“Thank you, Your Honor,” said Donny, already wondering what better angle he could come up with in that time to keep the case alive.

“And don’t try to come back in here with some other strategy to delay,” added the judge, as if reading Donny’s mind. “You have now officially exhausted our patience for your inability to manage your own mess. Can you manage that, at least?”

“Absolutely,” he lied.

2

In a just world, it would not matter that Donny’s client was dead. All that would matter would be whether the crimes he alleged had been committed. And those crimes would be dealt with by the state. But Donny had made his living, such as it was, fighting for justice from an unjust system. Most of it fighting a state that no longer really existed, and had worked hard to cover its tracks while it could. Maybe it was because of all the cases he lost that he couldn’t stop fighting now that the war was over. Even as most people had moved on to dealing with the fact that, while they were fighting, nature died.

It took a few years after the coup they called the state of emergency before the scope of the deeper crisis became apparent. Donny should have seen it coming. He started his practice representing detainees they had rounded up from the refugee camps, and he heard the stories about the barren breadbasket they had left behind up north. But when the price of corn started to lap the price of oil and outpace the rising temperatures and rising seas, the strain to the system became more evident. Even Donny realized it really was an emergency. And not just because he could no longer afford a cheeseburger, except on special occasions.

You could agree it was an emergency without agreeing that the implementation of authoritarian population controls was an acceptable solution. Especially if you could see how the new system they implemented was rigged to make sure a shrinking elite was able to keep extracting fat profits from a starved economy. Donny ended up making what he called a living defending the people who dared to resist the authorities, trying to work with a Constitution they were amending on the fly, one secret ruling at a time. It wasn’t easy, the clients were usually broke, and sometimes your own safety was at risk. But he got pretty good at it, and even learned how to clean himself up enough to argue his cases on the evening news, in the court of public opinion.