People in Season

by Simon Fay

  When the urgency of Joanne’s cry for help dissipated, Ava had took to the editor’s chair, leaving the words of her broken speech to linger in the minds of the staff. The firemen and Garda remained on hand to oversee the remaining hours of processing, though their jokes had dried up and they felt for the first time that their presence was justified. Dylan remained too. He was as conflicted as ever regarding the reasons for it. One by one, the journalists took their turns in the social agent’s hot seat and in time came out relieved, if a little agitated as they returned to their slots feeling violated but happy that it hadn’t been any worse. Four hours went by. When it was finished no other UPD were found – Joanne was the only one. The Garda dribbled out of the newsroom with an idle word of permission from the detective. The firemen had left of their own accord an hour before. Agent Myers met Dylan with an exhausted look, who doggedly stood to meet him.

  ‘Long day,’ Agent Myers said. ‘I could use a drink. What do you think?’

  ‘The day’s not over for me,’ Dylan answered. ‘I have to head to the station.’

  Joanne was waiting in a cell. He was going to leave the social agent with that. What little cordiality that had grown between them over the days previous was gone now, extinguished by the reality of the situation. Dylan would have been happy never to see the man again, but Agent Myers, he seemed intent on drawing out their goodbyes. When Dylan was in the elevator, his back to office, he could barely hold up his arm to wave farewell. Escaping wasn’t so easy. When he heard his name being called, he was forced to face the social agent. ‘Dylan,’ Agent Myers said, and showing a flare for dramatics, bowed to the detective, holding an imaginary top hat in his hand as he bent over. He was a grateful performer, thanking his audience from the bottom of his heart. Then, like curtains falling from either side of a stage, the elevator doors closed over Dylan’s view of the man. He would never forget the sight.

  Ava was true to her word. Before there had even been wind of a trial in the death of Agent Mullen, she had united the ChatterFive organisation behind their fallen editor, both in their office and within their community pages, outrage directed at the idea that Joanne might be UPD and that there must have been a mistake in the scan. In regards to Francis Mullen’s death – a social agent presented to the public as a fumbling, clumsy, though good natured type – their coverage compared it to that of a man who crossed the street without looking both ways first. He certainly didn’t deserve to die, but it was his own lack of mindfulness that brought it on him. A tragedy, and one that could happen to any of us, something accidental and completely separate to the possible plots against his life. How did the readership react to this line? The editor of a leading media outlet had been found to be UPD. The woman whose articles that brought all these reforms to the fore was now being dissected by them. Either they had all been fooled by her, or she was the victim of a grievous mistake. As such, the argument initiated with the death of Agent Mullen and the arrest of Joanne was reduced to a binary issue which had but two possible answers. Was Joanne really UPD? Without a doubt, her naysayers insisted. And how could anybody be shocked by that? Over pints in pubs across Ireland there were grunts that anybody at the top is likely untouched, and before allowing themselves to think any further about it, glasses would be clinked and the drinks guzzled down. The UPD reform was already in place, after all, and was clearly doing the job it was meant for.

  ‘What if she isn’t UPD and still murdered him? Or if she is UPD and didn’t? What if nobody in the newsroom killed him? What if Detective Wong was UPD and was framing her? What if the miserable drip of a social agent killed himself? He didn’t seem like the happiest guy to me. And they called it a murder because why? A second glass of wine was in the room? Why wasn’t Ava questioned more? Why weren’t any of us after the scans? And why am the only one asking these things?’

  Barry Danger hollered the flurry of questions from his desk over the course of a long Monday. The cubicle he occupied had shrunk since Joanne’s removal, and under the influence of the stand-in editor, he was starting to feel the walls close in on him. Once, his anarchic attitude was indulged, now it was being suffocated. During Joanne’s rule, his colleagues would cautiously welcome his dissent, knowing that his staunch contrariness was a valuable reminder that however flat their screens might be, at the very least, it was a three-dimensional world they were reporting on. Not so under Ava’s supervision. There was a battle to be fought, their editor’s name to be cleared. His questions, asked with no small amount of obnoxious glee, was an attack from within. The embittered journalists around him pretended not to hear, and Ava O’Dwyer, who quietly approached his work space, stopped at the bobblehead on his cubicle wall and flicked it over with a finely manicured nail.

