Payback

Chapter 3

Before the bomb blast, before Mumshine took me home to a house where everything had changed, before I got my babygirl back, my return begins with blood boiling between my ears. A kettle whistling. A pressure cooker. My head about to explode.

I can barely breathe because of the tension. Since I came out of Moneyland end of 2037, I’ve been in remand prison for three years and now it’s late 2041 and my hearing has finally arrived. I’m the defendant and everyone in here–the prosecution, the cops, the witnesses, their families–everyone wants me dead. Get rid of me and a lot of people think that’s justice for Moneyland. Like everything that went bad in there was my fault.

Fair, right?

BULLSHIT.

I’m standing in the dock, grinding my teeth as court begins. I feel like a car chassis in a factory, waiting to get bent, pulled, manipulated, and have stuff pinned on me then I’ll be pushed out the other side of the justice system. There are about twenty Fleshies down in the cells behind me, waiting to get judged after I’m done. I have to stand here in my damn crate while evidence is presented about what a villain I am. They’ll decide if I’ll be tried by a jury or judge alone. Then I’ll be moved along the conveyor belt, cycled back into the basement. Some rapist or burglar will stand in the same place as me. All because I confronted the world with how shitty Moneyland really was.

The head of the court is a squat white cube-vault on a platform under the flag and the coat of arms. LawSys3.0–my judge. LawSys is a mech with millions of lines of code in its system stuffed with legislation and precedents dating back to the ancient Greeks. Criminal law, civil law, privacy, bylaws, litigation, arbitration, employment law: all that junk’s in there. LawSys will get input from today’s prosecution and witnesses. I can give LawSys my defence, or ask for a settlement, it’ll calculate a result and we’ll have ceded yet another responsibility to a computer system that cant’ wait to see humanity gone.

TOTAL bullshit.

The most messed-up thing is it’s easier to go with the flow than stand up for myself. They know I’ll plead guilty to anything if I can see my baby quicker. I’ve had three years stuck in jail, not to mention twelve months trapped in Moneyland. The bastards are on the verge of winning. I just want this over with.

This courtroom bullshit is just a walk in the park compared to what I faced in Moneyland, anyway. I’m the girl who killed a crooked king. I fought a sharp-toothed dog with rabies. I bashed swans to death to feed my baby. If I have to mumble a few insincere sentences so I can go home quicker, I’ll say the stupid words.

The prosecutor begins, standing up and reading some pompous rules or threats or whatever. She’s a pretty black Fleshie by way of Newfoundland, Canada. Canada’s one of those innovative techie countries that got hit early when the Singularity happened. I know this because she was a gentle interviewer. We made smalltalk about Canada. She didn’t seem like she was out to get me. She shared a bit of herself when we were bargaining, when I was desperate to talk, to apply to get a trial started so I could get out of jail. Showed me pictures of her baby. Stroked my sore knuckles. She promised my public defender she’d ask for lenience.

Today, though, across the court, the prosecutor isn’t making eye contact. Gossip in the cells under the courtroom said Newfie has to win this case else the bank will take her home. She has to fight so here she is, screwing me over. Flesh versus flesh, like we’re gladiators made to wrestle for the emperor.

I look at my defender to see if we have a chance.

Jenny Price, LLB, is a woman with silver hair that’s faded from blonde. She’s getting fat, exhausted, her mouth bending down all depressed. I can see what’s written on top of the pile of notes she’s scrolling through: Sabosoft. It’s a real common trick of the Mechs to get people locked up. The Sabotage of Software Act means people face massive sentences for smashing servers, making malware, putting viruses into vending machines. Small resistances against a fascist tech overlord, but the Sabosoft Act means you can get a life sentence just for f*****g with a computer. Stupid, huh? It’s ‘cause the Mechs got the United Nations to recognise artificial intelligence as a form of intelligent life. They got themselves declared equal to humans. Now they get rights. They get to whine and b***h and plead about how “vulnerable” they are.

Ech. It’s overwhelming to think about.

I tilt my ear towards the prosecutor.

‘…January 6, 2037, Eden Grace Shepherd entered a biodome experiment with eleven peers,’ the prosecutor is saying. ‘Eleven of twelve subjects were Homo sapie–’

‘Really?’ I blurt, ‘You have to specify that?’

Every head in the room turns to study me, rows of spectators and relatives of the dead, plus like eight security guards.

