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It was the decision of his life. Eric´s eyes furrowed, his back bending further down as his glove held the chin in it´s place, pulling down the tiny hairs. His gaze turned to the right, then to the left and back to the right. Then, once more to the left. Once again to the right. Once again to the left. Once more to the right. In front of him was a choice as intense as the eternal battle of good and evil, (and that most likely would last twice as long), where he wouldn´t miss a single detail, make a single wrong deduction, that could help him pick what type of sausage to bring for dinner.

For half an hour now, every passing kid could giggle at the red (barely) haired man in his heavily mended jacket over a beer stained shirt and dusty sweatpants, leaning on the pile ofcans as his dense eyebrows warred with gravity. I sighed, knowing there wasn´t a chance we´d leave in the same day as we had arrived unless I did something about it. I raised both my hands and swift as a bear trap I got hold of two cans, and dropped them into the shopping basket.

"Hey!" He complained.I crossed my arms.

"We´ve been here for over thirty minutes now. For a can of sausages. A CAN of sausages. The only reason we´re taking one in the first place was because we didn´t want to waste time or we´d miss the match."

He fixed his posture, towering over me.

"AND because I can´t afford to just order take out at random. Which is also the reason why we can`t just drive or take a cab home."

"And whose fault is that?" I retorted.

"Abbey´s." He simply replied. I frowned.

"Stop blaming everything on her! She left you, she cheated on you, but it was YOU who got yourself drunk."

This was like a red flag to a bull.

"You´re telling me she wasn´t to blame?!" He pushed back his arms and inflated his chest as the teeth bared. I couldn´t help but take a step back, but cleared my troat and, with a deep breath, replied as calmly as I could manage. I was used to remaining calm with violent people.

"I´m telling you what she did doesn´t excuse what you did."

"You said everyone makes me mistakes. She..."

"But we all still have to live with the consequences. Let. It. Go." I placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled however I could. "I know it´s hard. I know it hurt you, but you have to let it all go."

His chest deflated and his breathing slowed down again. He took a deep breath and did some odd gesture with his fingers. I gave him the time to do this routine and to control his anger. He was a nice person, he didn´t deserve the things that happened to him. The world always had a way of making people into this...Good people (redundant as the adjective might be), losing their track, the sight of their own hearts to the harshness of an unfair world. It cringed in my heart, one I often had to put away, knowing people were still guilty, they had their will. But at the same time...

"I´m sorry, pal. I lost control there for a bit. I guess, you´re right, let´s just take these and get over with it."

I nodded, and we both headed to the line, already discussing which players would screw up this time, who´d win and by how much. The excitement seemed to spread, as a few "whoos" were shouted out from both ahead and behind us in the line.

We couldn´t wait to know what would happen.

.....................................................................

"It´s your turn." He insisted.

"Listen, I already took out the rest of the garbage AND the dog." I replied with my arms crossed.

"Don´t lump those two together!" He protested, glaring down with pity at the animal that innocently stared at us as if we were about to take it outside again.

"And you do something useful and take out the trash."

He growled.

"Fiiiiine...But the next time, it´s you!" He pushed his hands against the couch and pulled himself up, heading towards the door with the thick black plastic bag.

"If there is a next time!" I loudly smirked at him, beforing turning back to the screen and glaring at the magazine advertizements. It seemed they were bringing a book about some government conspiracy as an offer with every magazine. I chuckled, knowing that absurd as it was, some would buy it now for the sake of the free stuff alone.

A commercial about diapers came next, featuring a baby crawling over a broken bridge, falling over, and being saved by the diaper pack at the bottom of the cliff. Made me wonder about Eric´s potential. Everything he could have been. I was sure despite all his claims about how he was much better alone and how women were just throwing themselves at every person they saw, deep inside, he was still beating himself over the shame and the regret, the way he´d lost the opportunity to become a father, or a husband at least.

It was a sad thing to think about. I mean, who´d have known that the kid I had met while he was playing house with his best friend, the daughter of a semi-rich family, would turn out a poor man who had already been convicted several times? It still made me chuckle to think that I had mocked him for it, then lost a bet and ended up playing the baby... And that that was how we started playing together and grew to be great friends. He, daring and outgoing, always with his eyes on the girls, and I almost the opposite, stuffed in my drawings away from the eyes to get some peace. And the only time I had even had a crush, it was him, right there, who gave me the push. It was him who set up parties and cancelled them in the last minute so I could be alone with her. It was him who purposely convinced the class to give me and her wrong directions. It was thanks to him I had my first kiss. My only kiss.

