In telewindows throughout the land, individuals, families and civic groups were seeing the same recording of the Blue Monday trial that Jack Fleetwood Jr. was watching with Yuri Prokrefkin. Not all of what was important could be seen on the tape. Most of what mattered percolated in the minds of the principals. Little of it was committed to disk and the law prohibited some some of it from being commit to disk.

Judge Kakowski, in his black judicial robe, with his lacquered maple gavel lying at his left hand, sat above everyone in the crowded room. The aisle, wide enough for three large men to walk abreast, led to double oak doors. In front of the doors stood an armed white guard with his feet apart and his hands behind his back as in the military position of parade rest.

The high walls of the courtroom appeared to have been necessitated by the high wall behind the judges bench, which, in turn, appeared to be necessary to accommodate its adornments. On it was a large blue flag bearing the words,"The Great Seal of the State of Michigan" in a circle around two stags standing on their hind legs with their front hooves touching a three-cornered shield. Above the state flag was the Stars and Stripes of the United States. Above that, in bold brass letters, was the designation, "36^th District Court."

Six or seven paces in front of the bench stood two tables separated by the aisle. Behind the table on the left of the judge sat a white man in his late thirties and a black one in his early twenties. Ed Macky, the former Negro with the jutting Caucasian chin, stood next to him in a handsome, blue, Softglow suit and lavender tie, bending over some papers. Across the gap between the tables, sat Leah Flores in a modest blue business suit. Next to her was Blue Monday in a blue/gray Sharkskin suit. A young white man with thick glasses and freckles was whispering in his ear.

In the seats behind the row of prosecution staffers and arresting officers, were Macky’s chestnut-haired, cleft-nosed wife, and the Gidarb's 26-year-old duaghter Samantha and her husband Kyle. Behind them was a solid block of other white people, including Jill Kaiser and the Wyoming talk-show hosts, Sharon and Louise. In the seats behind the row of defense team members and staffers were friends and family of Blue Monday and Leah Flores, some black, some white and some brown. Blue’s attractive, dark-skinned ex-wife was there with her new husband and four of Blue’s cousins. Glen and Andrea were also there.

Andrea used all of her willpower to keep from staring at Samantha Gidarb who looked very much like her mother and nothing like her father. The maternal resemblance reminded her of Mrs. Travis and her daughter. Candy who looked so much like her. Since Andrea also appeared to have gotten her looks from her mother, she didn't care to follow the thought any farther than that. In any event, she was more interested in what Samantha Gidarb really thought of here mother, what influence her mother had over her, and who would ultimately have the most influence over Kyle and Samantha's two little boys.

The most influential person in the room was a small man with a twisted face, sitting on the prosecution side of the back row. No one there knew his name, though most had seen his work many times. Blue and Glen had pooled programming knowledge and techniques with him through his online alias of the "Genie." They didn't know his real name or what he looked like outside of a T-window or a VRS, but he knew them. He knew other key members of the drama, too, people that no one would have suspected of having the power to push the world into a new political orbit—or to preserve the status quo.

Judge Kakowski turned to the jury box on his far left, looking past the blue-eyed black bailiff who stood between them in his tan uniform at parade rest. Nine white women and five white men sat silently in two rows. He had seen countless juries, composed of people of every sort, but something about this one set his nerves on edge, something about a particular juror. Number 12, exuded a quality that was namelessly disturbing. Kakowski felt in his bones that he shouldn’t be there P.J. Shields, that P.J. Shields didn't belong anywhere in the civilized world. Had he been able to concoct a good excuse to exclude him, he would have, just to get him out of his sight. He didn't feel that way about anyone else in his courtroom.

He assumed that his bad feeling had to be the work of his subconscious, a buried memory, perhaps, of someone similar to the flaxen-haired man. Whatever it was, it wasn’t befitting a judge to let it affect his judicial decisions. There was no evidence that Piedmont Jay Shields was anything other than a responsible, citizen. The judge didn’t think he deserved to be categorized and ejected from the premises on the grounds of being a "creepy guy," just because he felt that way about him.

A spectator in the back row of the court with a twisted face was a man that gave nearly everyone the creeps. He might have affected the judge the same way had he not seen P.J. Shields first. Most of the women thought that P.J. was cute. One of those women was Leah Flores.

