“Can I ask you a… erm, sensitive question?”

“I am, quite literally, a captive audience.”

“What did it feel like?”

If the suicide bomber who had levelled an entire block in downtown New Requiem felt awkward about the question, he didn’t show it. Arturon Hernandez simply shrugged.

“Everyone asks me that. Truth is, no idea. Last thing I remember is seeing the people around me, then nothing.”

“Okay, but how did you… y’know, feel? Right before you pressed the button?”

“Fucking awesome.”

In stark contrast to Hernandez’ unsettling stoicism, Percival felt a deep nausea taking hold and he had long since given up trying to hide his discomfort. It was their third session under the horrible fluorescent lighting of the holding cell, and Percival was keenly aware of not just Hernandez’ coal-black eyes studying his every move, but also of the greater black orb of the security camera floating in between them. He removed the pocket square from his suit’s breast pocket and dabbed at his forehead; being silk, it did nothing to wick the sweat, merely smeared it around his bald head.

“You know there were innocent children in that building,” he ventured.

“Children? Yes,” Hernandez said, as if it had, improbably, only just occurred to him for the first time. He then leant forward as far as his restraints would allow him and added with a smirk: “But I wouldn’t exactly call them innocent.”

Percival screwed his eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of his nose, pushing uphis wire-rimmed glasses. “Respectfully, it’s the lack of remorse that is going to make my job extremely difficult.”

“Even you, of all people, think I’m guilty. There’s not much I can do to make your job that much more difficult.”

Hernandez’ voice came through to his side of the glass with totally lossless quality from the intercom, but Percival had noted in their very first meeting that the transmission seemed to be pitched down by few semitones. It had the effect of making Hernandez sound positively demonic, though he had since gotten used to it.

“You are guilty,” Percival responded back with a level of confidence that surprised him but stemmed from his years of experience in such matters. “And we’re not going to try convincing the jury otherwise.”

“What’s the point of you, then?”

“I’m here because we’re going to try and convince them to give you the death sentence.”

For the first time this session, Hernandez visibly softened. He relaxed back into the wall and broke his otherwise unceasing gaze from Percival, giving the camera drone a cursory glance before lowering his eyes to the floor. After considering the facts at hand, he rose up again with a wry smile. “The death penalty. Yeah, sounds good,” he said, then used his shoulder to scratch his beard stubble. “It’d be nice to get back to what I was doing.”

*****

Percival was as surprised as anyone when he was assigned by his firm as the defence counsel for The People of New Requiem v. Hernandez, not least because his client was - at the time - dead.

If Cicero had a good marketing team, they’d have used their proprietary animation technology to revivify every single one of the victims that were killed when Hernandez triggered the Casimir charge beneath his vest (or however many left recoverable DNA). Doing it for free, even as an overt PR stunt, would have massively shifted the public’s negative opinion on the wholly novel technology that could return the dead to life.

But Cicero did not have a good marketing team.

They had the best marketing team on the planet.

It was noted in a boardroom by white men in grey suits, perhaps even written on a whiteboard in rushed marker pen, that there was an incontrovertible truth: a society’s collective boner for justice was far firmer, and ergo more marketable, than any attempt to right a wrong. And so it was that Arturian D’Lacey Hernandez was the first living organism since Jesus to fully return to the mortal plane after death, solely to stand trial before a jury of his peers, and it fell upon Percival Ithikos Esq. to act as his defence counsel.

“All rise.”

The entire trial had been the most saturated media event since the cross-network had been established, arguably even of all time. It wasn’t solely due to the entertainment factor, though undoubtedly tens of billions of people were consuming it as drama of the highest stakes; whole colonies were following the developments as a potential landslide in legal precedent that they would probably have to adopt.

Percival dabbed at his head. It was hot in the courtroom.

