Alt-Defenestration

I threw him out the window. I shouldn't have, but my mind boiled with anger, my body went hot, and my vision went white. And the next thing I knew, I was propelling him back with my hand around his neck, his body hit the glass, and all I could see were his feet flying out the opening. 

The Cloud Towers are a thousand meters tall, and his apartment was near the top. He had a long, long way to fall. 

Even as my breathing slowed and my vision returned to normal, I couldn't help but smirk. Mr. Gonaviz's plummet wasn't sanctioned, but we were in his apartment, so he'd get charged the fine.  

I didn't know he would die. After the season finale of Better Than Dead went too far with the suicide of the dashing Troy Flanigan (i.e. they couldn't put him together again), public opinion insisted that the management company do something. They responded by installing nets every ten stories. Hitting them one after another apparently hurts, but those who fall usually wind up with minor injuries and a selfie-worthy pattern of mesh bruises to show for the experience.   

Even though I didn't know he'd die, I enjoyed the rush of the violence. My fists shook and little fireworks went off in my brain. I stilled my face, of course. No knowing who was watching. I needed to focus on something peaceful. Like counting. 

My mother used to sing a little song to me at bed time. How did it go? "Five little monkeys jumping on the bed," except as I stared out the window, the monkeys turned into tourists from the orbital, purchasing Cloud Tower drop packages to "really experience gravity." 

As my imagination produced a stream of bumbling vacuum dwellers falling off the tower, I finally relaxed. My hands unclenched, and my lips twitched. "One fell off and bumped his head." Well, Mom, they're bumping their heads plenty around here. 

I turned to go, glancing around the apartment to make sure I wasn't leaving anything behind. I had my toolbox, but Mr. Gonaviz had started haranguing me before I finished packing up, and the last thing I needed was to have to come back for a microwelder or nanoseal pen. 

By the time I'd taken a transit tube to my own digs – a comfortable apartment in the cave complex outside Denver - I'd stopped thinking about the altercation beyond the sense of well-being that always followed violence. 

The notifications hit as a wall of sound when I opened the door. The screen across from my couch had unrolled and windows popped up, talking heads chattering over each other as they all tried to deliver their messages at once. I yelled at them to be quiet, then watched their mouths move impotently as I grabbed a quick meal pack and a beer. 

Then I slipped my headset on, relaxed onto my sofa, and my cyber-space sprang up around me. I liked to keep things simple and didn't have the salary for complicated; the space looked like a great, dark cave with a rough stone floor, and I could feel but not see the sofa under me. A single, large screen floated against the nearest wall, replicating the hard-copy version in the apartment. I told the messages to play one at a time. 

Apparently Mr. William Gonaviz had a following as an old-school singer and a daughter, who shed disgustingly pathetic tears as she cried about the death of her daddy all over the web. 

Well, sh*t.

My trial was set for six o'clock . . . I blinked twice and the clock app opened. I had six minutes to gather my wits.

There was no hope of hiding and no hope of escape. By now, the online busybodies were collecting and sorting every scrap of my available history, stringing together surveillance video of my movements over the last twenty-four hours, and putting together hypothesis about my motivations. All I could do was arrange my thoughts and my face and try to make myself look good, or barring that, entertaining.  

On the plus side, I had a shot at getting away with murder. In the No-zone, police still held sway over truth and lies, innocence and guilt. Out here, public opinion was the final arbiter. 

Murder your colleague for compulsive coffee slurping? You'd be exonerated in minutes. 

Chop off the hand of the creepozoid who groped you in the transit tube? Any charges would be cleared before you made it home. Throw the hand into a sanitizer before he could retrieve it for reattachment? More debatable, but if his sympathizers raised enough to buy him a replacement, you wouldn't even be fined. 

And then there were the family feuds, the highest form of public entertainment. At the moment, the Morrows and the Vanderboltans were fighting for dominance in the polls. The Vanderboltans needed to generate some serious, tear-jerk sympathy if they wanted to keep their momentum, and side-bets said that either their underage daughter was going to turn up pregnant or their family dog was going to die sometime in the next week. 

If, like the other ninety-nine percent of idiots who went out the windows of the Cloud Towers, William Gonaviz had survived, the worst I'd have gotten was a slap on the wrist from HR for unprofessional behavior. 

Groping around for my invisible beer on the invisible table next to me, I took a chug and felt the cold bubbles slide comfortingly down my throat. Then I downloaded and opened the "SaveMe" app. I'd never used it before, but their ads were all over. They provided an interface for COPO (Court of Public Opinion). I clicked the "execute" button, giving the app permission to temporarily override my system, and the cave wall began to fill with new windows. 

The top box read, "William Gonaviz's Daughter vs. Milo Visse." Underneath sat pictures of the adorable daughter; me, looking thuggish in my work coveralls; and William Gonaviz in a dapper suit next to William Gonaviz lying in a pool of blood. I winced. 

