Harris sighed as he stared into the mirror in the men's room at the courthouse. He had to admit, even after years of practicing law, it still bothered him when he found himself having to defend a client he knew to be guilty.
Oh, of course he didn't have solid proof of that. (And if he did, he certainly wasn't going to stoop to withholding evidence.) But it didn't take a genius to see that Anderson was guilty of arranging for something to happen to Mr. (Mrs.?) Cooper. His motive was clear, and despite his statements, his demeanor towards Harris was quite clearly that of the spoiled child who resents being caught, not having done something wrong.
He splashed his face, washing the sweat from his brow. With all the lights plus the body heat from everybody in attendance, it got so warm in that blasted courtroom... He half-envied the prosecuting attorney - maybe being half-snake would let her adjust to external temperatures better.
The recess was nearly over now. Time to go back into the fray...time to argue for something he didn't even believe to be true... He laughed bitterly to himself. People who called lawyers heartless had simply never witnessed an internal struggle like the one he was having. He took a little comfort in the fact that at least he was bothered by it - if he had to defend a guilty client and didn't feel anything, then he'd be in trouble.
Still, he knew this was part of the job. Even when the accused was guilty, someone had to speak for them. If there wasn't anybody to do so, it was hardly more than a show trial. Didn't mean he had to like it, but that wasn't going to keep him from doing his job.
Harris exited the men's room and found that the prosecuting attorney was just leaving the ladies'. He nodded acknowledgement to her, and she did the same. They walked side-by-side in silence back toward the courtroom.
Anderson sat in the commissary, moodily nibbling at a sandwich while a guard sat beside him. This whole thing was so unfair...all he had ever done was retaliate! The stupid fox-woman wouldn't keep in line and listen to management, and he'd arranged for her firing - was that so wrong? Sure, it was what he'd wanted to do anyway, but it wasn't like he hadn't let the matter slide so long as she was willing to listen to authority. But then that stupid Crowe bitch had made it personal, using his own station to smear him...
(Of course, it was only ever "his own station" to him when he was having trouble controlling it, but that was hardly relevant!)
And then things had gone to hell and Toby had thrown in his lot with the upstarts...they'd smeared him, taken away his credibility and pinned him so that he had no choice but to give in and let them tear his authority up by the roots. And all he had ever done was one little retaliation! Was it so wrong that he'd arranged for Toby to be left out in the sun? If he was going to be all buddy-buddy with the sub-humans, it was only right that he get changed, too!
And then they'd gone and taken it to the police, as if it was his fault that they'd forced him into this position! And now in addition to probably losing his job, he was facing the possibility of being sent to prison...how was this fair? They were on the verge of destroying his life over one stupid firing!
But he had the upper hand now, didn't he? That was what he'd gathered from talking with Harris, at any rate. They couldn't disprove his blackmail explanation because they didn't have the guy he'd hired, they couldn't explain how Toby got that bandage, and they couldn't make this a conspiracy to commit assault without politicizing it...
Maybe this could work out for him after all. Anderson wasn't a legal expert, but he knew his marketing, and if he could make himself the victim, he knew it would be that much harder for the jury to decide against him. That was exactly why he'd gone with the blackmail story to begin with - it turned him from a player to an unwilling pawn in the eyes of the public.
And maybe...if he could take that a little farther, maybe he could turn his bad luck to good. He'd already implied that he was pressured into doing all this by an extremist, that his blackmailer was playing on a minor bias of his, the sort of feelings that the man on the street might have about the changed, that he really did regret his own feelings on the matter. Maybe if he could implicate his other tormentors in this...
After all, they'd pushed him so hard, it was already like they were conspiring to destroy him. Maybe he could make the jury see it that way - that Toby was gunning for his job, that he'd staged the whole firing affair so as to destroy Anderson's credibility...that was a good story, if he said so himself! He almost believed it - surely he could get the jury to buy it. That, after all, was what he did.
Effie wondered what would happen if someone did shut off the console. Where were they? Were they running locally on the Wii? She hardly thought there would be resources enough for one AI in a machine like this, but since she didn't know how cross-network travel worked, she couldn't say for sure. If the power went off on the machine they were in, and the RAM lost its contents...well, maybe they were backed up to disk? It would hardly be doable to dump their entire state to disk constantly, but if there were some sort of incremental backup of only the changed areas every few seconds, sort of like a journaling filesystem...
She was distracted from this line of thought by Nadine clutching her very tightly. It was more than a little uncomfortable, but she couldn't bring herself to push the girl away. Instead, she knelt down and took the Wii fairy in her arms. "I know," she said. "It's a scary thing, isn't it?"
Nadine sobbed. "I want to go home!" she said. "I want to be with my mom and dad, and be in my house..."
Effie nodded. "I know you do," she said. "I feel the same way."
The little girl looked at her. "R-really?"
Effie nodded. "I don't even know where my house is," she said.
Nadine hugged her tight. She reciprocated. "I know you want to get back home," she said. "But this is our world, at least for right now. Even if you could get out of the system and into the house, you'd find what Dennis and I did - we're too small to get around easily, and we can't affect physical objects. Your parents wouldn't even be able to see you. But if we can get them to turn the TV on, you might at least be able to talk to them."
The girl didn't say anything, but her trembling gradually diminished. Effie felt sorry for her - it was bad enough to be thrown for a loop like this as an adult, but for a child to suddenly find that she didn't even have a physical body anymore? Poor kid...
