New Alcatraz: Dark Time
Page 1
Praise for Grant Pies
“New Alcatraz is edgy, masterful storytelling, delivered with just the right psychological/emotional tone to be believable.” — B. Johnson (Amazon Review)
“To me, a great fiction story is one that keeps my attention, sucks me in, has characters that seem realistic and I can visualize, and has a storyline that develops so well that it milutiplies my interest as it goes on. This book definitely does all of that and more. A very well written book that you won’t want to put down!” — Rebecca Winters (Amazon Review)
“An outstanding read! This book just offers so much, with great writing and a plot which demonstrates wonderful imagination and creativity. Highly recommend does not say enough – one of the best books I have read in years!” — Graham S. (Amazon Review)
“Truly a phenomenal read! The author’s mastery of time and space and what it means to live on various planes of existence took me to a place in my soul I’ve never traveled before. It also really made me think about and imagine what the future of humanity will look like. I can’t wait to read the next book in the series!” — D.D. Scott, International Bestselling Author
NEW ALCATRAZ
Volume I
DARK TIME
By
Grant Pies
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are of the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Grant Pies
Second Electronic Edition: November 2017
All rights reserved.
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
Carl Sagan
New Alcatraz, Volume I: Dark Time
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 - May 15, 2070, Phoenix, AZ
Court Transcript 1
CHAPTER 2 - May 15, 2070, Phoenix, AZ
CHAPTER 3 - 2037, Buford, WY
CHAPTER 4 - 2048, Buford, WY
CHAPTER 5 - 2049, Buford, WY
CHAPTER 6 - 2050, Buford, WY
CHAPTER 7 - 2050, Buford, WY
CHAPTER 8 - 2050, Buford, WY
CHAPTER 9 - 2050, Yellowstone Nat'l Conservation Zone
Court Transcript 2
CHAPTER 10 - 2050, Yellowstone Nat'l Conservation Zone
CHAPTER 11 - 2050, Yellowstone Nat'l Conservation Zone
CHAPTER 12 - 2050, Yellowstone Nat'l Conservation Zone
CHAPTER 13 - 2050, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 14 - 2052, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 15 - 2056, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 16 - 2070, Phoenix, AZ
CHAPTER 17- 2070, Phoenix, AZ
CHAPTER 18 - 2070, Phoenix, AZ
CHAPTER 19 - 2070, Denver, CO
Court Transcript 3
CHAPTER 20 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 1
CHAPTER 21 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 2
CHAPTER 22 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 3
CHAPTER 23 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 4
CHAPTER 24 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 4
CHAPTER 25 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 5
CHAPTER 26 - 2033, Santa Fe, NM
CHAPTER 27 - 2050, Santa Fe, NM
Court Transcript 4
CHAPTER 28 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 5
CHAPTER 29 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 6
CHAPTER 30 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 6
CHAPTER 31 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 6
CHAPTER 32 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 6
Court Transcript 5
CHAPTER 33 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 7
CHAPTER 34 - 2070, Fayetteville, AK
CHAPTER 35 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 7
CHAPTER 36 - 2066, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 37 - 2066, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 38 - 2066, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 39 - 2066, Denver, CO
Court Transcript 6
CHAPTER 40 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 8
CHAPTER 41- 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 8
CHAPTER 42 - 2066, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 43 - 2067, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 44 - 2067, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 45 - 2067, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 46- 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 8
CHAPTER 47- 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
Court Transcript 7
CHAPTER 48 - 2067, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 49 - 2068, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 50 - 2068, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 51 - 2068, 128 KM Outside Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 52- 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 53 - 2068, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 54 - 2068, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 55 - 2068, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 56 - 2068, Ashton, ID
Court Trasncript 8
CHAPTER 57 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 58 - 2068, 200 KM Outside Denver, CO
CHAPTER 59 - 2068, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 60 - 2068, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 61 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 62 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 63 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 64 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
Court Trasncript 9
CHAPTER 65 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 66 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 67 - 2069, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 68 - 2069, Denver, CO
CHAPTER 69 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
CHAPTER 70 - 5065, New Alcatraz, Day 9
Court Trasncript 10
CHAPTER 71 - 2069, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 72 - 2069, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 73 - May 14, 2070, Phoenix, AZ
CHAPTER 74 - 2069, Ashton, ID
CHAPTER 75 - 2069, Ashton, ID
Court Transcript 11
CHAPTER 76 - May 14, 2070, Phoenix, AZ
CHAPTER 77 - May 14, 2070, Phoenix, AZ
CHAPTER 1
MAY 15, 2070
PHOENIX, AZ
I walked out of the courtroom and left my client, Whitman, seated at the table. The guards led him to a small room outside the court where he would be powered down until the jury finished their deliberations. I offered him no parting words. My footsteps echoed throughout the cavernous halls of the empty court house. The large tiles, which used to shine from a weekly polish, now were dull and tarnished with mounds of chewing gum and scuff marks. The few attorneys still in the courthouse huddled together to finalize their last-minute plea bargains before the jury returned a late-night verdict neither side was pleased with. No one approached me with a plea bargain. Prosecutors didn’t wave members of the ARC down to offer them a deal.
