UNDERGROUND

would plead guilty to the charges and hope for a reasonable magistrate.

Anthrax looked through the hand-up brief provided by the prosecution, which included a heavily edited transcript of his interview with the police. It was labelled as a ‘summary’, but it certainly didn’t summarise everything important in that interview. Either the prosecution or the police had cut out all references to the fact that the police had threatened to charge Anthrax’s mother if he didn’t agree to be interviewed.

Anthrax pondered the matter. Wasn’t everything relevant to his case supposed to be covered in a hand-up brief? This seemed very relevant to his case, yet there wasn’t a mention of it anywhere in the document. He began to wonder if the police had edited down the transcript just so they could cut out that portion of the interview. Perhaps the judge wouldn’t be too happy about it. He thought that maybe the police didn’t want to be held accountable for how they had dealt with his mother.

The rest of the hand-up brief wasn’t much better. The only statement by an actual ‘witness’ to Anthrax’s hacking was from his former room-mate, who claimed that he had watched Anthrax break into a NASA computer and access an ‘area of the computer system which showed the latitude/ longitude of ships’.

Did space ships even have longitudes and latitudes? Anthrax didn’t know. And he had certainly never broken into a NASA computer in front of the room-mate. It was absurd. This guy is lying, Anthrax thought, and five minutes under cross-examination by a reasonable lawyer would illustrate as much. Anthrax’s instincts told him the prosecution had a flimsy case for some of the charges, but he felt overwhelmed by pressure from all sides – his family, the bustle in the court- room, even the officiousness of his own lawyer quickly rustling through his papers.

Anthrax looked around the room. His eyes fell on his father, who sat waiting on the public benches. Anthrax’s lawyer wanted him there to give evidence during sentencing. He thought it