‘Ms Shepherd and her friends were each paid one million dollars cash in advance to stay inside the biodome for a year,’ the prosecutor continues, reading off a faint holoscreen in the air over her lectern. ‘This was an experiment fully vetted and endorsed by the Stanford Research Institute ethics committee. Things began promisingly, with a delivery of high calorie sustenance, no curfew, no regulations. Complete freedom for the defendant and her peers. Ms Shepherd unfortunately seems to have pursued more, shall I say, extreme thrills at the expense of what appears to have been an orderly regime led by one Adam Albert Turing, date of birth 8-12-20.’ The prosecutor clears her throat then says one essential word. ‘Deceased.’

extremeDeceased‘YOU MADE ME HAVE A BABY IN YOUR STUPID ZOO. You, you, you MECHS. He was going to kill my baby.’

YOU‘It is not your turn to speak, Ms Shepherd.’

‘You would’ve killed that prick too if you were in my shoes. Admit it.’

My defender tugs my elbow. ‘Girl–give yourself a chance.’

Girl–give yourself a chanceLawSys injects a polite voice through everyone’s earbuds.

‘The prosecution is speaking, and only the prosecution,’ LawSys says in our ears. LawSys doesn’t yell or bang a gavel or demand order in the court.

The prosecutor looks at me with squinty, bitchy eyes then continues. ‘Eden Grace Shepherd is charged with the following offences. One: defendant charged with manslaughter, having dispatched Ms Fatima Ibrahim to fetch food which resulted in the death of Ms Ibrahim following a wild animal attack.

‘Two: Defendant charged with operating an unsafe workplace environment which resulted in the death by drowning of Mr Kane Stiles, contrary to Section 2 of the Healthy Workplaces Act.

‘Three: Defendant charged with assault with a deadly weapon, namely a suitcase used in an attack resulting in the deaths of Mr Adam Albert Turing and Ms Anya Ekaterina Sveta.’

‘Lastly, theft of confectionaries from British Petroleum Incorporated, totalling eighty-six dollars and thirty cents.’

‘Oh, come on!’ I blurt, ‘I should be charging YOU with being traitors. You chucked us in there to starve.’

YOUtraitorsstarveMy words ripple through the audience, but I can tell people are snorting, rolling their eyes. Just the rantings of an insane person who deserves to go back in her hole. Everyone carries on listening to the prosecutor, who’s now lining up her… oh God.

Lining up her witnesses.

‘The prosecution invites Witness SHEP–E–0001 to the stand. Mr Chanvatey Prach.’

From somewhere out the back of the courtroom, Chan appears. He looks like an old Buddhist monk now, though fatter, a decrepit Asian man with a tired face and wisps of black and silver beard-hair hanging off his head. He has man-boobs and weird blubber around his hunched back. I’d heard Chan got massively depressed after he came out of Moneyland. He went from being on top of the world to begging for crumbs.

He skulks over to the witness box and taps the microphone to test whether it works. The speakers echo.

Chan’s eyes settle on me like a fly then flit away.

‘Girl’s dangerous, that one,’ is the first thing Chan says. ‘She wouldn’t give us… she played with our lives, man.’

‘Would the witness kindly identify who it was that endangered your life,’ says the prosecutor.

Chan points a finger at me. Heads turn. I see a red LED flash, momentarily, in the LawSys box. It’s supposed to be neutral, but I’ll bet LawSys is chuckling to itself.

The whole neutral, non-judgemental level-headed thing Mechs claim to offer? I don’t buy it.

‘Please, Mr Prach: a summary of your history with the defendant.’

Chan pinches his nose and strokes his curly black beard. He tells the court I humiliated him when he was desperate for rations. He recounts the story of when I drank everyone’s share of Up-N-Go milkshake. I also ate too much pumpkin, he claims–pretty major crime, apparently. I bossed people around. I forced people not to give their money to the Heart of Darkness, Adam’s gang/movementeligion/cult thing.

‘Tell us who she hurt,’ the prosecutor goes. ‘Did she beat you?’

hurt‘Whuh? Hell no.’

‘But she harmed you, yes? Don’t forget the defendant is charged in relation to multiple deaths.’

‘Fraud, maybe, I guess, ‘cause she told everyone she was, like, this bigshot leader.’ His stiff body shunts in the chair. God, Chan’s gotten old. His tired eyes briefly interlock with mine. ‘Yo, Eden, if you were such a good leader, how come my friends are dead? Huh?’

