“We’ll sort that out in a moment,” Finwell interrupted. “Let’s get through this footage first. Resume. Stop.”
The scene advanced a few moments. Now the cluster of missiles was in midair, just starting to separate from each other and plot their coordinated evasion patterns. Smoke was at the back of the truck now, his jaws spread wide as a gray cloud billowed out.
“Miss Long, did you order that bot to deploy a jamming cloud? That is what it’s doing, correct?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I answered. “I’ve only had them for a day, but I remembered the specs said it was supposed to be able to block most targeting sensors. I was hoping the missiles would go into safe mode and turn themselves off if they couldn’t get a targeting lock.”
He gave me a considering look. “You came up with all of that in, what was it, a second and a half?”
“It was a very long second and a half, Your Honor. I had time for my whole life to flash by my eyes, too.”
He chuckled. But Captain Minami wasn’t amused.
“This is what comes of letting children play with military hardware,” he objected. “What are those things, anyway?”
“They’re a Sakeri Combine personal protection system,” Captain Sokol said. “Square Deal offers their specs into evidence. You’ll find that they’re entirely defensive in nature, and don’t qualify as military bots. In addition to the smoke they can deploy microbot swarms with a variety of subdual agents, but the only way they could actually hurt anyone is by biting them.”
They spent a few minutes looking over the data and debating it before Captain Minami admitted that they didn’t quite violate any local laws. That surprised me, until I mentally called up my own copy of the documentation and realized there were two different spec sheets. The captain must have given them the one for the civilian version of the system, but the only difference between that and the military version was a software key.
I decided it would be a bad idea to mention that I could just as easily have loaded them up with nerve gas and disassembler swarms. Or a nanoplague, for that matter. Yeah, I’d just keep my mouth shut here.
“If these things are a professionally marketed security product, why are they so careless about endangering bystanders?” Minami demanded.
“Sakeri Combine products are designed to query the local datanet for applicable legal standards,” my captain explained. “They also place a very high priority on the life of their principle, as one would expect of any security bot. At highway speeds a smaller smoke cloud would not have covered the truck long enough to divert that missile attack, and the bot’s scan of its surroundings revealed no entities defined as human by local law. So it concluded there were no bystanders to endanger, and deployed the largest cloud it could generate.”
“No bystanders? There were more than a hundred serfs in the area!”
Captain Sokol shrugged. “I believe your judicial precedents set the value of a human’s life above any number of serfs. Don’t blame me for having my bots obey your laws.”
Minami wasn’t happy about that, and they argued back and forth for a while without getting anywhere. When they finally got back to the recording they spent some time walking through exactly how my smoke cloud had caused the big pileup. Then they went on through the rest of the chase, and there was a collective wince when we got to the part where I plowed the loading bot into the car. The traffic cameras had gotten a much closer look at that than I had, and it was kind of gruesome.
“There, you see? There was nothing accidental about that!” Captain Minami declared.
“They were trying to kill her,” Captain Sokol pointed out. “What do you expect her to do, ask them pretty please not to?”
“Gentlemen, please,” Finwell cut in. “Allow me to clarify a few things. Miss Long, exactly what orders did you give that bot?”
“I was actually using remote control on it,” I admitted. “But I was really careful not to kill anyone! Look, their heads are all intact. It’s not my fault if the medical teams didn’t bother to revive them. Heck, their brains are probably still viable. Isn’t the limit something like thirty hours at room temperature?”
“You’re talking about a full-scale nanomedical rebuild,” Captain Minami said. “On cheap mass production trolls? That’s insane. It’s far more cost effective to simply replace them.”
“Well, excuse me for actually thinking of them as people,” I said.
“Miss Long, are you offering to pay for your assailants’ medical care?” Finwell asked.
I sighed. “I don’t have that much money, Your Honor. Besides, it would be pretty stupid to pay for reviving someone who wants to kill me. What if they get it right next time?”
“Takeo Station’s citizens are the responsibility of the station authorities,” Captain Sokol said. “If the government of Hoshida chooses not to offer standard medical care to its serfs that is not my crew’s concern.”
That made sense to me, but Minami didn’t agree. They spent the next twenty minutes arguing about it, before Finwell finally cut them off.
“I believe I’ve heard both of your arguments on this topic, gentlemen. Now, what about the cause of this altercation. You said something about house recordings, Captain Minami?”
“Yes, but you’d better brace yourself. This is some of the worst footage I’ve seen in years. We also have testimony from one of the house trolls, and that poor elf girl.”
That didn’t sound good.
There was a brief snip from the public cameras first, showing Lilia accosting me on the street and then both of us climbing into the truck. Once again there were floating captions, one of which identified Lilia and noted that her owner was deceased.
“We’ve interrogated the elf in this footage, Your Honor. She reports that her household was suffering deeply from lack of a master, and had sent her out to find a human who would claim them. Miss Long agreed to take advantage of a security loophole to fraudulently claim the late Akio Sato’s assets, hence the conspiracy charge.”
“I did no such thing!” I protested. “If that’s what she said, then she’s lying.”
“Then why did you go with her to her address?” Minami demanded.
“She gave me this whole sob story about how her household was starving because her master hadn’t left enough money in the household account. She looked so pitiful I decided I could spare a few minutes to see if there was a way to help.”
“What, out of the goodness of your heart?” Minami scoffed.
“Well, yeah. I do try to be a nice person, and I guess I’m kind of a sucker for cute girls who need help. I’ll admit that she was offering to help me take money out of the accounts for my trouble, but I figured that sounded too much like a scam to be legal. I was planning to find out what the situation was first, and then call my supervisor back on the ship to ask what I should do.”