Psykogeddon

by Dave Stone

  "That Judge Dredd has been assigned to the case," the computer said. "Arrests, detentions and all kinds of Judicial mayhem are expected momentarily."

  "The notorious Judge Dredd, eh?" Drago San exclaimed with delight. "My word, that opens up some distinct possibilities."

  He sat for a moment, considering the distinct possibilities. Then: "Computer?"

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Hold back on starting a new cycle when the current one ends," said Drago San. "Clear the boards and ready the heavy-customisation skeining-vats. I have in mind the setting up of a very special event."

  EIGHT

  "Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

  - The Mikado

  "The Defence has attempted to contend," said SJS-Judge Slithe, "that there is no evidence, other than pure hearsay, linking Efil Drago San to the sickening and utterly deplorable slaughter that was broadcast city-wide from the Killing Zone. As you can see in this reclaimed footage, however, Drago San is culpable in every respect..."

  "Objection!" cried Barnstable Wheems.

  "Oh, Grud, what is it now?" said Chief Judge Hershey.

  "Veracity of this so-called evidence," said Wheems, rising to his feet and glaring about himself in an attempt to be imposing.

  "As I understand it," he continued, "the complex which housed this so-called 'Killing Zone' was completely destroyed, along with all its records, when several million tonnes of raw sewerage was blown through it, as a result of a completely unrelated accident in the Sector Nine Resyk facility, which necessitated what I believe is called an emergency core-dump."

  Wheems smirked a little, in anticipation of some coming and supposedly humorous comment. "Am I to understand that a number of Judges are slightly more... fragrant than before in reclaiming this so-called footage?"

  The humorous comment, of course, went down like a lead dirigible.

  "The footage was reclaimed," said SJS-Judge Slithe, "from material imprinted on the synaptic network of one Psi-Judge Janus, who was forced to psionically interface with the transputer-based control system of the Killing Zone before it was destroyed. This material and more was imprinted on her living brain by the psychic backlash."

  "Then Defence contends," said Barnstable Wheems, "that all of this is still merely hearsay. Some delusional hallucination resulting from that action - if it ever happened in the first place - or actively and maliciously made up."

  "Give it a rest, Wheems," said Hershey. "You're the only guy in the world, it seems, who even wants to question the fact that he actually did it. For one thing, we have surviving and unimpeachable witnesses - Dredd, Janus and an Undercover Operations Judge whose actual name has no bearing on this hearing.

  "For another thing, we have Drago San's sworn statement, which roughly boils down to, 'Did it? Course I bleeding did it. What are you going to do about it?" You're on a hiding to nothing here, Wheems, if the main thrust of your argument is that he didn't do it."

  "Of course," said Wheems. "I am merely serving the best interests of my, uh, client, and bringing up that first possibility as a matter of form. The purpose of this hearing, however, is to decide other issues than the point of simple culpability."

  "Hey, I'm Danny Consart, this is Mega-City News - a fistful of fun every fifteen minutes! Coming up, environmentalists - should they just get the drokk over themselves or what? We went through hell, after all, to pretty much make sure there's no environment left so's they'd stop banging on about it. That's a special report, with Hartley Whipple, coming up.

  "Also coming up, N'Synthetic sole-survivor and solo pop sensation Manda T talks about her new daughter, Pixie Astroflash. She's a right little star, says Manda, as you'll see when she uses the holo-vid footage of the birth in her stonking new data-wafer. Way to squeeze one out for the guys, Manda!

  "And we'll be talking to hot-rockin' Xeno-porn director Jason Kane about his upcoming and utterly original holo-sim, Xenomorphic Bondage Slaves XXXVII. I can hardly wait! Jason appears courtesy of Dead Dog in the Water PreProductions, and wishes it to be known by any Justice Department forces who might be watching that any similarity between him and the notorious Cursed Earth brigand 'Captain' Jack Harkness is a purely unfortunate coincidence. He's had a bit of trouble in that area, apparently.