“We have heard over the past two weeks,” he began, addressing the jury directly, “that my client, by his own admission, is guilty of all counts: mass murder, terrorism and high treason against the sovereign state of New Requiem…”

“Fuck New Requiem!” Hernandez abruptly yelled from where he sat, eliciting disgusted gasps from the gallery to which he summarily issued middle fingers from both hands. Amidst frantic gavel pounding from the front bench, he added: “Fuck every whore bitch in this colony, and fuck their children!”

“Order! I demand order!” the judge boomed, waiving his gavel between Hernandez and Percival. “I advise you to keep your client under control. And you. May I remind you that your conduct in this court will have consequences?”

“Don’t give a fuck,” Hernandez grunted, folding his hands across his chest. “I hope your Marquess dies of syphilis.”

This drew an even bigger surge of outrage from everyone in the courtroom. Percival frantically returned to the counsel table to urge his client to shut up. Amidst the crashing wave of feral anger and obscenities emanating from the gallery, the various news camera operators couldn’t decide whether to focus on the action or censor it; even airing an insult against the Marquess was technically committing their own seditious act of Lèse-majesté and could, at the very least, cost them their broadcast license.

It took another minute or so for the judge to wrestle the proceedings back into silence. Once he did, Percival was invited to continue; he did so with the acute knowledge that three hundred eyes in the court were watching him and around seventeen billion were joining them via Volumetric projection.

“Your honor, I will once again state this plainly and outright. My client is guilty of all crimes of which he is charged,” he said in as loud a voice as he could muster. The shocked murmurs weren’t because it was any kind of revelation, it was because it was said by the client’s own barrister. Percival waited before he had silence again to continue: “the defence would like to call into question the sentencing of any such crimes, and how it would be carried out.”

“Objection!” yelled Percival’s counterpart on the prosecution’s side. “That is not relevant!”

“Overruled,” instantly fired back the judge, “on the caveat that the defence satisfactorily explains why it is.”

“Of course, your honor,” Percival nodded deferentially. “I am not surprised that the prosecution raised an objection at this precise point, and neither should anyone here. The good lawyer opposite me is bankrolled by none other than Cicero.”

“Objection!”

“The prosecution can shut the fuck up,” the Judge said, waiving his gavel idly at Percival. “I wanna see where this is going. Defence, continue.”

“Gladly, your honor,” said Percival. “Could the clerk please present article 92b.”

The evidence was casted to everyone’s interface as Percival began to talk through it. “A clear, irrefutable papertrail linking Mr. Boyle here to Cicero’s marketing team. And that’s fine, by the way,” he said, holding his hands up to the jury in deference. “Yes, it’s shady to pretend you’re acting solely for the embassy bombing victims while taking massive payments from a conglomerate, but that’s by the by. It’s not illegal.”

“Then could the defence, you know, get to the point?”

“Certainly, your honor, and I can get there more efficiently if I may ask you a direct question.”

“I’ll entertain it.”

“Thank you. Should the good jury here find my client guilty of mass murder or any of the charges therein, what sentence would you impose?”

“New Reqiuem is a life-for-a-life nation. You know this, and I’m still waiting for the point, counsel.”

“Quite. And here it comes. If a guilty verdict was delivered on all one hundred and thirty-three murder counts, that would result in one hundred and thirty-three life sentences… correct?”

“Objection!”

“I swear to fucking god,” the judge growled, staring intently at Mr. Boyle which was all it took to communicate that it would be in the barrister’s best interests to quietly sit back down. After he had done so, the judge redirected his attention back to Percival. “It would, yes. In this hypothetical.”

“But there is no way to serve one hundred and thirty-three. This has been a quirk of the judicial system since the twentieth-century. Unless… clerk, file 96b please.”

Mr. Boyle slumped forward at his desk and began caressing his forehead. For everyone else who had not seen the blueprints, it took a few moments for the pertinent details to register before gasps rippled across the court.

“The same company that invented the technology to allow this dead man to answer for his crimes,” Percival said, gesturing an open hand at Hernandez before turning it back to the transmission screen, “is also trying to get that technology into the penitentiary system.”

