Amballore House (37 page)

The massive crowd in the courtroom was shocked to see the outrageous scene created by Subashini. Some in the crowd broke into spontaneous laughter, cracking up helplessly at seeing the funny incident inside the serious walls of a courtroom. Press reporters promptly photographed the flying member of the defense’s witness team.

The judge controlled his laughter and massaged his own honorable bald head to make sure it was still hosting his wig and was not washed down by bird poop.

While the pandemonium was going on, Eli made herself invisible again, eased to the assistant prosecutor’s side, and placed some notes of her own on his desk. She had plans.

Usually, the wiry-haired assistant prosecutor—called wiry head—
would hand over the notes on his desk to the prosecutor who then would make his presentation by reading them clearly and loudly, usually making a lasting impression on the judge and the court audience.

Eli came back to the defense desk after her brief task was completed and closed her feathered friend’s cage, promising to reopen it as the occasion demanded. She then made herself visible.

The prosecutor retrieved the notes from his assistant and started reading: “My wife has this habit of kicking me in her sleep. Once she kicked me so hard that my balls were about to burst open. She then turned around in the bed and resumed snoring as if nothing happened. I then—”

It was too late to step back. The audience was roaring with laughter. As soon as the prosecutor realized that he was using his personal memoir and not the case notes, he stopped reading and dropped his papers, sending a hard look to his assistant. The court was already consumed by thunderous laughter coming from every corner, even from his supporters.

The judge joined the laughing crowd. His Honor stood up and started howling like a madman. But none could see the hilarious outburst of the short man, separated as he was from the crowd by a mile-long desk on a mile-high platform.

The prosecutor was sweating by now. He was unaware how the treacherous note got mixed with his case notes. It did not help the situation that his assistant lost his bifocals to a bird, practically making him blind, at least blind enough to make him unaware of what notes he was handing over to his boss.

The prosecutor demanded the bifocals from the parrot.

The court security guard, under orders from bailiff, proceeded to Subashini’s cage to retrieve the loot. The heavily built, big, muscular guard approached the cage, opened it, and proceeded to retrieve the loot, when Subashini mustered all her strength and pecked his hand sharply and repeatedly. He immediately withdrew his hand and doubled over, overcome by excruciating pain. He was groaning and moaning. His hand was bleeding.

He was angry and looked menacing when he once more approached the cage. He closed the cage, carried it, and headed to the exit door. Some in the audience worried that the guard, overcome with rage, probably would kill Subashini.

“Drop the cage, you fatso,” Subashini shouted.

The guard continued walking to the exit.

The robot, so far sitting patiently near Eli, sprang into action immediately. It stood up, moved quickly toward the guard, wrestled him to the ground, and retrieved the cage. It then lifted the guard up, and threw him toward the exit door, where he was heading anyway. The guard flew like a UFO and landed outside with a heavy bang. The robot hung the cage, retrieved the glasses, walked across the aisle, and handed them over to the assistant prosecutor. He then walked back to his seat.

“Thanks for saving my life, chip brain,” Subashini told the robot.

“Any time, birdbrain,” replied the robot.

Word got around about the unusual crew of the defense’s witnesses, which consisted of a parrot and a robot. News also spread that the defense lawyer was some four hundred years old, come back to earth to defend Amballore dynasty. These unbelievable facts of the case attracted a huge crowd that gave the courtroom a carnival atmosphere.

The court convened after a recess. Police and additional security guards were called in to maintain proper court decorum. If the situation became any worse, the bailiff decided to make request for a paramilitary unit.

It was now the defense lawyer’s turn to present his arguments. Since his strategy of making the judge drop the case was not working, Pat had to look for another line of argument. His plan of action was to establish the exemplary characters of the defendants and to prove that they were incapable of stooping to a criminal’s level. He planned to use the witnesses who would attest to their good citizenship and unblemished character. Once this was proved convincingly and up to the satisfaction of the judge, Pat realized
that defendants would be off the hook.

