Mr. Huberson, the defendant’s counsel, had something of a religious experience last night, and has therefore taken a vow of silence. Really, Derrick, you couldn’t have found God after the case?” The lawyer shrugged. “So, I imagine you don’t have any opening statements, then?” the judge asked.
Mr. Huberson shook his head vigorously and scurried over to his table, where he had compiled his case notes. He rifled through one of his many fat binders, removed a single page, and placed it on the overhead projector they had in the court room. It was a chart, very technical in nature, with units of time running up and down, and what appeared to Evan to be figures representing electrical voltages running from left to right. It made no sense, out of context like this, and the newly monastic Mr. Huberson could do nothing but gesture aggressively at the screen.
He took the chart down and replaced it with another. Again, he pointed violently at the screen, as if only an idiot could not see what it implied. This went on for thirty-five minutes. Evan’s mind had begun to wander after the second chart, but he could see that Juror Number Eleven was as diligent as ever with her note taking. She had copied down, as quickly as she could, every chart, and had even made a note of every one of the lawyer’s convulsions.
Finally, Mr. Huberson had said all he could. He sat down, a huge smile on his face. His client Brent, however, did not seem so thrilled. He leaned over and whispered something to his lawyer, who simply patted his client’s arm and nodded.
“Okay,” the judge said. “I know we’ve only been here a little while today, but I have something else I need to take care of, so let’s call it quits for the day. We’ll start with testimony tomorrow. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.”
Day Three: Expert Testimony
It is worth noting that the only real instruction Evan had received thus far was that he was not to share any facets of the case with anyone outside the court, and that he was not to do any of his own research. This proved incredibly simple, as, even two days in, he still had no idea what the case was about. The people who asked him to break the rules for their sake all thought he was being coy when he told them that he wished he knew enough about the proceedings to divulge them. In truth, he took no moral issue with telling anyone who wanted to know, as that might help him sort out his own opinions. But he simply had nothing to say. He didn’t know why the old lady was suing the man called Brent. She was old, as her lawyer had explained, but that wasn’t something one could blame on another individual. Neither opening statement had adequately laid the foundation for any type of argument, justified or otherwise. All Evan could hope, as he passed through the security checkpoint on his third day of duty, was that the testimony would clear things up.
The first person to take the stand was a balding man of around fifty, wearing a loose-fitting suit and a perpetually confused look. The plaintiff’s lawyer introduced him as one Dr. Slowfoot. He swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God, and waited patiently for his questioning to begin.
“Dr. Slowfoot,” the lawyer said, “Thank you for agreeing to speak with us today.”
Dr. Slowfoot looked anxiously at the judge. “Am I allowed to say ‘You’re welcome,’ or do I have to wait until he asks me a question?”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.
Dr. Slowfoot said, “You’re welcome.”
The lawyer continued. “Now, Doctor, it says here that you recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is that correct?”
“Um, I can’t see your paper, so I can’t say whether or not it says that.”
“Fair enough, let me rephrase the question. Did you recently win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry?”
“Um, no. That was my cousin, Michael. Dr. Michael Slowfoot.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“But I thought you were Dr. Michael Slowfoot.”
“Um, no, I’m Dr. Mikhail Slowfoot. I’m a zoologist, specializing in exotic birds. Kinda funny, our names being so close. Actually, this happens all the time.”
The lawyer, to his credit, took this news in stride, pretending that he had wanted this particular Dr. Slowfoot all along. He then proceeded to ask questions regarding the life expectancy of toucans, or the mating rituals of the rainbow lorikeet, until lunch. It was clear that this had no bearing on whatever issue the old woman had with the defendant, but it was pretty interesting. Evan wrote down a few cool bird facts, in between doodling pictures of robots and brachiosauruses. Juror Number Eleven had filled three entire pages, front and back, on the differing calls of the quetzal. They took an hour for lunch.
Evan expected the cross examination to be an arduous ordeal of mute questions and unintelligible responses, considering the defense counsel’s vow of silence, so he put his notebook under his seat and tried to find a comfortable position. Mr. Huberson, however, had a different idea.
