Schoolteachers, store clerks, city employees, midlevel marketing people, all doing their civic duty or secretly happy for a change of pace from the tedium of their routine. Truly a jury of Joey’s peers, they didn’t seem to understand the Cloud any better than Joey. Couldn’t agree on the Cloud. When they tried to explain it to one another, as Cope suggested they do in the jury room—“Go ahead, explain it to one another. That will be helpful, won’t it?”—it confused them even more.

The Cloud. Too cloudy for them. But the concept of habeas corpus. That the accused is required to appear in court only if there is a clear charge. That the evidence must be there, as the judge had instructed them. That they understood. That was clear to them. And because it was something they could understand, they seized on it and didn’t let go. Like a log, a life raft—a familiar, recognizable object to cling to—in the swirling sea of Cope’s technological explanations. So they seized on it—habeas corpus, the evidence must be there—and held it hard. Too hard.

How could you really trust the Cloud? How could you be sure that what was in the Cloud came directly from Joey Richter’s phone and hadn’t made stops at some server farm under a mountain in Colorado or some satellite above New Zealand because of the requirements of technology, where signals could have gotten rerouted or misrouted or messed up? How could you really be sure—to a judicial certainty—of something you couldn’t see and hear and touch? How could they really be sure that the photos came directly from Joey’s phone? A phone, after all, completely destroyed by a cup of coffee. That part they could picture clearly. That was evidence. Evidence has to be based on something tangible. Not just the say-so of young, eager, politically ambitious prosecutors or the state. You needed to be absolutely sure because, in a capital case like this, someone’s life is on the line.