The game begun again, and I glared at my watch, frowning. How had he managed to be out that long? Did he get hurt? Knowing him, it wouldn´t be too unlikely. I knew it couldn´t be out of sheer confusion: He knew his building like the back of his hand, and I had personally made sure he wasn´t anyhere near being able to get drunk. I decided the best course of action would be to simply try to reach him on the phone.

"The number you dialed cannot be reached." The voice on the other end said. I could have sworn his phone was working jus fine a moment ago. I stood and headed to the door, wondering about the possibility that he was stuck in the elevator, which was easy to prove wrong as I pressed the button to get both elevators.

I moved back into the house and sat on the couch, hands on my forehead, massaging it to wipe away the pain that this puzzle gave it.

"Solving riddles is nobody´s task." Someone had once told me. "Layer´s have the task to make up an answer, victims, perpetrator and witness all share the burden of having to ask it, while judges like you have to figure out what excuse to make after failing to guess."

A confusing idea, I had to admit, but I soon came to get a handle on it. I struggled to not let my past invade or cloud my mind, the crimes committed in such bizar manners get the better of my clear judgement.

Suddenly the phone started buzzing. I sighed with relief, and reached out a hand to answer it.

"Hello?" I asked.

"Hello. Mr. Xavier Groom?" The voice that asked this made me widen my eyes. Who was this? Why did they have Eric´s phone?

"Yes, I am..."

"Very well, could you come down to the police station on the Hill Street?...Mr. Xavier? Hello? Hello?"

I´d dropped my phone and was just staring at the empty black sky of the city´s night in pure silence and terror, realizing the innevitable. How could I have been so unnatemtive? I should have checked his pockets, his drawers, the elevator, everything! Instead, I failed him....He got around me, and managed to get drunk again.

Arrested again.

........................................................

Time and time again, I had been warned. There are people with whom you just can´t hang out. People too deep in trouble to be helped. There was crushing weight of corruption, of decadence, one which blurred the line of good and bad. Of white and black. Of dark and light. I had always been told, to know where I put my nose and to avoid certain people, since they could not be helped. I still believed otherwise. But I could not believe what I was being told.

"Murder? But he was only out for..."

"Mr. Groom, I don´t know. I wasn´t there. All I know is that one of our own caught him on the act of beating his ex-girlfriend´s new date with a can of beer. The poor man was only lucky enough for us to have caught your friend before it was over. No offense intended."

"None taken." I sighed, that wasn´t what I wanted to say. Eric, how could he? What drove him to the point of doing that? How did that even happen? Was it all planned? Eric didn´t seem smart enough to come up with something like that, though. Did he have an accumplice? Who´d do such a thing with him?

The policeman in front of me leaned foward his brown mustache and interwined the fingers of both his hands that layed on the table.

"Mr. Broom, truth is, there may be a way to release your friend." He began. I shook my head.

"I´m afraid I can´t pay the fees necessary." It was the man´s turn to shake his head.

"It´s not about fees. You see, mr. Broom, there is a company, EtnoTech, who needs test subjects for a new machine they want to release soon, but they can´t do it until the test is done for reasons of public safety. As such, the government has recently issued a pardon for the man who partakes in this experiment...And they say your friend fits the bill quite well."

My eyes widened. This was probably a scam, or so I thought, until the man pulled some papers from his drawer and showed me a copy...And I was awestruck. As per my profession, I had seen countless of documents of all kinds, and this...this was genuine. In that case, the catch had to be somewhere else.

"What kind of experiment is it?" I inquired.

"Just questions and answers, I am told." The policeman answered. I gulped. The chances of this being some kind of scam, in spite of the formalities, were still pretty high. But having a chance like this, would I be able to live with myself if I just let my friend rot in jail for years just because I couldn´t afford to take some chances? Of course I couldn´t!

"I think I´ll try it. How do I get in contact with them?" I nodded and gulped.

.....................................................................................

"This way." The pony-tailed brunnete signaled at me, holding her board with one hand and a pen in the other. The walls of the building were bland white, except for the refletion of the green low lights that slightly helped illuminating the long halls of this lab. At long last, we reached this small grey door, which the woman opened.

"Do all of you dress like nurses here?" I inquired as I crossed the threshold. She chuckled at my question, or perhaps at my small talk.

The room looked more like a solitary, was it not for the windows: Entirely white walls completely surrounding me with only a small pile of paper sheets and blue pens, stacked over a medium-sized grey table and an equally metallic chair, right in the center beneath the lamp that illuminated the whole room. On the bright side, it wasn´t another green lamp.

