Jury selection was a science and an art. Some of Leah’s duties as a law clerk had involved precisely what was required to master the fine points of this particular game. It was, therefore, one aspect of the legal process where she could hit the ground running.

She sat in one of three Captain’s chairs in the otherwise barren office room, going over the demographic graphs of the Wayne County jury pool in the mid-sized business telewindow. She heard a knock on the door behind her.

"Yes?"

A nervous, dark-skinned, African-American girl in her late teens, poked her pretty head inside. "Ms. Flores?" she said shyly. "Ah...The lady from down the hall is here to see you."

Leah fought to suppress a giggle. That’s what you get when you hire your only client’s daughter, she thought. "Thank you Rachel. Tell her to come in...And remind me to show you how to use the intercom. It’s a little different from the one you’re used to."

The girl grinned, embarrassed and relieved at the same time. "A lot different," she laughed. "Thanks."

"Don’t mention it."

The girl bowed out and Andrea strolled in. "Hi counselor," she said as she closed the door. "How’s your new receptionist working out?"

Leah chuckled. "She’s a riot. She’s scared as hell, she don’t know shit and she’s hangin’ tough. I like her."

"She seems like a nice kid."

"She is. Smart too, like her father. She’s been asked to sign up for the honors program at Wayne State."

Andrea pulled up one of the other Captain’s chairs next to Leah and sat down. "Have you met her mother."

"Through the T-window."

"Well? What is she like?"

"She’s a knock-out."

"I figured that," said Andrea, turning her head toward the door. "Probably has a body like yours."

"How’d you guess?"

"What kind of person is she."

"You mean, what kind of person would dump Blue when he was a respectable banker and talk her next husband into hocking everything they owned to bail him out of jail when he switched to selling porn?"

"If you wanna put it that way, fine. But this is serious."

One good look at Andrea told Leah that it was. Andrea was worried. Leah swiveled in her chair to face her. "What’s bothering you?"

"Blue. He’s hiding something important. I can’t pin it down but something is definitely not right. I bet his ex knows what it is. It’s probably why she divorced him."

"If it is, it’s public record. We can call it up in a second."

"I doubt it," said Andrea. "Blue says she asked for the divorce. That means he would have gotten custody of the kid and she would have lost everything she owned, if he’d wanted it that way."

"Unless," said Leah, "she could prove he was at fault." While she spoke, she used the arm rest cursor control to access the state’s Family Court files from nearly a generation before.

"Or," said Andrea, "He agreed to pay alimony and child support without contesting it."

Leah guessed that her friend’s last analysis was correct, and confirmed part of it four menu picks later with the terms of the Mondays’ divorce settlement displayed in her T-window.

"There," said Andrea, pointing at a line in the first substantive paragraph of the document. She was a medical student. Is she a doctor now?"

"Yes, she is. Has been for quite awhile. She doesn’t need Blue’s money, and hasn’t taken any in nine or ten years. That was at least five years before she remarried."

"That doesn’t tell us why she left him. And the decree only says, ‘irreconcilable differences.’ What Glen said about his wife got me thinking. Remember that awful drink he served us and the stuff in his medicine cabinet; the stuff that was there and the stuff that wasn’t? Maybe there’s a connection."

Leah’s eyes narrowed. "Andrea, I don’t like the sound of this. I thought you liked Blue."

"I do. He’s a good guy. Maybe too good. Lets face it, nobody can be that sweet and generous and even-tempered all the time. Look at what Jack Fleetwood is trying to do to him. And what’s the worse thing you ever heard him say about Jack?"

"Nothing I can think of."

"To my knowledge, the worse thing he said was—and I quote, ‘He’s wrong.’ End of quote. That’s not natural."

Leah’s chest swelled with opprobrium that her deviate lover would condemn a friend for behavior she didn’t believe was "natural."

"Who are you to talk about what’s natural?" she snapped. "He never said anything like that about you and he never would."

Andrea recoiled at the harsh words, then smiled slowly, "That’s what I mean by natural. You thought I was turning on Blue so you turned on me. You were sizzling. As much as I love you, I would have reacted the same way if I thought you were turning on someone we both love. Sometimes everybody gets mad. It’s a chemical timing thing. We have no control over it."

Leah was confused. "You think he’s some kind of walking ELF?"

