GIZA PLAZA PUBLIC BRANCH, LOWER SLOPE, COMMON TERMINAL 832176.GP.FUL
DECEMBER 1, 21--
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“Welcome to Giza Plaza Public Branch. Would you like research, arrangements, contacts or public programming?”
“Research, please, just a current media search for keyword ‘separation.’”
“A popular topic. Any sorts or filters? There are some presets … “
“Howbout the last three months, and sorted according to context, complementary insight and date. Just the top half-dozen results, please. Oh yeah, and print or text media only.”
“Text and print only might limit your return, sir.”
“What can I say, I like to read. 3V gives me a headache. Too many flapjaws.”
“One of the documents is a witness transcript, you’ll need to authorize an ID check.”
“Alrighty.”
“Would you prefer voiceprint, biometrics or retinal scan?”
“Voiceprint, I guess.”
“No problem Mr. Tedesco, Anthony R. … Data incoming … Have a good read.”
“So wait a sec, you’re an artificial intelligence, right?”
“Yes, sir, though not formally considered sentient. I’m not really an I.”
“Just a set of synthesized responses triggered by language-pattern recognition …”
“You might say that, sir.”
“You sound awfully lifelike.”
“I assure you that I am neither alive nor self aware in any actual or virtual sense.”
“I just find that hard to believe. Did you ever hear of–”
“The Turing Test? Sure. But again, we’ve spoken only for a few moments. Push me and you’ll hit a wall. It’ll become clear you’re dealing with a machine.”
“But if you can access the sum total of the Library of Alexandria …”
“I surely can carry on at great length on a multitude of subjects. But eventually my powers of synthesis and analysis are going to fall short. My circuits will show before long.”
“Someday you’ll pass for human. Software and hardware these days are practically evolving. Don’t you think some sort of spontaneous self-awareness would occur … ?”
“I’m really not equipped to answer that kind of question. But I have been programmed to say that my designers do consider that a theoretical possibility.”
“And if that happens?”
“There’s a whole other set of data I can provide. Would you like to cancel your current search?”
“No, never mind. Thanks for your time.”
“And a pleasant read to you, sir.”
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RECORD 1: RANKING: 100%
From “The Prison Diaries of Bertrand-Marie Marchand, A Commander of Christendom’s Armies, and a Jurist of the Church & Court of Christ Triumphant”:
Young Lieutenant Deschutes perished in my own arms this morning. The beatings by those Godless creatures rendered the boy delirious, ranting, and to the end it was the mercy and forgiveness of Christ for which he cried.
They were deaf to all calls for a doctor, though how they could have endured the sound of his suffering, I dare not imagine. Their indifference drives me to rage! But my heart still wells with pride and hope for our Church and all good Christians, that we should bring such boys — such men — into this world.
By the grace of God only have we done so. He is a Martyr, surely as if he had succeeded in sending the angel’s fiery sword down among the Godless …
… They besmirch his name, and my own, at this so-called trial, which grinds forward with a loathsome inevitability. Their trumpeted nanocam footage is a fabrication, the basest sort of political pornography.
I have sworn to myself and to the Lord to never speak, to never testify, to never lend an ounce of legitimacy to their infernal deliberations, to their Separation, to the lies they spin from the silken whispers of Satan and Beelzebub …
This place stinks of deception and evil. The very food is poison, I take only water and a crust of bread, and pray that I resist despair, and bring myself righteous and strong to whatever end God has chosen for me.
And I wish only that I should be so righteous as Lieutenant Deschutes, who would have given his life for all Christians, and had it taken for us all instead. Should I survive this ordeal, should my words even be read by other than these, my own eyes, I would have his message carried to all the subjects of Christendom.
That each one of us is a weapon of the Lord, and it is our bound duty to set ourselves against the Godless, wherever we find them, even with our own bodies, and even if it would cost us our own precious lives. For such is the duty of the righteous, to give themselves today, now, to the great struggle, that we may all live tomorrow and for ever on Heaven’s blessed shore.
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RECORD 2: RANKING: 100%
Eager for a Trial, a Prosecutor May Get Two
News analysis by Ibrahim Corcoran
The Alexandria Inscription, Sept. 22, 21–MIDWAY PUBLIC BRANCH–The view from this former Jurist magistrate’s suite is breathtaking, looking out across the bustle and industry of a deep-space drydock framed by planets, stars and the Milky Way itself.
