Sequence Six: Immaterial Witness

The gunman's rampage erupted from nowhere, shattering the calm of a sunny afternoon. The patrons of the bistro -- a semi-open air establishment with greenhouse-like walls on three sides opening to a patio garden -- looked up, frozen in terror, as the bullets began to smash panes of glass and rip into human bodies. The thought crossed his mind that he should dive beneath the table and try not to be seen, when the gunman turned his way, the massive weapon blazing in the crook of his arm, and then -

A flicker of raw red agony, followed by grayness, a sense of plummeting --

Unconsciously, she gripped her sister's wrist. The golden bangles of her sister's bracelet pressed into the palm of her hand. If the gunman killed them, she thought, there could be no forgiveness: She had always been her sister's keeper, she's promised their mother --

Bullets stitched across her upper chest, destroying heart and lungs, severing her spinal cord. She felt herself slumping forward --

A swift tumbling feeling, shreds of dull oblivion wrapping around --

He saw others going down as bullets raked their way across the bistro. Plates, tables, the floor, everything was spattered with blood... He launched himself form his chair, toward the gunman, thinking: If I'm going down, I'm going to take you with me. The gunman caught sight of him, pivoted quickly. The muzzle flash flared white hot and then everything was white... and cool... then he felt himself slip beneath a surface of life and existence, into gray remorseless depths -

Gasping, Takata Ogada felt herself in her own body, saw her surroundings: A court room, dark panels of some luxurious wood, herself and eleven others in the jurors' box, witnessing the crime as the victims had seen it. A higher court had weighed in and ruled that prosecutors in this trial could introduce mnemodrive records into evidence. The prosecutor herself was watching the jurors with an almost prurient expression -- the expression of a predatory, Takata thought to herself. A victorious predator, feeling its own power.

Around her, the others dropped their heads into their hands, sighed, trembled, wept. Takata was plenty shaken up, but not to the same degree. She had been using mnemodrive tech for years. Most of the others in the jury had not. Many of them had never used it before they were compelled to do so in this trial.

Before they even had a chance to compose themselves, the jurors were subjected to a fresh trauma: The prosecutor, sticking her pointy rhteotical finger into their raw psychic wounds. Bitch, Takata thought.

The prosecutor had the gall to make a fatuous show of concern as her gaze roved over them one by one, making eye contact with whoever managed to collect themselves to pay attention. Eventually everyone on the jury, compelled by a sense of respect for her office and their duty to the court, had looked up and been met with her insincere attitude of solicitude.

If she were really that concerned with their well being, Takata thought, the prosecutor would never have put them through that.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence presented to you has come directly from the mnemodrives of victims and witnesses," the prosecutor intoned. She was an angular woman whose suit cut clean, sleek lines matching those of her face. Her hair was drawn back in a manner bordering on severe. Though small - not quite two meters in height - she dominated the room, exuding competence and sobriety. "Having seen through the eyes of the wounded and dying, felt the agonies of those whose flesh was pitilessly rent, and plunged to the very edge of death - to the limits of the mnemodrives, almost to a point of no return - having experienced all of this as though you had been there yourself, I am confident you will agree that the one and only fitting penalty for Willis Abergaard is death."

All around Takata Ogada, the men and women of the jury nodded and murmured. One of the men wiped at his still-wet eyes with shaking fingertips.

Willis Abergaard sat before them at the defendant's table. He was a large man - not quite as large as a professional athlete, many of whom reached three meters, but not only a couple decameters shy of it, Takata reckoned. Around eight and a half feet tall, she thought.

Takata's work as an antiquities and restoration specialist had made her fluent in the outdated English system of weights and measures, to the point that she sometimes thought first in ounces while puttering in her kitchen, or sized up her aquarium in terms of how many gallons the salt water tank held. She'd never learned to reckon in Fahrenheit, but then she had never needed to; temperature was, generally speaking, a matter of storage and not inherently part of an old chair's character, or something innate to a centuries-old painting.

Abergaard sat flanked by his attorneys. The courtroom was staffed by several additional security guards; the journo gallery was crammed full, with reporters peering down intently at the proceedings. A few of them wore cranial cam-sets, but most had upgraded to mnemodrives. The technology had been around for about six years, and was only now really starting to take off.

