Chapter 57
Triggered
MY FIRST REAL day in the courtroom sitting next to Judge Jones’ clerk and court reporter had seen the courtroom erupt loudly following her verdict involving postponing the return of Lilibeth Tully. It had been an extraordinarily unusual event, as I found later in my summer, and as my career continued. Courtrooms were meant to be somber spaces for justice, not a party atmosphere! Arguing was supposed to be limited to the counsel presenting their arguments at that moment – especially in a Court of Appeals!
Right then though I felt there was only one word that could describe things.
Pandemonium!
I felt like time had stopped as everyone on Aubry Harris’ side realized they were in line for some serious legal trouble, Addy probably wondered about her own legal exposure, and I just wondered if this evidence would do anything to help me regain my freedom!
I was also scared to death for Addy right then, as this video was going to clearly demonstrate the trigger her mom could activate, and could send her over the edge.
“ORDER!!!!!” The judge shouted, “ORDER!!! OR I’LL CLEAR THE COURTROOM!!!”
The video stayed frozen in the still as the courtroom finally grew silent. “If everyone cannot behave themselves like adults, I will have everyone but the attorneys and clients removed!” He looked truly shocked and pissed if I had to describe it. “Mr. Johnson, what was your objection?”
“This evidence is highly prejudicial, Your Honor and may cause issues with related cases.”
“Your Honor you have already seen the documentation about the legality of the evidence!” Kendra said.
He nodded. “Miss Harris, you were trying to answer Mrs. Stein?”
“Your Honor, I’m not sure…”
“You are under oath Miss Harris. I hope there’s not a need to, but you are entitled to plead the fifth amendment if you feel like you are in legal jeopardy here? Perhaps you should consult with another attorney?”
She looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time since that day she wouldn’t say ‘yes,’ and then turned to the judge and shook her head stiffly, “No sir, I’ll answer Mrs. Stein.”
“Your Honor!” Henry objected.
“Counsel, you will get your turn to rebut this evidence if needed. Mrs. Stein?”
“Miss Harris, do you recognize this woman?”
On the screen you could see two large men holding a young woman tightly to keep her from escaping just barely visible on the side of the wall by their sitting room. A ridiculous looking ball gag was stuffed in her mouth.
“Yes, that’s Gina Miller, my friend.”
“Who else is on the screen here?”
I noticed then that there was someone standing behind Addy, and someone behind Danica, with syringes coming at Addy and Danica.
“My mom, Aubry Harris, two of her security guards are holding Gina, my sister and myself, and I don’t know the names of the two women behind Danica and I.”
“Let’s see the film, huh?”
Kendra pressed play and I watched events that she’d described play out on the video.
The film showed both young women getting the needles pressed quickly into their bodies.
“What the Hell is going on?” Addison asked angrily.
“What was that?!?” Danica added.
Aubry Harris laughed a villainous laugh that chilled my bones as I watched, “What’s going on is that if you and your sister don’t start shaping up, you’ll be shaping down.”
“What do you mean?” Addy asked.
“Let me show you,” she said with a smirk.
Gina was brought fully into view then of Addy. She was screaming and fighting with the two men holding her.
“What are you doing to Gina?!?” Addy screamed.
“This,” Aubry said and pressed a button on a tablet she was holding.
We watched as Gina screamed in pain, and convulsed violently as she shrank, until moments later she finally lay on the ground naked as a newborn, now crying with the voice of one as well.
Addy yelled, “Change her back!”
“No,” Aubry said, “She was trying to turn us in on some things she found working for us in the office. She’s going to get adopted by a nice couple tonight. She’ll make a nice baby… just like the two of you will…”
“Mom you can’t do that to us!” Danica screamed.
“Oh, I can… I don’t want to, but I certainly will! If either of you don’t behave, I’ll have the code sent remotely to both of you so I can have a beautiful set of baby twin sisters for their big brother Matty. Now, first thing you’re going to do Addy, if you don’t want to be Baby Addy, is break up with that sniveling Little boy you’ve been dating!”
