The Court’s chief justice appeared comfortable allowing this public pillorying of Dunbar to go on, only occasionally reminding everyone that the hearing was not a trial for crimes against humanity. And by the end of the first week, the application for WMD status was granted to the Oracle SOOPE.
That’s when an Immensity strategy group in Darwin, Australia, decided to contact the woman who’d talked her way into Dunbar’s mansion and walked back out with the transcript for Enigmedia’s Tale of Two War Zones:
Audrey Zheng.
Audrey was given a new mission-project, and proceeded to catch the next suborbital flight to Geneva.
Arrangements were made for Audrey to have a reserved seat in the viewing gallery of the international courtroom. Arriving halfway through the hearing’s eighth day, she made her way to a seat high at the back of the gallery, dressed in her most conservative suit and equipped with the latest in discreet wireless satlinkage: a fully subvocalizable subdermal mike; a cochlear threadset; a contact lens with virtual data-display.
Feeling as linked, locked, and loaded as a diplomat-spy, Audrey slipped into her gallery seat, and soon began to wish she’d worn something more likely to get Dunbar to notice her. Because she was there to do more than act as official observer and point-of-contact for the strategy group following the hearing from down in Darwin. Audrey’s primary purpose in flying to Geneva was to get out of Dunbar what she’d failed to get from him at his Hoag Head Place estate.
The truth about what had transpired when Dunbar met with Mennochio at Los Alamos all those years ago.
That meeting — so impactful for Dunbar, so entirely forgettable for Mennochio himself — remained a puzzle. There was some twist to that story, Audrey had no doubt. And Dunbar had deliberately left it out of his Tale of Two War Zones. Was he holding it back as a bit of bargaining-chip testimony for this unavoidable hearing?
Flying Audrey to Geneva in the hopes of getting Dunbar to give her, and Immensity, a head’s up about what he might reveal about that Los Alamos meeting… Well, that seemed to Audrey a long-shot indeed, a sign of just how worried the strategy group in Darwin really was.
As it turned out, all Audrey’s attempts to get close to Dunbar, re-establish contact with him during the course of the hearings failed. Dunbar’s counselors and handlers were keeping everyone at bay, and keeping Dunbar silent on the stand while they made their case, claiming the Highway of Death bombing runs and resulting Republican Guard deaths were the responsibility of Allied combat ops commanders alone.
The prosecution didn’t trifle with the claims of Dunbar’s innocence; they were too busy keeping their eye on the DUTT prize. Having established the Oracle SOOPE as a ‘deadly and destructive’ memetic weapon, the prosecution had only one task left: To link the Oracle SOOPE to Jorges Mennochio and the founding of Immensity itself.
Audrey was annoyed that the details in A Tale of Two War Zones couldn’t stymie their DUTT case. The prosecutors weren’t the least bit bothered by the fact that Dunbar had met with Mennochio after developing the Oracle SOOPE. Oh, it would have been better for their case had Dunbar met with Jorges earlier; but in the long run all the prosecution needed was Dunbar to have discussed the Oracle during that mysterious meeting in Los Alamos.
If Dunbar had shared any of Oracle’s details with Mennochio, a DUTT lineage with Immensity’s own founding SOOPE sims would be established.
And Jorges would be called in.
It all came down to what was said at that meeting, what Dunbar said was said.
But so far he hadn’t said a word.
Audrey knew that prosecution lawyers had many ways of convincing a reluctant witness to talk.
But with such a big fish on the line — Mennochio was the one they’d been trying to reel in for years — she wasn’t surprised to see the prosecutors play it safe, and run a ‘shake, bake and break’ campaign against Kevin Dunbar. On the hearing’s tenth day they began bringing in widows and orphans of Iraqi soldiers who’d been incinerated on the Basra to Mutlaa highway.
Dunbar’s counsel objected, pointing out that the Oracle’s destructive-weapon status had already been ruled on by the Court.