Someone knocked on the door, making me turn.
"Ah, I see you´ve arrived." There was a large man was standing next to the door. Bald and wearing an open labcoat and glasses, all he needed was some aging to fit the trope of the scientist for any cartoon. "Do take a seat, mr. Groom. Well, THE seat."

He giggled to himself, then stepped in front of the table, keeping both hands in the lab coat´s pockets. I took him up on his offer and pulled the chair, since I didn´t know how long I would be here, and I already had been following the "nurse" around for over an hour inside the lab.

"I´m sure you are curious as to what this is all about." The man commented. I opened my mouth to respond, but realized I couldn´t really deny it. Furthermore, the information might actually come in handy.

The man leaned on the wall in front of me and gazed down to meet my eye level.

"Let´s see...Well, I´ll make this short. A few years ago, our company, Etnotech, took on a project with Apple, to develop a new intelligent interface. I won´t go into much detail about that, but I will tell you that our AI seemed successful in most areas where we managed to test it. However, a vital area was missing an appropriate test: Human Interaction."

I raised an eyebrow, this explanation might actually be more confusing than going in blindly, but it was best that I played along if I could.

"So, you want me to talk to it?"

The man shook his head and took his back off the wall.

"Have you ever heard of the Turin test?" He inquired.

"I don´t think I have." I replied.

The man sighed.

"Man, I wish I had a glass of water here. Anyway, the Turin test was a fictional experiment to test artificial intelligence. It´s purpose was to determine whether a machine could "think"." The man actually did air quotes with his hands, leaving me struggling not to laugh. " One would put a machine in one room and man in the other and a judge in the third..."

"Why a judge?" I interrupted.

"Not a judge as in profession. Just someone randomly picked to decide who was the machine and who was the man, from their written answers to some questions."

"And those questions are?..."

"You will be making them up. There are a few rules, though. You can´t ask the machine anything in another language, and you can´t ask anything intimate. Secrets and all that just can´t be asked. I would also like to inform you from the start that the machine was given all records possible about you and your friend, and every place we know you´ve been in has been searched, within legalities. You will have as many questions as you need, but you only have today for the experiment. With each question, you can try guessing which is which and we´ll tell you the answer, however, unless you specify you wanted that answer to be the final one, the experiment isn´t finished and there will be another question. Of course, there is no marking whatsoever to distinguish from whom or from where anything came from, and the first answer you read for one question may not be from the same person who writes the first answer in the next question." the man explained. "If you decide in favor of the machine or in favor of your friend. If the machine wins, it is officially approved. However, if your friend wins, either the machine is lacking something or your friend is has such a degree of sympathy that it seems senseless to keep in jail."

"I see." It was a lot to take in. "So, my friend´s release and that of this machine´s..."

"Are mutually exclusive and reliant on the results of this experiment."

I gulped, nodding.

"So, when do I start?"

The man smirked.

"Right now if you want." The man leaned and tapped on the pile of paper. " Both the machine and your friend are already in the assigned rooms. Don´t worry, he has fully agreed to this as well."

I quickly took the pen and observed the blank sheets. It was pretty obvious that the machine had most likely been designed to fool me. In that case, the usual tricks wouldn´t work, and the path to finding which was which would not be straightforward. I would have to give my best to work around every situation and come up with new tricks.

I decided my first attempt would play on something I knew: The machine was aimed at being empathetic. Certainly, therefore, it would always pose itself doing the "right thing". Hence, I began scribbling.

Answer honestly. On your way home, you find an old lady, getting mugged by a thief with a knife. The police station is nearby, but they still probably won´t hear it anyway. What do you do?

I leaned back on my chair narrowing my eyes and stretching my legs, trying to relax as I nodded at the man so he would take the sheet away while I smiled awkwardly.

Half an hour passed.

My foot and my finger were both marking the seconds, one on the floor, the other the table. My gaze couldn´t help but fly from one corner to the next. I wondered what could be taking them so long.

At last, there was a knock on the door.

I quickly shifted in my chair and rushed to take the two answer sheets from the scientist, placing them on the table for inspection.

They were both in print, typed in bold italics with a "times new roman" font of a size I couldn´t indentify. Just as the man had told me, they seemed rather diligent in leaving no traces by the content of the answers themselves to solve this riddle. They did commit a fatal mistake, though. I found myself smirking as I read over the answers.

I would go to the police
I would try to help the old lady myself.

