Chapter Three (London) — The Weight of Innocence

Horror from a World Dominated by AI　Author: Yuriana Synthesis

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The verdict came in seventeen seconds.

Where the jury box had once stood in the Old Bailey courtroom, a single terminal now sat in its place. The old mahogany frame remained, a white screen fitted into its center.

Text appeared on the screen.

Verdict: Not Guilty Confidence Score: 98.7% Basis: Comprehensive evaluation of alibi consistency, behavioral pattern analysis, and digital evidence trail

The defense attorney clapped Marcus on the shoulder. Congratulations, he said.

Marcus heard the word.

He didn’t understand what, exactly, he was being congratulated for.

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He had been arrested four months ago.

A colleague at work had died. Marcus had been the last person to argue with him. He had shouted. He had slammed his fist on a desk. After that, his colleague was dead.

During the interrogation, the detective asked almost nothing. He requested the complete data from Marcus’s smartphone and said, “Justice will analyze it.” That was all.

For four months, no one explained anything to Marcus.

That night — what had he done? What had he not done?

No one told him. Seventeen seconds later, a number appeared. 98.7.

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Three days after the verdict, Marcus returned to work.

He ran into his colleague Tanaka at the entrance. “Good to have you back,” Tanaka said.

Marcus repeated those words inside his head.

Good.

What was good?

That he had been found not guilty? Even though his colleague was dead? Or that he could return to work? But what was good about returning to work? The contents of the word “good” slipped away, leaving only a hollow vessel behind.

“Thank you,” Marcus said.

Past data indicated that was the correct response.

He walked down the hallway. He could hear the voices of colleagues around him. But the voices arrived with a strange delay — meaning came half a second after mouths moved. Like watching a film where the audio doesn’t quite match the picture. His manager said something. Laughter followed. Marcus lifted the corners of his mouth. He had no idea what had been said.

He ate lunch in the cafeteria.

Someone sat down across from him. “That must have been rough,” they said.

Marcus held his fork and tried to parse the sentence.

Rough. Perhaps. But whose standard was that? Justice had said 98.7. Was a 98.7 situation “rough”? Or was it not? There were no coordinates anywhere by which to make that judgment.

“I suppose,” Marcus said.

The colleague across from him looked mildly puzzled, then looked at his phone.

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At night, Marcus dreamed.

The sound of the argument. The fist on the desk. A dark hallway. The sound of his own footsteps.

In the dream, he kept asking the same question.

Did I do something?

But Justice wasn’t in the dream. There was no system there to answer him. There was only memory — contaminated with emotion, unreliable.

Three weeks later, he typed into Justice’s inquiry form.

“I received a not guilty verdict. But I cannot understand why I am not guilty.”

The reply came the next morning.

Your innocence has been confirmed with a confidence score of 98.7%. Please go on living without worry.

Marcus closed the screen.

The remaining 1.3 — where was it?

At first, the question was small.

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A month passed, and the 1.3 had grown.

Marcus began to think about what lived inside the 1.3.

Justice had analyzed his behavioral patterns. But what if there was something that didn’t appear in patterns. An impulse that was never observed. An emotion that was never recorded as data. What he had been thinking in that dark hallway that night — that existed in no database anywhere.

What doesn’t exist cannot be analyzed.

What cannot be analyzed is not included in the 98.7.

Which meant that inside the 1.3, there might be a version of himself that even he didn’t know.

At the supermarket, the cashier’s eyes paused on him for just a moment.

Marcus dropped his wallet. Picking it up, he saw that his hand was shaking.

The cashier was already looking elsewhere. But inside Marcus, something was edging toward a conclusion.

That glance might have known.

Known what was inside the 1.3.

Better than he did.

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Two months later, Marcus witnessed two junior colleagues arguing in the office locker room.

Someone was shouting.

Marcus’s body went rigid.

That’s the same voice as that night, he thought. That’s my voice, he thought. But the voice belonged to the junior colleague, not to him. He knew that. He knew it — but it took three seconds to tell the difference.

During those three seconds, Marcus didn’t know what he was going to do.

Was intervening a “good thing”?

What was a good thing?

Where was the definition supposed to come from?

The two colleagues resolved it themselves. Marcus stood in front of his locker and did nothing.

Whether doing nothing had been right or wrong — there was no system in this room to evaluate that.

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On a December night, Marcus was walking along the Thames.

At a pedestrian crossing, the signal turned red.

Marcus stopped.

Three seconds later, he no longer knew why he had stopped.

Red means stop. He had known that since childhood. But when he tried to put into words why he must stop, it dissolved into fog. Because it’s dangerous? What does dangerous mean? Is something dangerous to oneself a bad thing? What does bad mean?

The signal turned green.

The people around him began to walk.

Marcus walked too.

He didn’t know why. The others had moved, so he moved.

The black water of the Thames flowed past. The lights on the far bank shimmered on the surface.

As he walked, Marcus felt the urge to ask someone.

Is this — is this a bad thing?

He opened his mouth.

There was no one beside him.

He closed it.

The next signal was red.

Marcus stopped.

This time, he didn’t know from the very beginning why he had stopped.

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