  "All that, coming up soon. But first, our Public Service remit under the Laws and Statutes of Mega-City One require that we inform you of, ahem, a very important event happening as we speak in the Hall of Justice. The Justice Department of Mega-City One itself, it seems, is on trial, as they hold an extradition hearing for Efil Drago San, the Brit-Cit criminal Overlord who entertained... I mean, shocked and appalled us a few years back with the shocking, sickening and utterly appalling slaughter known as the Killing Zone.

  "You might get to see some old Zone footage, for what it's worth, but it mostly just sounds like a bunch of talking heads arguing the toss, quite frankly. You can't even vote on who gets evicted from the city-state. If you really feel the need, set your interactive blip to channel 4,971.

  I'm Danni Consart, this is Mega-City News. Up next, Manda T, right after these truly and sincerely important messages."

  The public chamber of the Chief Judge had been chosen as the venue for the hearing, more or less on the basis that the space was big enough, and the fact that the imposingly looming statue of an Eagle, the symbol of Mega-City One Justice, was suitably impressive.

  Hershey sat before it on what was basically a throne - an arrangement she hated at the best of times, calling to mind as it did images of kings and tyrants and despots, sitting in front of people in their audience chambers throughout history.

  On the other hand, in the current circumstances, it did lend a certain sense of authority to one who was serving as the final arbiter for this hearing.

  The rest of the chamber had been hastily remodelled as needed. A public gallery of bleachers had been thrown up, since it was a requisite, apparently, that justice be done in front of anyone who might like to turn up and watch the people doing so. First come, first served.

  Since no Mega-City citizen in their right mind would walk into the Halls of Justice voluntarily, the bleachers were only occupied by a smattering of Mega-City journalists, supplementing the floating microcams that were relaying the proceedings to the various news services of Mega-City One and Brit-Cit.

  The only other occupant was a single, old and possibly senile woman, who sat muttering to herself and knitting. Nobody quite knew how she'd got there, but then again, nobody ever quite got around to caring enough to ask.

  A reinforced Plexiglas cabinet had been set up before the Chief Judge to house the defendant, Drago San, and then replaced with a number of immobilising field emitters when it was realised how ridiculous Drago San looked in it. Rather like a Plexiglas box half-filled with dough. Sitting beside him was Barnstable Wheems, who, as we've seen, was acting as Counsel for the Defence.

  Also sitting before Chief Judge Hershey were Dredd - the arresting officer and the single most visible and identifiable symbol of Mega-City Justice - and SJS-Judge Slithe, who was handling the procedural bulk of the actual prosecution.

  The Special Judicial Service was commonly regarded as a bunch of conniving twisters, every bit as bad as the lawyers of the judicial system the Justice Department had replaced. So it was good, in some small sense, that someone had finally found a use for them.

  The chamber also contained a number of technicians, to operate the various consoles that might be required to display evidence, and a guard under the command of the Master at Arms, Brit-Cit Detective Judge Treasure Steel, comprised of Street Judges from both the Mega-City and Brit-Cit, to keep order should any crowd of observers actually turn up. This was the basic setup for the first procedural trial the Mega-City had experienced in a century. The problem was, by this time, nobody really had a clue as to what the drokk they were actually doing.

  The old process of laying out
the case for the prosecution, laying out the case for the defence and then summing up a (a process that, apparently, had taken months at a time) had seemed just too tedious for words, so the hearing had devolved into one of point and counterpoint, in the hope that, under the guidance of the Arbiter, one point of view would eventually prevail.

  If the presence of the Chief Judge of Mega-City One might have been seen as skewing the process in a certain way, however, that would be to forget about the final collection of people in the chamber, who we have thus far failed to mention.

  The individuals in the process that it had proved hardest, in the end, for the Justice Department of Mega-City One to get its collective judicial head around.

  The jury.

  In Mega-City One there was no such thing as an old Judge, at least, not in any active sense. There were various personnel from the ancillary services, like Med or Tek-Division, of such an age and degree of experience that they were kept around as an invaluable resource, but there were no old Judges out there on the streets.