Macky straightened up and walked around the table to the jury box with the posture of a general marching forward to inspect the troops. He stopped on the end nearest the bailiff, looking each of the women before him squarely in the eye. He then turned to walk slowly down the rail separating him from them and look each of the other jurors in the eye as he went. He got all the way to the end, then looped back around to stand centered on them far enough back to fit them all in his sights. It would have taken a strong person to stare him down. He saw no more than one or two who might have tried.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, to the jury and to the hidden telewindow cameras covering him from every angle. "This is the hour of decision. Let me remind you, as his honor will again, that Mr. Monday," he pointed to Blue, "as he sits before you, is a guilty man; as guilty as any drug dealer or money smuggler apprehended in the process of delivering his contraband. The people do not have to prove he committed the crime we allege. The defense has to prove that the people are wrong; that the allegation is false. A hung jury is a convicted defendant.

"Now, why is it that the state and federal courts have all adopted the principle of presumption of guilt in serious but non-capital cases such as this one? It’s because the Constitution of the United States mandates two things that the modern practice of jurisprudence failed to deliver with a presumption of innocence. The Constitution mandates the right of the accused to a swift and fair trial by you, a jury of his peers. And it imposes on every level of government, the duty to ‘insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare.’"

Macky paused for effect and proceeded in a tone so soft his listeners had to strain to hear him. "Insure domestic tranquillity. Provide for the common defense. Promote the general welfare."

Lifting his voice, he continued, "We used to say that it was better to let ten guilty men go free than to punish one who may be innocent. That might have sounded reasonable to those in previous centuries who did not have the benefit of modern crime detection methods. It may not have been a bad idea back then. Put yourself in the place of a man wrongly accused of a serious crime at a time before fingerprints, blood types and tape recordings."

Leah Flores slid a time bar on her transcriber pad back to fifteen seconds and read the printed text of Macky’s last words. "...to punish one..." it said.

He continued, "These and other forensic tools, primitive by today’s standards, would have been sufficient in most cases to exonerate you and implicate the guilty party. In fact, it is unlikely that you would have been arrested. But what of the ten or more innocent people who would have been victimized by the guilty ones set free—despite that kind of evidence against them—because their unscrupulous defense lawyers could create a reasonable doubt? Need I remind you of the first verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, when a proven killer escaped punishment simply because of his lawyers' inflammatory appeals to race before a black jury."

Leah barely reacted to the O.J. reference, not only because the law no longer allowed the defense to object to it in closing statements, but because its overuse had made it less effective.

Macky went back to the rail at the head of the jury box, making eye contact with each juror and stopping to talk directly to a man or woman who appeared less attentive or more vulnerable than the others at any given time.

"Modern technology has shown conclusively that the last generation of offenders released on the basis of ‘presumption of innocence,’ accounted for the average," Macky stretched the word out with his hands, "victimization rate of twenty times their number. That’s twenty victims for every criminal set free because of a presumption of innocence. A presumption of guilt would have put them behind bars. In some cases the number of truly innocent victims was many times the average."

Macky stopped at the center of the box and put both hands on the rail.

"A presumption of guilt is never made lightly. The arresting officer, the prosecuting attorney and the judge certifying the writ of presumption, can all be held criminally liable for falsifying, withholding or disregarding pertinent evidence in the case. A man is presumed guilty when he is caught in the act of criminal conduct injurious to the general welfare; of smuggling unearned money into a New Economic Zone—subsidizing poverty, in effect, which creates more poverty and more crime, or selling alcohol, cocaine, cigarettes or other narcotics indiscriminately, with equally deleterious secondary affects. A presumption of guilt is called for when a man cannot deny selling dangerous, mind-altering filth over the airwaves to anyone too weak, too innocent or too corrupt to resist."

Macky pulled back from the rail, crossed his hands in front of his crotch and continued, "These are crimes of perversion, subversion and indirect violence with multiple victims. There is never only a single victim or a single doubt about what was done or who did it. Blueford Monday is guilty of purveying obscene material, undermining traditional family values, promoting unnatural sexual behavior and encouraging the degradation and subjugation of women."

The former Negro uncrossed his hands and used them to illustrate what he described. "No less than the man who sells dangerous drugs from a vile, a carton, a bottle or a bag, that man," he said, pointing at Blue, "is guilty of pumping a dangerous drug into the bodies of people who will become victims or will victimize others because of it. That drug is produced by the human body as a result of pornographic stimulation. Combined with the suggestive powers of the pornographic image, it has caused rape," he pointed his head at an attractive woman in a white, frilly blouse buttoned to the neck. "Incest," he said, nodding toward a very young-looking woman. "Sodomy," he said, looking at a red-faced older man. "Sexual self-abuse," he said, looking to the ceiling, "and," seeking the most gentle face in the crowed he found P.J.’s, and said, "murder."