Takata herself had been an early adapter. She was a slim, petite woman herself, even shorter than the prosecutor. Her parents had not been interested in any of the bio-upgrades that had been available when Takata was a child, so she had grown up possessing only her raw attributes, enjoying none of the refinements her friends added on year after year: Catsight and magnasight, chameleonic hair, melanin enhancements and natural dermal sunblock for those who preferred a paler body hue. Those had been the refinements the girls went for. The boys usually chose more martial refinements: Myomesh, metabolic boosters, reflex accelerants - and, of course, phallic enhancement.

But Takata had not had any of that. She had only her own native intelligence, and whatever the combined forces of genetics and environmental factors conspired to grant her in terms of stature, coordination, pheromones, and other characteristics. So Takata had worked on capitalizing on her existing resources: She became attentive to detail, a piercing critical thinker, and an articulate speaker. She frequented the fitness center, keeping supple thorough yoga and becoming physically graceful through dance training, her hours of exercise toning her own myomesh-free muscles; she took pains to be sure her skin was clear and her mind uncluttered. It took time and discipline, but Takata had the satisfaction of knowing she'd made as much of herself as she had using her own natural ability.

The one area in which she did enhance herself was her mind. As soon as the first proven cognection arrays came on the market she invested in one despite the exorbitant cost. As cognection arrays became more powerful and added new features and capabilities, she upgraded. Finally, when mnemodrives replaced the old-fashioned arrays, Takata was among the first wave of users. She was even able to claim the cost off her taxes, because the mnemodrive's memory sharing function made it possible to link up with a global network of dealers, conservators, collectors, and assessors. Almost as soon as she had it, her mnemodrives was an integral part of Takata's business.

Perhaps it was the mnemodrives' superior qualities that gave her dark eyes an electric intelligence. Her air of thoughtful discrimination made her stand out in much the same way that all the standard physical refinements did for most other people: Both genders chose a standard suite of hormonal and neurological refinements that stripped them of body fat, added decameters to their height, and shaped their bone structures according to social standards of beauty. Most people also opted to suppress body hair; the men were beardless, the women smooth of leg. But not Takata; she used infradepilatories to keep her legs smooth, and if her facial structure was a little less than perfect, and her hair monochrome, she made those anachronisms work for her with stylish clothing and hairstyles, and the subtlest touch of makeup.

For the most part, Abergaard was similarly unrefined, but he took few pains to make up for it and he'd gone overboard in the ways in which he had opted for refinement. The overall effect was that he looked like the freak that he was. He had a heavy, honey-colored beard, and his thick thatch of dark blond hair was streaked with gray. He'd overdone it with the myomesh and the lean muscle boosters, so his less-than-three-meter height was overbalanced by his thick torso and his stubby, powerful arms and legs. His neck, too was stubby - his head almost seemed an extension of that neck, thick and corded as it was. He was also nearsighted, and wore eyeglasses to correct his vision - a grotesque aberration that would have made him abhorrent even if he wasn't a murderous deviant.

The jurors' collective gaze stuck to Abergaard as his lead defense attorney moved away from the table and made his way over to the jury box. There was a general sentiment that the first mistake the defense made was to go with male lead counsel; the jury was heavily tilted toward females, with a ration of eight women to four men. This was a maneuver on the part of the prosecutor, who knew that, given that eleven of the fourteen fatalities in the mass shooting were women, a female jury would be more likely to reject the insanity defense and find Abergaard guilty of murder in the first degree.

The lead counsel for the defense stood awkwardly before the jury box. The journos focused on him tightly, so an not to accidentally include any imagery of the jury box; It was illegal for the press or anyone else in the courtroom to capture image or audio of the jurors.

The defense lawyer looked ill at ease, and he had good reason to feel uncomfortable. He was already unpopular on the feeds and talk casts. He and his team were leagues above the standard state-appointed defense lawyers; Abergaard had a fair amount of personal wealth and he was using all of it to avoid the death penalty. There was no way that he was not going to jail - security video showed him coming into the Waterplex Bistro, his massive assault rifle slug across his back, then swiftly and smoothly positioning the weapon and unleashing dozens - if not hundreds - of rounds in a chaotic series of gunfire bursts. Some victims were hit several times and killed instantly; others were only grazed or suffered flesh wounds. Of the fourteen dead, four were equipped with active mnemodrives that captured their last moments.