“How’d it go, Powell?” one of the bailiffs asked me on my way out. His wide grin revealed a missing molar in the back of his mouth as he tried to keep himself from laughing mid-sentence.
“You gonna win this one?” The grizzled bailiff barely got the words out of his mouth before he started to laugh. His guttural sounds of mocking drowned out my footsteps. I squeezed the handle of my beaten briefcase and offered him no response.
A professor of mine, an old shriveled man whose glasses teetered on the edge of his nose, and whose body slouched over like a heavy weight hung around his neck, told me “an attorney is only as good as the facts they are given. Others may try to tell you otherwise, but it’s true. Shitty facts are shitty facts and no amount of theatrics, catch phrases, preparation, depositions, or anything else will change them,” he said.
Obviously, he never thought a lawyer would represent anything other than humans. He never envisioned the Android Representation Counsel. The ARC. What I have found, throughout my years of practice, is it really boils dow
n to an attorney is only as good as their client. And in my case, all of my clients were androids.
I haven’t represented a human in five years. When I applied to law school, the admissions officers rattled off salary figures and employment rates. They explained how, with a law degree, I would have endless potential. Start your own firm, contract work, in-house counsel for a large corporation. If you don’t want to practice law, they told me as if it made sense to go through law school without a desire to practice law, you can work in human resources, political campaigns, or federal agencies.
The reality was they told this to millions of people. We all fell for the promise of endless possibilities, and entered the halls of our law school with the grandest plans locked tightly in our minds. But we all left with the hollow feeling that the last three years taught us nothing more than “don’t get sued.”
Give me the best set of facts possible, but if that client is an android, none of that matters. The android might as well have been caught red handed. These days, with time travel, or time movement as the Time Anomaly Agency calls it, alibis and time of death are meaningless.
The first case I worked as a member of the ARC involved the robbery of a pharmaceuticals and chemicals warehouse. The security system showed a human employee creep to the back door of the warehouse and swipe his security card. Once inside, the cameras were disabled. The next morning, crates of proprietary chemicals were gone. Nothing but square outlines of dust were left where the boxes of chemicals used to sit. But the police found tiny metal plates and green circuit boards from an android with serial numbers etched on them scattered around.
The police tracked them back to an android that was found guilty and decommissioned within three days. The employee was never charged. Everyone knew the employee had purchased an unregistered android and simply scattered some of their parts at the scene, but no one cared as long as someone, or something, was charged.
People would much rather just feel safe than actually be safe, and that makes the judicial system’s job much easier. People just want someone, even the wrong person or wrong android, to go to jail than have a crime go unsolved. The public can’t handle an unsolved case. People want to be deceived, so our judicial system just gives them what they want.
Once the public saw how easily androids were convicted of crimes, there was a surge in crime. Criminals could simply buy an android to act as their own fall guy. It was better than an alibi. Cops called this a ‘buy out.’ It’s nothing official, of course, but well known enough to have a nickname. These days, the only time a ‘buy out’ won’t work is if there is DNA evidence left behind by a human. But people are rarely that stupid.
Most people leave their android in a sleep state at the scene of the crime, so it is waiting there when the police show up. Sometimes, they place evidence on the android. If it’s a robbery they place currency with incriminating serial numbers on the robot. If it is a murder, or violent crime, they splatter blood on the android. If they don’t want to lug the android to the actual scene, they leave behind paperwork with an address on it or a piece of the android with a serial number on it, leading the police to the android. Of course, they reported the android missing long before the crime was committed. The police know, or at least they should know, a buy out immediately when they get to the crime scene.
With every android conviction, it becomes even easier to convict the next one, and the next one, and so on. Most people don’t automatically convict an android because they dislike them or dislike the idea of them. They just simply don’t care enough to really weigh the evidence in a case. The juries in the android cases are made up of twelve humans with a Federated Identification Card that have passed the eighth grade. They equate androids to their cars or electric razors.
It would be easier if the Federated Government allowed androids on juries. But the court ruled that an android’s ability to continually browse the Internet could allow them to consider outside evidence during trials. But, in reality, humans just don’t trust androids to convict another android. So that leaves me, defending, what most believes is a glorified washing machine, in front of twelve people who just want to unplug the washing machine and go home.
UNIT 5987D V.
FEDERATED NORTH AMERICA
CASE No. 2070FN99823
Direct Examination of Defense Witness Unit 5987D by Counselor Powell
Q: Please state your name for the record.
A: Unit 5987D.
Q: That is your factory designation, right?