P.J. was impressed, giving the man a little nod to show that he had scored a few points. He couldn’t see how any of the things Ed Macky said applied to him, but he was sure they must have applied to somebody.

P.J. recalled the Ted Bundy case and others were Estelle Gidarb proved that pornography caused violent sex crimes. She didn’t say what excited Jeffrey Dahmer about the "Return of The Jedi" scene with a man writhing in pain under a torture beam, or how things like that fit into her thesis. No matter. Jeffrey Dahmer was a faggot, thought P.J. What can you expect from a cocksucker—male or female? To his way of thinking they were all obviously sick in the head.

Macky started slowly back to the front of the jury box.

"As you know, the people are not seeking punishment, per se in this case. We are seeking a surgical cure for Mr. Monday. A cure perfected by one of the most respected psychiatrists and surgeons in the country—a cure which has been falsely and recklessly portrayed by the defense as mutilation."

Macky shook his head and chuckled. "That’s not only false, it’s not scientific..." He lifted his face to the ceiling and threw up his hands, "and it's not even the issue! The Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that the Gidarb procedure is not a punishment. Therefore, the Constitutional proscription against cruel or unusual punishment does not apply. I mention it now because the defense, despite numerous warnings from the bench not to do so, repeatedly injected it into the proceedings. "It is not your job to question the wisdom of the Supreme Court. "It is your job to weigh the evidence carefully and dispassionately, and determine whether the defendant, Blueford Monday, is innocent, as proven by the defense, or guilty as charged by the people of Michigan." He made eye contact once more with each of the jurors and said, "Thank you."

The assistant Wayne County prosecutor strolled confidently back to his seat acknowledging a jittery Leah Flores with a nod as he passed her. He did not acknowledge the tranquil Blue Monday.

Judge Kakowski said, "Ms. Flores, would you like to give your closing arguments to the jury?

"Yes, your honor," she said. When she started to rise, Blue pulled her back by the hand and gave her a reassuring smile. "You’re gonna do okay, Leah," he whispered.

Leah’s chest swelled with renewed confidence. She already had all the preparation and courage she needed. The extra confidence was welcomed. "Damn right," she said, squeezing his hand and rising to do battle without looking back at her friends and family who had come to give her their support. She knew they were with her in spirit, even her friends like Kimberly and Vera who couldn’t be there in mind or body. She was also fighting for them.

She hoped her trembling didn’t show as she took stage center before the people in the jury box whose faces she’d come to know as well as her own. She had an audience of millions now, with no chance of winning over all of them, particularly with the line of argument she planned to pursue. She couldn’t worry about them. The first twelve people in the box were the ones who had to be with her in the end—all of them. The two she’d picked to persuade the ones she couldn’t, were the two she had to talk to know. Thank God, both of them were still on board. If twelve people didn’t agree to acquit, the sentence on Blue Monday would be carried out within 24 hours.

"Well," she said, cursing herself for beginning her presentation the way her tenth-grade public speaking teacher told her never to begin, "Here we are." Christ, she thought, that’s not what I wanted to say!

She took a long pause, trying to make eye contact with everyone without lingering on those of her secret allies. She waited longer than Macky had; longer than a good public speaker ever should. Some of the men and women of the jury were beginning to squirm in their seats and allow their eyes to wander. At any moment, she expected the judge to tell her to get on with it. She hadn’t frozen. She had made a decision: The next time she opened her mouth she was going to have something worthwhile to say.

"...What do you think of me?" she asked rhetorically. This time the long pause she took had a lot to say. No one told the jurors they couldn’t speak up or that they weren’t supposed to. And no one could tell them not to consider the question honestly. As she studied their faces she knew that they knew the whole world was doing likewise.

"What would you think of me if you knew I was a lesbian?"

Nearly everyone in the box showed some reaction to that; flaring nostrils, bulging eyes, a blink, a smirk, a jerk of the head. Either they had been thinking of her as a lesbian when the question was asked or they hadn’t. Either way, they were now faced with the truth of what they were thinking and the chance that their faces might tell on them. Good, thought Leah, Now that I’ve got you all on board this trolley we can go somewhere.

"Oh," she said, "I forgot. You already know that, don’t you? How did you find out? You couldn’t have learned it from one of those celebrity ELF programs that are so popular on the X Channel, because you’re too smart to believe an ELF. Besides, you wouldn’t watch a program like that, would you?"

Leah paused again, hoping that the most popular versions of the trial disks being recorded would show the juror’s faces.

