The Trial Of Summary James - Chapter Three
A great African nation has risen in North America. But something is… wrong. Chapter 3 of 20 in the novella.
Chapter Three
I couldn’t tell how Sonata felt about my escapades. I had helped four convicted murderers avoid the rigors of Campeche Island. I could understand her objections if she brought them. Most people would say I had no business interfering with the judicial system. People had the impression that convicted murderers in the Union lived in luxurious beachfront accommodations, quite the contrast to most nations — although I’d argue that those accommodations were easily countered by 14-hour days of hot, hard labor on the docks, best I could tell from my research.
Instead of showering me with objections, she seemed eager to help. That alone made me nervous. I couldn’t imagine what was in it for her. As alluring as she was, I found myself not trusting her motives, and my radar for these things was, although not infallible, awfully good. I decided I’d need to store my testosterone in a mental bottle and treat her with a wary eye. Not an easy thing to do in the presence of a lady like that.
I contacted Trace and described the assailant from my visions. He ran the descriptions through his facial matrix software and quickly sent back a profile of the guy. It was hard to tell how accurate it was. My vision had given me a lousy view of his face, other than that sadistic, crooked smile on his lips, or I had simply forgotten the details.
My visions were like dreams that way — what I couldn’t remember within the first hour was quickly shuttered away forever. Trace thought the square-topped haircut was unique enough to provide some kind of entry into the gateway of the world’s digital images, and that the killer probably was vain enough about the hairdo that he’d not change it, especially considering he wasn’t on any constable’s radar.
“It was purple, by the way,” I said to Trace. “The hair.”
“Well, that he probably changes all the time. Hopefully, he’s a local guy,” said Trace. “That extra thump he gave your victim suggests to me that it may have been personal. The mouth is pretty distinctive, too. Whenever he snarls or smiles at someone that mouth should show up. And then there’s the bat.”
“Well, the bat probably came from Williams’ office. Probably a big baseball fan if it’s a Joshua Gibson bat. That’s like, what? A hundred years old?”
“Close. If it’s a genuine signature. Okay, finding out if Williams was that big a baseball fan should be easy enough. Could be Gibson was a relative, too. Either way, easy research.”
I wanted this time to be different. I wanted to do more than help Summary James stay out of a life of hard labor. I wanted to find the killer and bring him to justice. I was starting to feel like the bad guy. Maybe my poorly considered confession to a woman I barely knew was giving me the guilts. The fact that she was enmeshed in the legal system was not helpful. After this was over, I felt like I would need a medical exam to see how it’s possible to function in life working from nothing more than a brain stem, because Sonata had led me into working with a dangerously reduced thought process without her even trying.
Women didn’t normally affect me this way. This added a sorry dimension to the project. I sensed something special about Sonata, which conflicted with my distrust of her, but the distrust was more a generic instinct than an evaluation of her as a person. I didn’t know her well enough to make a true evaluation. I got the sense that it was more distrust of myself. My confessions to her happened way too early in the relationship, if there was one brewing. And that’s what I had to be on guard over.
There were some standard protests over James’s sentencing. I caught a few videos and didn’t think much of them. Then Sonata called me. “Have you seen the clips of the protesters walking over the bridge to the island?” she asked me. No, I hadn’t seen that. “They seem a little rowdier than usual. What do you think is up with that?”
I had no idea. “There’s nothing unusual about this case over any of the other cases the rehab crowd screams about,” I offered regretfully, thinking that it was dumb of me to knock a movement I actually had some serious respect for.
“I’m guessing they’ve just decided this is their moment.”
“Doesn’t really change anything for us. Still gotta find my guy.”
“It changes lots. Once the protests get onto the newsfeeds, Summary James’s image will be on everybody’s cell phone and computer screen. I don’t know what you have planned, but based on what you told me, you’ve already started rolling, and your plan depends on people not recognizing him instantly.”
“Nothing rolling yet. Honestly, I’ve been focused on trying to find out who the killer is.”
Her call prompted me to consider that it was going to be harder to pull off a convict kidnapping now that I’d done it four times. This wasn’t one of those things practice makes perfect. More guards, more awareness, more points of failure. I began to wonder if I should skip the idea completely and focus on finding the killer. But I had developed a routine. I would try to do both.
“Trace,” I said when I called him again. “Can you get at Summary James’s medical records?”
“I don’t see why not. Why?”
“He just got very sick. As in hospital sick. Obviously asymptomatic, but if it isn’t taken care of post-haste, his passing will be very public. Probably quite excruciating. It will be a plus if he’s a raging contagion.”
“I’ll need a couple of days to be able to falsify records like that without a trace.”
“We don’t want no Trace,” I laughed. Trace didn’t seem to see the humor, judging from the click on the other end of the line.
Trace ended up doing one better, thanks to an extreme bit of luck centered around an old friend of his who happened to be a medic at the Campeche Island clinic where Summary James was scheduled for a mandatory physical. For Trace, an old friend was usually somebody who owed him a big favor for some reason, usually one that would arouse suspicion, but I didn’t pursue that when he told me about his sudden fortune.
All that mattered was the result, which in this case was going to involve using his technical skills to obtain a genome of Poliomyelitis, better known as polio. He’d add several markers to it to disable its pathogenic characteristics so that it would be presented to doctors as though it were still a hungry, disabling beast. The genome of the poliovirus was a genetic runt consisting of only 7741 bases, easy pickings for a fellow like Trace, who could hack DNA almost as well as he could software. “It’s a little tricky,” he told me, “because the RNA isn’t stable enough to play with. So I need to convert the RNA sequence to DNA, which means replacing every uracil base with a thymine.”
