Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (11 page)

“You’re saying that the prosecutor didn’t do the same kind of job that a paid lawyer would have?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Connor. “And any one of you who thinks a real person wouldn’t have challenged the defense’s claims is deluded.”

Lips were chewed, pencils were drummed on the table, and there was a lapse in verbal communication.

“So, what do we do now?” The foreman was folding and refolding one of the small slips of paper. “There are eleven of us who think there’s a reasonable doubt, that these boys should walk, and you’re the only one who says they shouldn’t. I don’t think anybody’s going to convince anyone else they’re wrong.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Connor. “I think a lot of the evidence presented would have looked different if the prosecution had actually done its job, but I won’t waste your time just for me. You guys vote and I’ll abstain. If the vote is still eleven for not guilty then the boys can walk. If at least one of you agrees with me that the robot could have done better, then we look at some of the evidence again.”

Ten faces were turned down to their papers so Connor locked eyes with the only juror who was looking in his direction — a muscular man to his left, halfway between himself and the foreman. He held the stare for a moment but broke it off, not wanting to make the man uncomfortable. Connor turned and paced to the corner of the room while the others voted. He took great pains not to look at any of the jurors, and instead stared into the fake window — a viewscreen recessed into the wall which showed a scene of a sun-drenched corn farm, thin clouds floating through the clearest of blue skies. ‘Windows’ like this were a staple underground where there was no sky.

There were nine guilty votes and two in favor of reviewing the evidence. Most of the nine cursed. Some threw up their arms in exasperation. Mrs. Rational and Mr. Muscles looked calmly at Connor. At least now he knew who his potential friends were.

“Thank you,” he said, waving a hand at the viewscreen. The sunny vista disappeared, replaced with a menu listing all the evidence of the case. “I just want to make sure nothing was overlooked. This doesn’t have to take long. I know some of you have things to do.”

Mr. Angry rose from his seat. “I can’t believe two of you fell for this garbage! We could have been out of here by now. These are good kids, they thought she was a vampire, and it turns out she was!”

“They were dead quiet when they were first interrogated,” said Connor. “Check the timeline of the evidence. They only said they thought she was a vampire after they heard from their lawyer, and that was after he had seen the coroner’s report.”

“That doesn’t mean they didn’t know it beforehand.”

“No, but it means that they might only have gotten the idea from their lawyer.”

“You’re full of shit. These are good kids who’ve never been in any trouble. Their moms were sobbing on the stand when they were testifying.”

“And right beside them were the sobbing parents of the victim, so what does that prove?”

“That girl deserved what she got,” said Mr. Angry. “What was she doing in a dump neighborhood like that if not looking for trouble? She was six levels underground, only the worst of the worst spend any time down there.”

Connor brought up a still image of the location where the attack had happened. The courthouse’s level was a kilometer underground, with so many twists, turns, and elevators between it and the surface that it would take almost a full day to navigate to ground. A billion people lived this way; many of them were born and died without ever seeing sunlight. Lack of sun was why there were so many vampires underground, where the government had all but declared open season on them.

“Six-Underground is only one level down from this courthouse. And she ran into your
good kids
in that neighborhood, didn’t she? If it was such a trouble spot, what were they doing there?”

Mr. Angry didn’t respond.

There was silence around the room as Connor took his seat, shaking his head with disgust. “Nobody deserves what this girl got.”

“Okay,” said the foreman, “so maybe their lawyer told them to say that they thought she was a vampire. It doesn’t change the fact that she
was
a vampire.”

“She was a vampire when the coroner got to her, that doesn’t mean she was a vampire when the boys got to her.” Connor gestured at the listed evidence. “Look, here’s the blood test we saw in court, the one from the morning before the attack, taken when she applied for a job. That test was negative for vampirism.”

“So you think a vampire saw what happened to this girl and turned her afterwards? What for?”

“To stop her from dying, I guess. To save her life.”

There was a laugh around the table.

“Great,” said Mr. Angry. “Now we have compassionate vampires, biting people in the neck so they won’t die. You know what he
could
have done to keep her alive? Call a fucking ambulance!”

More general laughter, of approval.

Connor stared at the man until the laughter died down. He stared until the silence grew uncomfortable. He had no problems making Mr. Angry squirm. He knew that he could convince some of the other jurors through logic, some through charm, and some would follow like sheep. He knew that some would need to be humiliated or berated. What Mr. Angry needed was to be afraid, to understand that there was one in this room who was bigger and fiercer. Connor waited until the man swallowed and looked away. “Do you know so much about vampires?” he asked. “Do you know that one of them wouldn’t have behaved that way?”

“They’re monsters,” replied the man. “I’ve seen it firsthand. They don’t feel anything. They’re not human anymore, that’s why they don’t have rights.”

“Then maybe this vampire smelled blood and got hungry, I don’t know, but I bet that they feel more than you think,” said Connor. “And the expert who testified agrees with me. Nobody knows exactly how vampirism does what it does, but victims respond normally to most lines of questioning even if they’re clinically dead.”

“And then they grow ridiculously violent and the cops have no choice but to put them down for good. They can’t even be sedated.”

“That’s right,” said Connor. “Sedatives don’t work and neither do stimulants, but this girl had drugs in her system. If she was a vampire, what would be the point? As for the violence, how would you react if they locked you in a cage without food but you could never die of starvation? What would you do if they left you there for days or weeks until the hunger was the only thing you could think about, until it had torn you inside out, and then they had you interrogated by a giant hamburger, or whatever your favorite food is? You’d lose it, too.”