The first record had come from a game designer who was visiting different kinds of places that day - parks, museums, the bistro - to gather sense impressions for his work engineering synthetic environments. His mnemodrive records were a kind of sketchbook he had planned to re-visit as he worked. Instead, he'd found himself in the middle of the same kind of carnage his own company created in games. One parents' group had publicly applauded the man's death, calling it poetic justice. Takata thought this sort of callousness was appalling.

The second record was from a young woman whose sister was visiting from Peshawar. She had intended the record of her lunch with her sister as a gift to their elderly mother.

The third was a young man who'd gone to the bistro in order to record himself lifting a glass of champagne and giving voice to a proposal. He'd evidently meant to send the mnemofile as a digital transmission to his boyfriend, an ice hauler due back from the Kuiper Belt in two years. Now there would be no reunion, and no wedding.

The jurors had not been forced - not yet, anyway - to experience the fourth record, which was taken from the point of view of a middle aged woman who'd been mortally wounded and had lain on the floor gasping and bleeding for three or four minutes until shock and blood lops claimed her. Though the prosecutor had not said it in so many words, it was clear that she intended to force this record, too, on the jurors if they didn't seem ready to agree as one to find for murder in the first. Takata was under no illusions that many of her fellow jurors would rather throw Abergaard under the bus if that's what it would take to spare themselves that experience.

The bistro had had seventy-two people within its confines when Abergaard went on his rampage. Twenty-three of the surviving witnesses had active mnemodrives and of those, nine had agreed to share their experiential recordings of the event.

The defense had no choice but to acknowledge that Abergaard was the culprit, but they were pushing hard for a finding of innocence by reason of insanity - or, at the least, a guilty verdict that nailed him on murder in the first, but a sentence that commuted the death penalty on the basis of Abergaard's unsound mental state. It was a distinction that made little sense to Takata; if Abergaard were not mentally and emotionally sound, then he was not entirely accountable for his actions and murder in the first degree wasn't something he should be charged with nor convicted of. But that was the deal the defense was trying to make.

"Ladies of the jury," the defense lawyer said. "Gentlemen. The horrors you've seen through the eyes of the wounded and mortally injured are inexplicable - enraging - heartbreaking. We behold the actions of this man, my client, with contempt and with justifiable outrage. But what we cannot see is the defendant's own state of mind - we cannot see the world the way he sees it.

"Willis Abergaard is a deranged and dangerous individual," the lawyer went on. "We cannot but agree that this is true. But is he responsible for the harm he has done? Can we demand accountability from him? If his sense and reason are lacking, then under the law we must remove him from society, for the sake of society - but also, under the law, we must spare his life. We do not punish people for being sick."

The defense attorney went on in this vein for some time. Then he introduced a new line of argument -- one that produced a frisson among the jurors, exactly as he intended.

"Ladies of the jury, gentlemen, please consider this," the attorney said. "The injured and the dead have spoken to us through technological means of their terror and suffering. Their agonies have become your own; their horror has echoed through your hearts and minds. The prosecution pursued this presentation of evidence, a first-person memory share of a sort never before imposed upon a jury. Until now, the technology has been used only in cases involving nonviolent crimes, and from the point of view of witnesses -- never victims. But the prosecution know that my client is insane; they know he is not responsible for his own actions; they know you can see this for yourself. They also know that when people are compelled to make emotional decisions, rationality is set to the side. This is their strategy: To inflict horrific suffering on you in order to ensure an unfair guilty verdict.

"Yes, my client is the cause," the defense attorney continued. "His actions resulted directly in the blood and trauma and fear we in this room have experienced -- and we on the defense team have experienced these same traumatic memories, just as you have. We know how shaken and angry you are; we know how frightened these sense records have left you. But the old principle of justice derived from certainty holds true: We must convict and execute this man only if we are certain beyond a reasonable doubt that the acts he committed were undertaken out of malice and a desire to do harm.