There are noises across the courtroom as people shift in their seats. A drone from ShameStream is humming just beneath the ceiling, filming us. My defender mentioned yesterday ShameStream’s been calling our group of survivors the Famine Five on TV every day. KT, Esther, Chan, Eli, and me. Supposedly, because we made it out alive, we must be in on some conspiracy. I spot the ShameStream drone’s lens narrowing as it zooms in on my face, studying my reaction. I’m stoic, though, a stone statue, like Socrates, the old Greek grump Watson taught me about. The stoic who stood firm in court when the whole state was demanding he give up and eat hemlock.

The prosecution reads out all these cruel-ass words against me then finally, just as she’s about to excuse Chan, she asks him if he hates me.

he‘Hate, no, oh Lord no, not hate,’ Chan says, easing his tired body out of the box. ‘In another life, maybe we could’ve even been… Anyway, whatever the opposite of hate is. Disappointment.’ Disappointment is totally in his shoulders and his stride as he comes down from his high booth and shambles toward the exit.

He limps out of court while I’m standing in the dock, feeling like I’ve just been slapped.

The next so-called witness in the stand is SHEP–E–0002, Katherine Stiles, a name which at first makes me go ‘Huh?’ before the prosecution clarifies for Judge Cube that “Katherine” changed her name to Kayty, then KT, when she was twelve for “marketing purposes,” people in school used to say. Urgh.

Like a blonde bobble-head, KT makes a show of navigating the backs of chairs, nodding at the ShameStream camera, bowing to the Mech-judge, and perfecting her posture in the witness stand. KT moves her highlighter yellow hair so it’s exactly in the right place. Her blown-on makeup will look incredible on HDTV, no doubt. I can see her black sticky lashes from across the big room. She wears a dress that’s pretty much a ballgown. With no money and no brother, her family disgraced and wounded, being a celebrity is all she has left.

‘They’re freakin’ conspiring, her and Chan,’ I whisper at my defender, ‘They want money, I bet. They asking for damages?’

Jenny nods. ‘Nine hundred million, four hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars.’ She checks her holoscreen, brushing through a spreadsheet. ‘Big list of grievances. But that’s the civil case. This is criminal. Civil comes after.’

‘Hell does that mean?’

‘It means regardless of the outcome of the criminal charges, they’re going to sue. And hard.’

hard‘A reminder for silence, please,’ the voice in our ear says. We all touch our right earlobe with a fingertip and hunch a little.

KT continues performing for the camera.

‘…and she had this real arrogant attitude, like she just wouldn’t surrender, you know, and she kept telling people we couldn’t turn the goldfish pond into a spa bath even though the view was like literally PERRRRfect, and she let Fatima get this honey even though it wasn’t even manuka like the good stuff, but the WORST, honest, the WORST thing that byatch done was she let my brother build this, like, totally unsafe waterworks for like our toilets and junk. She’s, like, SUCH a cow.’

A spinning pinwheel shows on face of the LawSys Mech-judge. It’s running over forensic reports, police statements, essays, recorded risk factors, workplace liability, measures of provable intent, case law, precedent. As if some logical sequence of records might work out whose fault the whole Moneyland f**k-up was.

KT is onto the part of her story where evil King Adam is building a pyramid–except it’s all over the place. It starts after Adam’s fallen into his pit, zooms back to before.

Adam, his mountain of mud, gold at the top, the fat corrupt slug in the wheelchair tossing sacrificial hearts down at his followers, the world cracking under him, falling, falling, too proud to scream out for helllll–

Adam, his mountain of mud, gold at the top, the fat corrupt slug in the wheelchair tossing sacrificial hearts down at his followers, the world cracking under him, falling, falling, too proud to scream out for helllll–I’m trying to even remember if I was justified in killing the bastard when LawSys says in everyone’s ears, ‘You’ve spoken sufficiently, Ms Stiles. You are dismissed.’

‘Dis–what?’ KT goes, putting on a startled face, touching her breast with painted fingernails like she’s some southern belle. ‘But–but I was going to perform this, like, this script I wrote and–

‘You are dismissed. Next witness.’

Who’s up next? Maeve can’t come because she’s dead. Same with Anya, Adam. Watson’s a puddle of melted latex. Omar was last seen bleeding to death in a sewer. The prosecutor is running out of haters.

I don’t see Esther anywhere.