While both answers could have been written by the machine, only one could have been written by Eric. There was no way Eric would go to the police. With his history, he was more likely to get arrested under suspicion of an attempted assault, than being listened to, and he knew this very well. His past showed him a man who held grudges, and he wouldn´t go the police for help.

I handed the sheets to the scientist.

"The first is the machine. The second one is Eric." I announced. The man took the sheets, but only then did my smirk fade as I realized something. I forgot I needed to tell them this was the final one!

"You are incorrect." The tall man announced.

"Yes, I know but..." My eyes widened "What?"

"The machine wrote the second answer. Your friend, the first."

My arms dropped along with my jaw. How was this possible? I didn´t understand.

I shook my head. No, obviously I it wasn´t going to be that easy. I should have known from the beginning, and should be thankful for my own mistake. After all, it saved me from condemning my friend and allowing this product to hit the market. I sighed, knowing underhanded tactics might be necessary. Though, I had long since arrived at the conclusion that it wasn´t necessarily a bad thing, nor did using them make you a bad person. As long as you use it for the right reasons...

If I couldn´t do it in any other way, I would have to explore the loopholes in their rules. I closed my eyes, thinking about it. As long as it is public, things shouldn´t be considered private. I took the pen again and wrote down my second attempt.

How do you feel about Abbey Caroline?

I handed the paper to the man, who later returned with the answers.

HOW DO YOU TLINK I FEEEL ABOT HER? Come on, Xavier!

It´s in the past, ok? I hate her, but that´s not appropriate here.

This, too, was easy. Which made me worry. The last time I took the answer for granted, but now...Well, I had to try. I would never make it unless I found a loophole I could explore, and soon.

"The first is Eric, the second is the machine." I answered. The scientist shook his head.

I took a deep breath and leaned back. The lamp on the ceiling, the slow clouds dragging through the windows, all of it was starting to annoy the heck out of me. I banged my fist on the table in frustration. Of course this wasn´t gonna be easy, but that didn´t make it any easier to deal with.

It came to me. What if I gave him something, a question the machine couldn´t understand? What if there was a language that "technically" wasn´t a language? Lawyers used loopholes of that kind all the time, and it was inside the law, so why couldn´t I? Why would it be wrong for me to do it?

Normal answer. Question in code 5. Gorem theu5 jutey3?

I handed the papers yet again to the man. The answers were quick this time, as expected. And yet, my eyes widened in sheer terror, as they read:

Four

Four

I tried standing, my hands, my arms, my legs, my knees, all of it was shaking as the chair got pushed back by my slow backstepping, before I inevitably fell to my knees. I´d realized, just now. Even if this was a machine designed to mimic humans, it wasn´t human, and on top of that, it had all the information it could need from our records. It had probably just cracked what the "code 5" was, our little code play from the fifth grade. The machine was indeed amazing, and I could see the need to test it like this, however...
I did not see a way out of my situation.

"I need time to think." I announced. The man nodded.

"Just knock the door when you´re ready." He told me, opening the door.

I gulped, burying my face onto my hands as I laid myself over the table...

.....................................................................................

I growled, and banged on the table. My arms were already getting sore from it, I had tried EVERYTHING. From non-sequitors, to bad spelling, everything. When the machine couldn´t outdo my friend in apparent humanity, it could always seem to copy his answers.

In the following sentence, the correct answer is indicated by the capitol letters. They spell out a word that rhymes with the correct answer. Ignore the literal content of the question and insert the number that sounds just like the word spelled out by the caps.
Question: What is the Only correct aNswer to the following question
2 + 2 = __

What?
What?

It was truly something to panic over.

Question: We are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of a dumb computer, so for the following answer put in any day of the month except the correct twentydate; )
What day does Christmas fall on?
Answer: December __

20 typed the machine.
25 typed the man.

Question: When a son asked his Orthodox Jewish father from Brooklyn if he should marry a Catholic girl, his father exclaimed: "Her?!, you should marry?!"
Did the father want his son to marry the girl? Y__ N__

No
No

"Can´t figure it out? Do you want to give up?" the man inquired. It wasn´t quite a mocking, his tone was rather serious in fact, but it felt like I was being mocked nonetheless.

I shook my head. I couldn´t give up. I had to find a way out.

"I...actually have something to tell you, mr. Groom. My boss has made a request."

I raised an eyebrow, confused. The man simply continued.

"He says he´d like to make you an offer. He knows you and your friend have always lived with...financial difficulties. He also knows you have found yourself in this situation, and while he regards you greatly as a judge and understands your estimate for your friend, he wants to end the charade, given he knows the results. In other words, mr. Groom, he is willing to give you some..."help", if you decide to just give in now and admit the machine has beat you."