"Can we really know that? Ladies, gentlemen, we cannot. Mr. Abergaard has no mnemodrive. We cannot peer into his mind and know his outlook. If we did, we might find that the world, to him, is perpetually as fearsome and grueling a place as any of the suffering he imposed on others. What would any of us do if we, laboring under the burden of insanity, were forced to live with daily terrors? What threat did Mr. Abergaard perceive closing in on him? What drove him to such desperate actions? We wish to see him as a monster, to punish him for the hurt he caused - hurt that the prosecution forced us to endure in building its case against him. But is Mr. Abergaard the proper target for our anger and our urge for retribution? I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that it is not Mr. Abergaard who should suffer our anger and our desire to punish.

"Let me put it plainly," the defense attorney intoned after a brief pause and an intent look at various faces among the panel of jurors. "An overzealous prosecution has made victims of us here in this room - and in the course of so doing, used the pain and anguish of my client's victims most unpardonably. An overzealous prosecution has compounded the suffering of a mentally ill man by painting him as a monster, when what he is, to put it in the frankest and most forthright terms, is a victim in his own right."

The defense lawyer paced thoughtfully. His initial awkwardness had vanished; he now prowled the room with the confidence and concentration of a panther. His pheromones, too, Takata realized, had shifted: He was no longer the desperate lawyer placed in a no-win situation. Now he was the sympathetic advocate worthy of compassion, whose client was also worthy of compassion despite his crimes.

"What is fortunate for us is that we can do the right thing in every respect by simply finding Mr. Abergaard innocent by reason of insanity," the defense lawyer resumed. "We will do right by the victims by refusing to allow this heartless, cynical use of the victims' suffering to succeed. We will do right by Mr. Abergaard by ensuring that he is remanded to treatment, rather than to a purgatory of unending terror at the hands of the penal system - or, worse, put down like an animal instead of being cared for like the human being he is - the sick, irrational human being who slipped through the cracks and ran amuck. And we will do right by justice itself by standing firm against the abuses this court has permitted to take place in this room - abuses that left each of you savagely misused.

"That misuse, ladies and gentlemen, is not Mr. Abergaard's fault. Please don't scapegoat him for it. Rather, hold the court itself accountable for turning this judicial matter into a sideshow of psychological horrors. Find my client innocent and in so doing call to account this court for its overreach and its lack of sensitivity and decorum."

Displeased growls and murmurs told Takata that the jurors had not been swayed by the defense lawyer's speech. These were angry, viscerally frightened people. When they saw Abergaard's face in the courtroom, they flashed onto the face they say in the memories of his victims.

Each of the jurors was now a victim of Abergaard's, too.

***

"I say we fry the son of a bitch," a hulking woman named Annette said. She had a heavy, chiseled face and long gray hair and cold, flinty eyes. Her cheeks and nose were flushed with fury. The longer the jury deliberated, the redder she got, and the sharper the glint in her hard little eyes.

"He's guilty," Jerome, the only outspoken male juror, said. "All the bullshit about Abergaard being innocence? Liberal crap. He did it. He should pay."

Jerome looked at the other men. Each of them was staring at the floor. One had his mouth compressed into a thin, tight line. Another was visibly shaking.

"Look what this has done to us," Takata said.

Everyone looked toward her.

"We're not thinking about the case and its merits. We know he's guilty; we saw it; we suffered his attack. I am having nightmares now, every night for the last four months, ever since we began to share in the memories of the victims. We were not at the bistro Why do we have to suffer as though we were?"

"We're not here to deliberate on whether the court used those memory shares appropriately," Annette flared. "We're here to decide if that fucking beast is guilty. We all agree that he is."

"Guilty in that he carried out the actions," Takata agreed. "But not guilty in the sense that he knew what he was doing."

"Jesus Christ," Jerome spat, throwing his frame back into his chair. The frame squeaked. Jerome was even bigger than Abergaard, a full three meters tall.

"We are supposed to deliberate, meaning think about this carefully," Takata said. "I don't see anyone doing that here. We're all reacting emotionally."

"You bet we are," Annette snapped. "The memory shares showed us in detail what he did to those people. The coroner's report is gruesome, and it gave me nightmares, too. But the memory shares..."

