“Blame the public,” Erin told him. “People got tired of paying the increasing costs of the legal system. An AI doesn’t require a staff, office, salary, healthcare, or retirement. And it isn’t the judicial intelligence that will decide here, Ephraim. It is our juror—our very human juror. Which is why we have to figure out what’s really vital to tell and decide how you’re going to tell it.”
He wasn’t even looking directly at her anymore. His face had lapsed into a glazed, lost expression that frightened her. At the same time, there was something compelling about those gray eyes…
“Look, we don’t have to talk about your art right now. Let’s go over your background. When you started using the implant and when you first noticed problems. Then we’ll talk about what kind of juror we should try to select. We don’t have to do it in my office. You name the place, and I’ll meet you there.”
He named a coffee shop near his own neighborhood, and she went there and waited for two hours, and he never showed up. She went to his residence in a high-rent tower, but there was no answer and the door would not admit her. She took the elevator to the underground, walked two blocks, and caught the mag-lev to the stop nearest her own apartment.
Erin worked alone all weekend. She finished reading the medical records and stored them in what she pictured in her mind as an old-fashioned paper-file drawer. She colored that drawer red, then linked it to the remembered smell of antiseptic and the sound of an ambulance siren. She did the same with the product designs, marking that drawer blue, cross-linked with the smell of motor grease and the steady hum of heavy machinery. The defense experts’ depositions and reports were colored black and linked to the bang and cordite smell of a gunshot. If she needed to find something fast, in the middle of a rapid cross-examination, she could access the files instantly by remembering the color, the smell, or the sound.
She prepared her opening statement, then worked on the expert examinations and thought about what kind of juror they wanted: which age, sex, occupation, ethnic, and other characteristics might be more receptive to Ephraim’s case. One more thing she needed to cover with Ephraim. She tried to call, wound up leaving messages. Her last message late Sunday night was abrupt.
“Ephraim, if you don’t at least show up in court tomorrow morning, the judge will default you. And NeuroTek will win. Is that what you want?”
She must have been out of her mind to agree to represent an artist. Especially in a case like this, she thought, as she broke the connection. It was his choice—it wasn’t her fault if he didn’t show. But she didn’t sleep well that night, even after she let herself go to bed, and when she walked into the courtroom in the morning, she didn’t expect to see him.
But he was there, sitting at their little table and carefully looking away from her. Clark had come with two legal assistants, several cases of paper exhibits and records, and a laptop Netlink. Was he just an old-style lawyer—or had all these trials taught him something about his client’s product?
Between the two counsel tables and the judge’s bench was an empty space, maybe four by seven meters, flanked on one end by the jury box. Erin thought of that space as the arena—which it had once actually been, centuries before, in medieval England, when trial had meant trial by combat, and justice would be dispensed only through divine intervention. It might take some of that to salvage this one, Erin thought grimly.
She started to explain the juror selection process to Ephraim, but the judge appeared, opened the day’s session, and brought in the jury pool, seating them in the twelve seats along the right-hand wall. The courthouse had been constructed almost fifty years ago, in the days when everyone had the right to a jury of twelve—before public concern about costs became the overriding tenet of the judicial system. After the selection process eliminated all but one from the jury pool, that single juror would sit alone among the eleven empty seats.
The jurors each gave their background information, then the two lawyers took turns asking them questions. Erin wanted to know if they or anyone close to them had ever been seriously injured. How about an injury to the mind? How did they think it would make them feel, if their memory was eroding, they were gradually losing their self? And if you were aware of it, and knew you were also losing the ability to do the work that was the most important thing in your life?
Clark wanted to know if they had read or watched any news reports of implant injuries. Did they know any implant users themselves? Were they aware of all the millions of users who had used the NeuroTek implant safely, for a number of years? Of how much some people relied on the implant to do their work or function more efficiently in today’s society?
“Ms. Mendel, I’ve noticed, is a user herself,” Clark said, as if in afterthought. “If not NeuroTek, then one of our competitors’ products.”
Erin raised her head. Oh, no—he wasn’t going to get away with that one! It meant little to ask the judge to tell the potential jurors to disregard Clark’s statement. She had to make them understand that it was outrageous.
“Object! What counsel do or don’t do themselves is totally irrelevant.” She was on her feet and could feel her voice quivering. It was no pretense; she was angry—she had a well of anger to draw on that had been growing deeper all weekend, she realized. “What’s worse, it’s unfairly prejudicial to Mr. Polk.” She touched her hand lightly to Ephraim’s shoulder; she could feel him begin to flinch away and squeezed her fingers to stop him. “Your Honor, Mr. Clark knows full well that remark was improper.”
“Sustained,” the judge said. “The court finds that defense counsel’s statement is a moderate violation of the rules of evidence. Defendant is sanctioned with removal of ten minutes’ time from its opening statement.”
As Erin regained her seat, she noticed that Ephraim was looking at her for the first time that morning.
One potential juror, an older woman, announced that anyone who would put something artificial in his head was assuming the risk of losing his mind. Erin convinced the judge there was legal cause for dismissal of this juror. Another juror had a brother who had been mind-damaged by an implant; a second admitted she could never be fair to a big corporation. Clark got them both dismissed, for cause. After that, three more potential jurors, who obviously did not want to sit through a three-day trial, claimed they could not be fair to a corporation either. The pool was thinning out rapidly.
It came time for Erin to exercise her first peremptory challenge. By tradition and court rule, each party had three such opportunities to dismiss a juror without legal cause, for any reason. It was each side’s chance to narrow the pool down to the one juror who might be most favorable and receptive to that side.
There was no more important issue than the person who would decide the case. She didn’t have the right to make the choice on her own; this was Ephraim’s trial. She conferred with him, recommending challenge of a middle-aged male who had only given them a single, contemptuous glance during the entire proceeding. Ephraim agreed.
It was Clark’s turn, and he bumped a young male college student. Erin and Ephraim agreed to dismiss the elderly man who had not seemed able to understand Erin’s questions, and Clark challenged a young female hospital nurse.
Erin had one remaining challenge. There were two people left in the jury box, a man who was a senior partner in a large structural engineer-ing firm and a young woman who worked in a body ornamentation shop. The man’s answers to both lawyers’ questions had been deliberate, thoughtful. The woman had answered more spontaneously; she definitely seemed more malleable and subject to emotional appeal.