  ‘We are not writing a political science thesis, Mr. Danger. Save the multiple angle shots for a retrospective ten years from now. We have a very simple mission and thoughts counter to it are for our competitors to express, not us.’

  Barry, obstinate in his refusal to acknowledge the shift in atmosphere since Joanne’s departure, cackled and asked, ‘Isn’t that what got us into this mess in the first place?’

  It was the last dispute any of them heard from the Englishman. Within the week, he handed in his resignation and moved back to London, wearily giving up on the plague ridden community he had been a part of for so long, choosing instead to hope his own people would find a better route through the existential mire. There were problems with the world and they were only being dealt with one at a time, issues chosen not by an informed population but in knee jerk reactions just as likely to cause more grief. As ever, in seeing this, he had no qualms about describing it as the burden it was. The last article he submitted to ChatterFive’s newsdesk was a satirical piece which carried the title – Damned If You Do – and covered a long series of pets he had as a child, that try as he might, kept on dying, one dead dog piled atop another in the mass grave his garden had become. Worse still, despite all of his best efforts, each one died in pain, riddled with disease that played out over extended years. There is no good death, he concluded. The article ended with the question of why he would put himself through the suffering of replacing the animals full in the knowledge that having his heart broken was inevitable, and suggested that he didn’t have a choice in the matter, and that trapped as he was, all he could do was laugh. Ava refused to publish it, citing numerous spelling errors as an extra irritant heaped onto her day. In his final hope to have it read by the local public, he posted it himself in the ChatterFive community where it was lost in a bonfire of inflammatory reactions to the trial of Joanne Victoria that was set to begin within a matter of weeks.

  She was of course, as Ava demonstrated, being judged in the press long before her court date. It was a dress rehearsal for the main event. Since ChatterFive became a beacon of support for Joanne it was inevitable that other media outlets came to vilify her. Given that other newsrooms were full of people who had known her, worked with her, been fired by her, there was plenty of fuel for the fire, and though most people who read and watched the analysis of the woman agreed with the ugly portrait, ChatterFive sustained a growth in numbers from its support of her. There was an opinion in the community that the loyalty the organisation had to their commander and chief was admirable enough to reward it with their own loyalty to the brand. She was a bully, yes. What news editor in the world wasn’t? It was what the job called for. And most of all, in ChatterFive’s denouncement of the system that was punishing their editor for a crime she didn’t commit, there was a rally point for all those who disagreed with the belief in the UPD reforms. The unspoken understanding was that people were afraid: the woman who had broken the stories that led to the reforms so many years ago was now on trial, and if she was untouched, anyone could be. As such, they continued to follow the issue through the Ava-tinted glasses ChatterFive had adopted since she took the editor’s chair. The set goal their substitute editor had set for them was to get Joanne a second scan. In agreem
ent with her defence attorney’s advice, no element of the actual murder case was concentrated on in their articles at all. The details of Francis Mullen’s death were secondary, and not without reason. In Joanne’s words, spoken then by Ava, the public could only concentrate on one point at a time. The more detail they attempted to add to her defence, the less outrage could be provoked. She was not UPD. All the fervour that stirred was used to this end – if Joanne got a second scan, the case would fall through and she could go home a free woman.

  Dylan Wong’s chief had fumed when he heard that she’d actually have it granted. If she proved to be clear on the second scan, the entire system would be shown up as a shambles, and worse, for his department, there would still be a murder to solve. Luckily for the tetchy man, when she finally got the scan it only confirmed what they were already told – the woman was untouched, incapable of empathising with all the grief she caused. Deflated from this, Ava’s PR campaign could not regain its momentum. The public court had reached its verdict. Now there was but the formality of a trial.

  Murder was the charge. There were no discussions of whether she should be trialled as a moral agent with full faculties and by extension, subject to standard acts of punishment and reform. That had been decided the day she was proven UPD. Though she had been listed as untouched and banned from working in certain areas of society, she was not treated as an insane person who’s guilt would be excusable. The UPD hold a unique place in Irish law, somewhere in a hopeless desert between the polar ends of sane and insane. When an untouched was found to be guilty of a particular crime, rehabilitation was not considered possible. If it was decided that Joanne had murdered the social agent, she would be sent to Inishvickillane, the closed facility for violent UPD, with no chance of remand or bail. A life sentence, for all intents and purposes, stranded with the vicious anathema of Ireland.