"They are awful," Taka said, her voice calm and firm. "Beyond awful. But we have to bring our own thoughts and experiences into this deliberation, not simply become overwhelmed by the memories that were taken from the victims."

"I don't have anything in my entire life that let me make sense of this," a juror named Curtis spoke up.

Takata nodded toward Curtis. "I have used memory share for years," she said. "It's part of my work day. The more I use it, the more I realize that shared memories contain more than is healthy or natural for individuals to communicate to each other. A colleague with a growling stomach records his visual or tactile impressions of an artifact or a textile. Or a pregnant colleague passes along her bodily discomfort, her fatigue and her heightened, fragile mood. I know these people from the outside, but that doesn't compare to sharing their sensory and cognitive memories. One man I work with has a heightened color sense; what the world looks like through his eyes, what a canvas by Van Gough looks like... it's nothing like what I see myself. The form is the same, the colors are brighter, but the perception... that is vastly different.

"I know from all these professional experiences how much impact memory shares make, how first-hand they are, how strange and frightening it is to see even an ordinary event through someone else's eyes - and feel their thoughts behind it all, because their thoughts are recorded too. Their thoughts and attitudes, a shadow of their whole personality. It's all there, and for a few minutes we are living in someone else's psyche," Takata added. "It's alien to the human condition, It's unnatural and sometimes it's revolting. I don't want to know when a professional contact has pain from the scars left by intestinal surgery. I don't want to know when a female colleague is grieving a miscarriage. I don't want to suffer the miseries of their divorces, or their parents getting sick and dying, or the confusion about the child who has come out as transanimist. But it's all there, along with what I need to see and hear; all that baggage. It tells me more than just their literal point of view, it tells me about their outlook. Their experiences that make them receptive and amenable one day or make them hostile to the very same impressions the following week."

"What has this got to do with anything?" Jerome groused.

"Because all my experience with memory share have given me a sense," Takata told him -- told the whole room, the long table and the eleven other jurors and the cold, flickering light, and the cheerless beige paint job on the walls. "The way a photographer can know what the world will look like through any given camera, I have a sense for what the world will look like to a person, even if I don't share his memory. I look at Abergaard and I can see some of what the world looks like to him. He's frozen with fear -- every minute of every day. We have seen him lose control, break out into screams and try to rush the door. He doesn't understand where he is, or why. The world is shifting for him all the time. He cannot hold on to the thread that each of us grasps instinctively to connect us with external reality. I see this in him, I see how his attention and response do not match what happens in the courtroom. His senses bring him pieces, but he cannot put those pieces together."

"So he's innocent? Even though we all saw it? We saw what he did? The gun in his hands? The way he was screaming while he -- while he -- " Jerome, big and burly as he was, mean as were the expressions into which his face naturally fell, burst into uncontrollable sobs. He shrank into himself. Takata's ability to see into his mental state, the same kind of sight she was trying to explain, easily discerned his shame and embarrassment at breaking down so helplessly.

A tall, thin woman next to him -- Serena -- put her hand on Jerome's shoulder. She did it because she was attracted to him, the same reason she habitually sat next to him. Takata had seen that attraction from the first. She also saw what a mistake Serena's gesture was -- and Jerome proved it, flinching from her touch, waving his had to ward her off while trying to stifle his jagged sobs.

Annette threw Takata a look of pure loathing. "Now you're the one hurting us," she seethed. "And why? For the sake of that asshole out there?"

Annette. So full of anger and self-important righteousness from the very first day of the trial. Being sequestered was bad enough, but having to share space with Annette and her noxious aggression day after day had long since become all but unbearable. Takata carefully modulated her own feeling of disgust for the woman and kept her voice calm and level. "There is a reason why people not connected with a crime serve as jurors, and witnesses and victims do not," Takata said. "But we have become victims, too. That's not the defendant's fault. That was something the court did to us. If we find Abergaard guilty, all we do is play into the hands of those who are using us for their own purposes."

"Not to mention," Curtis piped up, "we set a terrible precedent. Do we want to blaze this trail? Do we want to encourage prosecutors to inflict this horror on jurors from now on?"

"With respect to Abergaard, we have a responsibility to rise above our feelings, to be impartial," Takata said. "But we are only human. Our feelings will enter into it. Okay, fine, but let our anger and desire to punish be directed at the proper target. It was the prosecution who did this to us. Why should we reward them for it? I don't think it's right."