The prosecution pointed out in turn that this was an international hearing, and that their Iraqi witnesses had come a long way to have their side of the Gulf War story heard. To send them home without letting them speak would be to compound their loss.
The chief justice allowed the new witnesses. And as one Iraqi after another stepped to the centre podium to read their statement, and as translations were piped over the courtroom’s radio channels, Audrey could see the weight of guilt-pressure these new witnesses were putting on Dunbar. His earlier calm resignation was crumbling. His unearthly motionlessness of the first week — which had made Dunbar appear part of the terrible digital war-stills backdropping him — was gone.
Dunbar now alternated between bouts of key-wording on a paper notepad and guilt-ridden glances around the courtroom, eyes flickering from one accusing face to another in the crowded galleries above him. A few times he seemed to be looking in Audrey’s direction, and at those moments she tried hard to catch his eye, shifting in her seat, adjusting her hair with both arms held high behind her head, as close as she could come to waving for attention.
Dunbar didn’t appear to notice her. And over the next two days his posture grew droopier, more beaten down, his keywording more frantic, the frenetic scribbling of a man trying to map out a route back to safety, sanity. By day twelve, the Court’s press gallery was crowing over how close Dunbar looked to breaking down. They didn’t seem to realize what was obvious to Audrey:
Dunbar was already a broken man. He’d been broken for decades.
Nevertheless, the press had it right.
On the morning of the hearing’s thirteenth day, Dunbar finally broke his silence. But just before he spoke he tore a page off his notepad, handed it to an assistant counselor. The entire court watched as the counselor walked across the floor, then up into the viewing galleries, then handed the note to Audrey.
She opened it carefully, to prevent the press cameras now training on her from filming its contents. Just two lines.
Thought-crime does not entail death.
Thought-crime is death.
A quote from Orwell, not a good sign. Dunbar was giving her the heads-up she’d come for, a warning that he was about to yield to another of his ‘burn it all down’ impulses. Audrey subvocalized the bad news to the Darwin strategy group — It’s about to go down, Dunbar intends to roll on us — then she looked up to see the prosecution team staring at her and exchanging a flurry of whispers, trying to ID her from the sign-in sheets. The second they had her pegged, chief prosecutor Killian Van Vechten popped up, strolled over to Dunbar’s table, stood in front of the star witness and said:
“Counsel has repeatedly told us how Mr. Dunbar revealed all in his so-called ‘tale testimonial’ to Enigmedia.” Van Vechten turned, cast a knowing look directly at Audrey. “But that online confession, while entertaining, was merely an attempt by Immensity to shape public opinion before this hearing could convene.”
The Tale of Two War Zones material, ignored for most of the hearing, was a juicy bone left to last, something the prosecutors were no doubt prepared to spend days tearing apart.
“Besides,” Van Vechten sighed, “that biased online account left out the crux of the story, didn’t it?”
Audrey heard a double-click in her cochlear threadset, then a member of the strategy group murmured in her mind, Message received, Aud. We’re watching the live feed now.
Placing both hands on the witness counsel’s table, Van Vechten leaned closer to Dunbar. “Enigmedia’s account left out what happened when you traveled to Los Alamos, lunched with the good Doctor, founding father and patron saint of Immensity… Don’t suppose you’d like to tell the Court about tha
t now, would you?”
Knowing he was unlikely to get an answer, Van Vechten had already started to turn away when Dunbar sat forward, cleared his throat.
Here it comes, Audrey subvocced.
“Ever met Doctor Mennochio?” Dunbar asked, looking up at Van Vechten.
Dunbar’s table of counselors glanced at their client in surprise, but made no attempt to stop him from speaking. Audrey was confused. Was Dunbar the one who’d chosen to just sit there, take thirteen days of unsubtle accusation and incrimination without a word in his own defence?
“Never met him,” Van Vechten admitted. “The good Doctor’s a hard man to see these days.”
An understatement. As a target of many assassination attempts, Mennochio was impossible to meet these days, was rarely seen outside the secure Emerald campus on the outskirts of Darwin.