"The people who did this are criminals who I believe should receive the most severe punishment a civilized society can impose: public exposure, restitution and incarceration. Real punishment for a real crime against real people. But they’re not the ones who told you about my private sex life. My partner didn’t tell you. It’s a private matter to her, too, for practical reasons you are all aware of, as well as personal ones you can imagine."

Leah took a deep breath and let it go. "We’re not ashamed of being different from most of you in some aspects of our private lives, but we are not exhibitionists. We don’t leave our shade up at those times and we don’t want Peeping Toms spying on us through the cracks. Simply having to say that I am a lesbian when I’d prefer you didn’t know that, gives you an unauthorized peak into the most intimate aspect of my personal life and makes all of you voyeurs, whether you want to be or not. That, to me, is obscene."

She began strolling the rail, looking mostly at her feet. "Unlike Mr. Macky, I do believe that the sale of obscene material is criminal. The question is not whether obscenity exists, but where it exists, and who has the right to decide what it should be called. I believe that the people responsible for invading my privacy and turning a profit from exposing their version of it to the public against my will are criminals. I think I have the right to call their depiction of me obscene. And I believe that they are criminals who should be punished, not treated, for what they did."

Leah stopped and faced the jury. "Lets be honest. Curiosity about other people’s sexuality is a basic human trait. It’s one of the needs my client was in business to satisfy. We all want to be amused, aroused, informed; to know who’s like us and who isn’t, how our impressions match up to reality and where we stand in respect to someone we feel drawn to...or where we stand in the natural order of things. Most people want to be normal," Leah looked at juror number 8—a man in his early forties with black hair, a thin moustache and an IQ of 183—and lifted her eyebrows, "and they want to see if you are."

The man smiled. Leah looked away, trying to remember to gesture more with her hands—but not too much.

"Curiosity doesn’t give us the right to know everything we can find out about our neighbors. It does not entitle us to trespass on their right to say, ‘No, you can’t look at what I’m doing; you can’t listen to what I’m saying; you have no reasonable excuse to expose me to your scrutiny and I wish you’d leave me alone.’ So, how is it that you know so much about the sex life of the defendant’s attorney? And why is he on trial? He did not trespass on anyone’s rights. He worked hard to ensure them. He’s not the one who violated the Constitution of the United States; the State of Michigan did."

Leah started pacing again, reminding herself to make more frequent eye contact with the jurors.

"The defense has shown that Mr. Monday was and is the victim in this case. He took extreme steps to exclude people from his communication network who might be offended by the uninhibited exchange of information he offered, and to protect the privacy of those who desired it. He now faces sexual mutilation as a penalty for what the illegal government invaders of his privacy found offensive to their idea of ‘proper’ sexual expression."

Macky stood. "Objection, your honor. This is the kind of inflamatory language—"

"Objection sustained."

Leah strode purposely toward the bailiff. Anticipating her request, he handed her a four-legged display stand while he reached back beside the jury box to pick up a telewindow. It looked more like a 3’ x 5’ oil painting canvas in a thin metal fame. He followed her to the center position in front of the jury box where she set up the stand and he mounted the telewindow on it. She thanked him and he returned to his post.

Ed Macky gritted his teeth, knowing what was coming and wondering how Judge Kakowski could have allowed it.

Standing beside the T-window, she said, "Did you hear the joke about the psychiatrist and the ink blot test? All eyes in the courtroom shifted momentarily to a miffed Estelle Gidarb. "Well, I’ll tell it anyway," said Leah as though she hadn’t noticed. "A psychiatrist shows a young man an ink-blot and asks him what he sees. The man says, ‘A naked woman lying on a bed with her legs open.’ The psychiatrist takes a look at the splotches of ink and scratches her head. She shows the patient another ink stain and asks him what he sees. He says, ‘a man and a woman having sex with the woman on top.’ The doctor takes another look at the picture and scratches her head again."

The joke was funny only when you could tell it with four letter words and excessive detail, with the wildest, raunchiest sex acts you could think of. Leah was hoping that some of the jurors had heard it the way it was meant to be told and that enough of the others would get the point of why she wasn’t telling it that way. She wasn’t going for laughs.

"The third time the doctor shows him an ink-blot, he describes another explicit sex act more lurid than the last. The doctor says, ‘Young man, you obviously have an obsession with sex.’ The patient points an accusing finger at the psychiatrist and say’s, ‘you’re the one with the dirty pictures!’"

Leah hadn’t expected knee-slapping belly-laughs and she didn’t get any, but all of the jurors were smiling except juror number 12, who she was sure would go along when he saw he was alone...Sure enough, he did.