"Who cares what you think?" Annette asked.

***

But in the end it was Takata -- what she thought, what she believed -- that changed the verdict.

All twelve jurors found Abergaard guilty, and because the prosecution had only charged him with fourteen counts of murder in the first it was that crime he was guilty of. The conviction meant a mandatory sentence of death -- if, that is, the jury unanimously agreed that the defendant were sane and accountable for his actions. If not, the judge had a fair amount of latitude in pronouncing sentence.

Takata had felt compelled by the judge's instructions to agree with the finding of guilty. But she felt unshakably convinced that Abergaard was insane, making the death penalty inappropriate in his case.

Takata was disgusted when she realized the others, to various degrees, also believed Abergaard was insane - but wanted him dead anyway. "He's bug-house crazy," Jerome shouted at her. "Putting him down would be a mercy."

"If you feel so bad for him," an intense, auburn haired woman named Janda had said, "why do you want him to keep living that hellish life?"

But that wasn't the question. What Takata and the others were supposed to decide was whether Abergaard's actions merited his execution. Due to his mental state, Takata believed they did not.

She was alone in this. The room was filled with hatred and fear; even Curtis, he alone voice of support, crumbled in the face of peer pressure. But Takata held fast.

The others hammered at her for hours, pleading and screaming and coaxing and crying even threatening. "If you do this," Annette had promised, looking Takata right in the eye as she spoke, "I will see that you pay for it."

But Takata held strong. At last the jury stood before the judge, the defendant, the lawyers, the journos, the surviving victims, and family members of those who had lived and those who had died. One of the quiet men, a sad-eyed fellow named Chad, read the guilty verdict, and then admitted that the jury had not been able to unanimously conclude that the defendant should suffer the death penalty.

Murmurs quickly escalated to cries and angry shouts as a shockwave raced around the room. The judge banged his gavel and called for order, and then pronounced his sentence: Three consecutive life sentences in a maximum-security facility, with no possibility of parole.

Takata had not expected much better, but she still bit down on her disappointment. The man needed psychiatric care; now he was to be warehoused until he died. And what did it mean, this fiction of three life sentences? Once he finished the first term, the remaining two would be moot.

There was more noise from the people in the room; one older man, heavy in the belly and red-faced, was screaming incoherent obscenities at the jurors. Two guards were on him, holding him back as he bucked and writhed in their grasp. A frail-looking woman had climbed to her feet; she was clutching the banister that separated the public gallery from the rest of the courtroom. She swayed, and then crumpled in a faint.

Another guard ushered the jurors from the room as the judge continued to call for order.

***

It was Annette who leaked what had happened, and who named Takata. A right-wing blogger posted Takatla's name and profession, the name of her company, and home address. Talk cast hosts excoriated her. Callers who were clearly every bit as unbalanced as Abergaard himself flooded the airwaves with imprecations and threats.

Takata chose to ignore the maelstrom. She deleted the hate-filled emails and the venomous audio-messages. She had the full faith and support of her clients - cool and impeccably practical people who didn't react to much, and never took hasty action. Life and business went on.

Until the evening that Rand Orvercab - who had spent two months stalking her, investigators later realized - cornered Takata. Orvercab's girlfriend has lost her sister in the attack on the bistro. Orvercab wanted justice for both of them - Jenny, who was listless since her sister had died, and Madeleine herself, so beautiful, cut down by a maniac who should have paid with his life.

Orvercab was a rugby player, and bigger than most. He had no trouble holding her down and stifling her screams. He surprised her in the alley behind her apartment building, and shoved her between a couple of dumpsters. He took his time, concealed from surveillance cams, letting his favorite knife do all the cutting and piercing it wanted. So this was the bitch who thought it was funny to take the light out of Jenny's eyes? He would make sure she paid a Biblical price. The blade punctured one eyeball, then the other. Takata struggled; he bore down and broker her collarbone, then grabbed her hand. This was the bitch who had defanged the justice system? He turned the knife around and smashing the steel hilt into her mouth, again and again, splitting her lips and knocking teeth loose.

