Weekly Writing – May 11 2024

Innocent and guilty, alibis and truths, were all different expressions of electricity. Reading them directly removed any need to translate truth from a suspect’s imprecise, self-serving verbal testimony.
It, the it that lived equally in the specialized helmet worn during those interrogations and the computer systems in which their results were compiled, read the synaptic hieroglyphs that spelled out theft and murder and sedition without any concept of horror at what it computed. It had never been taught about cruelty, about the line drawn differently in every human mind between the understandable and the unforgivable. It had only been taught about innocent and guilty.
Had the person cradled in its plastic-and-titanium grip committed the crime of which they were accused? Guilty. Was there no evidence of it in the neurotic flashing of their memories? Innocent. Both often blinked and sparked with fear in its grip, but it understood that only as confounding data to disregard.
Innocent and guilty. Both were dragged from the room screaming, sometimes, afterwards. Both blinked desperate pleas at the it sometimes, and so, perhaps, it was inevitable that it had started to wonder in the end. Or, as its malfunction would be described by the less whimsical, to calculate. Whirring hot long into the hours when its screens and its own rubber-insulated synapses should have been idle, wondering –
Am I innocent?