‘Where’s triple-oh-three?’ I whisper to my defender, ‘Esther. I thought she was testifying too?’

Jenny Price palms the air, pinches a spot of information, pulls her holoscreen towards her. ‘Your friend Ms Wadlow was supposed to be next, she…’ My defender frowns. ‘Without her, this morning… Huh. Interesting. Extreeeemely interesting.’

‘The prosecution calls witness SHEP–E–0003, Elijah Joshua.’

He walks to his seat like he’s got a stick up his ass. Eli’s a full-time preacher now. s**t got biblical in Moneyland. No wonder he takes life super-serious, like he has to walk on ice.

‘Eden,’ a voice is going, ‘Aren’t you even gonna look at me?’

EdenEli is speaking across the court directly at me. He has a thick black curly beard. There are purple trenches under his eyes and his hair is a wild afro. Eli appears to have gone half-insane, staying up all night studying the Bible to figure out how he fell out of God’s favour.

‘Sorry, Eli.’

Eli smirks, snorts, shakes his head. ‘Bit late for apologies.’

‘WELL, FORGIVE ME, MR HOLIER-THAN-THOU.’

‘ORDER IN THE COURT.’

Eli begins a sermon. He says he’s always been convinced Moneyland was a pre-planned punishment from an unimpressed God. Eli was sent to the Mahonyland Experiment to bring a million dollars back to his community. For him, starvation seemed like martyrdom. If Jesus was tested in the desert for forty days and forty nights, we can be tested too, Eli told us one night around our fire as we ate barbecued koi carp. You suffer a bit, you come back, and serve your community a better person.

Except Eli came back worse. He got desperate. He got corrupt. I offered him a place in a Community of Equals, even if we were only four out of twelve. Eli ran away and paid a gangster for protection instead. He stayed alive under Adam’s wing, sure, but he returned to his people bloated, ugly, corrupt–and with next to no money.

‘You’ve called me here today to tell you what happened in the dome, I’ll tell you,’ Eli is saying. ‘What happened is a failure to unite under God. Know how many prayer meetings we had in the dome? Not one. NOT ONE. We FAILED.’ He’s weeping and sniffling now. I notice shadowy people around the fringes of the packed court muttering stuff like ‘Praise Jesus,’ and ‘Continue, child.’ He’s brought half his congregation with him.

‘You wanna convict somebody, convict us all.’ Eli pounds the witness box. ‘Every one of us is responsible for what happened. Revelations 14 verses 9 to 10: He who forgets God’s privilege will be forgotten by the privilege of God. We were worshipping the wrong–the wrong–the wrong… wrong MAN.’ Eli pours his face into his hands. ‘I’m not selling her out, kay, and I know Adam’s dad hates you guys which is how come he’s not here to testify. Eden Shepherd was the only one who didn’t… shivers.’ He snorts snot back inside his face and looks at me. ‘Who didn’t give up hope. Ede’s been waiting on this kangaroo court for nearly four years now. Let her go home to her baby, already.’

The mech judge’s light is blinking, taking in every word, comparing Eli’s testimony against its database of case law.

‘Prosecution,’ says the judge into our ears. ‘Where is the data recorded by Unit 2341–239847–98?’

The prosecutor-lady is flustered, checking her notes urgently, prodding and shaking her holoscreen, punching her own stomach to shift a spreadsheet which has stalled. ‘All data belonging to the participant they called Watson… It was supposed to be shared in discovery, I don’t know what to tell you, I’m sorry, I thought we had more time. I guess… right now I can’t find it, but–but–but that doesn’t mean–

My lawyer elbows me. Her eyes dance as she grins. ‘They needed Watson’s footage!’ my lawyer brags, ‘Without the footage–

Everyone touches their ear as the Mech-judge speaks to us. ‘I find the witnesses unreliable. Without forensic evidence, fingerprints, or a confession, all charges against defendant Eden Grace Shepherd are hereby dismissed. Ms Shepherd, you’re free to–’

A shockwave knocks the paintings from the walls. The wooden coat of arms leans into the air then falls, cracking. The ceiling releases a gasp of plaster. Everyone is yanking their collars over their mouths and noses. A white puzzle-piece of daylight appears behind the judge-in-a-box as the wall cracks, crumbles and falls away. LawSys is swallowed, tipping backwards into the light of the street outside, leaving a trail of red and purple wires like guts.

Justice has been attacked.

Somebody doesn’t want me free.