  Rejuve-treatments might keep a Street Judge physically healthy and extend the active life of his body, but the mind in that body was a different matter. When a Judge reached a sufficient age that his Judgement, as it were, started to go, the punishment of the streets was merciless and lethal, nine times out of ten.

  And for that one in ten who might survive, watching the disastrous results of his Judgement failing him, the only alternative was the Long Walk - out into the badlands of the Cursed Earth beyond the Mega-City walls, there to bring the Law to the most lawless place on Planet Earth.

  Many a gang-razed settlement in the Cursed Earth, in short, now rang to the terrifying, righteous cry of, "Hold it right there, you scum! Prepare to face the leaden wrath of - aw, drokk, I've fallen off my Zimmer frame."

  In Brit-Cit, it seemed, they did things in another way. When a Judge got too old to be of any use, they simply promoted him.

  The jury - or more properly, the Board of Adjudicators who would make the final decision on the result of this hearing under the direction of Chief Judge Hershey - was made up of five Brit-Cit Senior Judges. The Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber.

  Senior being the operative term, in the same way that "senior citizen" is the polite way of saying "drooling, piss-spraying waste of space who, in any reasonable world, should be shot in the head, as a matter of course, for standing at a store checkout, paying for a single tin of cat meat (which they probably eat themselves) with the exact change from a coin purse."

  The other sort are even worse, of course. Whether of the curtain-twitching sub-variety who have passersby shuddering with revulsion as they sense the mordant presence of a Nosy Parker skulking in the dark, or the variety who just blunder around white-knuckled and seething with barely-suppressed ire at the goings-on of the youth of today, they seem to exist in a state of mean-spirited spite at the fact that those younger than them (everyone else in the world) have the audacity to go around breathing oxygen like they own it.

  Such people were, of course, the last ones who would wish to be in the business of pronouncing informed Judgement upon anything. They sat here now, in the Chamber of the Chief Judge, dressed in a variety of scraps culled from Judges' uniforms over a century of Brit-Cit styles. Several of them were plugged into portable life-support systems, which wheezed and creaked and bubbled almost as much as the bodies of those who weren't.

  You could tell by their eyes - those eyes that were not filmed by cataracts or simply vacant with terminal senility - that this Board of Adjudicators wasn't going to let these Mega-City upstarts get away with anything.

  In the case of Efil Drago San, things were looking black - or at least, a quite appalling shade of urine-stained beige - for the Justice Department of Mega-City One.

  "On the matter of evidence," said Barnstable Wheems, "we have evidence of our own to present. Evidence concerning events in the Boranos system, shortly after my client was taken into custody, gathered by means of recording equipment situated inside his mobility-pod..."

  "That's impossible!" Dredd growled, from his position beside SJS-Judge Slithe. "Drago San has spent a year in the Iso-cube system. No recording devices of any kind showed up in the security scans. What are you trying to pull here, Drago San?" He glared at the immobilisation-field containing the accused.

  The field was supposed to allow full facial movement and speech, but Drago San just stared out blankly, his eyes glazed, nothing but a sense of deadness inside them.

  If Dredd didn't know better, hadn't had a perfectly normal conversation with Drago San mere hours before - so far as any conversation with a mass-murdering master-criminal can be considered normal - then it was almost possible to believe that he was suffering from Cube-psychosis.

  "Passive recording and storage," said Wheems, taking it upon himself to answer. "Integral to the structure of the unit. A troubleshooting measure, I believe, allowing the manufacturers to run diagnostics as to the situation and circumstances of any failure of the unit. There's no reason why it should show up under anything until power was plugged through it to play that gathered material back."

  "I don't believe you," said Dredd, shortly. "Our sensors are sophisticated enough to pick up anything like that, active or passive. And believe you me, we'll be taking Drago San's drokking floater apart under a microscanner to prove it."