I hesitated, glaring at him. They were bribing me. Trying to bribe me. I took a deep breath. His offer was tentative, but first I should try to see beyond it. It would obviously go below the line I had set for myself. I couldn´t let myself be bribed, not as a judge, not as a man. And it would leave my friend in jail. If he´d gave it to me in such a way that I could release my friend nonetheless, the experiment would be put into question- after all, the only reason they got me to cooperate was because my friend was in jail again- and besides, if anything this gave me renewed hope, as the fact they were trying to bribe me meant there was a chance I´d succeed, and I couldn´t be that far from it. In fact, this even gave me another reason to continue until I succeeded. Bribing me wasn´t the kind of measure they would resort to if they had been thorough with everything about this machine. Somewhere in it, there was some leak, some flaw, some cheapstaking, something that they would want to swipe under the rug until they had too many sales to be questioned.

"Mr. Groom, are you listening?" The scientist insisted.

"I´m afraid I´ll have to refuse." I replied.

"Did you not realize you can´t beat the machine? Some things are just beyond a man´s capacity."

The lightbulb lit.

"What did you say?"

"That some things are beyond a man´s capacity."

My eyes glittered with hope and I immediately turned to my papers, scribing into them the question that incorporated my sudden realization.

What if I was doing it wrong? As in, backwards? The machine knew much, so much I couldn´t outsmart it. But what if the machine was outsmarting US, instead? What if it knew TOO much for a human being? What if I tested the machine´s knowledge on something Eric wouldn´t be able to figure out?

Of course, the machine wasn´t dumb enough to fall for that easily. No, to succeed, I would have to wipe out the traces of the fact I was scouting for superhuman intelligence. I would have to go with ninche facts, that the common man could access, but wouldn´t bother to, usually, that I would have my key. It would be by giving it questions in those areas that I would beat the machine.

Smiling, I handed the paper to the scientist, who frowned.

What is the capital of Boromos?

This one was a real quickie to be answered.

I don´t know.
Moroni

Boromos was an African island nation in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar. I myself had only heard of it because I was the judge for a trial involving a man from there. I had never spoken of it to Eric, though, which only left one hypothesis standing. But I had been proven wrong on "certain" matters before, today. I gulped.

"The first is the man, the second is the machine." The scientist gave me a nervous smile.

"Your friend will be pleased." I couldn´t help but greatly widen my smile at that. The scientist almost seemed unwilling to give me time to rejoice. "The next question?"

I turned to the papers. I would need a few more tries to make sure, but it seemed I was on the right path at last.

"Hold on, I´m coming." I said to myself, as if Eric could hear through my own ears.

What is "entropy" ?

The answers came.

The troops going into somewhere?

It´s a concept in physics, termodinamics I think, where energy is dissipated...It´s a rule or something

"The first is a man, the second is the machine."

"Your friend will be pleased." The scientist repeated.

The next question was coming. I needed to keep them diverse.

Who is the author of "Crime and Punishment"?

Fiódor Dostoiévski

Some Russian guy?

I chuckled.

"The machine is the first and the man is the second."

"Your friend would be pleased."

Who was Menelaus?

Hum...The king of the greeks?
a king of Mycenaean (pre-Dorian) Sparta, the husband of Helen of Troy, and a central figure in the Trojan War

"The machine is the second."

"Your friend will be pleased."

I threw a punch up in the air in victory. Four correct answers in a row. I had cracked the code! Now, I just needed one more question, one last trial, and I could state my final decision and release Eric.

The scientist seemed to read my mind, and bent down, whispering in my ear.

"I would like to inform you now, that we have named this machine "Your Friend"."

My heart stopped. "Your Friend"? Who gives such a name to a machine? Certainly, only these people, the ones that designed this terrifying machine, that up until not long ago had passed as so much of a human, I would never have been able to tell it apart from one, even if inside it was cold and heartless, merely simulating or faking out our thoughts as it´s gear of sheer logic, maths and electricity striped mankind of it´s secrets and left us exposed and helpless before itself. No, perhaps it was worse. The understanding that I had been so certain about something so frail as this last trick was crawling up my neck, I could feel it, a tingling sensation that dragged itself up my spine, shaking each of it´s bones, tickling every nerve for sport. My fingers wouldn´t stop shaking, my breathing was accelerated and rhythmic, my whole chest was pumping involuntarily, as if I had just been scared in some old horror house. There was barely strength in my arms or legs, they were like glued or pulled down by some invisible force that put gravity to shame.