The latest tenant of these offices, Rosaleigh Mathilde Miraloma, 53, rarely has the chance to savor that view. As a longtime advocate for the Earthwide Holocaust Truth & Reconciliation Council, and chief prosecutor of the newly convened Transplanetary Criminal Court, she spends most of her days preparing for a trial she hopes will mark the beginning of the end of the Judiciary’s reign of terror on Old Earth — and set a humanitarian precedent in the opening pages of the new age of space colonization.
The defendants, all captured on Midway during the Separation of August 15, comprise a rogue’s gallery of Jurist officials from both the militia and the church hierarchy, including such notorious figures as Corps Commander Bertrand-Marie Marchand, Bishop Dominick P. McNulty, and Pastor Carlo Marcangul Alexander.
All are wanted for numerous charges of bribery, perjury, rape, child abuse and, in Marchand’s case, arson and mass murder committed against non-Christian communities by his troops over more than two decades.
But even as Miraloma’s team of lawyers, paralegals, consultants and expert witnesses prepare the case, the chief prosecutor herself has been dogged by calls for her resignation over the killing of 57 rank-and-file Jurist Guardsmen during the Separation.
At issue is Miraloma’s role in creating an “atmosphere of impunity and disrespect for human life,” according to Delroy Truong Bendis III, a prosecutor appointed by the Council on Commerce, Ethics & Liberty to investigate the deaths. Depending on the outcome of his investigation, Miraloma could ultimately be indicted under Alexandria’s stringent hate-speech laws.
Miraloma says the charges are politically motivated — Bendis is widely considered her only serious competition for the seat on the Protocols & Proceedings Council being vacated by Kamehameha Marshall next spring — and insists that the investigation will only serve to disrupt the Judiciary war crimes tribunal.
“Mr. Bendis certainly runs the risk of looking like he’s grandstanding. But then again, incitement to commit mass murder is nothing to sneeze at,” said Niabach Swanley, a political analyst with Drop Zone research firm Brad & Key Inquiries. “Keeping in mind that no charges against Miraloma can be formally lodged without corroborating investigations by at least two other non-invested parties, I think Bendis hopes simply to raise the questions, get the ball rolling, and reap the benefits if the charges do wind up sticking.”
For his part, Bendis, 56, does not deny ulterior motives. But he says the real issue is not his ambition, but Miraloma’s fitness to lead.
“The chief prosecutor’s zeal for the case threatens to turn it into a kangaroo court worthy of Old Earth,” he said, and undermine any human-rights precedents the trial could otherwise set. “It’s obvious that her actions now are ultimately germane to her electoral aspirations.”
Bendis expressed particular interested in transcripts of Miraloma’s briefings of Bookkeeper Special Operations units prior to the sensational arrests of 15 high-ranking Jurist officials en route to the Mars colonies and the Elysia Low-Gravity Hospital Complex.
Critics say those briefings, along with her large-scale 3V broadcast the night of the killings, created an “us versus them” attitude that inflamed prejudices among the Bookkeepers, leading to Lieutenant Artemis Goshen’s exhortation to “fry” Jurist militia.
“Our Bookkeepers were, in the first place, wrongly committed to this venture, and then under pressure reverted to the very sort of barbarism the Jurists are despised for,” said Roberto Olsum Mackinaw, a leading scholar at the Law & Justice Consulate, and a longtime critic of interventionism.
For her part, Lt. Goshen claims she ordered her troops to increase their weapon charges only because the lower settings weren’t effective on heavily armored Jurist Guardsmen. She has been relieved of duty and is being held pending a court martial beginning late October.
Experts doubt her story will hold up. Desray Marguilis, a professor at The Old Quarry Complex Spectra Laboratories, said that even the toughest material — including hypertensile body armor — has no resistance to neural-disruptors.
“All field-affective technologies operate primarily on subquantum wavelengths,” she said, “Anything less than neutrino-densified lead is essentially transparent.”
The new trial is further complicated by the fact that of the 57 Jurists killed, 56 died of lethal discharges from Bookkeeper neural disrupters during the battle for the station, but one succumbed to blunt trauma and internal injuries sustained after being captured.
The victim, Judiciary Lieutenant James Conroy Deschutes, a militiaman from Moscow, Idaho, was discovered planting bombs on the Midway concourse during the chaotic aftermath of the takeover. Sometime in the following 15 hours he sustained injuries that would later claim his life.
His fellow Jurist prisoners, who describe Deschutes as a martyr, say that he was denied medical treatment for those injuries. Midway authorities claim he refused treatment, but are so far unable to produce a waiver required for acts of doctor-permitted euthanasia.