The footage stopped, and I saw Addy was trembling, and tears flowed out of her eyes and down her face. Her mascara was running badly down her cheeks as she tried to wipe her face with her hand.
“Bailiff?” Judge O’Connor said after a moment.
“Your Honor?”
“Please arrest Mrs. Harris. I’m issuing a bench warrant for her at this time until the district attorney’s office and Federal Investigators can issue their own indictments.”
“You ungrateful little bitch!!!” Aubry said as she hissed towards Addy. I watched in horror as she pulled out her phone and began typing in a code in some app as the bailiff walked towards her. I had little doubt as to what she was doing as she gleefully pressed a button and looked up at Addy.
I could tell she expected her to immediately shrink like her friend had.
I looked back and forth at them, expecting the same thing to happen.
“What the Hell?” She swore. Mrs. Harris pressed a couple other buttons in rapid succession then.
“Officer, please take her into custody now and preserve that device for evidence!!!”
I felt like a spectator at a cage match or something as Mrs. Harris threw the device as hard as she could. Another officer, who had been summoned as backup, happened to walk in the door and right into the path of it. I watched as he reflexively caught it with some pride, before developing a blank stare on his face!
All of the other eyes in the courtroom were all focused on Aubry Harris, who was being cuffed and brought down by the bailiff who had already been inside the room. Her attorney was making noise about the arrest being unfair and no one was paying attention to the other officer. Sensing something was wrong I bolted over there and could see swirling colors on the screen with that weird tint that I apparently now saw on hypnotic screens. I leapt up and yanked it easily from his hand and turned it face down.
“Officer, are you okay?” I asked him.
“Huh?” He responded incoherently just as he began to pee his pants.
“We need a medic or someone over here!” I shouted.
The Little doctor had apparently not left, and she and her mother were over there. “What’s wrong?” Holly Nickerson asked.
“He got a dose of the screen there – it had a hypno screen on?”
She made a face at that, “It already affected him? A Big?”
“That’s bad…” her mommy said. “Let’s get him to the hospital. I don’t know if we’ll be able to do much for him. Sir, do you understand me?”
He slowly nodded, “What’s going on?” He asked like he’d downed a full bottle of liquor on his own.
“You got hit with a hypno bomb, we’ll take you to General and see if there’s anything we can do for you…”
Another officer showed up then and said, “Where’s the device?”
“You need to put it in a bag, there’s a hypno screen that was active just now,” I told him.
He held a manilla envelope that we carefully slid the phone in without looking at it. Even from within the bag you could see the screen was bright, so we doubled it up and he followed Aubry Harris out of the courtroom.
It took a while to come back to order for the courtroom, and you could tell that Judge O’Connor was pissed!
“I don’t know what the Hell is going on here, but this circus is ending now!”
He looked at our table where Kendra and David had joined me in sitting down. “Mrs. Stein, do you have more questions for Miss Harris?”
“Just a couple more, Your Honor?”
“Make them quick – no more theatrics!”
“Yes sir,” she said. “Miss Harris, I know that had to have been a shock for all of that to happen right now. For the record, you broke up with our client Mr. Sylvester because your mom threatened to turn you into a Little?”
Addy looked truly shell-shocked, but nodded, “Yes… She threatened to do the same to my sister… I couldn’t risk my sweet sister Danica having that happen…”
“Last question, as far as you were aware, your mom’s trigger on the nanites should have worked on you just now, correct?”
She nodded, “She even tested it on me one time and permanently removed my body hair… I know it worked… it’s never grown back.”
“No further questions, Your Honor,” she told the judge.
“Questions for this witness, Mr. Johnson?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Do you have any further witnesses, Mrs. Stein?”
“Just one brief one to testify on this matter with the nanites? I think it’s relevant?”
“Briefly!” he said.
“Thank you, Your Honor. We would like to call Doctor Amanda Westerfield to the stand at this time.”
Amanda was led into the courtroom and gave me a wide smile as she passed by. Once she was sworn in Kendra began, “Doctor Westerfield, would you please explain your credentials?”
“Certainly! I am the head of the AI Department at Emerson University.”