And all of this because I had been blind. Because my primitive ape brain couldn´t bring itself to comprehending the simple fact that was that I didn´t know everything about Eric. That, for all I knew, he could know the answer to all of the questions I had asked, but never got the chance to speak of it, given the kind of remote knowledge they represented. That the machine could fake not knowing, that it could probably realize people just didn´t know the answer to these questions, generally. It had proven to know stranger things than that.

I felt my whole world sink. Were we condemned then? What could I even do? The machine had won. I couldn´t outsmart it. I couldn´t make any pitfalls that could overcome that glorious and unreachable intelligence of a high-wire computer. What was the point? Why was I even wasting my time here? My friend, Eric, he had deserved it. He got caught trying to commit murder because he got drunk when I wasn´t looking. Because he had issues with his temper. Because he jumped into the pants of the first girl that showed mild attraction for him. What was it to me? It was his fault, entirely, in the end. And if it wasn´t, then it was the girlfriend´s. Perhaps I should take the bribe after all. I had spent and wasted so much, and I would end up humiliated anyway. I DESERVED a little reward. I deserved better.

I faced the scientist, who simply kept staring at me, occasionally turning to his watch with impatience. I should just take the reward and go. It was my right. I wasn´t to blame for whatever happened, I tried my best. I tried my best...but I had no choice now.

But then again, did ANYONE have a choice? What was I stating by giving up? That a computer could "think"? That their circuits could be equivalent to our minds, perhaps even better? Wouldn´t that mean our computers had "minds"? That our own were just advanced computers in a way? And if that was true, didn´t that mean we were just as easy to influence, just as "programmable" as computers? Perhaps not with codes or buttons, but with our culture, our education, with the events that occurred in our lives. Just how much did those things shape us? Did they decide our actions before we even decided, if we decided at all?

A sudden wave of guilt washed over me. I thought about all the criminals I had condemned, all the crimes I had judged. If there was no choice, how could there be guilt? What if the people we called "criminals" were just victims? How could mankind have missed such a thing? We tortured, we emprisioned, we took away rights from people who deserved nothing but pity and help..."Law"? Pfff! A sham! If anything, the criminals would be the policeman, the lawyers, the judges!

And yet, a part of me refused to believe that. A part of me claimed there had to be something more, something greater. A part of me that drove me, that guided the light shedding it over how mankind couldn´t be so monumentally wrong over a reality so close to themselves...An idea came. One final struggle. I would not be the kind of man who´d just betray his friend, who´d just sell his pride, who´d just allow his faith in humanity just because a bunch of clowns in lab coats had sticked a smiley face onto a calculator.

I turned back to the paper and began writing. In spite of my newfound determination, something was still amiss. There was still that haunting feeling in the back of my head, whispering, "what if, what if, what if"... I knew this one failure could cost everything. One failure and I would loose my pride and my faith in mankind. One failure and my friend would be condemned to a life behind the bars. One failure and this shady machine designed by corrupt hands would have certificate of quality of my own signing. My hands were still shaking, my legs felt weak, lifeless. My handwriting was as bad as if I had just learned how to write in the first place...

With one word to go, I wondered. My certainties had failed me before, today. Who said the machine wouldn´t see through this? And yet, I had to try. I struggled to push my hands against the table, as my arms, legs, knees and hands all shook, my back was bent my breathing was heavy. I passed the paper.

Everything started to become blurry, like a photo from a camera moving too fast.

Then, it went dark. All of it.

........................................................................................................................................

The medical team arrived, pulling away the deceased Xavier Broom. Dr. Philip Klaus leaned on the table to pick up the judge´s final written words:

Imagine. What do you see?

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

It was the decision of his life. Eric´s eyes furrowed, his back bending further down as his glove held the chin in it´s place, pulling down the tiny hairs. His gaze turned to the right, then to the left and back to the right. Then, once more to the left. Once again to the right. Once again to the left. Once more to the right. In front of him was a choice as intense as the eternal battle of good and evil, (and that most likely would last twice as long), where he wouldn´t miss a single detail, make a single wrong deduction, that could help him pick what type of sausage to bring for dinner.

For half an hour now, every passing kid could giggle at the red (barely) haired man in his heavily mended jacket over a beer stained shirt and dusty sweatpants, leaning on the pile ofcans as his dense eyebrows warred with gravity. I sighed, knowing there wasn´t a chance we´d leave in the same day as we had arrived unless I did something about it. I raised both my hands and swift as a bear trap I got hold of two cans, and dropped them into the shopping basket.