“You may recall that yesterday I had decided to quit speaking. Well, don’t worry. That didn’t last long. Like most born-agains, my faith was loud but built upon flimsy ground. I’ve come to realize that the truth, the real truth of the universe, is far more subtle and intrinsic than some harebrained notion of a bearded man in the sky who listens when we lie awake at night. With your permission, I would like to dive in to what I believe the nature of reality to be.”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.
Dr. Slowfoot, clearly out of his element, nodded and said, “Um, sure.”
Huberson then launched into an intricately detailed lecture, beginning with a three-hour long dissertation on fractal geometry. “You see,” he said at one point, “Benoit Mandelbrot really pioneered the idea that nature acts as a series of self-repeating systems. This explains why multiple levels of scale seem to mirror one another. A biological form behaves very similarly to a major city, which mimics the solar system, and so on. Thus, if one can extrapolate this concept past our known universe, it would appear that we could zoom out indefinitely, with no end in sight. Or, the other way, we could zoom in forever. The shoreline of England is, in fact, infinite.”
“But what about the Planck length?” Dr. Slowfoot asked.
“Very good, Doctor!” Huberson exclaimed. “Very good. Now you’re getting it. Max Planck did indeed claim that there was a limit to how small one can measure. This would be a perfect time to integrate Universal Automatism into our little theory. The idea that our universe is actually a computation. Now, if you can reconcile the two concepts of physical size and computational processing power, you--”
“Your Honor,” the plaintiff’s lawyer interrupted. “This has gone on long enough. I mean, nothing he’s said so far has any relevance to this case.”
Mr. Huberson laughed. “Oh, and I suppose it was necessary to catalog the different plumage displays of Macaws?”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said. “This is really blowing my mind.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. As I was about to explain, Wolfram seems to imply that the universe is not only a simulation, but also the computer causing the simulation…”
Evan loved every minute of cross-examination. He still had no idea how he was going to rule in the case, but he now had a firmer grasp on certain concepts that had crossed his mind before. Juror Number Eleven had been scribbling furiously all day, and by the time the judge told them to go home, her supply of ruled paper had been depleted.
Day Four: The Plaintiff and Defendant Speak
Today was supposed to be the final day of testimony. It seemed to Evan that only two days wasn’t enough, but he wasn’t about to complain if they wanted to bring this absurd occasion to an early close. He had actually enjoyed Dr. Slowfoot’s time on the witness stand, but he was ready to go back to his life.
The morning session was set aside for the plaintiff, then, after lunch, the defendant would have a chance to explain his side. Finally, the people involved in the actual conflict would clarify why they were all here. Evan made sure he had a new pen and a fresh page open in his notebook.
The old lady took the stand and promised not to commit perjury. Her lawyer, who finally, after three days, introduced himself as Rick Chalk, led her through the basic biographical questions before diving deep into what he considered the most important piece of evidence in the entire case: the chart the defense had shown the jury on the day of opening statements.
It didn’t make much sense. No one had explained what the chart represented, and all Mr. Chalk did was read off the numbers and times listed.
He read the chart three times, over the course of two hours. Evan had copied the figures down in his notebook, but he still had no frame of reference as to what any of it meant. Juror Number Eleven re-copied the chart every time Chalk went through it.
During cross-examination, Huberson also simply recited the cold numbers until the judge said he was hungry, so they were going to break for lunch.
An hour later, it was Brent’s turn. Chalk spent a good amount of time berating him obliquely, saying things like, “How do you sleep at night?”, or “Oh, yeah, you’re a big man, aren’t you? A real big man, think you’re so cool.” Evan, after this had gone on for half an hour, suddenly remembered the promise Chalk had asked them to make, two days prior: that none of them look at Brent a single time during the proceedings. Chalk never once brought this up again, and in fact he very often brought to the jury’s attention what he considered to be Brent’s physical shortcomings. He body-shamed the man for a good seventeen minutes before Huberson objected on the grounds that the questioning was mean. “Your honor, he’s quite literally bullying the witness.”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.
“No, it’s fine, Your Honor,” Chalk said. “I think I made my point. I pass the witness.”
Huberson got up from his table and faced the jury. In what was either a stall for time or a ridiculously awkward power play, he began to silently make eye contact with each juror, beginning with Juror Number One. Evan, being Juror Number Twelve, was worried that by the time Huberson got to him, the atmosphere of the court room would be far too heavy with anticipation for him to handle. However, it never got to that point.