“I assume there’s an English translation for what you’re saying to me?”
Trace laughed. “Okay. Well, no. Anyway, there’s one more trick.” Since the first trick was beyond my comprehension, I just let him talk. “I need to acquire very specifically arranged bases from one of the online DNA repositories that crank out DNA splotches, layer them together, and then immerse the DNA in an enzyme soup to convert it back to RNA. The challenge with that isn’t finding the repositories. There are plenty of those. The challenge is finding one within a congregation that has a weak enough security protocol that I don’t get nailed.”
“It’s what you’re good at, Trace.”
“This is DNA splicing, compadre, not your typical records management or even electronic surveillance stuff. It took the Synod 30 years after the first genome was reverse-engineered before scientists were even allowed back into the game. It freaks the religious nuts out to no end.”
“It freaks me out, too, Trace. So what’s the timeline on this sort of thing?”
“After we assemble the DNA, we need to add markers to prevent it from attacking the patient. I mean, I don’t know. With my equipment, I can probably get it done in a couple of weeks. But like I said, it’s getting caught I’m most worried about.”
“As long as you don’t kill anybody, the most you’ll have to worry about is doing a few hail Marys with stern nuns for a few years.”
“Not funny. I’d rather be in Campeche.”
“I doubt that. I don’t know why, but I get the sense something funny is going on there.”
“Do tell.”
“I can’t yet. It’s just a hunch. Place has got a weird vibe.”
“Fair enough, just keep me posted and let me know if you need anything there for that.”
“I think you’ll be busy enough.”
“Yeah. Speaking of. I sent you an email with some leads for you on your man. I don’t know if they’ll help or not, but it’s a start, and I may not be able to do much more for a bit.”
Well. This plan Trace hatched was certainly not something I could share with my new friend Sonata. This was an easy test for me, and my willingness to let her in on too much. I wasn’t easily spooked, but this idea freaked me out. I couldn’t imagine what her reaction might be. And I wasn’t about to find out.
Trace had further assured me before we finished speaking that there was no chance for the virus to fire up to the point of infection, but there was still no way we could let the “patient” know he was being injected with a poliovirus, was there?
Trace suggested that I look at it as more like a vaccine than a virus, which didn’t help, but I had to admit that the whole scandalous idea was clever. The plan was for James to get his medical, after which the Texas Light medical team would freak out and order him into the nearest full-service health facility. Of course, that medical facility would be secured, but not as well as the internment housing, which was probably impenetrable for someone with my resources.
I didn’t yet know how I’d get James out of the medical facility. Trace thought it would take a week before the medics figured out that the poliovirus in James was benign because Trace would add a marker to make it look like it wasn’t. They’d have to disassemble the genome to discover the true qualities of what they were confronted with. Eventually, they’d discover that the genome was fully synthesized, which would create another problem. We had to get James out of there before that discovery was made. I wasn’t a bioterrorist, even though I was suddenly about to act like one.
When Sonata contacted me again, I had a halting tone when she asked me what was going on. I decided to be blunt. “Are you on your own with this? Or maybe hunting me down for your congregation as a means to an end that is likely to really mess me up?” I asked her.
“I’m surprised you have to ask. Your antics haven’t made any newsfeed headlines yet have they?”
“Let me check my phone.”
That made her laugh. If there were a phone app that I could use to pay for hearing that laugh, I’d have been using it addictively. “Listen,” I said to her. “I gotta be straight up with you. I should never have told a barrister, or anybody involved in the judicial system, about my exploits. I don’t know what I was thinking. Nothing personal. But now that I’ve opened my big fat mouth, I need to know if…”
She interrupted me. “Your secret is safe with me. I’m an empath. Remember? I know you’re one of the good guys. If you were some creep, you’d be in your third week at Mother Mary’s camp for wayward gentlemen by now. And full disclosure, my congregation does have an interest in this, but our aims aren’t in conflict.”
“Wait. It’s been three weeks since I told you all that?”
“Time flies.”
“No. It feels like three years since I’ve seen you. Can we meet up?”
She laughed again. The delightful song of her laugh could tenderize cowhide. I felt a charge surge through me.
“Yeah, sure,” she said.
End of Chapter Three
NOTES
You can find Chapters One and Two here:
This short novella was unplanned. It popped out of my head when I started researching for Restive Souls. I cranked it out in 2021 after an embarrassing number of drafts (maybe 5 or 6, I’m guessing, so it’s almost still in first draft form!).
This novella takes place in an alternative North America that celebrates diversity, avoided genocide, and corrected the mistakes of slavery as a side-effect of a failed Revolutionary War. As such, although no human endeavor can avoid tragic error, it takes place on a much less dystopian continent than our current experience.
The world represented here is much larger than can be conveyed in such a short book. This world is more fully represented in a trilogy called Restive Souls, which begins in the late 18th century. The novella is a potboiler meant as an easy, quick read, whereas Restive Souls is more serious business, and is in an endless state of edits that I’m hoping to complete before the year 3000.
But the main character of this novella, Longman Jones, told me he wasn’t willing to wait for me to finish that novel. Maybe that is in part because he makes no appearance at all in the larger work.
But he is a restive soul, and he needed to get out of my head. As some of you know, my head literally (yes, literally) explodes when there are too many characters living in it.
All 20 chapters are on their way here soon.
NOTES
You can find Chapters One and Two and the current table of contents here:
Thanks for reading!
““We don’t want no Trace,” I laughed. Trace didn’t seem to see the humor”
I thought it was funny. 🤣
Enjoying this tale, Charles. Thanks for creating it.