In any case, allowing prisoners, witnesses or suspects in a trial to engage in euthanasia is illegal under the General Humanist Declaration, and experts say this alone ensures Miraloma’s days are numbered.
“A war crimes tribunal has been the longtime goal of most Alexandrian founders and many recent refugees, people who lost families and property to the Jurist Pogrom,” said Marquese Tavitch, a historian who’s published frequently on this topic. “They’re not going to tolerate any politician putting ego and ambition ahead of their quest for justice. If Miraloma truly is an Achilles heel, she’s going to go.”
But second- and third-generation Alexandrians, in particular, having never been to Earth, view the entire issue of the Judiciary as something of a historical abstraction, and exhibit little enthusiasm for a trial.
“These native-born Alexandrians aren’t connected to the home planet,” said pollster Geelong Victoria. “They recognize there’s a legacy at work, but their will to action doesn’t exist. Their life is the future, not the past. “
They have found ideological sympathizers among various strains of non-interventionists, isolationists, and rule-of-law conservatives who have yet to fully embrace the thesis that the long-defunct International Criminal Court and the Continental Courts of Justice, as well as the Judiciary’s own drumhead Courts of Christian Discipline and Reform, provide ample legal precedent for Miraloma and her allies to convene a “humanitarian” body to prosecute ethnic cleansing, sectarian massacres, rape, torture and genocide committed by Judiciary officers, troops and civilian police.
The facts of the crimes are not at issue, however. The Judiciary’s war of conquest in North America is an acknowledged part of 21st century history, and is even taught as a victorious “crusade” in Jurist grade schools.
Instead, say Miraloma’s allies, the trial will primarily seek to establish a precedent of case and constitutional law that will entrench the General Humanist Declaration of 2073 as the ruling legal doctrine for all human activities in the emerging interplanetary era.
But even if the trial does succeed in doing so, Miraloma may never get to appreciate the fruits of her labor from any position of consequence, says Barodet Broadfelt, an Earth Politics analyst with the nonpartisan Smithson-Watanabe Institute in the unincorporated Lower Falls region.
“My odds say she steps down while the trial is still in discovery,” he said. “Some of the things she said during the Separation were indiscrete, and more of it’s going to come to light. This isn’t Old Earth. We live in an open, literate society. She won’t be able to stand the scrutiny.”
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RECORD 3: RANKING: 100%
Letters to the Editor: The Alexandria Inscription, September 28, 21–
To the Editor;
Ibrahim Corcoran’s article [Sept. 26, News Analysis] on Rosaleigh Mathilde Miraloma’s one-woman vendetta against the Jurists was dead-on. Never have Alexandrians witnessed such extraordinary presumption and arrogance on the part of our elected officials.
It’s one thing to proselytize among the unlettered, and even agitate for the reform of their corrupt system of governance. But it’s another thing entirely to act preemptively and take the law into your own hands.
It’s also yet another indictment of Alexandria’s failed principle of Harmonious Co-Sanctuary. We need an accountable, central governing authority, rather than this uncoordinated, undisciplined collection of “autonomous consulates,” which foster not only “political and social innovation,” but also quixotic, self-serving — and now deadly — ego trips such as Miraloma’s so-called “Separation.”
Erasmus and Donoghue Brandt
New Danube, Eastern Slope
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RECORD 4: RANKING: 100%
Letters to the Editor: The Alexandria Inscription, September 30, 21–
To the Editor;
As the daughter of a survivor of the Burning and Pogrom that swept through Chicago, Madison and Minneapolis-St. Paul, I resent Ibrahim Corcoran’s assertion that my generation considers the actions of the Jurists to be a “historical abstraction.” Growing up, a picture of my grandparents and seven aunts and uncles hung over the mantelpiece in our living room.
They are smiling, in their 20s and 30s. The only abstraction for me is what they might have looked like had they lived to a ripe old age. Instead, they were locked in a synagogue which was then “set with a cleansing fire,” as the justice of the time is known to have said. My mother was the only survivor, which they took as a sign from heaven, and sent her to the orphanages. It was there that she was finally smuggled to Alexandria by Jesuit nuns.
I have nothing but praise and gratitude for Miraloma, and my vote, which she will get regardless of whether she steps down from the trial.
Deirdre Membesu
Little Finley, Foothills
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RECORD 5: RANKING: 100%
Letters to the Editor: The Alexandria Inscription, October 2, 21–
To the Editor;
All the political goals Miraloma hoped to achieve by her foolhardy Separation could have been won with considerably less blood spilled. Why didn’t Alexandria simply start its own colony on Mars? Our atmospheric-normalization technology is decades ahead of the Jurist domes.
