Chapter 160: A Public Platform
Isaac sat in the relatively bare, generic government meeting room, deep in thought. Normally, witnesses would have been placed somewhere in the courthouse, possibly even on a chair right outside the courtroom itself, with just a small amount of supervision to ensure they didn’t try to sneak a peek or talk to other witnesses that might be present.
But making sure the witness wasn’t biased by overhearing the various charges was obviously a hell of a lot harder where someone like Isaac was concerned, so he’d been banished to a random building that housed some tiny, practically insignificant part of government bureaucracy and had a room available for him.
He’d even revealed the limits of his hearing, but that was A. only his current limit and B. his new [Aura] trick meant that the limits of his hearing didn’t matter anymore.
Unfortunately, there were limits to his auric senses. Mainly, sensory overload. In exchange for using his [Aura] in such a way, he had to vastly reduce his normal senses and turn his [Aura] into a series of thin shells that surrounded him, able to tell when something passed through it and nothing else.
The only thing that made this even possible was how one’s [Aura] grew stronger with your Level, more malleable, and lost less volume when stretched beyond its normal size. Where at Level 25, extending any part of the [Aura of the Desperate Seeker] to fifty meters would reduce its overall volume by half, nowadays, he could push it to a couple of hundred meters and still have almost ninety percent of his sixty-five thousand cubic meters of [Aura] available.
But he wasn’t really listening to the trial as there wasn’t anything interesting happening. He’d known about everything she was going to be charged with ahead of time, and while the chaos in the courtroom was a little funny, it wasn’t worth devoting his time and attention to.
Instead, he was mentally running through the list that Krebs had given him. She’d been trawling through the dreams of her fellow prisoners for information ever since she’d gained the ability and it had shown.
As for the inmates themselves, they were an eclectic bunch, ranging from career criminals whose Level was too high for most prisons and had therefore been concentrated in a single facility to those who were at risk of being broken out by people who could not be kept out by regular walls.
And then you had those who were here to show them that their new superpowers meant nothing. Businessmen, mostly, who’d been involved in shady enough dealings to end up arrested and too influential to be let out on bail as they posed a serious flight risk.
These were people who’d become [Businessmen], [Day Traders] and the like and kept going as normal, all the while not realizing that blocking investigation [Skills] required [Skills] of their own on top of the methods of obfuscation that had been employed to date.
Sure, those [Skills] had been available, but they’d have required [Classes] with unsavory names, and becoming a [Corrupt Businessman] would have gone over like a house on fire if the [Class] name had become public knowledge.
The [System] had changed many things, but crime and the justice system were among those most fundamentally altered.
Casual crime would soon become almost completely non-existent as people who committed criminal acts were caught in moments without the [Skills] needed to evade detection.
In other words, if you wanted to find success as a criminal, you needed to commit to the bit. You needed the [System’s] assistance to escape [System]-empowered members of law enforcement.The initial posting of this chapter occurred via Ñøv€l-B!n.
This was a double-edged sword, though.
On one hand, few people would want to commit to becoming stuck on the wrong side of the law, and fewer people would become criminals by committing crimes of opportunity as getting away with them was just ... not going to happen.
On the other, rehabilitation was almost impossible. [Skills] were needed to work, no matter what the job was. So if someone’s [Skills] were all geared towards committing crimes, that person was functionally unemployable, often forcing them back on the wrong side of the law to earn an income, which would then land them right back in jail.
What was really nice though was how this new reality affected corruption in law enforcement. “Getting away with crap” wasn’t a part of the standard [Skills] available to law enforcement [Classes], which meant that when someone pulled something, that would be proven so thoroughly that not even the powerful police unions would be able to get them out ... unless you had a non-standard law enforcement [Class]. But how long would a [Dirty Cop] or [Crime Family’s Little Bitch] remain employed?
So those were the two hundred people who shared a prison with Arianne Krebs. And of those, seven had been contacted by the mystery organization that was driving Isaac up the wall.
Almost four percent of the population of a prison for serious prisoners were connected, and what was worse, the prisoners themselves weren’t connected in other ways.
Isaac didn’t react though, just kept dumbly scrolling on his phone until the bailiff who’d led him in here pocked his head in.
“Uh, Dr. Thoma, something happened in the trial and your testimony will not be necessary anymore. The defendant confessed to everything, The sentence is being deliberated. Would you like to watch the rest of the trial?”
Isaac nodded “Sure.”
And barely a minute later, he was stuck in front of the security checkpoint in the lobby of the courthouse, along with several other witnesses. Of course, there were very few witnesses for Krebs’ crimes, so most of them were cops from Leipzig.
“Does that happen often?” Isaac asked, “Someone just confessing in the middle of the trial with no clear reason and throwing deserved shade at the government?”
“I haven’t heard of something like that, specifically, but I’ve seen some crazy stuff. One time, there was this guy who’d damaged a couple of ‘rich guy cars’ while drunk. His lawyer then read the statement ‘I did it, I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it. I’d like to petition the court to legally ban me from entering bars’. The judge obliged, and that was that. Trial over in two hours.” A police officer whom Isaac barely recognized said.
“Nah, I can top that.” Habicht declared. He was already on the other side of the checkpoint, but the conversation had clearly sparked his interest.
“See, there was this witness who was a complete jackass. The judge had already fined him, and that helped a little, but this guy was still acting like a total bastard. So when the witness statement was over and done with, the cross-examination ended, the judge didn’t ask him if he wanted to stay behind and watch the rest of the trial.”
He paused for a moment, so Isaac obliged and asked “What does that mean?”
“You know how we were just asked if we wanted to watch the rest of the trial? Basically, that’s because trials have to be public in Germany, but witnesses aren’t allowed to watch until they’ve given their statement to avoid bias. Afterward, though, they have to be officially asked if they want to stay, permitting them to watch and therefore keeping the trial public.
“So do you know what the defense lawyer did? He asked for a recess and once it was over, asked for a mistrial as the public had been excluded.”
“Oh shit,” Isaac observed.
“Yep.” Habicht chuckled “Except there was a small wrinkle in that plan. See, the witness had come by train and the station was right outside the courthouse. So some poor bastard of a bailiff had to chase him down and apparently managed to drag the witness back out of the train car by his jacket, then bring him back to the court for the judge to ask the question, and the defense attorney looked like an idiot. But the sheer look of panic on that judge’s face ... obey the rules of the court or there will be hell to pay.”
“All is well that ends well, I suppose.” Isaac shrugged “Let’s hope the same goes for this trial too.”
“Let’s.”
***
“... and Arianne Krebs is hereby sentenced to life in prison, with Sicherheitsverwahrung being strongly advised.”
And that was that. Life in prison, which tended to translate to around fifteen to twenty years of time served, as well as Sicherheitsverwahrung. This was an extension of a person’s sentence that could be added when there was a serious danger of them committing a crime once they got out. Where a normal prison sentence was meant to rehabilitate the offender, a Sicherheitsverwahrung was meant to protect everyone else.
Things had gone about as well as they could have. She was stuck in prison, but her powers weren’t going to waste and she’d already proven useful. The threat she posed was neutralized and she’d forever serve as a representation, a tangible example of what could come from careless handling of the [System].
However, should there be a problem, should she put one toe out of line, he’d always be there, ready to stop her in as final a way as was required.
Now if only his new adversary was to be as easy to deal with. If they were even real, that was.
