“The writing is on the wall.”
Robert
Langdon, The Da Vinci Code*
Today my air conditioning broke. Fortunately, like superheroes, my
Aunt and Uncle saved us from the flames by allowing us to stay at
their place. Anyway onto the flash fiction!
Temporal Legal Defense
“Jacob Hickory, did you or did you not hit my client?” The old
prosecutor asked with a voice resembling that of a schoolteacher. He
used this voice often since he noticed juries, raised in the school
system, often were ingrained to respond to the voice of a powerful
teacher since at least once in their lives they mostly likely ran
into one they both feared and respected.
Jacob gained the favor of the jury merely with his wonderful smile,
but lost it with his looks. He stayed indoors most of the time to the
point of taking what could have been beautiful fair skin into a
bleached color. He wore a strange suit, it looked like someone made a
tuxedo out of leather. However the leather possessed a strange blue
color with a metallic sheen. His eyes had the oddest effect, their
brown resembled tree bark, but the more you made direct eye contact
with them the more it turned from a lively color to a rotting one.
He responded to the prosecutor with the truth, since he both
respected the court oath and was a terrible liar, despite the advice
of his defense attorney. “I didn't punch Reggie. Okay, that's not
true in the technical sense. What actually happened is that I have no
longer punched him. ”
The prosecutor responded, “What?”
Hickory, still trying to get across his message as everyone in the
courtroom looked at him awkwardly, “Okay so see, I traveled back in
time to stop myself from punching him.”
The prosecutor then said, “Your defense is that you can travel
back through time.”
“Yes,” Jacob then said, “To prove it I'll tell you this. Your
babysitter read to you the tortoise and the hair when you were six.
Your favorite toy was a dinosaur you named Freckles. I went back in
time to be your babysitter.” The prosecutor knew the impossibility
of situation without time travel and yet also knew the impossibility
of time travel. He chose not to confirm Jacob's assertions.
Jacob then added more proof of his time travel with examples about
the jury and judge. The judge told him he might be investigated for
stalking later, but Jacob was a man, who despite his time travel
abilities, thought of the present. At least the present from his
perspective.
The prosecutor then said, “Despite you 'proving' your ability to
time travel.” The prosecutor assumed Jacob's strange suit allowed
him to do this, “We have footage of you punching my client, since
you had the audacity to assault him in public.”
Jacob then replied, “That's because after stopping myself from
punching him, I had to punch him. In order to keep the time line
straight I had to keep events in order, so I went to the moment
before impact, froze time, and pushed myself of that time out of the
way, delivered the actual blow myself before moving myself back in
place to the proper position after the punch. See I had to have a
reason to go back in time, namely this lawsuit, to prevent myself
from punching him so I had to make sure Reggie was still punched.”
The prosecutor almost dropped his professional behavior as the
entire ridiculousness of the twisting, winding statement filled the
courtroom. “So you stopping yourself from punching him, to punch
him? Then you still punched him. You just confessed.”
“Well no, see the me that punched him is the me that's seventy
five years old and living in Russia with a different name. You'll
have to sue him.”
The prosecutor then tried to dig through every bit of legal
knowledge he had and muttered to himself, “Does that even count as
having an accomplice.”
Jacob then finished with, “Good luck filing the paper work.”
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