A: Yes.
Q: But is that what you call yourself?
A: No sir, I call myself Whitman.
Q: Just “Whitman?” No surname?
A: No, just Whitman.
Q: Did you give that name to yourself or did someone else?
A: I gave it to myself.
Q: So why not give yourself a full name? First and last?
A: A first name is informal. People change, shorten, or alter their first names all the time. It has little significance. But surnames are formal. They carry great weight with humans, and associate a person with a familial group, clan, or tribe. It signifies where you come from. And, more importantly, it signifies who you come from. That cannot be given to yourself. That cannot be made up.
Q: I see, so is that what all androids do? Just give themselves first names?
A: Not to my knowledge. Many androids pick both first and last names for themselves.
Q: OK, so how did you come up with Whit…?
Federated Prosecutor Klipton: Objection! I don’t see the relevance to continuing this line of questioning. The model refers to itself as Whitman. I don’t see the need to belabor this point.
Court: Sustained. Counselor let’s move on please.
Counselor Powell: Sorry your honor. I will move on.
CHAPTER 2
MAY 15, 2070
PHOENIX, AZ
After my closing argument in the Whitman case, I walked home and I couldn’t help but wish I could leave the ARC. Unfortunately, as with most jobs these days, I was essentially conscripted. I signed an eight-year agreement with the ARC. In exchange, they dropped all charges against me.
That is how everyone in the ARC gets there. Years ago, the Federated Bar enacted Rules of Conduct. Supposedly, the rules gave us credibility. Maybe they did. People assumed that, without rules, lawyers would somehow cheat the system and take advantage of the general public. Maybe we would. Like most sets of rules, they were quickly used for purposes other than originally intended.
After android ownership became more prevalent in society, and ‘buy-outs’ were invented, android crime increased, and the Ministry of Science created the ARC to address the lack of suitable attorneys who were willing to represent the androids. No attorneys joined the ARC willingly, so the Ministry populated it with people who violated the Federated Rules of Conduct. In exchange for their ‘joining’ the ARC, the Ministry agreed to not disbar an attorney and drop any federal charges against them.
At first, the ARC consisted of the blatant rule violators. Attorneys who falsified pleadings, lied to judges, or helped clients evade taxes. If you were caught, the choice was clear; disbarment, incarceration, or join the ARC.
Some attorneys were just a few years shy of retirement anyways, so they just accepted the disbarment. But the majority of us couldn’t afford to retire. We had home loans, student loans, and taxes. It was blackmail of the worst kind. Government blackmail.
The ARC is such a nightmare for attorneys that they started to behave better when faced with the threat of joining. The stricter they enforced the rules, the better behaved the attorneys became. The Bar Grievance Committees and the Ministry of Science grew frustrated. They didn’t want us to follow the rules. They needed us to break them.
Soon they created more rules. The more desperate they got for ARC members, the more outlandish the rules became. The Federated Bar prohibited the representation of family members, limited the amount of allowed practice areas, dicta
ted what an attorney could charge, and prohibited all forms of advertising. They made rules against how many hours a week you could practice or how far an attorney could live from his office.
It doesn’t matter what rule I broke. All of them are equally absurd. I was not only threatened with disbarment, but also with a brief prison sentence. The ARC is bad, but prison is worse. Not to mention temporal prison; New Alcatraz.
The ARC isn’t just a pay cut and horrible hours. Most attorneys already were faced with diminishing pay and extended hours before they were forced into the ARC. It isn’t even the stigma of representing androids that is the worst part. Not for me anyway.
The worst part is the hopelessness of the ARC; the guarantee that you will always lose every single case. Even the most indifferent attorney will tire of losing eventually.
I am five years into my eight-year contract. By now it is easy to forget about all of the cases I have lost. Tomorrow, Whitman will be decommissioned. Even he knows this. I have never won a case since joining the ARC, and the Whitman case will be no different. The case would have been over tonight if it weren’t so late. Tomorrow the jury will ‘deliberate’ for however long they need to make themselves feel like they did their duty. They will return a verdict of guilty, and Whitman will be decommissioned on the spot. No last words. No appeal. No post-conviction motions. Nothing.
They will remove his main power circuit. Wheel him back to his manufacturer, Wayfield Industries, and strip the synthetic skin off of his metal frame. Then the engineers will begin to disassemble Whitman one piece at a time. The parts will be inspected, and stored in Wayfield’s underground vault. A vault rumored to house all decommissioned androids.
Reports from anonymous ex-employees of Wayfield claim that the vault is buried twenty stories underneath the Denver Airport. Some say it is fifty stories underground. Allegedly, the vault could withstand a 9.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. Other reports stated that the vault was powered by a proprietary energy source created at Wayfield Industries, which would last long after the next ten generations were dead. Whitman will remain in that mystery vault until his parts are used for other androids or until his model becomes obsolete.