Over the next few weeks, I will share #SaturdayScenes for Prime Decision, episode one of Quantum Law. You can get the full download of Prime Decision by registering through my Reader’s Club:

If you need to catch up with previous part of this or other stories, you can access them at my #SaturdayScenes page…

“You asked earlier what I thought of what Enriquez had to say,” he started. “In short, I’m signing off.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Meaning?”

“I’m off this case. Don’t want anything to do with it.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Am I wearing a clown suit?”

“You can’t leave a client… He needs proper representation.”

“Which I’m sure Quantum Law will provide him in truckloads. But that’s not me. Quantum Law’s flawless logic should know that. Jerry Simmons? Oops. Wrong guy.”

She paused, no doubt to calculate the optimum response. “How can you say that? Look at how well you handled yourself in court today.”

He chuckled. “Exactly what Enriquez said.”

Jerry tried his best to uphold a smile as he looked at her. From his perspective, he hadn’t done all that hot in court. Yet Enriquez and now Ace maintained he did. Odd? More than that, the three blinking Quantum Law towers posing as judges had folded. OK, clever argument, their actions had implied. You got us, Jerry. Being efficient and quick aren’t the same thing, like your elevator ride proved. Recess until tomorrow. Go talk to your client and make it count.

That easy.

Yeah, it felt odd, in an arranged sort of way. A setup, maybe? Or was he letting himself drop into paranoia?

He calmed himself down and held Ace’s gaze. She returned the favor. They sat there, staring at each other. Who would break the silence first? Not him, Jerry decided. So far he’d played it as he’d planned. Riding in the drone he’d sorted it out like this: first decide if he wanted this crazy case, then figure out whether he could trust Ace to help him with it. Didn’t need to answer the second question if the first came back negative, did he? Seemed simple enough.

So, did he want the case?

He crunched on that for a bit and kept coming back to Ace. Her role in all of this. How she was treating him. How she struck him as not entirely onboard with Quantum Law. That came more as a hunch, his intuition. But she did come to the edge of revealing a flaw in the system: the violation of attorney-client privacy, and hence, privilege. She hadn’t confirmed it. Still, she’d let him know how it should work, in theory, hypothetically. Why?

The answer eluded him. It required more digging on his part. Still, he realized: he shouldn’t take the case unless he could trust Ace. He had no chance to win it without some quantum logic juice on his side, without that instant network access to the Federation’s legal databases. No doubt about that. If not her, he would need another Advocate at his side. Except he’d have to answer the same question about them: working for the humans, or working for the system? He’d rather take his chances with Ace. No sense in starting over with an unknown. There he had it, then. The question he’d relegated to second place jumped to the foreground. Could he trust her? Could he figure out a way to make the determination?

“In your heart of hearts, you know you don’t want to drop this case,” she said.

“Heart of hearts. Wow. Your empathic module is cranking it big time today, isn’t it?”

She wrinkled her nose yet again. It struck him as an odd response. A glitch, he guessed. Couldn’t find a more appropriate gesture, so she defaulted to the one she sensed he’d taken well enough.

“Let’s work through this together, OK?” she said.

He drummed his fingers on the table. “That’s just the thing, isn’t it? Whether we’re working on this together.”

She folded her lips inward for a moment. “I may be part of Quantum Law, but I know what role I play. Unequivocally.”

“It must be nice to know your place and purpose with that kind of certainty.”

“My assigned mission is to ensure humans get the best defense available. Period.” She straightened up in her seat. “I am quite optimum at it, by the way. I have a seventy-two-point-six percent success rate achieving acquittals and/or substantial sentence reductions. Eighty-five-point-three percent over my most recent twelve month period of service.”

“Well, you’re trending right. Until they gave you this bowser.”

“Bowser?”

“Never mind.”

“You can’t drop this case, Jerry.”

“Why?”

“Because your client won’t accept Quantum Law advocates.”

“Am I the only human lawyer around? I mean if you have to scrape the barrel real hard, I’m sure you can find one or two in New England, from Harvard, or whatever.”

She reached inside her suit jacket and took out a rectangular object. At first Jerry pegged it for a portable communicator. Why would she need that, since she had a built-in comlink? But she solved the mystery for him by folding it out, once, twice, one more time. It snapped-clicked into place each time until a page-sized shiny surface lit up.

It only took Jerry a second to recognize the screen contents: his law school paper. “Wow. Splat from the past.”

“Good to see you remember it.”

“Enriquez remembers it even better.”

She smiled. “He may have had… assistance in finding it. Hypothetically, of course.”

“I thought you said earlier this line of defense wouldn’t work.”

Her smile tilted sideways a little “Can’t you guess why?”

Right. The listening thing. Everything was bugged. And if she couldn’t speak freely, that meant they were checking in on her, too.

He felt his pulse start thumping in his ears. That was it. No more clever verbal sparring or roundabout maneuvers. Bang. Bring it on, straight out.

“You expect me to believe you’re onboard with this?”

She blinked. Why, Jerry couldn’t figure out. Her empathic module glitching again, or trying to let him know he’d struck an emotional chord. Or the facsimile of one.

Ace recovered and tapped on the screen again, then slid the whole thing to Jerry. “The real question is whether you believe it.” She waited for him to raise his gaze. “Did you believe it then, Jerry?”

“I believed I wanted an A.”

“Get serious.”

“OK, I knew I’d never get an A if I submitted that version of the argument. I did end up with a B+, though. Pretty good for a rebel with a dumb, doomed cause.”

Her lips drew that taut little line of hers. Her gaze drilled into him for a moment before she withdrew the slim-screen and raised it. Her voice went lower, to a male register. His register. How his voice sounded back in law school.

“While at one point humans needed the rescue that a consistent, evenly applied, simplified and optimized rule of law provided, algorithmic justice is a spoiling, dead thing. Original intent has its place, but only in so much as to give The Law its birth. So that it lives. For it must live. It must dwell in the hearts and spring from the minds of living, sentient beings. It must adapt and evolve to address their self-emergent concerns and aspirations. It must flow and blossom with the creativity, innovation, and growing understanding that their ever-transforming society and their previously undiscovered challenges demand.”

Jerry looked away, fixing his gaze on the rusted sink.

She kept on.

“Yes, returning to basic, foundational principles and original intent arrested the worst effects of The Crisis. It halted the unpredictable outcomes and rampant corruption that arose from arbitrary, subjective, highly interpretive judicial rulings. It banished the corruption and chaos drowning our pre-Crisis judicial system. But it also left us with a state of affairs where the Law, boiled down to a predetermined set of conclusions and decisions, died. Let us resolve to breathe new life into it by releasing it from the strictures of cold, speedy calculations.”

He looked back at her and realized she hadn’t been reading from the slim-screen. Had it all memorized. Of course.

Ace set the tablet down and slid it back toward Jerry.

He glanced at it, refusing to pick it up. “That boy could write.”

Her voice returned to its female register. “That’s good stuff, Jerry. One heck of a summary for a compelling twenty-five page argument.”

“Is that what the court would say in its decision?”

She shrugged, looked almost girlish doing it, coy smile and all. “If I were sitting on it.”

“You’re not tall or dark enough.”

She nodded at the screeen. “Do you believe it?”

“Does it matter what I believe? Words on a page, without the power to enforce them… they just gather dust.”

“Before we give up, why don’t we bring them to life?”

“You, me.” Jerry pointed at the screen. “We bring them to life.”

She smiled. “Yeah. Maybe not DNA to DNA, like Enriquez said. But yeah. You. Me. One to One.”

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