The blueprints were exhaustive. Percival took the cycle remote from the clerk herself and flicked through them as he described what was being shown: a perfectly viable way to extract a human brain and keep it alive indefinitely. The idea had been a mainstay of mad science for centuries, and sometimes lauded as a plausible immortality technique, but here it was presented as both a legitimate possibility and a nightmare worse than death itself.

According to Cicero’s blueprints, the brain would be extracted under anaesthesia using a proprietary technique. Once housed in its viscous sphere, the brain would be brought back to full capacity and consciousness, where it would utterly scramble trying to comprehend why there was no longer a body around it, nor the senses it had evolved to make sense of the world. No sight, no sound, no touch. No sensation whatsoever… not even the respite of sleep, according to the Cicero blueprints, though the abstract to the peer reviewed paper (which Percival had highlighted on slide 99J) did posit that such a brain might simulate some kind of rest state as it hallucinated into an unceasing madness.

Ultimately, the technology did not benefit the once proud, corporeal owner of the brain one jot, but as evidenced on the final slide (99T), it was a fantastic answer to a once whimsical judicial question: how can you make a conscious being serve longer than a life sentence?

Proceedings were paused as one juror vomited, the smell and spectacle of which made the juror next to her also throw up.

*****

In the days that intervened, Percival did not leave his hotel room. As with most law careers, there had been no dispensation for work-life balance. University followed school, junior positions followed the degree, seventy hour work weeks had occupied his life ever since. He was wealthy by most peoples’ standards, but there was nobody in his life that cared about his location or wellbeing, save for the braying mob uselessly roaming around the streets of Gravenhage in an attempt to find him and lynch him. The Korps shut them down pretty quickly.

Perhaps it was his total absence of family or interests outside of the office that led to the firm choosing him for such a ridiculously high-profile case, but that didn’t strike Percival as a solely satisfactory explanation. He was hardly the only lawyer that lived for the firm, and although he had a flawless record as a defence barrister so far he was merely a thirty-year man, not a senior partner with an entire life of legal cases under his belt.

What Percival did have, however, was a passion for law itself — an admiration for the very institution of law that had long been beaten out of most of his peers. He spent every waking minute in the hotel suite poring over the most obscure cases of jury nullification, the nature of cruel and unusual punishment, the implications of the bizarre, legally unprecedented situation his client found himself in.

He remained faithful in his argument that the Hernandez sitting in the dock was not the same biological entity that had committed the crimes of which he was charged. He had a lesser (though still robust) faith that the jury would share in his steadfast belief that Cicero’s brain vat technology was an aberration of nature which should never be cemented into legal precedent.

On the eve of the final hearing, Percival wearily switched off his screen port and drank the last of his peppermint tea.

His safety net was prepared should either of those two avenues fail.

*****

“All rise.”

The sheer volume of people watching nearly brought down the cross-network. The court was deathly silent as the judge entered; Percival was even surprised to find, for once, that Hernandez was being perfectly compliant. Either the gravity of the situation had finally landed, or he simply didn’t see the point in continuing his theatrics at this stage.

Percival also noted that the judge was stirring an Alka-Seltzer into the pitcher of water that was waiting for him at the bench.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” he said while using the end of a pencil to stir the water.

“It has, your honor.”

“What?”

The lead juror cleared her throat, then said, slightly louder: “It has, your honor!”

“Alright, Jesus. Keep your wig on. Send it through to me,” he said while tapping his screen port. The news cameras were desperately trying to zoom in on what was a reversed image from their side, to bring into focus on the writing that may appear there. “The gallery may be seated. The defence and prosecution counsels, and the defendant, please remain standing.”

The judge himself stood, thought differently of it, and sat down again.

“First of all,” he began, “I would like it to be recorded that I reject the defence’s argument that the defendant in the dock and the individual charged with the crimes in question are two separate individuals.”