“Wasn’t hard to meet when he was just another Los Alamos mathematician,” Dunbar said. “And I can tell you this much: first impression you get of Mennochio is that there’s something … wrong with him.”
An appreciative murmur rippled outward from the prosecution team’s table, across the lower press area, up into the higher galleries. The Geneva crowd was warming to this conversation; bureauflunkies seated near Audrey exchanged small knowing smiles.
Meanwhile Van Vechten was undergoing a cautious, pious transformation down on the courtroom floor. Audrey saw the chief prosecutor ease a hip onto the front edge of Dunbar’s desk so that he was half standing, half sitting, hands clasped humbly on his lap, head bent as though in prayer over Dunbar, who also had his head down over the table’s built-in microphone. The scene instantly became one of confession.
Van Vechten, the brilliant Dutch-protestant prosecutor so adept at reading people that he’d instinctively slipped into the role of Catholic priest-confessor for Dunbar’s bent repentant form. “Take it you’re referring to Mennochio’s physical appearance,” Van Vechten said softly.
“His appearance? No.” Dunbar leaned closer, voice dropping to a lower more confidential tone. “I mean the way Mennochio thinks.”
The looks of anticipation on some of the junior prosecutors become unabashed smiles.
“I swear to you,” Dunbar went on, “Jorges Mennochio does not think like any ordinary human being. Spend a few hours with him, and you’d know. You’d see he’s capable of doing it.”
“Doing what, Kevin?” Van Vechten daring a first-name familiarity with the man he’d been carefully corroding for thirteen days.
“Running things in parallel, right before your eyes,” Dunbar said. “Running SOOPE sims inside his head, without having to compile them in path-code. Snatching algorithms out of the air, summoning systems to life right there, in his office. Whole new metasystems, you can’t imagine. I couldn’t imagine. But I did, in the end.” Dunbar looked up at Van Vechten, as though apologizing for something. “I saw how it would run, where the world could go, with Mennochio’s vision. I saw. And I believed in him, wholly, utterly.”
That’s not what you told me, Audrey thought. So strange, that here in front of the world’s cameras, Dunbar was capable of a more intimate sharing of truths than he’d been with Audrey in the comfort of his own home.
“Did Jorges ask you about your previous SOOPE work, the Oracle project, and so on?”
“He’d heard the rumours. So I told him the truth.”
It seemed to Audrey that everyone in the courtroom looked buoyant, expectant, even as she held her breath, afraid of what was coming next.
“I told him his Immensity visions would boot-up in bigger ways than he realized. And I told him I couldn’t work with him, then I left,” Dunbar said, abruptly shutting down.
Another double-click in her cochlear threadset, and a gravelly murmuring in her head. I remember this fellow now. The words of a man with a rebuilt voicebox, sitting in with the Darwin strategists. The one who listened, then left! Said nothing for an hour, then talked like a prophet stepped down off a mountain for a minute or two. Made some remarks about Immensity’s boot-up phase, infectious growth patterns, eventual success. Then told me it wasn’t in his firm’s best interest to do any work for me, and vanished.
It was eerie, Audrey thought, hearing Jorges himself in her inner ear, describing the man who was down on the courtroom floor describing Jorges.
“So you couldn’t in good conscience join the push for Immensity,” Van Vechten continued, still playing the confessor. “Why not, Kevin?”
“Because he had me doing it, too.” Dunbar seemed lost in his own reflections, off on his own somewhere. “It’s as though Mennochio’s abilities rub off on you. Listening to him, I felt my understanding of SOOPE theory expanding, had a kind of parallel-processing epiphany. I actually ran path-code in my mind.” Dunbar shook his head, awed even by the memory of it. “I saw whole metasystems surging forward, decades into the future — not Mennochio’s alternative systems, mind you. Our systems.” Dunbar made a sweeping gesture around the courtroom. “This system.”
“And what did you foresee?”
Van Vechten truly had the patience of a priest, Audrey thought.