"No. I think he’s taking drugs."

"Illegal drugs?"

"Prescription drugs."

"And you think his ex is supplying him."

"Who else? They’re not enemies. They just couldn’t live together as man and wife for reasons unknown. If we hadn’t gotten him out of jail she would have—her and her husband. They couldn’t get the money as soon as we could but they were working on it."

"You’re forgetting something," said Leah.

"Oh?"

"The police raided his house looking for whatever they could find. The only dangerous drugs they came up with was that so-called wine of his. But he’s got a drinking license, so it doesn’t matter. And another thing...Blue is getting back at Fleetwood. He’s fucking the man’s wife."

"Yeah, but when did he find out who she was? And what does that have to do with getting back at anybody? He loves her. She loves him. That’s all there is to that."

No. That wasn’t all there was. Andrea’s last questions fired up a memory of something Blue had told Leah about the attorney general tracking down people through their payments for his services. He was so confident that it would never happen. How could he have been that sure unless he was planning to use the attorney general’s wife for blackmail insurance?

Andrea noticed her friend’s expression. "You thought of something."

"I’m not sure."

"Well, tell me what you think."

"When I got Blue out of jail..." Attorney client confidentiality! thought Leah with horror at how close she’d come to betraying it. She had assumed the mind-set of a malicious gossip, presuming guilt and attributing dishonorable motives to Blue’s every word and gesture which might have had other explanations. That thought alone stirred up a couple of possibilities for Blue’s confidence in preserving his clients’ confidentiality. He knew the banking system inside out. And there wasn’t much he couldn’t do with a computer to make any transaction look like something other than it was.

"Leah. You were about to say something."

"I was about to say something dumb."

She didn’t have to hunt up another reasonable explanation for Blue’s attitude about the electronic money trail. By assuming her own identity as his friend, it automatically occurred to her that he may have had other friends in enough key positions to ensure a cold scent no matter what electronic bloodhound was put on the trail.

How remarkable it was that such conflicting ideas about one person could proceed so effortlessly from the same mind with a different mind-set. Then again, when she considered the "set" as a set of instructions for what to pay attention to and what to ignore in a given context, it wasn’t remarkable at all. That was one of the things programmers did to define the interactive response capabilities of their ELFs and their "hollow" VRPs, the virtual reality equivalent of ELFs. It was one of the many subtle things Blue did with his, that made them so life-like and his X Channel services so popular.

Andrea couldn’t read the far-away look in Leah’s eyes, but the "you’d-better-leave-now" tilt of her body was unmistakable. She wanted to tell her friend that she appreciated her professional ethics concerns and was sorry for inadvertently encouraging her to violate them. She moved her lips to speak but said nothing.

She wanted to say that she knew how patronizing and overbearing she must have seemed, how cold and unfair. She moved her lips to speak but said nothing.

She wanted to defend herself, to express her hurt at being so harshly and wrongly judged. She said, "It’s getting kinda chilly in here." She forced a smile as she stood to leave.

Leah returned her forced smile. "It is a bad time," she said semi-truthfully, "I’ve got the whole defense team waiting for me to finish this profile."

"Have you decided how you’re going to approach it?" asked Andrea, caring less about the answer to her question at that moment than the opportunity it gave to depart on a warmer note.

"Uh-huh. Naturally, we’re going to argue the Eighth, on the bail and the Gidarb procedure. We’re also gonna hit’em with the First and the Fourth but with a twist."

The excitement in Leah’s face told Andrea that her ploy had worked. "The First, the Fourth and the Fifth with a twist. Why didn’t I think of that?"

Leah hid her face briefly in her hand, "Jesus," she said with a crooked grin, "I sounded like you do when you want to show off your Ph.D."

"I know what the First is," said Andrea with her chin up. That’s the freedom of speech and freedom of the press amendment, right?"

"It’s also the freedom of religion amendment and the freedom of assembly amendment. This is what it says in full..."

"I thought you didn’t have much time."

"It won’t take much. It says, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’ That’s all of it.

"The Forth Amendment is the one about unreasonable search and seizure almost everyone interpreted as a right of privacy until the Thomas Court ruled differently. We’re gonna use their definition of unreasonable searches and seizures and force a ruling on free assembly and seizure of private property for public use. Any argument that rests on private property taken without just compensation, for a higher public cause, is in direct violation of the Fifth. Michigan vs. Monday was made to be thrown out."