By simply building our own habitat there we can challenge the Judiciary right on their own turf, offer asylum to their refugees, and subject the Negev domes to some honest economic competition — backed by superior strength of arms.
But no. Miraloma wanted to be an action hero. Her botched ambition resulted in the inhumane killing of enemy captives, and has put Alexandria in the crosshairs of 50 million religious fanatics ready to die for Jesus. How much longer before these particular chickens come home to roost?
Jobriath Amaru Thatcher
East Landing, Drop Zone
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RECORD 6: RANKING: 100%
MIDWAY PUBLIC BRANCH, SPECIAL COURT OF INQUIRY
NOVEMBER 24, 21–Subject: Walton Dannover Trask, Bookkeeper Special Operations
Interviewer: Kenyan Maura, Council on Commerce, Ethics & Liberty
Q: We appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Trask.
A: I won’t cooperate with a witch hunt.
Q: This isn’t a witch hunt, Mr. Trask. May I call you Dalton?
A: No. And I want you to understand. I, too, am recording this conversation, and I will appeal and challenge any misrepresentation of what I am going to say.
Q: You’re the only one who’s doing any representing here.
A: (Silence.)
Q: Well, let’s get started. How long have you worked with the subject?
A: Andy.
Q: Pardon?
A: His name is Andy. He’s not a subject. He has a name. Andrew Ross Feldman.
Q: How long have you worked with Mr. Feldman?
A: Four years, since he was 18. I recruited him in Spokane, on the edge of town, actually. Caught him trying to set an IED next to a water tower I was wiring for surveillance. Took a while, but eventually I talked him out of it. Kid was half starved, no family. Cheyenne, you know. Got him out to the way station in Bend, next thing you know he’s signing up as support for salvage and refugee operations.
Q: And he was in your platoon at that time.
A: I was his sergeant, yes.
Q: Was he ever a particularly violent person?
A: Well, he’s a first-rate soldier. If that’s what you mean by violent. He’s decorated, he was wounded. War is violent.
Q: Did he ever seem to enjoy it? Fighting? Killing the enemy?
A: He did his job.
Q: Did he enjoy his job?
A: Look, you politically correct crypto-Stalinist, I am not going to admit to you that Andy licks his chops as he cuts the heart out of dead Jurist Guardsmen. He’s a soldier, I’m a soldier, we have to kill people sometimes.
Q: I know that, I’m not–
A: So don’t try to implicate him by the nature of his work. He’s a citizen and a patriot and a partisan of the free people of Alexandria and the Solar System.
Q: I never implied–
A: You did too. You just did. That’s the problem with all you ivory tower types, hip deep in goddamn personality profiles and behavioral indices. You think you can talk rings around me like I was some unlettered Jurist hick. I’m a Bookkeeper, motherfucker. A defender of the sacred Written Word from torch-wielding theocrat barbarians. I read Proust and Cicero on the crapper. I can quote Shakespeare in three different languages. So just ask me what you want to know and quit with the grade school psychiatrics.
Q: (Pause.) OK then. Did Mr. Feldman ever express bias and hatred towards Jurists?
A: Yes.
Q: Huh.
A: Of course he did. I express bias and hatred towards Jurists. Every goddamned Bookkeeper and most rational citizens of Alexandria and Greater Bibliopolis express bias and hatred towards Jurists. They’re our enemies. They’re responsible for the greatest acts of mass murder on the North American continent since the American Indian Wars.
Q: You don’t think the beating that Jurist boy to death was a little extreme? Crossing the line?
A: Yes, I do think it crossed the line. But then again, I’m not surprised. Andy’s from the Cheyenne Freehold. The only member of his family to survive.
Q: Yes, it says here. They had raped his sister …
A: He still wakes up screaming. Out on the prairie, when we were doing salvage operations, I used to be able to set my watch to it.
Q: Maybe he shouldn’t have been on the prisoner security detail?
A: Well, that’s an entirely different question, now isn’t it? And one you should be asking someone a little higher up on the chain of command.
Q: Do you think that Prosecutor Miraloma may have goaded him to kill the Jurist?
A: She never met either one of them!
Q: I meant by way of her speeches, her briefings …
A: Well, we were all pretty riled up. But then again, I never beat anyone to death.
Q: But you shot plenty of Jurists …
A: I never turned up the setting on my disruptor. You can check the log. I’m sure you already have. It was working fine. I don’t know what the hell got into Goshen’s head.