"Now," she said, "I’m going to show you some dirty pictures."

She stood beside the T-window with her body set at a slight angle to the multi-layered plastic pane. "Some of these images will be shocking and deeply offensive to you. I apologize for that and beg your indulgence."

She peered over her shoulder at the man with the freckles sitting next to Blue. The two men were looking at a T-window in the lid of an open laptop on their table. The judge swiveled around in his chair to face the wall with the flags. When Leah’s assistant touched the "On" button, everyone saw the same image the judge did. He saw the state flag become the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. Flanking it, stood two World War Two-era marines in dress blues, with M-1 rifles at port arms with fixed bayonets.

The first image was a flashback of a Babylonian whore with red lipstick smiling at a prospective customer. It was followed by a series of smiling women in red lipstick whose sexual proclivities may or may not have been indicated by what was shown. The last two women in the series were Monica Lewinski, who most adults on the planet had see in action with President Clinton, and Euelalia Charmain, better known as Charm.

The next set featured bathing beauties, beginning with bare-breasted twenty-first century women, whose physical proportions were the only measure of decency in the minds of most viewers. It went back in time to a roaring twenties vamp, in a "daring" one-piece suit.

Macky looked away in disgust, as the heavy-handed "ink blot test," proceeded without comment. What galled him most was the fact that it was mostly Blue Monday’s work.

The next series of live action cuts featured wet T-shirt contestants and topless lounge dancers. Most of the audience took the funny wiggling to the funny music as comic relief. They laughed heartily until they realized the men in the audience of that time saw eroticism where they saw comedy and some people outside of those establishments saw obscenity that they thought should be outlawed. When a few nude male dancers were abruptly thrown into the series, all of the male jurors saw obscenity. When they saw Michelangelo’s David, they saw a glorious work of art.

Next came mouth to mouth kissing scenes of various intensities between men and women, men and men and women and women in various combinations of age, attractiveness, ethnicity and androgyny. After that were flashes of mutilated bodes, followed by action scenes from mainstream movies and telewindow programs that killers and rapists had found highly erotic. It closed with the cut from Return of the Jedi with Luke Skywalker writhing in pain, that had aroused the serial killer and cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, so intensely.

When the State flag reappeared on the wall behind the judge’s bench, the bailiff retrieved Leah’s telewindow and stand.

Leah spoke with more passion now than she would have measured out for herself in advance. "My client is not guilty of selling anything obscene. You may not enjoy his programs. But, unlike the dirty pictures you were just now compelled to watch, you don’t have to watch his. Nobody can tell you what’s obscene. You know it when you see it by how it affects you, and so do I, because that’s what obsenity is, our revulsion to what we see. We see with our minds as much as we do with our eyes; with our memories, our desires, our fears and our convictions of what is right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. Obscenity cannot be objectified. Once it is taken out of the personal realm, it is bound to be seen differently in the minds of different people. Blue Monday can’t be guilty of something that exists only in someone else’s mind."

Leah thought she’d get a big reaction to that, but she didn’t. "Mr. Macky claims that the Gidarb procedure—which, in my personal opinion is obscene—is permissible because my client is not being prosecuted as a criminal. If he is not guilty of a crime, what is he guilty of, besides failing the STOPIT test of normalcy which earned him his unique status before the law?"

Leah resumed her pacing. "Well, he’s guilty of a lot of things. Primarily, he’s guilty of being different. Look at his hair. Look at that suit. And, of course, his eyes. I admit, he isn’t normal. He has a hidden handicap, too—a rare condition that causes him to see things other people don’t see and to draw conclusions he believes are true from evidence most of us would reject as foolish, impossible, inconsequential or insane. In other words, he’s a genius."

Leah stopped near the front of the jury box with one hand on the rail. "Do you know what separates a genius from the rest of us? It’s his ability to see, to hear and to grasp things the rest of us can’t; to see things that aren’t there yet, but will be in time; to see the solution to a complex problem where you or I may not even be able to see a problem. A genius doesn’t think like normal people. When normal people reject an idea that is obviously wrong or accept one that is obviously right, a genius may think: Well, maybe the obvious isn’t true. Or maybe there’s more to it that we don’t know about yet."

Blue Monday was at peace with himself. He had a beautiful daughter who loved him, who respected his privacy and who he knew would be all right. He’d done the things he’d set out to do and enjoyed the love of two fabulous women. He’d still be married to the first one if they hadn’t discovered they had the same philandering father. And what could he say about the last love of his life, except that he longed to be with her, wherever she was...