  "Do so," said Wheems. "You'll find matters are precisely as I say, now that you know what to actually look for. In the meantime, I suggest that I be allowed to present my evidence - on the understanding that you are at liberty to confirm or deny, at any time, whether it conforms to your recollection of events."

  "That seems fair," said Chief Judge Hershey, glancing over to the board of adjudicators to see how they were taking it all in.

  The Brit-Cit Senior Judges, in fact, didn't look like they were taking much of the proceedings in at all. Each of those who were not merely sitting and drooling, every bit as blank as Efil Drago San, appeared to be looking in a different direction, in the celebrated manner of one following the flight-path of a nonexistent fly.

  "I'll allow it," said Chief Judge Hershey, somewhat lamely. "Proceed."

  "Very well," said Wheems. His own sense of confidence and authority seemed to be growing in direct proportion to the degree which the Mega-City Judges were finding themselves nonplussed. He gestured to the techs manning the consoles. "Proceed, if you'll be so kind, with the playback..."

  Backflash: 01:27:2125

  "Drokk!"

  In the fungus jungles of Boranos, the floater-pod of Efil Drago San stalled against the marked unevenness in terrain caused by the felled mass of some decomposing mushroom the size of a tree.

  The pod was calibrated for flat surfaces, like the floor of a corridor off the gangways of a ship, and continually overcompensating. The reaction jerked Dredd back and almost caused his feet to slither out from under him.

  "Apologies," said Efil Drago San, in the unconcerned tones of one who is not, in fact, sorry in the slightest. "I do so hate being a burden."

  "You're a drokking liability at this point." Dredd grabbed for the floater-pod to steady himself. "I should just pitch you out of this. Leave you shackled somewhere and see if I can use this thing to gain some height. See if I can catch our bearings."

  They had been wandering lost in the fungus jungles since crash-landing their escape pod, ejected from a Justice One hijacked by privateers working for the Boranos Accord.

  The "vegetation" of the jungle was incompatible with human biological processes; their only hope was to locate the base to which Justice One was being taken before they died of starvation.

  In this the pair was handicapped, somewhat more than they might otherwise have been, in that they were handcuffed together. The smack-shackles were standard Justice Department issue when transporting a wanted fugitive - their failsafe mechanisms would not open until they were back in the secure environment of the ship.

  "A fine idea in princip
le," said Efil Drago San. "Though unfortunately, entirely unworkable in practice. After the... incident, years ago, that cost me the use of my legs, the control systems of the pod were directly melded to my spinal column. Man and machine inextricably linked, as it were... unless you really do feel competent enough for a spot of microsurgical whittling with your boot knife?"

  "Well, at least you could use it to drokking keep up," Dredd snarled.

  Drago San snorted. "As ever, Dredd," he said, "you're rather missing the point. The functionality is such that the floater is a replacement for my legs and nothing more. Too inherently powerful and I'd be forever braining myself on ceilings and shooting through walls - not my idea of a good time."

  "I could think of worse for you," Dredd said. "Shame you didn't die in the landing, all things considered. I could have just hacked myself free of you and left you behind." He paused thoughtfully. "That still might happen, you give me any more trouble."

  "Empty threats, Dredd?" said Efil Drago San. "That's uncharacteristic of you. I shall put it down to the stress of recent events. Need I remind you that I'm in your custody? That works both ways. It means, in a very real sense, that I am under your protection."

  "Yeah," said Dredd. "Well let's see how long that protection lasts when I'm forced to choose between protecting a creep like you and protecting someone relatively innocent."

  "Oh, come now, Dredd," said Drago San. "Surely, any small misdemeanours I might have committed in your fair city-state-"

  "Misdemeanours?" Dredd exclaimed. "You killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands in that Killing Zone of yours, and broadcast the results to half the city. And when we finally caught up with you, you tried to destroy an entire Sector!"

  Drago San shrugged. "Well, we can none of us be held to blame for the mistakes made in our youth."