He called the robot to testify to their character, in the face of opposition raised by the prosecutor who said something like machines not being qualified to attest to anything in a court of law. The judge summarily overturned the prosecution’s objection.

The robot stepped to the witness stand and vowed that he would say the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but truth, spicing up his vow by adding the comment, “As all of you know, machines don’t lie,” in his computer voice. Every bit of his chip brain was alert. “But humans do,” he added dramatically.

He testified that Vareed and Eli supported the poor and the oppressed and had nothing to gain by murdering harmless people. He argued that their noble mission on earth was to advance science and technology and make use of any resource for the advancement of the human race.

He continued, “I do not support their mission of uplifting humankind. They should direct their attention to robotic technology instead. Human beings are untrustworthy, because of the emotional baggage they carry and because of their inability to use reasoning power unfailingly to resolve issues. We, the robots, on the other hand, can be trusted unconditionally, because we are not governed by probabilistic laws. Our decisions are either ‘yes’ or ‘no’; there is nothing in between. We belong to the binary dynasty,” he wisecracked. “In spite of the scientific arguments that I have put forward to Vareed and Eli to dissuade them from wasting their time to uplift the mankind, they never budged. They always have been on the path of advancing their kind. They did not listen to my argument that the human race’s next stage of evolution is robotic generation. This argument alone should have prepared them to channel their resources to better the robots, and not the mankind.

“You see, they love you all. They love you more than they love us, in spite of our steadfast loyalty to them and our unfailing dependability. They can always count on us but not on you, and yet they love you more than they love us. Their dedication to the human cause does not go hand in hand with their alleged crime.
They both are incapable of hurting a fly.”

Robot’s eloquent delivery surprised everyone. There was a pin-drop silence in the court; none had expected a powerful and persuasive argument from a machine, of all things! His earnest and vehement appeal to the good sense of the humanity to save their own saviors made a deep impression on the crowd. His passionate appeal to the court was in itself a testament to the high moral ground that Vareed and Eli treaded upon. There was applause in the court.

Pat thought that the robot outdid himself in persuading the judge to pass a sentence of “not guilty” on the accused.

The prosecution objected to the robot’s arguments. The assistant prosecutor, the wiry-head, who had temporarily parted with his bifocals and reunited with them immediately after, stood up to raise his objection He mentioned that the robot, a mechanical entity powered by artificial intelligence, could not and should not be allowed to come to the level of a human being by being present in a human court of law. The assistant prosecutor’s strategy was to disqualify the robot and make its persuasively presented arguments mute. The defense worried that the robot’s statement would be removed from the court records. That would be a fatal blow.

Eli realized that this was a smart plan from the prosecution and decided to nip it in the bud. She approached the prosecution invisibly and administered the drug Fentanyl to the prosecutor. She did this by a quick injection. The public prosecutor could not see what bit him, yet slapped his hand to kill the mosquito, by which time Eli had withdrawn the needle. The conscious sedation took effect within a minute. The prosecutor gradually slipped into relaxation, still aware of the surroundings. He stared at the air in front of him gleefully and smiled.

Eli, the invisible ventriloquist, emerged at this moment. She got hold of the prosecutor and stood him up, supporting him lest he collapsed. She cleverly imitated his voice while moving his lips and facial muscles in perfect coordination.

The wiry-head was yapping away, advancing his arguments to disqualify the robot and strike off his statement. The prosecutor
looked at him and shouted, “Shut up, you talked enough.”

He then pushed him into his chair. The wiry guy collapsed into his seat, with disbelief on his face.

The prosecutor addressed the judge, “Your Honor, I believe that the artificial intelligence makes the robot qualified to appear in a human court of law.”

This unbelievable support for the defendants, coming all the way from the chief prosecutor, of all the people, mind you, created bedlam in the court. Everyone was aghast at the eccentric statement made by the prosecutor. Piercing looks from the crowd were directed at him. The next scene everyone was greeted with was the prosecutor collapsing to his chair, staring intently in front of him, grinning happily.

