“That’s why you had the implant done? Just so that you could access more images?”
“Just?” Incredulous, he stared at her. “Just so—yes!” He balled his hand into a fist. “It takes the right images to make it work—a lot of the right images. If I could, I’d search every archive in the Net. To make it work. Did you have a dog when you were a kid?”
She blinked at him. “Yes.”
“Did you love it?”
Her expression was definitely wary now. “Yes, I did. I was very young.”
“I found a puppy when I was ten.” He looked back at the fake view of the Rockies. “Someone had thrown it into a dumpster. It was tiny—its eyes barely open—way too young to be away from its mother. I fed it canned milk with an eyedropper, and woke up every hour so that it wouldn’t get hungry. I wanted it to live. I had never wanted anything so much in my life. Later on, we had to give it away—we couldn’t keep pets in our apartment. But that wasn’t so bad. It was alive, and that’s what mattered.” He looked her in the face. “That week is part of what I put onstage. It’s part of what makes it come together the way it does—the echo of that kid wanting, those silent hours when everyone else in the whole damn world was asleep, and he lay there waiting for the alarm, just him and that squirming bit of life. Cut out that memory—take it away, and… it loses something.” Children’s Crusade. He swallowed. “It is lessened,” he whispered. “Shallow. Can you understand?” He got abruptly to his feet, needing to be out of this tiny office, away from this woman who would weigh his loss and maybe find it insufficient when weighed against significant cost. He was losing focus. The scene was unraveling into frayed and disconnected images. The implant was leaking again. If it was a bad episode, he might drool. “I’ll show you what I do.” He opened the door. “But not right now.”
“Wait!”
Not in front of her… He fled down the hall.
Erin stared at the closed door sifter he left, not reviewing the mass of information about his case now stored in her head or doing any of the other mental work she had to do before the trial began. The air circulation in her office was poor, and his scent still lingered; it was not unpleasant, she decided.
Was he more miffed about her having the implant or the fact that her office was so small and shabby? She looked around at the four little walls with the one holo view. No artwork or other decorations. None of the stacks of old lawbooks that most lawyers still kept as props to impress clients. She hadn’t even bothered to get her degrees framed and hung up. This was a place even smaller and emptier than where she lived.
Too much time and money spent on loser cases. A good trial lawyer could make a living, have a nice office, maybe even real human staff—but you had to be selective to live off contingency cases. Erin had pushed herself hard enough, often enough, to know her weakness: she loved the pressure, the all-consuming intensity of trial too much. The tougher the case, the more that was true.
She had some other work—paying, transactional work that would at least help her to meet her overhead. But none of that would put her in trial on Monday. She would probably lose, and Polk would walk away blaming her; but not as much as she would blame herself. Then she would be despondent for a few weeks, until she managed to latch on to the next loser case, and go through it all again.
Polk seemed different from her other clients, though. He was guarded, wary, maybe not just of her; it was probably his nature. But a few times there, when he had talked about his work, and especially the puppy, she had caught glimpses of a great depth and power of being. An inner charisma? Maybe he was someone who could only open himself up to others under cover of his art. If so, that made it even more imperative that she see and comprehend what he did.
Erin shook her head. She had too much work to do to waste time in reverie, and a lot she needed to do with him. She decided to spend half an hour reviewing the medical files, to give him time to get home before calling. There was no unanimity about the how, but the medical authorities agreed that the NeuroTek interface was erasing or over-writing established connections between the billions of neurons in the brains of some users. In that intricate webwork was stored a person’s memories from earliest childhood, memories that made up the very sense of self. Some users had been damaged to the point where they did not know who they were at all, would have to record messages to themselves before going to sleep every night. And a frequent secondary symptom, present in Ephraim's case, was occurrence of petit mal-like seizures, triggered by stress.
As she accessed this information, Erin realized that the same thing could be happening to her even now, insidiously, without her ever knowing until it was too late. But in her case, that might not be so great a tragedy. Some people never had a real childhood to lose. She could imagine worse things than forgetting the day one of the older kids had taken her street mutt away and killed it.…
The guarded expression was already in place when his face appeared on her phone monitor. She was right, then; it was habitual.
“Ephraim,” she said, before he could speak, “I’ll make you a deal. You won’t run out on me like that again, and I won’t run out on you. Okay?”
He wasn’t going to agree to anything that simply, she saw.
“We have to go over your testimony,” she began again.
“What’s the point? You said I didn’t have a chance.”
“I didn’t say that. I said it’s going to be tough.” She could not bring herself to tell him how tough. The class action had been abolished by statute two decades ago. Of the 163 individual NeuroTek lawsuits brought by mind-damaged users, seventy-eight had already been dismissed by summary judgment. This would be the tenth case to go to trial. NeuroTek had won the first nine. “We have to work really hard and hope for some luck. Everything depends on whether we can get a good juror.
“All that stuff I said to the judge about the credibility of expert witnesses… your expert isn’t enough to win this for you. The thing that counts most is your testimony. We have to make that juror understand what this has done to you, make that person feel what you’re going through.”
“I went through all that with Derocher. When I gave the deposition.”
“That was different—you were answering questions for NeuroTek’s attorney. Here, you’ll be talking to the person who’s deciding the case. We have only a short, short time to present your testimony.” It used to be that products liability cases were allowed weeks, even months of trial time, and that time-sanctions were not imposed for just a single improper question. She didn’t tell him that, either.
“A damn program is going to judge me! What the hell is an AI going to care if I remember my first day of second grade? I can look facts up, right? I can access news clips. We need a human judge, not a computer.”