“I demand a trial by combat!” Brent said, as his lawyer was gazing intensely into Juror Number Nine’s eyes.
Chalk stood up, shaking his head. “Your Honor, my client is an old, frail woman. She couldn’t possibly be expected to--”
“I accept,” the old lady said.
“Your Honor, please let me confer with my client for a moment,” Chalk said.
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.
“No, I don’t need to confer!” the plaintiff said. “It is my right, as the plaintiff, to accept any call for a trial by combat. It says so right there in the constitution.”
“She’s right, counselor. It does,” the judge said. Evan had admittedly never read the constitution, but he was pretty sure he had never heard of any such civil right.
The plaintiff continued. “It also says that, if I cannot fight, I am allowed to enlist another as my Blood Surrogate.”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.
Evan, who by now was getting the hang of this bizarre spectacle, could see where this was going. The old lady was going to pick one of them to take her place in the ring. Evan tried his very best to become invisible, but something inside him, some dust-covered tribal instinct, told him that he would be named Blood Surrogate for the old lady. He had no logical reason to believe this; he was far from the most physically impressive member of the jury, though he was among the most lively. But he could feel the summons coming, like when you think about a person just before your phone rings. An irrefutable fact of the universe is that when this happens, it is always the person you were thinking of who is calling. So he stood up before the old lady even had a chance to draft him. “Fine. I accept the role of Blood Surrogate.”
“Net, poleaxe, or nunchucks?” the judge asked, standing up and opening a cabinet behind his bench.
“Nunchucks,” Evan said. It was the obvious choice. While the poleaxe would add some much-needed range to his game and the net might prove useful in creating new striking opportunities, Evan, like most boys raised on “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Walker, Texas Ranger,” had been pretending to fight with nunchucks for almost as long as he could walk. His entire life he had flung all manner of things, from socks to sausages, between his arms and made quasi-racist Bruce Lee noises.
Brent was about fifteen years older than Evan. Clearly more a fan of “Planet of the Apes” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” he chose the net as his own weapon. Evan breathed a sigh of relief at this, as he wasn’t sure how to counteract the reach of the poleaxe. The net would be a nuisance, but it wouldn’t cancel him out.
The court room didn’t seem big enough to host gladiator battles, but once Evan stepped into the space between the lawyers’ tables and the judge’s bench, it seemed to get a lot bigger. There was now a red stone circle encapsulating the arena, and the floor, previously a close-knit carpet, had become course, rough sand. Without being asked to, Evan removed his shoes and rolled the bottoms of his pant legs up to his knees. He would never forgive himself if he lost the battle because he tripped over the hem of his Dockers.
Evan thought there would be some sort of ceremonial procedure involved in starting the fight, but, once the judge said, “I’ll allow it,” Brent charged ahead full-force, flinging his net like a drunken fisherman. Evan got only marginally tangled, as he had instinctively dodged to one side the second he saw movement.
The net had wrapped around Evan’s nunchucks, and Brent was using this opportunity to fling his weak hand towards his opponent’s face. He made contact with a single sharp slap, causing Evan to emit a high-pitched, involuntary squeal. “Hey, back off!” he said, as an attempt to save face.
“No!” Brent said, trying to connect with another slap.
Finally, Evan was able to untangle his nunchicks, passing them through a gap in the net to his left hand. He pulled back and hit Brent across the temple. Brent swayed in place, seemingly dazed, and blinked his eyes. “Fuck, man! That hurt,” he said.
“Shit, I’m sorry, dude,” Evan said, “but you did challenge me to a trial by combat.”
"I didn’t challenge you, I challenged that old lady! I didn’t know she was gonna come at me with some legal loophole.”
Evan looked up at the judge. “So, uh, does this mean that I won? Or that the lady won?”
“Oh, no. Trial by combat can only exonerate the defendant. It cannot decide the case for the plaintiff.”
“Oh. Um, can I go back to my seat now?”
“I’ll allow it.”
Ten minutes later, the judge announced that his favorite show was coming on in just thirty minutes, so they were all free to go. Tomorrow the jury would hear closing statements and enter into deliberations.