“A world trying to resist Mennochio’s memetic infections,” Dunbar replied. “Legal bodies trying to bring Immensity down by DUTTing its foundation sims, its boot-up SOOPEs. Courts were already DUTTing simulations even then, you know. And I knew the two teams that had defected from my firm to work for Mennochio were protected from DUTT charges by the confidentiality agreements that bound them to secrecy. They couldn’t provide a DUTT lineage back to the Oracle because, by law, they couldn’t provide any Oracle algorithms or details—”
“But you had no such constraints, Kevin,” Van Vechten reminded the courtroom and the cameras. Shifting off the desk, he stepped out across the court floor in Audrey’s direction before gesturing back at his wayward witness. “Dunbar and Caety owned the Oracle SOOPE outright. You could discuss it, even show parts of it to a potential Los Alamos client.”
“You forget that I flew to meet Mennochio the morning after that.” Dunbar turned, gestured at the digital wall behind him, displaying another Highway of Death still-image. “Knowing it was my idea to SOOPE that.”
“Counsel should remind their witness that our Court is seeking a DUTT lineage, not a lineage for casualties of war,” the chief justice interrupted. “Mr. Dunbar, you are not on trial, this is merely an informal hearing.”
“So you keep saying. But you’re not hearing me,” Dunbar complained. “I said I saw it all in my head, back in Mennochio’s office. Saw how big Immensity systems would get. Saw how our systems could undermine it, bring it tumbling down. Through me,” he said.
“Mister Dunbar—”
“If my firm worked with Mennochio on his SOOPE projects, they’d all have a DUTT lineage directly to that.” Another wave at the wall behind him. “Immensity would be infected by Dunbar and Caety’s proprietary algorithms, by Dunbar and Caety’s reputation, don’t you see? The firm that designed that would have designed Immensity’s SOOPE foundations.”
“And we are to believe you saw all this during your first meeting with him?” Van Vechten was falling back into his former Doubting Thomas role.
“It was unreal what I saw, listening to Mennochio.” He turned to the chief justice. “I saw systems running ahead all the way to this courtroom, this hearing.” Another wave at the wall behind him. “I saw that that moment entailed this moment. And I’ve been waiting for this moment to come ever since.”
Something clicked inside Audrey, and this time it wasn’t her threadset. Wondering why she hadn’t seen it before. This hearing was not about the DUTT, not for Dunbar. He’d given up a lot to protect Mennochio’s Immensity concepts back then, he’d do so now.
Audrey subvocced: Jorges, I fear my friend Dunbar has used you as bait to get his fifteen minutes in this courtroom.
A double-click, then that gravel voice, stones in her head. Would have made a formidable Immensity strategist. He sees how to use the old systems against themselves.
“It always comes to this,” Dunbar was saying, to himself, to the watching world. “A door opens, a room fills with lawyers, cameras. Arguments are presented that lay the blame on the system, the war machine, the generals, the field commanders, the soldiers, the missiles, the bullets. But in the end, the question remains.” Turning to face the press gallery cameras, Dunbar pointed to the image splashed across the wall behind him.
“Can any one person really be responsible for that?”
Then he suddenly, shakily got to his feet. “If the court will allow me,” Dunbar said, “I’d like to answer that question, and clear my name.”
Caught off guard, the chief justice waved him forward. Dunbar stepped out from behind the table, and crossed the courtroom floor, passing the chief justice’s table and stopping before the seated rows of middle-aged Iraqi orphans, ancient widows, soldier-survivors of the Highway of Death who’d come to make their impact statements.
“Let me be the first in this courtroom to say it.” A click from deep in Dunbar’s throat. He swallowed, didn’t say anything more for a moment. Then nodded, and declared:
“I am responsible. For the excessively high casualties on that day, that particular highway—” Raising an arm that now seemed too heavy to lift, aiming it one last time toward the digital wall. “I lured those troops out of safety onto that road, I aimed the war machine, the generals, the pilots, the missiles at them. All those who died there died according to plan.”
“My plan.”
He bowed his head.
Silence across the huge courtroom.
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 38
