Brain Storm

Brain Storm

  by

  Michael D. Britton

  * * * *

  Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton / Intelligent Life Books

  The playback completed abruptly, the image dissolved, and the lights came back up in the near-empty court room.

  I rubbed my eyes. Not sleeping well lately – my conscience had been staying up late and sleeping all day. But the extra money was undeniably nice. It beat my standard pay as a Memory Detective by about five hundred percent.

  “Mr. Grant,” said the prosecutor, “you still deny the charges, even after your BR reveals you to be responsible for the death of Alan Finchley?”

  “As I have been trying to explain,” said Harold Grant, “the brain reflection may be able to show you things I have seen, but it’s all out of context.”

  The court was silent. I looked over at the jury box, which was populated by twelve flat screen monitors. Each presented the bored face of a juror, piped in from Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Leeds, and another half dozen places around the country. Ultimately, they wouldn’t matter. The case I’d built against Grant was solid – solid enough for Judge Clemens Rodd, who stared impassively at the defendant.

  The prosecutor, Sir Dale Healey, was a respected man of the law who’d tried more than a hundred cases of this nature. This whole deal should be routine – just like the last few that I’d been paid extra to process.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is settled law,” Sir Healey said emphatically, facing the small webcam mounted just above the jury screens. “For more than twenty-five years, the justice system has functioned under the efficiency and accuracy of brain scan technology, capable of showing you, the jury, exactly what transpired, as seen through the eyes of the accused. The BR has been used to convict thousands with perfect accuracy. The verdict is inescapable.”

  Sir Healey had once told me that jury trials would soon be a thing of the past, only hanging on as long as they have as a formality in the modern age of irrefutable proof and incriminating evidence drawn directly from the minds of those accused of crimes. I would’ve agreed – but I prefer not to have an opinion on legal matters. I leave that to the blokes in the wigs.

  In this case, the evidence was clear enough to condemn this man on the stand to a life behind razor-wire and energy beams in one of Britain’s six hundred privately run, government-subsidized high-security camps. My presence here was a formality of the proceeding – it was unlikely I would be called to testify.

  BR had been tested, retested, and run through several high-level government review boards. For years now, the fate of accused criminals had rested in their own memories – the images seared into their own minds at the time of the crimes. These imprints, played back for the court, were always sufficient to establish the truth of a case.

  Or, that’s what I kept telling myself. After all, most of these defendants really were guilty. Grant was only different in that I had been asked to make sure the BR had no holes. Unfortunately, the extra money was bumping up against my professional ethics with a relentless “thud thud thud” that kept time with my pounding headache.

  I decided I had to do something. I sent a brief, cryptic message to the defense attorney’s handheld device.

  “Does the defense have any closing words?” asked Judge Rodd.

  “My Lord,” said Roland James, then glanced at his buzzing device. “I, uh, would move to closing statement, but I believe I may have what will be exonerating evidence.”

  “New evidence to be introduced?” barked the judge. “To contravene the BR? Why do you insist on wasting this court’s time, Mr. James?”

  “I’m sorry – excuse me – if I could just speak,” blurted Grant from the stand. “I-I can prove my innocence! The BR was pulled from my mind after the interrogation. After I’d had Mo-barb administered. After! Don’t you see? The Mo-barb allowed your overzealous interrogators to plant false memories in my mind. I mean, yes the memories are real – I know you can’t plant false memories, per se, but by removing the context, the obvious interpretation of the memories becomes false.”

  “My Lord,” said Sir Healey, “the defendant is simply running through the usual objections to the incontrovertible evidence of his own guilt. The standard behavior of a desperate and guilt-ridden man who fears the consequences of his own actions. Next, I predict he will claim that BR technology is flawed. If the crime were not so grave, this act would be laughable, My Lord. And Mr. James is merely struggling to avoid retiring as a one-hit wonder.”

  “Defense?” grumbled the judge.

  Roland James, charged with defending Grant, had been doing so with all the enthusiasm of a man ready to retire after a career marked by repeated defeat. As a young attorney, he’d broken new ground when he used BR to prove the innocence of a framed client – it had been the first and only case in which BR had not resulted in a conviction. The case was unique, the only historical example of BR getting someone off the hook. James knew this; he had no more fight left in him or energy to pursue appeals. To him, Harold Grant’s future was as certain as the fact that by six o’clock James would be sipping a tall golden lager at the pub on the corner of Bow Street.

  Until this message came across his PDA. Now, he had a spark of hope.

  “My apologies, My Lord, for taking the court’s time, but I would need to confer with my client.”

  “Five minutes,” the judge stated flatly, tapping his gavel.

  Grant stepped down and sat beside James at the defense table. One of my tools of the detective trade, an intra-aural booster, allowed me to listen in on the conversation.

  “Why don’t you move forward with what I told you?” Grant whispered to his attorney.

  “I will. Maybe. I’m having second thoughts about that line of defense. I’ve been on these BR cases for most of my career now, and I’ve seen many a defendant go through the exact same throes as you are, only to wind up incarcerated nonetheless. Now, it’s a long shot, Mr. Grant, but I’ve just received a tip that could make a difference.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you right now. I need time.”

  “Time? They’re about to send me up! Just let me testify as an expert witness. Surely you know, I’m not just some run-of-the-mill criminal. I helped write some of the code for the very BR trans-imaging software being used to hang me. I know the limitations of the system. My perspective – the facts surrounding my experience – are not represented in the reflection viewed in court today. And, I know that the Mo-barb used in my interrogation affects the areas of the brain associated with memory, causing sensory input to bypass the conscious and get stored in long-term memory without proto-processing.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Ever have déjà vu?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you really remembering the present? Or is it just a trick of brain chemistry?”

  “Well, uh, you can’t remember the present, so I suppose it’s some kind of mental misfire.”

  “Would you want to be convicted of a crime – sent away for the rest of your life – based on a mental misfire?”

  “All right,” James conceded. “I’ll present your evidence – which amounts to six lines of computer code that the court will view as gibberish. And I’ll question you on it. I don’t understand it well enough to really argue the case, so your fate will be in your own hands. I’ll give you enough rope to either hang the jury, or hang yourself.”

  Grant grimaced. “You inspire such confidence, Mr. James. And the new evidence?”

  “If the judge allows, I’ll look into it.”

  The gavel tapped once more. “We will resume,” intoned Judge Rodd.

  “My Lord,” said James, “my client wishes to take th
e stand again. As evidence, I present the following six lines of BR programming code.” James tapped his desk and an image appeared in the air as the lights dimmed in the court. “These letters, numbers and symbols hold the key to Mr. Grant’s innocence. He will now explain how, and why. Mr. Grant.”

  Grant was nervous as he began his explanation, but quickly gained confidence as he settled into his own area of expertise, attempting to explain using language the court would understand.

  “So, you see, when the image processor reads the neuron code and translates the algorithms, any external variable such as the chemical compounds found in Mo-barb will skew the base calculation. When that happens, the BR protocols behave as if they are uploading from the memory centers of the brain, but they are really calling data from the subconscious and conscious areas. It is a fundamental flaw that creates a kind