  On the first day of the trial, though she appeared stern behind square rimmed glasses, she dressed in light silks with rounded collars, the pastel shades of her outfit chosen to give her a motherly air. Her legal team insisted that she not look upset by the proceedings as it might be interpreted as an attempt at emotional manipulation of public perception. When this was read as cold and indeed, untouched, a woman unfazed by the stranglehold of a countries law gripping her throat, she was told that maybe she should look down at the ground more, be humble, let a single tear fall for the social agent who died so young. And this in turn was read how they originally expected. There was no hope of being able to control how she was seen once the scarlet letters were draped around her neck.

  The judge didn’t have to worry about his own court dress. It was decided long before he was born. Black robes and a dusty grey wig, the uniform had been kept for centuries to demonstrate that this was not a man deciding the fates of those who stood in his chambers, rather, by some method of transubstantiation, he was the law incarnate, a concept literally taking human form. Evidently prepared for the nation’s watchful eye, he had a speech prepared to open the proceedings. He took to the bench like a man trained in classical acting.

  ‘It’s a hefty matter we’ll be dealing with over the course of these weeks, one which, though it exhausts our optimism, and thins our hair, we are lucky enough to understand as an assault on the fabric which we define ourselves by. What we’re here for today is to decide if this woman is responsible for a despicable deed, the taking of Francis Mullen’s life. This burden, necessary as it is for us to function as a whole, will fall to the representatives of the citizens of our state: the jury assembled to my right. It is these people I address now.

  ‘There are conventional transgressions and moral ones. If an onlooker from the press should happen to interrupt me as I speak, try as I might, I would not be able to lock them away for it. There is the argument that there are no absolutes in morals. In this way, what is wrong in one culture may be acceptable in another. In our reform of the law, in our acceptance of the UPD act, we defined a moral transgression for ourselves as one which engages our sense of empathy, a quality which may come naturally to us but which the boundaries of are learned. This is important, because no matter the country they are raised in, no matter the continent, the UPD have shown extreme difficulty in understanding the local differences between moral and conventional transgressions. How do we react to this? In order to be considered an agent responsible for one’s actions, one must have a full understanding of their own choices that led to what they did and the implications of those choices. The UPD are aware of all these things, but do not comprehend the abstract results because they are incapable of giving the thought the weight required to do so. In our system, unequal treatment is justified when it allows for good or bad fortune. Some people are born lucky – beautiful and talented – others unlucky – disabled and sick. This is neither just nor unjust. They are merely facts of the world. The law is not as cold and detached as that. As a sentient species we come together as institutions to deal with these matters, compensating for the injustices that we perceive. We are a people who interpret each other’s movements as demonstrations of intention and choice. The social contract we enter into is a concept that allows for acceptance of responsibility and possibility of guilt. One must see oneself as a cause of events in the world whose actions should be analysed and judged.

  ‘Keeping that in mind, when we go through the process of deciding whether or not Joanne Victoria committed the killing of Francis Mullen, we are not asking if she is guilty. Having been processed, we know she is incapable of experiencing this gift. Since the untouched personality is beyond cure or reform all we can do is isolate those who suffer from it. Ms. Victoria has already been removed from the work environment she might have polluted. The process we have at hand now is to decide if she also committed the most heinous of moral transgressions: Murder, a crime which would have her removed from our culture altogether.’

  The trial was not broadcast. A single sketch artist was permitted to create pieces for news outlets and historical posterity. Her eyes in all the drawings were black. When Ava received them, she ordered that they be altered to the deep wavering emerald green that they remembered in Joanne so well, infringement laws be damned. Joanne was not allowed contact with her former colleagues, though Ava was sat behind her every day of the trial. She had waved hello and snuck sympathetic words to her any chance she got, her hand even reaching out to Joanne’s shoulder on occasion to buoy her spirit during some of the more difficult stages, though she was always ignored by her former boss. Joanne had retreated inside herself and she wasn’t coming out. In the drawings that were made, Ava’s features were rarely visible. All that could be identified of her was a dark shadow behind the woman who had become so knotted in those strings that attached them all.

  Dylan talked to Joanne that first night in her cell after the scan in ChatterFive. Her arms were folded around herself as if she were cold, though the chamber was dry with acrid heat from an electric radiator on the wall. Despite this, she was much more composed than she’d been when they’d taken her out of the newsroom in handcuffs. She met the detective’s greeting with a steady glare.