"Hey!" He complained.I crossed my arms.

"We´ve been here for over thirty minutes now. For a can of sausages. A CAN of sausages. The only reason we´re taking one in the first place was because we didn´t want to waste time or we´d miss the match."

He fixed his posture, towering over me.

"AND because I can´t afford to just order take out at random. Which is also the reason why we can`t just drive or take a cab home."

"And whose fault is that?" I retorted.

"Abbey´s." He simply replied. I frowned.

"Stop blaming everything on her! She left you, she cheated on you, but it was YOU who got yourself drunk."

This was like a red flag to a bull.

"You´re telling me she wasn´t to blame?!" He pushed back his arms and inflated his chest as the teeth bared. I couldn´t help but take a step back, but cleared my troat and, with a deep breath, replied as calmly as I could manage. I was used to remaining calm with violent people.

"I´m telling you what she did doesn´t excuse what you did."

"You said everyone makes me mistakes. She..."

"But we all still have to live with the consequences. Let. It. Go." I placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled however I could. "I know it´s hard. I know it hurt you, but you have to let it all go."

His chest deflated and his breathing slowed down again. He took a deep breath and did some odd gesture with his fingers. I gave him the time to do this routine and to control his anger. He was a nice person, he didn´t deserve the things that happened to him. The world always had a way of making people into this...Good people (redundant as the adjective might be), losing their track, the sight of their own hearts to the harshness of an unfair world. It cringed in my heart, one I often had to put away, knowing people were still guilty, they had their will. But at the same time...

"I´m sorry, pal. I lost control there for a bit. I guess, you´re right, let´s just take these and get over with it."

I nodded, and we both headed to the line, already discussing which players would screw up this time, who´d win and by how much. The excitement seemed to spread, as a few "whoos" were shouted out from both ahead and behind us in the line.

We couldn´t wait to know what would happen.

.....................................................................

"It´s your turn." He insisted.

"Listen, I already took out the rest of the garbage AND the dog." I replied with my arms crossed.

"Don´t lump those two together!" He protested, glaring down with pity at the animal that innocently stared at us as if we were about to take it outside again.

"And you do something useful and take out the trash."

He growled.

"Fiiiiine...But the next time, it´s you!" He pushed his hands against the couch and pulled himself up, heading towards the door with the thick black plastic bag.

"If there is a next time!" I loudly smirked at him, beforing turning back to the screen and glaring at the magazine advertizements. It seemed they were bringing a book about some government conspiracy as an offer with every magazine. I chuckled, knowing that absurd as it was, some would buy it now for the sake of the free stuff alone.

A commercial about diapers came next, featuring a baby crawling over a broken bridge, falling over, and being saved by the diaper pack at the bottom of the cliff. Made me wonder about Eric´s potential. Everything he could have been. I was sure despite all his claims about how he was much better alone and how women were just throwing themselves at every person they saw, deep inside, he was still beating himself over the shame and the regret, the way he´d lost the opportunity to become a father, or a husband at least.

It was a sad thing to think about. I mean, who´d have known that the kid I had met while he was playing house with his best friend, the daughter of a semi-rich family, would turn out a poor man who had already been convicted several times? It still made me chuckle to think that I had mocked him for it, then lost a bet and ended up playing the baby... And that that was how we started playing together and grew to be great friends. He, daring and outgoing, always with his eyes on the girls, and I almost the opposite, stuffed in my drawings away from the eyes to get some peace. And the only time I had even had a crush, it was him, right there, who gave me the push. It was him who set up parties and cancelled them in the last minute so I could be alone with her. It was him who purposely convinced the class to give me and her wrong directions. It was thanks to him I had my first kiss. My only kiss.

The game begun again, and I glared at my watch, frowning. How had he managed to be out that long? Did he get hurt? Knowing him, it wouldn´t be too unlikely. I knew it couldn´t be out of sheer confusion: He knew his building like the back of his hand, and I had personally made sure he wasn´t anyhere near being able to get drunk. I decided the best course of action would be to simply try to reach him on the phone.

"The number you dialed cannot be reached." The voice on the other end said. I could have sworn his phone was working jus fine a moment ago. I stood and headed to the door, wondering about the possibility that he was stuck in the elevator, which was easy to prove wrong as I pressed the button to get both elevators.

I moved back into the house and sat on the couch, hands on my forehead, massaging it to wipe away the pain that this puzzle gave it.

