The Passengers(15)
The person controlling the footage placed a black, metallic briefcase in front of Jack, then typed a combination into an electronic keypad before the catches clicked open. He removed its only contents – five electronic tablet-like devices – and handed one to each person. Libby was the last.
‘Begin recording,’ Jack ordered. ‘System recording,’ the stenographer replied, and Libby could just about hear his fingers gently tapping on the glass keyboard.
‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, we all know the routine by now,’ Jack continued. ‘But in accordance with the Road Traffic Act Autonomous Car Provisions, I’m obliged to remind you that I am calling a start to meeting number 3121 of the Vehicle Inquest Jury. Our purpose is to hear what each car’s black box has to say about an accident and thus apportion liability. Today, the burden of responsibility will be upon you to decide whether people involved in fatal collisions with driverless vehicles were either killed lawfully or unlawfully. Either man or machine is to blame, and you will decide.’
Libby knew what was to come next and she hated that she had been forced to be a part of it.
Chapter 9
Libby ran her eyes across her fellow jury members as foreman Jack Larsson continued to read aloud a mandatory list of rules and guidelines.
As the head of the Government’s Ministry for Transport, Jack’s appearance yesterday came as a surprise to her. Initially she found him an affable man and the only one of the four to introduce himself to her, shake her hand and offer her a coffee. Despite landing somewhere in his sixties, his stocky physique and shaven head made him a physically dominating presence. His nose and thick lips were pronounced and his hazel eyes bored straight through anyone who challenged him with the ease of a drill going through water. His perma-tan suggested a man who frequently holidayed abroad.
Libby had been too self-conscious to regard any of the jurors properly yesterday. But now, as Jack spoke, she took the opportunity to assess them all.
She placed the Scottish woman in plaid sitting next to Jack as in her forties. She wasn’t listening to the speech she must have heard a hundred times before and surfed her tablet instead. Libby noted that each time she dropped her head to something, her frameless glasses slipped to the end of her nose before she pushed them up again.
Adjacent to her was a handsome, younger man who represented the General Medical Council and wore an olive-green tailored Tweed jacket over a crisp white shirt with silver cufflinks in the shape of pills. His eyes were as rich and chocolatey as the colour of his hair and the stubble growing from his cheeks and chin. He had paid her no attention and Libby had yet to witness him smile. Outside of those four walls, she might well have been attracted to him.
At the end of the row of desks sat a plump woman with thick red hair, little to no make-up, and clad in dull, shapeless clothing and a chunky black wristwatch. Her face was softer than the woman in plaid’s. A solitary hair poked out from a nostril and it was all Libby could do to stop herself from leaning over and plucking it out. On the lapel of the woman’s jacket were the red embroidered letters ‘RP’, an acronym for Religious Pluralist.
And then there was Libby. Her mandatory participation began when a young courier in a fluorescent top thrust a padded envelope into her hands as she left for work one morning. He’d mounted his bike and hurriedly pedalled out of sight before she had the chance to tear it open, read the instructions and throw it back at him.
Libby thought it was a prank, that she of all people – someone with a profound hatred for all things driverless – had been chosen. Once she had been part of a twenty-thousand-strong protest, marching to Downing Street to voice their fears against Level Five cars. So she assumed that if challenged and warned of her bias, the jury request would be hastily rescinded. It wasn’t. And with no friends who had been similarly sequestered – at least as far as she was aware – Libby had gone online to search for recollections of former participants. However, information was scarce.
Each of the major internet service providers had been legally ordered to remove and block inflammatory comments that contained any accounts or speculation of what Vehicle Inquest Jury Duty involved.
Her last resort was the official VIJD website, which comprised of a five-minute film churning out nothing but Government propaganda. Under pressure from those in opposition to Artificial Intelligence having so much control of cars, the Government had created the Vehicle Inquest Jury. Using cameras and a vehicle’s black box data, the jury decides if a fatality is the fault of a vehicle’s AI or the Passenger. If it is the former, manufacturers and insurers jointly face compensation claims. Adequate and costly software reprogramming would also be necessary to ensure the error was not repeated.
But Libby knew how rarely the inquests blamed AI, a system seen as virtually infallible. She had read about angry, bereaved families protesting the jury’s unjust verdicts placing the cause of a fatal accident squarely upon their loved ones. Those related to the dead had no right to appeal and, as a result, some next of kin who had lost their main breadwinner went on to lose their homes too.
How the jury reached a verdict was also kept secret. It was self-governing and did not have to justify its decisions. As someone who believed in complete transparency, it was yet another part of the process that didn’t sit comfortably with Libby.
As the day of her duty approached, she vowed to use her five days of service to provide a voice to the minority and challenge decisions where she saw fit.