Day Five: Deliberations
The closing statements were just brief re-hashes of the same confusing chart, and neither side took more than ten minutes. As the jury was getting up from the box, the judge waved his hand and motioned towards Evan. Evan walked over to the bench.
“Yes, Your Majesty?”
“Your Honor.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Honor.”
“Deliberations. Time for you all to actually get to work, right?” he chuckled like a kindly grandpa in a kid’s movie.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” Evan said.
“Now,” the judge continued, “normally at this time, the jury would vote on who would be the foreman. You know what that means?”
“Yeah, it’s, like, the guy who reads the verdict off.”
“Well, actually, I’ll be doing that part, but some judges do have the foreman do it. No, the foreman’s main job is basically to run the meeting. You know, fill out the forms, read ‘em, count the votes, embark on the the Reckoning, stuff like that. The more boring, office-work type stuff. Does that make sense to you?”
“Almost all of it. What was that about--”
“Good, good. Now, I said normally, because we’ve got ourselves a little different situation for this case.”
“We do?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Evan sighed. “You know, I’m glad you said that, because, honestly, this whole thing has been pretty weird.”
“I’ll say!” the judge exclaimed. “No one even left a slaughtered cat on the courthouse steps to ward off evil spirits.”
“Oh,” Evan said, crestfallen. So it was to remain as it had been. “So what’s different about this case?”
“We have a Blood Surrogate, of course.”
“That doesn’t happen often?”
“Oh, no. It’s actually a pretty obscure little rule, so most people don’t know about it. Usually, the plaintiff will deny the call to trial by combat. I mean, why even bring charges if they thought they could just duke it out, right?”
“Well,” Evan said, “because that’s, like, street justice, and that sorta goes against the whole point of having a legal system?”
“Sure, sure, but it saves us a boatload of money. Anyway, in the event that we have a Blood Surrogate, and that Blood Surrogate wins the fight, said Blood Surrogate is automatically named foreman of the jury. Congratulations.”
“But, wouldn’t that make me biased against the defendant? I mean, I literally fought him.”
“Great question! I can see you’ll make a wonderful foreman. Now, time’s ‘a wastin’.”
“Wait. You said something, earlier. The Reckoning?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Uh, yeah, you did.”
“Yeah, I did. You’re right. Okay, do good in there.” And with that, the judge got up from the bench and left, ignoring Evan’s pleas for him to return.
The other jurors were already seated at the table in the jury room when Evan got there. They all had their notebooks out, but they weren’t talking yet. “Took you long enough,” Juror Number Seven said after Evan had closed the door.
“Yeah, sorry. The judge was talking to me.”
“About what?”
“Well, since I had to fight the defendant yesterday--”
“Good job, by the way,” Juror Number Four said. It was literally the first time Evan had heard him speak. “I would have chosen nunchucks too. What kind of idiot brings a net to a fight?”
“It’s actually a pretty traditional gladiatorial weapon,” Juror Number Three said. “I’m a professor of Roman history.”
Evan tried his best to re-capture the momentum of the conversation. “Cool. Anyway, since I was the ‘Blood Surrogate,’ I am automatically made the foreman of the jury.”
Juror Number Seven stood up, enraged. “Now hold on! Who says?”
“Um, the judge said. That’s why I was late. I just said that.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
“Look, I don’t want to do it. It sounds super lame. And he said something about a ‘Reckoning,’ and I have no idea what he was talking about.”
“Wait, I have it right here,” Juror Number Eleven said.
“You do?” Evan asked.
“Yes. I over-heard the lady bailiff telling her trainee about it on our first day, so I wrote it down in my notes.”
“Cool. What does it say?”
Juror Number Eleven cleared her throat. “ ‘The Reckoning? That’s some fucked up shit, man. I wouldn’t want to be the foreman. You know they make you sit in the closet and have all these crazy visions? No thanks, I’ll pass. You can’t even leave until you have a verdict. Then you have to convince the other jurors to believe what you saw.’ “
“Okay, so I go sit in the closet, until I get an answer? That doesn’t seem that bad. Lemme brew myself a cup of coffee and I’ll do it. Anyone else want some, or can I just use a K-cup?” Nobody else wanted any coffee. A minute later, Evan took his cup and headed for the closet door. Just before entering, he hesitated. “Hold up. You said you heard them talking about this on our first day?”