Mr. Angry had started to sweat, and he loosened his shirt collar with a finger. “We can’t prove whether she was a vampire when they got to her. Nobody can. But we know that when her body was found that she was a vampire. That’s enough doubt for me to say that maybe the boys aren’t guilty.”

If Mr. Angry was starting to argue using logic, then Connor was winning. He turned to the foreman. “Can we do a quick vote? I think I’ve put a small hole in the ‘good kids’ argument, and I’ve given a couple of explanations besides the one where this girl was a vampire before the beating. I’d like to know if we’re going to keep going through the evidence or if nobody agrees with me.”

There were four votes out of eleven to continue re-evaluating the evidence.

“Maybe we should order some food?” The foreman leaned back in his chair, patting his stomach. “It looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”

Connor startled at the mention of food. He hadn’t eaten since the previous day and the hunger was becoming hard to push aside. It was easier to keep at bay when nobody spoke about food. “I’ll pass,” he said. “I had a huge breakfast, and I doubt they have anything here that I’d find particularly appealing.” He waited until all the others had indicated their preference for food and the foreman had given the list to a guard outside the door.

“Okay,” said Connor. “Let’s forget who was good and who wasn’t. Aside from the coroner’s report, what evidence do we have that the girl was a vampire before she was attacked?”

Mrs. Rational chewed her lip, staring at the viewscreen. “The girl finally stopped fighting back when the boys stabbed a piece of wood through her heart. That’s a vampire thing, right? The expert witness talked about that.”

Connor stared at her for a moment, and then leaned over to pick up a pair of pencils from the table, placing them end to end in his palm and closing his hand so that two inches of wood protruded from the top and bottom of his fist. He looked at the woman’s eyes, then to the center of her chest, then back to her eyes. “It’s not exactly ‘a vampire thing’.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I see your point.”

The juror to Mrs. Rational’s right looked thoughtful. “We really only have the testimony of the boys, I guess.”

Connor nodded. “They said she attacked them, but video evidence only shows her standing on the corner while the boys approached. She certainly didn’t back down from them, but she didn’t make the first move.”

“The boys said that she threatened them, and fought like a demon, strong and fast.”

“Strong and fast compared to what?” asked Connor. “People have been engineering their kids’ genes for almost fifty years. Everybody’s strong and fast — bones like titanium, muscles like Atlas. People are living so long that we don’t even know what the life expectancy of a human is anymore! What do vampires have that humans don’t?”

The foreman raised a hand. “Are we sure she was engineered? I don’t remember hearing about it at the trial.”

Connor menued through the options on the viewscreen, stopping at the victim’s basic information. After her name was the indicator M01FF. The last two letters meant that she had been born female and was still female. The
em
meant that she was modded — genetically modified. The numbers indicated that she was first generation modded — that her parents had not been engineered.

The foreman nodded. “They said she was stronger and faster than ‘normal’, that they hit her as hard as they could and she wasn’t going down, not until after a long time.”

“The video shows that,” agreed Connor, “but if she was still a human, that could have been the drugs. The footage shows the boys dragging her body into the alley just before they left. The coroner’s report says that the girl’s death was caused by massive loss of blood. ‘Near-complete loss of blood’ was what he said. And yet the police didn’t find all that much blood at the scene. That’s another argument for her being attacked by a vampire
after
she was attacked by the boys. A vampire might have tried to drink what was left inside her.”

“The shopkeeper whose sidewalk it happened on hosed a lot of blood away before the cops showed up because he didn’t see a body anywhere,” said Mrs. Rational. “The police had no way to measure how much blood was inside or outside her body when the boys left.”

“I know that,” said Connor. “But bodies don’t bleed out
all
the blood inside them, no matter how badly you cut them. You’d have to run them through a blender. There must have been some blood left when she was dragged into the alley.”

“So you think a vampire got to her in that alley, sometime between the point at which she was beaten to death and the time the police arrived?”

“That’s what I think could have happened, yes.”

Connor noted six heads nodding at his assessment. With any luck, he now had a majority. Having numbers on his side might even swing some additional votes his way, especially if some were more interested in leaving early than in seeing justice done.

“But you’re not sure?” asked Mrs. Rational.

“How can anybody be sure?” asked Connor. “But the prosecutor-bot sure didn’t bring it up, and it should have.”

“So let’s say,” said the woman, “for the sake of argument, that she wasn’t a vampire when these six guys beat the tar out of her.”

Connor nodded.

“And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a vampire got to her in the alley after she was dumped there, and it drained all her blood, which turned her into a vampire, but then she was too weakened so it didn’t stick and then she died…”

Connor nodded again.

“If that’s the case, then these kids are still not guilty of murder. Some vampire killed her.” She leaned back in her chair, waiting for Connor to come up with a valid reply. There were murmurings from almost every other seat.

“We don’t have to find them guilty of murder,” said Connor. “At that point we could return a guilty verdict for a lesser charge like attempted murder.”

“But that’s a lot of theory,” said Mr. Angry. “There’s still reasonable doubt that the girl was already dead before they got to her. We have to find them not guilty.”

Mrs. Rational nodded. “It’s not that I disagree with you about vampires; I think we as a society could, and should, find a way to integrate them, but that’s not our job here.”

Connor stared back at her. If he lost her support, then there was no hope for a guilty verdict. Was it enough that he had convinced one person that vampires deserved equal treatment? He had come to see justice done for a girl whose only crime was to have been bitten in the neck, could he live with having altered one person’s perception towards the undead?