On the right, viewer stats: gross numbers, charts showing log-on and log-off rates, and a sympathy pendulum that used input from viewers' headsets to aggregated their sentiments (the pendulum's rod pointed emphatically towards the small girl). 

On the left sat an entire window for the fact checkers. In the top pane, Certified Fact Checkers entered info considered true beyond doubt. In the middle, data feeds from the mass of people scrambling for certified status. I had no doubt that some of them were at William Gonaviz's apartment now, uploading pictures or ferrying bits of material off to labs for quick analysis. The bottom panel was for the rumormongers, the loudmouths who didn't have to prove a thing but could push whatever story they wanted. They were notorious for swinging the audience, and every once in a while, by pure luck, coming up with the truth.

The middle screen was reserved for the speakers. 

The viewer count rose into the millions, and then a countdown appeared on the middle screen: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. The numbers faded out, and a pretty woman with a firm jaw and a sparkling personality appeared, a professionally whitened smile plastered across her face. 

"Welcome to this evening's episode of 'What's YOUR Excuse,'" she said in a strident tone as music swelled in the background. Cheers, boos, catcalls, and murmurs from the crowd of watchers filled my cave, and for the first time, I felt a spike of fear. I wasn't one of the crowd any more. Those noises were focused on me. 

Even as I steeled my nerves, the lady continued talking. "My name is Betty Teeth, and I'm here to moderate this evening's trial. Event of the hour: death by falling from a Cloud Tower. Who's to blame? William Gonaviz, country singer, recently deceased? His accused murderer, Milo Visse, hardware troubleshooter? Or – " and here her smile widened, making her teeth seem even whiter and sharper, "Mr. Gonaviz's daughter, who's persistent complaints drove her father to the extremity of rudeness and inspired the violence that led to his death?"

I smiled, appreciating the woman's willingness to go there. Gonaviz's wife had used her daughter as complainant in the case as a ploy, thinking that no one would drag a little girl through the muck the way they might a wife. Obviously, she was wrong, and I was glad Ms. Teeth wasn't letting her get away with it. My eyes darted to the public opinion pendulum. Sure enough, it had inched away from the little girl and towards me.

"First, we'll take a look at what actually happened," Ms. Teeth said. One of the line-items on the Fact Checkers' box expanded, and a high def video replaced her face on the central window. 

I hadn't seen a camera in Gonaviz's apartment, but I wasn't surprised. Most people monitored themselves these days, as if their lives were works of art. On screen, I was kneeling, putting the last of my tools back in my toolkit, explaining that Mr. Gonaviz wouldn't be getting water back for another few days. He was standing between me and the window, hands on his hips. I could see both our faces as Gonaviz berated me. My face went white, then red. Spittle flew from Gonaviz's mouth as he started yelling. I snapped, lunged forward, arms extended. Then he was out, flying, falling. 

The me on the screen stood at the window, hands clenched, breathing hard for a few moments, then he turned back, collected the toolkit, and left. 

Ms. Teeth reappeared on the screen and said, "Now you've seen the bare facts, what do you think?" She glanced up at the public opinion pendulum, which was swinging wildly but didn't seem to have budged much in my favor. In the rumormonger's window I glimpsed words like "acid," "lover's quarrel," "faked," and "cyborg" flash across the screen. 

Ms. Teeth's eyes glittered. "I think it's time we see what our participants thought of the replay, don't you?" 

The audience cheered, and the screen split in thirds. In the middle, the murder. On the right, the me of a few minutes ago, sitting in my cave watching the murder, expression stolid and cold. On the left, the sobbing girl. Snot bubbles grew from her nose as I launched myself at her father, and then a hand covered her eyes. 

The public opinion pendulum swung back hard towards the girl. 

The split screen switched, showing the girl and me in real time with Ms. Teeth in between. 

In broken words, the girl explained that she hadn't meant to be so mean to her daddy and that she wouldn't whine so much anymore, she promised, cross her heart, hope to die. 

I worked hard to summon some tears of my own but didn't have much luck. I gave up on tears and managed sympathy instead, focusing on my anger at the girl's mother. What kind of monster would put her daughter through this? 

Sensing blood, Ms. Teeth made a jab at the mother, asking in dulcet tones, "Have your parent's been fighting a lot, sweety?" The girl choked and sobbed and nodded into her mother's chest, the ribbon in her hair bobbing up and down. "It hurts when our parents fight, doesn't it?" The ribbon bobbed some more. 

I glanced at the other windows again. The pendulum was sliding back towards neutral, and the rumormongers were chiming in with variations on the theme of "What a B*TCH."

"It'll all be okay, honey. For all you viewers out there, we're launching a 'ThrowARope' campaign to fund psychiactric therapy for Mr. Gonaviz's daughter." With a wave of her hand, a new window flew up on my cave wall. Almost instantly, the bar began to fill, racing towards the bell at the top. Donor names flashed underneath, giving screen time according to dollars donated. 

