Body Swappers 11
Maya and Robert discuss the justice system.
The new inmate set Maya’s nerves on edge. His aura was slate gray, for one. And there was something in his face, something calculating and hard, that reminded her of the look she’d seen on so many abuser’s faces throughout her time at work. He sat down and immediately leaned back in his chair. His jumpsuit said Chadwick.
“You wanted to talk to me?” he said, looking back and forth between Robert and Maya.
“Yes,” Robert said, his tone a little different than it had been with Gimble. More cautious? “You maintained throughout your trial that you were not guilty.”
“Yeah.”
“Could you tell us what you remember about that evening?”
“Yeah,” Chadwick said again. A thin sliver of black began to slither into his aura. “I was minding my own business, making dinner. I must have passed out or something, because then it was dark for a while.” Red joined the black, twining with it and pulsing. “Then I opened my eyes and I was on the ground in my kitchen, with a knick on my arm and blood on me. I had cut myself with my knife while I fell down. I cleaned myself up, but then the police came and arrested me.”
“Did you know the victim?”
“No, I’d never met him,” he said. The black grew even larger.
“Well,” Robert said, straightening in his seat, “Thanks for your time. This has been very helpful.”
Maya looked at him. She knew he was better at detecting lies by looking at someone’s aura, and she wondered what it was he’d seen that caused him to cut the interview short without asking for a look inside his mind.
“That’s it?” the inmate asked. There was something slimy about the expression on his face, and in the way his aura moved.
“That’s it. Thank you.”
Chadwick got up, and he and the guard left.
“He did it,” Robert said when the door had shut.
“Can you tell me about this mysterious power you seem to have to tell if someone’s lying?”
“Well, it’s partly instinct.” He thought for a long time. “Did you feel a sense of wrongness, when you looked at him?”
“Yes. He creeped me out instantly.”
“It’s a little like that. There’s reasons you were creeped out, it isn’t out of nowhere.” He bobbed his head side to side for a moment, then looked at her. “Okay, there was something to his posture, and his facial expressions, which our brains took in without looking at individually too closely, and reached the conclusion that he was predatory. It’s similar with knowing people are lying, or whether they are persuaded by what I’m saying. I’m sure I could parse some of what it is, if I thought about it really hard. For example, just knowing how gray his baseline is, tells me he’s checked out in some way or another. Maybe he’s high, which I doubt given how controlled an environment this is. Or maybe he’s psychopathic. I leaned that way, given the ‘creep’ vibes.”
Maya nodded. “The black and red were behaving strangely.”
“Yeah, I will say that typically when people lie, they get flashes of emotion. But if one suffers from psychopathy, that’s not typically the case. And it’s possible to practice one’s way out of flashes of emotion when lying. It’s the same theory as fooling a lie detector test. People who are very psyched out by being hooked up to one might get false positives, while people who can remain calm despite the danger can get false negatives. This guy’s emotions were not at all flashy, other than the pulsing in the red.”
“What do you make of that?”
“I think he was excited while he was remembering the murder,” Robert said, grimacing.
Maya suppressed a shiver. “Well thanks for not asking me to peek around in his brain. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the experience.”
Robert nodded. “I can imagine. Can you…tell me what that’s like?”
“Transference?”
“Yeah. I’ve never done it. I haven’t had much exposure to it, either.”
Maya tilted her head. “It’s…interesting. I mean, there’s the three different levels. Sometimes I have no real connection to the other person’s mind, because it’s a complete transfer and they’re back in my body. But when we’re in there together, there’s some…sloshing. Their thoughts can leak to me, and my thoughts can leak to them. Sometimes that’s the point, like what we’re doing here. But sometimes it can be a distraction, or if I’m not focused enough, I can come across unprofessionally.”
Robert laughed, a short, loud bark. Maya looked at him and he made an apologetic gesture with his hands. “I can imagine, that's all. I myself have had some unprofessional thoughts while speaking with clients.”
Maya grinned. “Oh?”
He met her gaze, grinned back, then cleared his throat, looking away.
“What is it like, being a lawyer? Did you really sell your soul to the devil?”
He chuckled. “Well, I’ve never worked for a firm, personally. That way lies a lot of money, but also a lot of morally questionable actions. I am a defense attorney, which means prosecuting attorneys think of me as the black hat, and them as the white hat. But thinking that relies on the presumption that they only ever go after those truly guilty of the crime they’re accused of, as well as the presumption that our legal system has the correct outcomes for people found guilty of those crimes.”
Maya said, “Aren’t they usually true on the first assumption?”
He shrugged. “I’m not satisfied with usually being correct about identifying a criminal before completely tearing their life apart. I think it’s a horror beyond imagining to take an innocent person, put them in captivity, ruin their job prospects, take away their right to vote, and put them in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. Even if we thought that was okay or right or just to do to true criminals. My preference would be that we always correctly identify whether a person is innocent or guilty, rather than usually doing so.”
“You keep talking like you disagree with what we do with criminals.”
Robert looked at her sideways, and she had the distinct impression he was weighing something before speaking. Finally, he nodded. “I do. I think it’s dehumanizing, and counterproductive.”
“So you don’t think their victims deserve justice?”
He sighed. “I think that’s a moralizing argument, which is completely beside the point of the justice system.”
Maya’s shoulders tensed, and that familiar pang made its appearance. “How can it be beside the point?”
Robert spread his hands, palms up. “What do you want to live in?” He raised one hand. “An authoritarian system in which those who transgress against others are punished into a subhuman existence?” He raised the other hand. “Or a system in which people commit transgressions less often?”
“That’s a false dichotomy.”
“It isn’t,” he said, putting his hands down. “Because a system in which people are punished into a subhuman existence is a system in which it considered not only morally acceptable but justified, to devalue the humanity of another. Being cruel to other humans will never teach those humans to be kinder.”
The door opened, and while Robert turned to look at the next inmate, Maya continued to stare at him, stunned.