"That doesn’t mean it’ll happen," noted Andrea.

"I think it does. If we can win with a jury, Fleetwood will drop it like a wet dog turd and try to wash his hands of the whole thing. If we have to appeal it, the Appellate Court won’t want to get stuck with explaining to all the people in Telewindow Land why the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can get away with something Joe Citizen can’t."

"You’re gonna blackmail the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? Are you nuts?"

Leah laughed. "We’re not going to blackmail anybody. We’re just going to compile a list of people who subscribe to information and entertainment services of a peculiar nature, whereby they can contact people who share their interests. It could be flashbacks of Madonna concerts or ancient Greek wrestling matches. It doesn’t have to involve sex as long as most people think its weird, disgusting or sick."

"Like old horror movies converted to T-windows," said Andrea, "or gun and knife shows." She shuddered with the thought of such people with such interests, even though she knew from her practice that most of them were decent enough in the conduct of their day to day lives."

"You see what you did?" said Leah excitedly.

"What?

Leah imitated her friend’s shiver of revulsion. "Most people do that when you talk about guns. They can’t understand how anybody outside of a disposal zone can be so enamored of hardware conceived, designed and manufactured to kill people. Do you have any idea how many of those gun lovers are well-known American Party congressmen, business executives, cabinet members, National Public Radio commentators and judges? Some of them smoke cigarettes, use real sugar in their coffee and eat red meat!"

Andrea’s eyes widened, "You have their names?"

Leah pushed her tongue against her cheek and nodded with a smirk. "It’s public information. It’s relevant to our case because of the T-window connection between them and their suppliers and other people like them. We’ve got God on our side, too. You won’t believe how big that is in the rest of the country and in Canada. Remember the thing Hector Clay and Gail what’s-her-name did a couple of weeks ago on the NEZ system?"

"I was on a fishing trip with my brothers."

"Oh, yeah. Well, they talked about gun dealers and drug dealers and organized crime and the legal system that keep’em all in business. But you know what got guns off the streets of the rest of the country?"

"Yeah. The Second Amendment."

"Do you know what that says in full?"

Andrea frowned as though she had been asked if she knew her ABCs. "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

"You couldn’t quote the First Amendment and you didn’t know what the Fourth one was, but you had no trouble with the Second. That’s because you heard it on NPR and T-window public service announcements so many times when Congress and the White House got serious about murder on Main Street, that you couldn’t forget. Before then, the NRA was claiming a Constitutional right for anybody to own a gun, even people who couldn’t pass the ACT, and they were using the Fourth and Fifth to keep them from being taken away."

"So, what’s your point?"

"The Constitution is not a legal document that safeguards everybody’s rights. It has always been the servant of people in power to get and keep what’s important to them...On the bar exam, they ask a series of questions about truth-tellers and liars that you’re supposed to put yes or no questions to. The trick is to get the truth teller and the liar to give the same answer or to phrase the question in such a way that only one of them can answer. It’s not easy, but it’s possible, and when you’ve got the answer you know it. It’s the same with Blue and the federal government; legislative, administrative, and judicial. If this becomes a federal case, we got’em all by the balls."

Andrea smiled with understanding and pride. She looked at her wristband time display. "Oops! Didn’t mean to hold you up. You did have to attend to something, didn’t you?"

Leah checked the time display in the corner of the office T-window.
"Afraid so. We have three more jurors and alternates to seat by noon. I know the prosecutor and I are going to fight over two of them."

"My ten o’clock canceled and I don’t have anyone scheduled for eleven. Mind if I stay and watch?"

"Not at all. It probably wouldn’t hurt for you to learn how to use the USADP."

"The what?"

"The U.S.A. Demographic Program...This thing. We call it ADP, for short." Leah closed the window on the divorce settlement and reopened the one Andrea had seen when she walked in. To the untutored eye, the window now looked like an old-fashioned television screen with a two dimensional bar graph running like steps of various heights and colors across the surface.

"It’s a graphic listing and cross-referencing library of everyone in the United States who can be legally classified by age as an adult for different purposes: 10 for full-time, non-agricultural labor; 14 for imprisonment and execution; 17 for driving; 18 for military service, 21 for bank card ownership, voting, alcohol consumption, and anything to do with sex. It’s a great tool for anybody in the criminal justice system. Employers, marketing people and recruiters of all kinds are starting to us it. It might help you track down that missing patient you’re so worried about."

