Walter Mosley Read online

  Little Brother

  1

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

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

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

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

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

  “Frendon Blythe?” a musical tenor voice asked.

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

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

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

  “What?” Frendon replied.

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

  Frendon rubbed his fingers together.

  “Answer,” Otis Brill said.

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

  “What if I lied?” Frendon asked.

  “We would know.”

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

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

  “Why am I strapped to this chair here?”

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

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

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

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

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “Why you got me strapped to this chair?”

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

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

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

  “Oh.”

  “Do you have counsel?”

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

  “The court will be adequate.”

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

  “Do you have counsel?”

  “I don’t have money.”

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

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

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

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

  “Not guilty,” the African-American image offered. “Are there witnesses?” The Court asked The Defense.

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

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

  Both cowl and woman regarded him.

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

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

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

  “Just makin’ my case, Officer Brill.”

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

  “Really?”

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

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

  “First I wan
t to fire my lawyer.”

  “You cannot.”

  “I can if she’s unqualified.”

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

  “How’s that?” Frendon asked.

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

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

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

  “You got ten thousand brains in there?”

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

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

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

  “And prosecutors,” Frendon added.

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

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

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

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

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

  “The slave studies his masters.”

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

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

  “Your attorney is qualified.”

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

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

  “What about my extenuating circumstances?”

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

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

  “Tryin’ to make it home for dinner.”

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

  “From where I sit there’s only up.”

  “You’re crazy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I would be if you allowed it.”

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

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

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

  __________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What are you doing, Blythe?”

  “Fighting for your life, Otie.”

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What is your evidence?”

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

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

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