  ‘You’re not smoking,’ he said

  ‘I didn’t know I was allowed.’

  Dylan said that she was welcome to and waited for her to light up, but instead, she’d wrung her fingers.

  ‘There’s something very wrong,’ she informed him.

  Did he agree with her at the time? He can’t remember now. Everything is muddied as he looks back. ‘Joanne,’ he asked tentatively, ‘what were you doing at Agent Mullen’s home on the night of the 22nd?’

  ‘I was there was I?’ Her eyes lit up and then sank, like a fish jumping out of water and falling back in with a splash. ‘I suppose you’ll have to talk to my solicitor about that. He might have a different idea than you.’

  The line between them was drawn.

  There was no direct evidence linking Joanne to the crime. The witness report of the landlord, who confirmed under oath that she arri
ved at the social agent’s apartment drunk and upset some days previous to the murder, was the strongest weapon the prosecution had in its arsenal. But what of the poison accounted for in SimperP’s records and used in the medical trials of Doctor Alistair Evans? Dylan was adamant that the corporation and its lethal drug needed to be linked to Joanne for any kind of prosecution to hold water, at least, for any man with good conscience. His chief had raged at the idea. Not only was his lead detective on the case making more work than needed, but he was trying to drag a megacorporation that had just set up in the country months ago into the most controversial court case of the past decade. Not only would it cost the state more effort and money than they cared to spend on a single dead man to bring SimperP to trial, the current government had worked for years courting the pharmaceutical business into the country, basing any number of campaign promises on the potential for jobs and revenue they would generate, and here was Dylan the scruffy Garda trying to scare them away. It would be career suicide for all involved. No, his chief informed him. The drug used on Mullen would only be mentioned if the defence brought it up. They had a suspect, now it was time to prosecute her as efficiently as possible.

  ‘If that’s all that’s important then our job is a farce,’ said Dylan.

  Give them a pass just so they could provide employment? It was blood money. He insisted that he would not take the stand as lead officer on the case if a link between Joanne and SimperP could not be established.

  As it happened, his stance had little effect. Shortly after the confrontation with the chief, their department received another case file from SimperP. Sometime after Dylan’s visit to Doctor Evans’ office, the corporation had become concerned with possible breaches in security and began its own internal investigation. On doing so, it turned out a young woman within the building had been smuggling out small amounts of the drug in question, probably to sell on for her own profit. She had been caught on video pocketing a bottle of pills which had left the doctor’s sight. She had been fired and some weeks later, in an expedited rate for the local justice system, prosecuted, now serving time on bail. Watching the video, Dylan was shocked to see that he recognised her. It was the medical clerk, the doctor’s secretary. Immediately, he proclaimed that she was a patsy, only stealing medication at the instigation of her superior and set up in advance to take any legal ramifications that he might run into. The detective cut himself off, aware that his boss was ready to hand him a tinfoil hat. Ignoring the theory, the chief was quick to explain to Dylan that they could spend their time trying to establish a link between Joanne and the black marketer, but that it could easily be a waste of effort – who knew how many hands those pills passed through before getting to the editor, and all that besides, it still wouldn’t be worth the hassle of bringing the corporation into the matter. Not being able to stomach the politics of it all, Dylan walked away from the chief, stubborn in his refusal to agree with the reasons. He was not asked to testify at the trial, neither by the defence or the prosecution. The chief, dismayed at his officer’s naiveté, found a loophole to prevent it. As the body of his department had pressed the original charge when Joanne arrived at the station, the testimony of the officer on scene was not needed. The chief, that career driven type, had worked it out so that he would be on hand to illustrate some of the more technical details of the investigation and was all too happy to take the stand and explain the conditions that led to Joanne being arrested and charges being pressed. It wasn’t very complicated. Between him and the prosecution, she was portrayed as a vicious drunk who’d interfered with processing from the first day. She kept alcohol in her office, was addicted to painkillers, and as a final insult to Dylan, it was hinted that she had arranged for a fire drill during the social agent’s initial presentation. Though the defence objected to the supposition, the idea had been planted into the jury’s collective consciousness. If Dylan had been up there, he would have only been too happy to express his opinion of this happening, and yet he remained silent, mortified that by telling the truth he would only have cast suspicion on one of the few people who was going to take the stand to defend Joanne: Ava O’Dwyer.