"How?"

"Watch."

Andrea eased back into her chair turning her attention to the telewindow with a new professional interest.

Circular bullets the color of each bar ran down the left-hand column, with a name for each category it represented and a comprehensive list of sub-categories:

• BIRTH RACE / White (Western European, Northern European, South...

• LEGAL RACE / White (Western European, Northern European, South...

• BIRTH SEX/ Male, Female

• LEGAL SEX/ Male, Female

• CHRONOLOGICAL AGE/ 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,...

• LEGAL AGE/ 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35...

• EDUCATION/ Prenatal, preschool, kindergarten, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8...

• OCCUPATION/ White Collar (accountant, actor, architect, athlete...

• TITLE/ CEO, President, Vice-president, Director, Assistant Director...

• EMPLOYER/ U.S. government, The State of Alabama, The State of...

• EMPLOYEES/ 0, 1-3, 4-10, 11-20, 21-50, 51-100, 101-200, 201-500...

• PAY GRADE/ (upper-upper, upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle.

• RESIDENCE/ Rural (upper-upper, upper, upper middle, middle, lower...

• POLITICAL PREFERENCE/ American (conservative, moderate liberal...

• RELIGIOUS PREFERENCE/ Protestant (Presbyterian, Episcopalian...

Leah said, "Below the last category you can see on the bottom of the window, are 37 more. There used to be twice as many. It gets simpler to use with each version. Actually, it’s about as simple as it can get right now. The biggest thing you have to do is devise a profile of who you’re looking for."

"I already know who. What I need to know is where. He could be anywhere."

"That’s where most people go wrong. He can only be somewhere on the planet and probably in the States. And probably in this one. And probably in a building. You can construct a profile for a place as well as a person. And you can put them together. If you can feed in enough characteristics that define what you’re looking for, your chances of getting it are pretty high."

As she spoke, she scrolled the main list from top to bottom, and long lines of sub-categories from right to left. Highlighting one specific characteristic at a time, she dragged it over another characteristic on another line and dropped it. "Every profile has a color with a numerical equivalent. See the little numbers below the profile?"

"That’s the red pie on the right."

"Yeah. I’ve got all of the qualities I’m looking for in that pie. As far as the program is concerned the color is the same as the profile. I don’t have to do anything now but match colors until I’m as close as I can get to red-orange 159. After you’ve done this a few times you’ll—oh shit!"

"It went black! What happened?"

"If the program can’t handle the numerical computation with the pool of real people it has to work with, sometimes it spits everything out and contaminates the whole file. This part can take a while. You have to sneak up on it. Let’s see...The last good number was 149. If it takes it without turning blue or green, we know we’re okay. Let’s try 153...Great. 155..."

"It went black again."

"No problem. It has to be 153 or 154. What the hell..."

Leah entered the higher number and it held.

"There. Now we can look at who we’ve got and give the ones we want a call."

"If they all fit the profile, what difference does it make?"

"That depends on what the prosecutor’s profile looks like. I can only guess at that from the jurors we’ve agreed on so far. I included that in this file. The task now is to see which of them is more advantageous to us than the prosecutor thinks."

"Of course, he’s doing the same thing."

"Of course. The thing is, I’m not interested in finding twelve jurors and two alternates who are most likely to weigh the evidence and the testimony in our favor. I’m looking for the one or two who’ve already made up their minds and are strong enough to convince the others if we can give them the ammunition they need to do it. And we’ve got the ammunition."

Andrea knew what Leah was talking about. She’d seen it over and over in group meetings of every kind. A few wanted to lead and the rest were willing to follow a good leader. There was always a ritual of dominance and submission involved. Sometimes a couple of rams butted heads before one emerged as the leader. Andrea’s status as the official leader in her therapy groups normally cast her in that role but it wasn’t automatic. It depended on who was present and what was being discussed.

"The prosecutor is looking for fourteen people he thinks he can sway," said Andrea. "He thinks he’s got eleven. I’m pretty sure I’ve got one or two who will lead the others our way. I’m looking for three more solid citizens who won’t challenge them. Might as well get the easy one seated first."