Percival, with his hands folded carefully in front of him, remained stoic. He chanced a sideways look at Hernandez to see his reaction, only to see there was none; it had already occurred to Percival during their sessions that the terrorist was too stupid to understand the argument that he was a new person, so this wasn’t a surprise.

“It seems that the jury agree with my assessment,” the judge said, looking down his nose through his reading glasses at the viewport, then lowering his head to glare at the newscasters over them. “Also if any of you pricks can see what I’m seeing on my screen and are broadcasting it, I swear to the almighty fuck above I’m going to hold you all in contempt.”

Those who weren’t already focussing their cameras on Hernandez and his reaction very quickly did so. The judge continued.

“Arturon Hernandez, the jury finds you guilty of all counts. For each of the one hundred and thirty-three counts of murder, I sentence you to one hundred and thirty-three life sentences, to be served consecutively.”

The gallery erupted into cacophonous whooping and applause. The judge allowed the moment, and the newscasters struggled to know where to point their cameras; to Mr. Boyle of the prosecution, with his Cheshire cat grin. To the many family members of the victims in the gallery, sobbing in melancholic relief and hugging each other. To the reincarnated form of Arutron Hernandez, who had begun noticeably shaking as the reality of what awaited him took hold.

Or the judge, who had slammed his gavel down once more to command attention.

“However,” he boomed in a tone that dampened all excitement in the room and left a nervous anticipation in its place, “you are also found guilty by this court of high treason against the State of New Requiem. Under the High Treason Act of 2065, the sentencing statute allows for no discretion. I have no other recourse than to impose the mandatory sentence of death.”

Three words which, when combined in that order, held an enduring reverence in the human psyche: The Death Penalty. The mere utterance rendered the entire courtroom silent. Billions of watchers were similarly mute, as if the entire solar system had become darkly quiet. They had to mentally process what implications it brought and how it squared with their braying sense of justice: the death penalty? It sounded good, but was it… good?

Percival had already spent weeks considering this three word phrase. For him, his client, and the entire legal system going forward, the word in the middle was the only one that mattered. This was the Hail Mary he’d been hoping for should all else fail…

… pending one final detail.

“Your honour, if I may ask…” Percival said, approaching the bench.

“Uh-huh,” the judge said, waving him forward with one hand while putting his glass of water to his mouth with the other.

“In which order will the sentences be carried out?”

“What?”

Percival cleared his throat. “Your honor, in which order will my client serve his sentences?”

“I don’t fucking know. You know why?”

“No, your honor. If you could enligh…”

“Because there’s not a single thing in this fucking book,” he said, struggling to pick up his hardcover of Spowegg’s 2026 Sentencing and Commissions Guidelines with one hand, lobbing it angrily across the desk, “or indeed any book, that covers a situation like this. So let me ask you, which would you prefer?”

“With respect, your honor, I’d prefer to see my client executed as the first course of action.”

“Fuck it, sounds good to me. Less hassle all round,” he said, waiving Percival away as if he were a gnat. “Return to your desk, I need to consult with the Statute Board.”

Another thirty minutes passed, largely in silence as the gallery waited in baited breath for the final ruling. At one point the judge disappeared to his chambers before returning; he had seemingly misplaced his gavel, so he simply punched the desk with his fist. The court was ordered to rise as he delivered his monologue:

“The sentence of death shall be carried out following the completion of the defendant’s custodial obligations. The defendant is therefore remanded to the Department of Neural Corrections for the commencement of the first of one hundred and thirty-three consecutive life sente… what?” the judge paused, furrowing his brow in annoyance while putting a finger to his earpiece. “Oh, right. Apologies to the court, I’m told it is to be referred to as the Department of Neural Corrections, sponsored by Cicero.”

Death, the judge had decided, was still the promised release for Arturon Hernandez.

His brain simply had to live 10,520 years in a sensory vacuum to receive it.