“Yeah. When they were handing out blindfolds.”
“But we didn’t have notes then. They didn’t give us our binders until Tuesday.”
“Maybe you weren’t taking notes, but I was.”
“Why?”
“I have Chronicler’s Syndrome. I have to document every aspect of my life experience on paper.”
“Is that a real thing?”
“That’s what they say is wrong with me.”
“Okay. Sorry. Didn’t mean to call you out like that.”
“Huh?” Juror Number Eleven said, while scribbling frantically in her notebook.
Evan entered the closet, closed the door, and sat down. There was a light hanging from the ceiling, and the sunlight from the jury room windows was managing to creep in, so it wasn’t really dark at all. Quite the spacious closet, too. He could lie down if he wanted to. But he didn’t. This was the final step of the case, and he wanted it over with. He hoped Juror Number Eleven’s notes were right, that he would receive visions telling him what was going on. He had no other way to come to a conclusion, other than to flip a coin and fake like he had gone through some sort of decision-making process. He decided he trusted that the chronicler had heard correctly.
Nothing to do now but sip his coffee and wait. In the closet. He chuckled, thinking about that horrendous R. Kelly concept album/soap opera thing about being trapped in the closet. Evan always thought that was some bizarre way for R. Kelly to admit to himself and the world that he was a gay man, but that he couldn’t fully commit to that lifestyle. But then Evan had recently seen part of this TV show about how R. Kelly was actually some crazy, but presumably heterosexual, sex pervert, keeping women prisoner in apartment complexes and stuff. And oh yeah, he pee’d on that girl, like fifteen years ago, and there was the whole thing with Aliyah. She played a vampire in that one movie. He never saw it, but he knew that the author who wrote the book it was based on went to the same high school as him. Not at the same time, obviously, but like thirty years before. Movies are weird. Come to think about it, so is high school. But you know what’s really crazy? High school movies. Like Porky’s. Porky’s was made by a bunch of grown adults. But it’s about high school dudes going to hookers and creeping on chicks and stuff. That’s strange. The world is strange. That lawyer dude was right, that fractal stuff really does make the most sense. I mean, there are so many levels, like a cell’s its own thing, but also a cell inside, like, a leaf, or a dog, or something. So, like maybe I’m the same: simultaneously independent, but also part of this huge, living body that I’m just too small to see. The wall is breathing. My knees are getting farther and farther apart. Pretty soon one of them will be poking through the wall, and the other one will be out the window. Elvis Presley convinced Richard Nixon to make him a federal agent, and he stopped an airplane on the tarmac to shake down one of his enemies. There’s something in my coffee.
There was something in his coffee. The acknowledgement of this fact made it marginally easier for him to focus. This must be the Reckoning, he thought. Or reckoned. People who say “I reckon” can go fuck themselves. Stop. Focus. Stop thinking about other things. Let the visions come, the ones about the case.
He started moving into time, along the z-axis, between the now and then, like during the movie on his first day. This, apparently, was the domain of truth, and it had annexed him long before the old lady asked him to fight for her. He had been called here for this moment, and this moment alone. That the case was just a bunch of nonsense was irrelevant. The real case, the real meat and potatoes, was right now. So, he took a deep breath and let the testimony begin.
He stepped back into the jury room forty minutes later, absolutely drenched in sweat. He was breathing heavily. He grabbed a bottled water off the counter and sat down at the table, where he closed his eyes and sighed.
“So?” Juror Number Seven said. “What’d you see in there? What verdict did you get? And do you have a good enough handle on it to convince all of us?”
Without opening his eyes, Evan said, “We are ruling in favor of the defendant, and if anybody even tries to disagree, I will punch them in the genitals.”
Juror Number Seven had no response to that. Juror Number Eight, an older Indian lady, said, ever so delicately, “Can you at least tell us what happened?”
Evan opened his eyes and took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe he had wasted a week of his life on this case. “She’s a flat-Earther,” he said.
“A what?” Juror Number Eight asked.
“She believes that the Earth is not actually a globe, but a flat disc, encapsulated in a gigantic dome.”
“Like a cake stand?” Juror Number Two said.