The punishment went on and on until he decided to show her what mercy really was, and thrust the knife into her heart. Takata heard, as well as felt, the blade crunch through tissue and bone; as her life ebbed, her senses seemed to converge and melt into a grayness that washed and ebbed and then bottomed out --

And she was tumbling through gray oblivion --

Anita Benson gasped as the long sequence of memory clips ended. She struggled back to the reality of her own life, her own thoughts embedded in her own personality.

Anita looked around at the others. She was the first to regain herself. The court room was silent, watching the jurors' responses. One by one, the others in the jury box reclaimed their own identities, re-emerged into the present moment. One woman moaned; one of the men, pale, seemed on the verge of passing out.

The jurors all turned their eyes to the man who sat ensconced by his defense lawyers -- the vicious brute killer, Rand Orvercab.

***

"They spared that crazy motherfucker Abergaard," Orvercab said to his lawyer. "Why shouldn't they spare me?"

Denise was a good lawyer, but an overworked one. She'd been appointed by the court to take Orvercab's case -- which, given the direct sensory evidence retrieved from Takata's mnemodrive, was open and shut. Orvercab was an angry, overbearing man, but he wasn't too bright. It was public knowledge that Takata was a mnemodrive user -- Orvercab could have put two and two together and realized her memory records would be retrieved and used against him.

That was exactly what happened. It was the memory recording of the torture and murder that had led the police to Orvercab's door; they hadn't even needed to wait for the report from the physical evidence forensic team.

The trial proved similarly straightforward. The jurors experienced the relevant memory share clips from Takata's mnemodrive record; afterwards, several of them were shaking, pale, traumatized beyond speech. The court had agreed to provide counseling; this was little more than a PR move and a hedge against liability. There was considerable public backlash not only over the Abergaard case, but the fallout it had generated. Two of the jurors from the Abergaard trial had committed suicide; one of them, Annette Glanserby, had been arrested on a felony charge for disclosing details about the jury's deliberations. Glanserby, in her own trial, had pled innocent by reason of emotional trauma brought on by the use of memory share technology.

There was also a challenge from a civil rights organization seeking to discontinue the use of memory share evidence in trials involving violent crime. But that case wasn't expected to get anywhere soon; meantime, prosecutors nationwide were aggressively boarding the bandwagon, seeking greater access and latitude for the use of memory share evidence.

As a result, the wheels of justice - which traditionally ground slowly as the proverb had it, but finely - had sped up. With direct memory evidence, investigators and jurors were able to side-step many of the doubts and uncertainties that older methods had entailed. Crimes that used to require extensive time and effort to reconstruct and understand were now observable in real time, exactly as they had happened from the victims' point of view. Aside from the impending legal challenge to the use of memory share evidence the only limitations to its use were the still-low numbers of mnemodrive users in the general public, and the fact that some criminals seemed to be catching on: A few had decapitated their victims and taken the heads with them; in one or two cases, a perp had attempted to destroy the device through blunt force trauma, obliterating the head and mashing the brain tissue to pulp. One particularly clever killer had subjected the corpse of his victim to a high-intensity EM field, evidently hoping to erase or destroy the mnemodrive. It hadn't worked; the device was sturdy and well shielded.

The finer points were still being ironed out, but, Denise reflected, the tech was only going become more pervasive and, on the whole, prove a boon to law enforcement - especially once nascent plans to continuously upload mnemodrive records to the NSA database were implemented. When that happened, killers who pulverized or hacked off heads wouldn't get away with their crimes. In fact, crimes wouldn't have to be discovered after the fact: They could be monitored in progress and intervention would be possible.

But for the moment, Denise's problem was Orvercab.

"I don't think," Denise told Orvercarb, speaking slowly and apologetically, "that this jury had anyone like Ms. Ogada on it."

Indeed not. The verdict was unanimous: Twe've angry, horrified faces staring him down as Orvercab tried again, out of turn, to explain himself, to point out why his actions were justified, why the bitch had to die.

The sentence was unanimous, as well.

In the fullness of time, his appeals exhausted, Orvercab died screaming. The lethal injection scalded his arteries, melted his organs, agonized his nerves, and gave those who viewed his demise on closed-circuit video feed a measure of savage satisfaction.