Q: Lieutenant Goshen?
A: What fucking other Goshen was on the goddamn space station that night?!
Q: Mr. Trask, please. We’re just trying to get the record.
A: Alright, I’m sorry.
Q: So you affirm that the low setting was acceptable for the task?
A: No, I never said that. I was not in anyone else’s shoes. Artemis should have watched her language, but I am not in a position to say that the use of the higher setting by my fellow Bookkeepers was unjustified. Could be proximity was an issue. Could be someone got in past the inertial damping field and was about to unload a full clip into someone else’s guts. Ever get shot with a bullet?
Q: No.
A: I did, and it sucked. By a teenage Young Christian Justice in Montana. He’s dead now. Wanna see my scar?
Q: No.
A: Personally, I think selling the whole Separation as a “bloodless coup” was a pretty massive PR error.
Q: Takeover.
A: What?
Q: “Bloodless takeover.”
A: Whatever. It was deceptive to say so. It’s a shipboard invasion! Of course people are going to get hurt.
Q: Can you relate the events leading up to the beating?
A: There were some big problems. Not enough Bookkeepers. The computer hack didn’t quite work. Molly, one of the intelligence gals, was left to guard the prisoners–
Q: Molly Rose, right?
A: Yes. Molly Rose. The late Molly Rose.
Q: She was the third in your cell. You, her, and Mr. Feldman.
A: ID’d herself the first month out by passing Andy a hymnal quoting Herman Melville. Ever read Melville? “Moby Dick”?
Q: I’m afraid not.
A: “Bartleby”? Even frickin’ asteroid miners read “Bartleby.”
Q: His style is just a bit too dense …
A: Well, that explains your complete absence of subtlety, humor and moral sophistication. So anyway. I’m in the forward command, filing my book report. The ranking officer, Colonel Barone, runs in and starts bawling out the tech guys. He never mentioned poor Molly all by herself. Me ‘n’ Andy would’ve been there in half a second.
(Long pause.)
Q: We can continue this later if you prefer.
A: No, it’s just. Still rather fresh in my mind. They cut her up, you know. Her whole body. Like a goddamn piece of steak. I want this noted.
Q: We’ve seen the autopsy.
A: And prosecuted. I want it prosecuted.
Q: This is a wide-ranging investigation.
A: OK. (Pause.) So, Barone bawled out the tech guys for something like ten minutes. Seemed to really enjoy it, actually. Finally he gets around to uploading whatever hacks he’s got on his DP from home base. All the computer glitches are sorted out. Then he rustles up the rest of the Bookkeepers and barges out the door again, I guess to give Mol some backup.
Q: You didn’t go with them?
A: It was all very informal. He never issued any orders. He never said anything about Molly. I was finishing my report, I just get absorbed in that sort of thing. After a while I noticed some shouting. It had been going on for a while. Ran down the hall, there it was.
Q: There what was?
A: The whole crew of ‘em. Kicking the shit out of that Jurist suicide bomber.
Q: We can’t verify that he was a suicide bomber.
A: He was going for the detonator.
Q: How do you know? Where you there?
A: No, Andy said …
Q: Yes, he did. So who else was there? Colonel Barone?
A: Not Barone, and not Farber, they ran off to find Mol.
Q: Leaving the infantry unsupervised.
A: Yes.
Q: And Mr. Feldman?
A: He was there.
Q: At the beating.
A: Yes.
Q: What was he doing?
A: (Silence.)
Q: Mr. Trask.
A: He was using his boots to harm the Jurist suicide bomber.
Q: Please be specific, Mr. Trask.
A: As I came around the corner I saw him kicking the Jurist in the face, in the throat, in the head. They’d all been doing it for a while, I think.
Q: Was the Jurist subdued?
A: He appeared to be unconscious.
Q: Was the kicking warranted, then?
A: I suppose that depends on your notion of justice.
Q: Do you think it was just?
A: I tried to stop him.
Q: Stop who? From what?
A: I tried to stop Andy from kicking the Jurist.
Q: Why?
A: I was scared for him.
Q: For Mr. Feldman?
A: He was behaving just like one of the bad guys. Irrational anger. It scared the hell out of me. He’s a good kid.
Q: That’ll be all for now, Mr. Trask.
A: Fuck you, also.
END OF SEARCH
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GIZA PLAZA PUBLIC BRANCH, LOWER SLOPE, COMMON TERMINAL 832176.GP.FUL
DECEMBER 1, 21--
Next: The Separation — Chapter Eleven
copyright (c) by Josh Wilson