“Exactly like a cake stand. Roughly seventy percent of flat-Earthers believe that the sky is a dome, suspended above our world, with the stars and galaxies painted on it like the ceiling of a planetarium.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Juror Number Five, a man of twenty-seven, raised his hand.
“I don’t think you have to do that,” Evan said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Only seventy percent? What does the other thirty percent think?”
“See, now we’re getting somewhere. That’s the real question. There are other schools of thought, but, according to the visions I received, the main challenger to the ‘dome theory’ is the ‘infinite plane theory.’ It’s basically the same, but it says there isn’t a dome, and that other flat Earths could conceivably be sitting right next to ours.”
“That is fucking crazy,” Juror Number Seven said.
“Yeah, I know. Do you not get what’s going on here? These aren’t my ideas. This is the case. The defendant, Brent, subscribes to the infinite plane. He and the old lady, Patty Vang, have been having a pretty compelling flame war on Youtube for the past few years. They make videos where they ‘prove’ their own theories, and disprove the others. It gets pretty heated.”
“So where does the case come in? Why are we here?” Juror Number Nine asked.
“About six months ago, Brent conducted an experiment designed to disprove the dome theory. I use the word experiment loosely, because we know that you’re not supposed to have made up your mind about the results before you even do it. Except it seems that Brent actually succeeded. That’s what those charts they kept showing us meant. It had to do with the way different elements showed up on graphs or something based on how far away they are. Or something like that. He actually got some scientists to respond, saying that it was a legitimate experiment. Not too many scientists, but some.”
“Is that why the lady brought in Dr. Slowfoot?” Juror Number Eleven asked.
“Yeah. They messed up and got the wrong one, but his cousin really did win the Nobel in Chemistry. He’s on record as saying that Brent’s experiment didn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. Patty took that to be an endorsement of her theory, when that is clearly not what he meant. Welcome to the internet.”
Juror Number One said, “So why is she suing Brent?”
“Brent of course made a slew of videos about the scientific acceptance of his study. He started winning over some of Patty’s fans to his side. She apparently had some shady advertising deal with this bananas insane diet supplement company, but they pulled out and started sponsoring Brent’s videos. She’s suing him for defamation and theft of her now missing ad revenue.”
“You’re making this up,” Juror Number Four said.
“I don’t think I could make something like this up,” Evan said.
When the judge read the verdict, Brent got up from his chair and yelled, “Yeah, in your face!” The judge allowed it. Outside the court room, Brent’s lawyer, Mr. Huberson, was greeting the jury, shaking their hands and laughing at their jokes. It looked like some tasteless victory parade, and Evan wanted no part in it. Huberson, knowing that Evan had been the one to embark on the Reckoning, tried his best to talk, but Evan put his head down and entered the elevator alone.
As he walked to where he had parked in the underground garage, he felt a low rumble on the ground beneath him. He thought nothing of it; just wrote it off as vibrations from the street above, reverberating down into this hollowed-out space. His car didn’t get great radio reception down here, so it was really fuzzy until he finally made it above ground.
Something was wrong. The world was now shaking with greater and greater intensity. Cars were crashing in the streets. Birds were falling from the sky. The radio stopped mid-song, switching over to an emergency alert system broadcast.
“We don’t know exactly what is happening, but we do know it’s happening all over the globe. The vibrations show no sign of stopping any time soon. It is recommended that you make it below ground as soon as possible, as there have been worldwide reports of debris falling from the sky. What kind of debris is not yet confirmed, but some have said that it appears to be raining glass.”
“Oh, no,” Evan said. “Come on.” He turned left, towards the front of the courthouse.
Patty Vang, the plaintiff in his case, was standing on the front steps of the building, waving her arms in the air and screaming. “It’s happening! I was right! Oh, I’m so happy!” Just then, a giant shard of glass fell from the sky and split her down the middle. Evan looked away from the mass of vindicated gore. This couldn’t be real. The sky was falling.
He made a quick u-turn and headed back down to the underground parking garage. There, a security guard stopped him and told him to roll down his window.
“What’s going on?” Evan asked.
“We don’t know. It’s crazy. But you’ll be safe in here. The court house is protected through means which even I can’t comprehend. We have food, water, and communication. Come back up into the building.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Well,” the security guard said, “we have a pretty heavy schedule of cases lined up, so I’m sure we can get you on a jury.”