“AI meaning Artificial Intelligence?”
“That’s correct.”
“What do you all focus on?”
“Well in the last ten years programming on nanites has been one of my main focuses.”
“You are in fact one of the leading experts in nanite AI programming, correct?”
“I’d like to think I’m up there, yes.”
“A couple weeks back we contacted you due to receiving information about the nanite bomb that was placed in Miss Harris and her sister. What can you tell us about that?”
Amanda sighed, “Well it’s unfortunately a real thing – and hers was capable of reducing her in size and mass just as the video you showed me of the other young woman.”
“For the record she is referring to Gina Miller,” Kendra said.
“Why didn’t it work?”
“Assuming that was her intention, it was no longer going to operate with her password. Your office contracted me to change the passwords to give her some protection.”
“You hacked into the code?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“When and how?”
“Their private investigator discovered they were going to be traveling to our local mall. We traveled there quickly and I ‘ran into’ Miss Harris and her sister out shopping with Mr. Sylvester. It was pretty simple to scan for the frequency of the nanites, and through some proprietary software, edited the nanites’ passwords and code.”
“You just gave them new code?”
“Essentially, yes,” Amanda answered.
“So, your code did what?”
“The nanites are still inside Miss Harris, it’s just changed the password needed to alter her through them.”
“What’s the point of having such a code?”
“Well, nanites have been heavily used in the medical field, but boutique changes to Littles using them have become more and more common. At some point it was realized that the nanites stayed inside a Little and could be programmed still to make additional changes without going back to a hospital or a research lab. Now if you go into a doctor’s office to have a Little altered, they’ll give you a password and you can have settings changed further with a simple visit.”
“Is that something that should be done?”
“That’s not in my field,” she smiled. “I have seen them do a lot of good for some people, including my own two Little girls.”
“You only have one?”
“My other Little girl grew up and went back home to her home dimension after she graduated from Emerson,” she smiled. “She’s doing well for herself there.”
“One last question, can any of the nanites in people’s bodies be altered?”
Amanda grimaced, “Yes, unfortunately that is one of the biggest faults of them.”
“And they stay forever?”
“At least fifteen years according to our studies. They self-replicate in the body and use some of the same nutrients that a person consumes to power them. At some point in the future, we may very well view them as being a harmful pollutant.”
“Interesting, no more questions, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Johnson?”
“Your Honor to be honest I don’t see the relevance of her testimony, no questions for her.”
“Thank you Doctor Westerfield.”
I sat tensely in my seat as Kendra said, “Your Honor we had subpoenaed Judge Taney, but she responded that she had a court scheduling conflict. Without that overridden in some manner, that is our final witness.”
He looked at his watch, “Tough to get someone like a judge in… If you want to wait and force the issue you may, but I don’t believe it would change the facts of this case in any way. Let’s adjourn for a thirty-minute recess, then each of you will have a fifteen-minute closing argument you may make.”
He gaveled the court into recess and I gratefully took the opportunity to start walking out.
“Where are you going?” Addy asked me, grabbing my hand.
“The bathroom?”
“By yourself?”
“I…” I started to argue. “Yes?”
“You’re still my baby girl Cammie, I’ll let you use the potty again, but you’re going with me.”
I turned to Kendra who shrugged, “I would have said not to go alone too after everything that’s happened today, Cameron. Make sure he’s right back here after the potty break.”
Addy smiled at me, “Come on.”
She led me by the hand to the bathrooms, and any hope of using the men’s room was squashed as she took me into the women’s, and one of the larger accessible stalls. “Hand me your coat…” she told me.
I groaned, but didn’t want the contents of the diaper bag that was on her shoulder ending up on me instead. After I handed it to her, she let me unbutton my pants and I hopped up onto the large toilet to do my business. Going number one and number two, she was ready with toilet paper that she insisted on wiping me with, before helping me with my coat and holding me to wash my hands.
One woman came in and said, “What is a man doing in the women’s room?”