The girl's image slid away, replaced by Ms. Teeth, who was smiling, if anything, more broadly than before. "Now, Mr. Visse, what do you have to say for yourself?"

Speaking slowly, thickening my accent to that of my childhood, I said, "I'm awfully sorry, ma'am. I didn't know he would die. Those towers were supposed to be safe, right? I thought there was no way anyone could die falling out of those towers. I didn't mean to kill him."

Skepticism filled her voice. "You didn't mean to kill him? You certainly seemed mad enough to murder." 

I let my tone go even more sorry. "Well, I was awfully angry, ma'am, but I don't know about murder. You see, ma'am, if I meant to kill him, I would have grabbed my hammer or something. I was holding it when he started yelling. I'd been thinking of Cloud Towers and the tourists and all, while I was working, and he was just standing in front of that window, and I just wanted to get him out of my face, and I pushed." 

As I spoke, I could see the pendulum swinging in my direction, and at Ms. Teeth's next words, it passed the midline in my favor. 

"You're from the No-zone, right?"

As she spoke, words unwound across the bottom of the screen: "The No-zone, an insular community that has revoked all technology. Little is known about the life or customs of No-zoners."

"Yes, ma'am. My parents brought me out when I was fifteen."

"That must have been hard." 

I used the words I'd heard from teachers and therapists and bosses in the years after we'd left the No-zone. "It was, ma'am. I wasn't equipped with the skills for modern life. I had to learn everything from scratch. I'd never even seen a VR interface before."

"I see you're still using the old windows-based interaction system," she said, and my side of the screen spun around, showing all the viewers my cave with its floating windows.  

I felt a surge of anger at the violation – at least back in the No-zone, we could shut our doors on strangers – but managed to stifle it before the view swung back around to my face. The rumormongers were dropping phrases like, "whoa," "old-school," and "pity the bstrd." 

"Why did you leave the No-zone?" 

The real reason? I'd failed to hide a body well enough, and the old rumors about my proclivities for violence had resurfaced. The reason I gave Ms. Teeth? "My mom got sick. The doctors in the No-zone couldn’t fix her, but the doctors out here could." 

One of the Fact Checkers posted a link to a medical report describing the tumor in my mother's chest. 

"But medical care is free. Couldn't she come get fixed then go home?" Ms. Teeth knew the answer, but she was fishing for tragedy. 

I gave her what she wanted, let my expression fall. "She could have, would have, but they found her out. Then they kicked us all out. Said we were contaminated."

"What did your family do next?"

"My parents couldn't adjust. They're in subsistence housing, getting by. I help as I can. The Education Board tested me and decided they could train me for manual labor." 

Once more, text rolled across the bottom of the screens: "Although improvements in materials science and robotics have eliminated 99.99% of the need for human-assisted maintenance of the built environment, a small number of humans are employed to make damage assessments and repair city infrastructure."

Ms. Teeth nodded sympathetically. "Despite your underprivileged origins, you have become a valuable employee of the Denver City workforce. You have expressed regret for the unintentional death of Mr. Gonaviz. And you have no history of unpardoned dismemberment or permanent death."

A chart of my statistics with respect to the general population popped out of the Fact Checkers window and showed the audience my "blood and mayhem" histogram. Well below average, though I'd taken care to participate in the occasional fight and destruction of property so that I wouldn't ping the system as psychopathic. 

My side of the screen scrolled away, and Ms. Teeth's sculpted features returned. "So, viewers, what do you say? What is this man's fate?

A new window popped up, and was quickly populated by suggestions, ranging from "give him a medal" to "give him to the iron maiden."

Most flew past more quickly than I could read, but as the clock ticked, the viewers voted, and within a minute, the options fell by half and then half again. My stomach sank as suggestions for punishment proliferated. Then, rising from the depths like a shark after a swimmer, the final verdict splashed across the screen: "In the case of 'William Gonaviz's Daughter vs. Milo Visse,' Mr. Visse is to be thrown from the Cloud Tower out of the same window from which he defenestrated Mr. Gonaviz. Bidding for the opportunity to throw Mr. Visse begins now. The Cloud Tower nets have been repaired, so Mr. Visse's death is possible but not expected. All proceeds from the auction will go to Mr. Gonaviz's daughter to support her in her time of need." 

The details of the auction continued to roll across the bottom of the screen as Ms. Teeth's smile appeared for a final time. "And there you have it, gentle viewers. The winner of tonight's auction will be announced at midnight. Mr. Visse's fall will be aired on this site during our 'Punishment Hour' at this time tomorrow."

My inbox chimed, and I scanned the contents. A Fact Checker would collect me tomorrow to escort me back to the Cloud Tower. I wondered what it would feel like to plummet, to experience the wind against my cheeks, to hear the flex and snap of net after net against my back, to see the white web rising above me, like a cage.