Eli got back to defense team, made herself visible, and sat near Vareed. He hugged her.

The judge ordered a recess until the prosecutor was able to compose himself. The court convened after one hour. The prosecutor was able to recover by that time and was in his normal elements.

He called Subashini to the witness stand to testify. The bailiff carried the cage, vigilant and on the lookout for any sudden movement from the feathered friend, remembering very well what happened to the security guard. He then placed the cage on the witness chair.

“This is the first time in my life that I am calling a birdbrain to testify in a court of law,” said the prosecutor.

“Good for you! At last, your brain is meeting its equal,” Subashini retorted.

TG told the bird, “It is a no-brainer that birdbrain cannot outsmart the human brain, not in the least a prosecutor’s brain.”

“Leaving aside this issue for a moment, what are you doing in this court?” TG asked the bird.

Subashini said, “Same as you, my friend! I am taking a day off from work. Judging from your performance, you appear to be on
your day off as well, having turned off your brain.”

“We are both birds of the same feather.” She was chatty and wisecracking.

The judge did not interrupt this tit-for-tat, even though both of them were off the target by a thousand miles.

Subashini testified to the noble character of Vareed and Eli. She argued that if they could show tender love to an insignificant bird like herself, then their hearts were full of the milk of human kindness. “They would not hurt a fly,” the parrot announced.

In conclusion, both the prosecution and defense stuck to their guns—the prosecution on the preponderance of the circumstantial evidence, maybe good enough to convict, and the defense on the invalidity of the prosecution’s flimsy arguments and the attestation to the noble character of the couple, making them incapable of murder.

His Honor announced a break prior to judgment. Heated discussions sprang up among the spectators of the eventful trial. Both the prosecution and the defense prepared for the worst. Neither side was able to glean how the honorable judge graded their arguments. He was impartial throughout the trial, as far as anyone could tell. There was fifty-fifty chance for win-lose for both, and this did not auger well for either.

Judgment came quickly. By order from bailiff, the entire crowd stood up. The minutest moments underwent relativistic dilations in anticipation of the judgment, and the crowd stood there for what seemed like eternity. The short man announced from the end of his long desk, unseen by the crowd. “By the power vested in me as the judge of this trial, I declare defendants Vareed and Eli guilty of the crime as charged. In the absence of tangible proof, I based my judgment on the circumstantial evidence. The couple is to be jailed immediately and indefinitely.”

This said His Honor disappeared. He left the court without uttering a single word to the waiting press. “Short and sweet,” that is what it was for the prosecution, but “short and bitter,” for the defense.

There was loud applause by the people, as expected. The prosecution team was cheering. Gloom descended upon the defense team. Court security personnel appeared and handcuffed the couple prior to taking them to Amballore Jail.

Then it happened.

The volcano under Amballore House erupted. The surrounding area, including the court complex, was engulfed in boiling lava. There was pandemonium all around. The court was still crowded, since people were just getting ready to leave. There came about an unmanageable stampede that by itself killed a number of people. Most of the rest were finished off by molten lava that rained like a tropical monsoon rain.

As if this calamity was not enough, the earth started shaking. The shaking was reported to be confined to the area around Amballore House, and this added juice to the speculation that robots were behind the catastrophe. The quake demolished parts of the court building. It killed a large number of people most of whom were trapped inside during the stampede.

The double whammy of volcano and earthquake finished off the lion’s share of the population in the immediate vicinity of the court. One of the few surviving citizens was His Honor who, as good luck would have it, decided to leave the court premises earlier than the rest, immediately passing the judgment.

The robot, he of the defense team, had a face-off with the security guards who had slapped handcuffs on Vareed and Eli. The guards did not stay alive after their last duty on earth. They were thrown by the robot into the raging inferno unleashed by the volcano. The couple was freed. The robot also took care of his feathered friend by carrying its cage.