“I brought my baby in here, I didn’t want him possibly being kidnapped or harmed…”
The woman seemed incredulous, but took a stall and closed the door. I was glad to take my bright red face back out into the hallway! I didn’t speak with her returning to the room, other than to look up and ask, “Are you okay?”
She sat down in a seat and pulled me into the chair next to her. Addy shook her head, “No, I’m decidedly not okay… My mom is a monster in every way she can be. Seeing her arrested should make me feel better… knowing that Doctor Westerfield saved my sister and me from being shrunken earlier should make me feel better. Honestly, I think this hearing is going well for you – and that should make me feel better too, but at the heart of the past few weeks is my heart being ripped back open…”
I looked at her and said, “I’m sorry…”
“None of this is your fault, no need to apologize. Now why don’t you get back up there with Kendra before the judge comes back and let’s figure out what’s going to happen…”
I squeezed her in a hug, and walked back up to the front. Kendra leaned down, “You okay?”
I nodded, “This whole thing has reopened wounds for both of us… Worst of all, that was by far the most embarrassing bathroom trip of all time. You could have helped me out you know!”
She smirked, “I’m hoping this gets taken care of – might as well have given her a little more time there.”
The judge was soon back and I was listening to the opposing arguments.
“In conclusion, a reminder that today isn’t about the circus theatrics we’ve seen today. Today is about procedures and if the right steps were taken to declare Mr. Sylvester in contempt of court, and a case of Maturosis. Even without the testimony of our witnesses, the video and information on her many diapers she’s been through, the initial outburst was definitely deserving of this change in status for Cammie Harris.”
I glared at the jackass as he walked back with a cocky smile.
David stood up to deliver the closing arguments like he usually did. “Your Honor, Mr. Johnson is absolutely correct that this case is about procedures, process, and law. I agree with that one-hundred percent, but his conclusions are flawed and highly colored by his own opinions. The judicial part of our government does rightfully wield significant powers to be able to dispense justice. In Ames, yes, it is legal for a judge to declare someone under eight-feet-tall as a person unable to care for themselves. But there should be due process. A hearing? Interviews with psychologists? Testimony from those around them? Surely there should be some of this per case law as testified by Professor Marshall.”
“The ultimate problem though is that the process, not even followed, was tainted by blackmail and intimidation. We’ve shown that Judge Taney was not adequately distanced from the case at hand. She should have at the least recused herself. With our evidence though, we’ve shown it was more than that – and I suspect if we could examine Judge Taney, I would not be surprised to discover she has her own nanite bomb programmed and ready to blow for Mrs. Harris to control her.”
“Your Honor, Cameron Sylvester is one of the most noble hearted men I have ever known. He stands the likelihood of possibly even being on a bench himself someday! There is no doubt in my mind that he is more than mature enough to live on his own, and continue to contribute to society as an amazing attorney. We implore the court to right this injustice today. Thank you, Your Honor.”
I gave David a small smile of thanks, and felt my stomach twist and turn as Judge O’Connor sat there silently, moving a few documents around.
“I want to thank both counsels for well-presented arguments and testimony. I would have preferred to not ever have the theatrics we had today in my courtroom, but that is neither here nor there as they say. I have sat on the bench now for thirty years, and during my fourteen years on this bench, I have held a tradition that I will consider both sides for a period of time before rendering my verdict. A rush to judgement due to passions sake will not benefit the law, and society overall. To that end I will issue my ruling within the next seven to ten-days through my office. During that time, I am remanding Mr. Sylvester to the care of Miss Harris.”
I wanted to cry then. Freedom had felt so close!!!!
“During that time Miss Harris is not to have ANY contact with her mother, mother’s attorneys, or her agents. She may go into work if absolutely needed, but during that time no contact shall happen with your mother Miss Harris. Mr. Sylvester is not to be modified physically in any way! You may still dress him according to your wishes as a mother, but he should be allowed unlimited contact with his attorneys and they with him. I implore you to be kind, Miss Harris, and not make me regret my decision.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” she said to him.
“Very well, court is adjourned!”
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Well I hope you're enjoying the ride! Please let me know with a comment if you are! I'll post the next three chapters on Sunday.