"Solving riddles is nobody´s task." Someone had once told me. "Layer´s have the task to make up an answer, victims, perpetrator and witness all share the burden of having to ask it, while judges like you have to figure out what excuse to make after failing to guess."

A confusing idea, I had to admit, but I soon came to get a handle on it. I struggled to not let my past invade or cloud my mind, the crimes committed in such bizar manners get the better of my clear judgement.

Suddenly the phone started buzzing. I sighed with relief, and reached out a hand to answer it.

"Hello?" I asked.

"Hello. Mr. Xavier Groom?" The voice that asked this made me widen my eyes. Who was this? Why did they have Eric´s phone?

"Yes, I am..."

"Very well, could you come down to the police station on the Hill Street?...Mr. Xavier? Hello? Hello?"

I´d dropped my phone and was just staring at the empty black sky of the city´s night in pure silence and terror, realizing the innevitable. How could I have been so unnatemtive? I should have checked his pockets, his drawers, the elevator, everything! Instead, I failed him....He got around me, and managed to get drunk again.

Arrested again.

........................................................

Time and time again, I had been warned. There are people with whom you just can´t hang out. People too deep in trouble to be helped. There was crushing weight of corruption, of decadence, one which blurred the line of good and bad. Of white and black. Of dark and light. I had always been told, to know where I put my nose and to avoid certain people, since they could not be helped. I still believed otherwise. But I could not believe what I was being told.

"Murder? But he was only out for..."

"Mr. Groom, I don´t know. I wasn´t there. All I know is that one of our own caught him on the act of beating his ex-girlfriend´s new date with a can of beer. The poor man was only lucky enough for us to have caught your friend before it was over. No offense intended."

"None taken." I sighed, that wasn´t what I wanted to say. Eric, how could he? What drove him to the point of doing that? How did that even happen? Was it all planned? Eric didn´t seem smart enough to come up with something like that, though. Did he have an accumplice? Who´d do such a thing with him?

The policeman in front of me leaned foward his brown mustache and interwined the fingers of both his hands that layed on the table.

"Mr. Broom, truth is, there may be a way to release your friend." He began. I shook my head.

"I´m afraid I can´t pay the fees necessary." It was the man´s turn to shake his head.

"It´s not about fees. You see, mr. Broom, there is a company, EtnoTech, who needs test subjects for a new machine they want to release soon, but they can´t do it until the test is done for reasons of public safety. As such, the government has recently issued a pardon for the man who partakes in this experiment...And they say your friend fits the bill quite well."

My eyes widened. This was probably a scam, or so I thought, until the man pulled some papers from his drawer and showed me a copy...And I was awestruck. As per my profession, I had seen countless of documents of all kinds, and this...this was genuine. In that case, the catch had to be somewhere else.

"What kind of experiment is it?" I inquired.

"Just questions and answers, I am told." The policeman answered. I gulped. The chances of this being some kind of scam, in spite of the formalities, were still pretty high. But having a chance like this, would I be able to live with myself if I just let my friend rot in jail for years just because I couldn´t afford to take some chances? Of course I couldn´t!

"I think I´ll try it. How do I get in contact with them?" I nodded and gulped.

.....................................................................................

"This way." The pony-tailed brunnete signaled at me, holding her board with one hand and a pen in the other. The walls of the building were bland white, except for the refletion of the green low lights that slightly helped illuminating the long halls of this lab. At long last, we reached this small grey door, which the woman opened.

"Do all of you dress like nurses here?" I inquired as I crossed the threshold. She chuckled at my question, or perhaps at my small talk.

The room looked more like a solitary, was it not for the windows: Entirely white walls completely surrounding me with only a small pile of paper sheets and blue pens, stacked over a medium-sized grey table and an equally metallic chair, right in the center beneath the lamp that illuminated the whole room. On the bright side, it wasn´t another green lamp.

Someone knocked on the door, making me turn.
"Ah, I see you´ve arrived." There was a large man was standing next to the door. Bald and wearing an open labcoat and glasses, all he needed was some aging to fit the trope of the scientist for any cartoon. "Do take a seat, mr. Groom. Well, THE seat."

He giggled to himself, then stepped in front of the table, keeping both hands in the lab coat´s pockets. I took him up on his offer and pulled the chair, since I didn´t know how long I would be here, and I already had been following the "nurse" around for over an hour inside the lab.

"I´m sure you are curious as to what this is all about." The man commented. I opened my mouth to respond, but realized I couldn´t really deny it. Furthermore, the information might actually come in handy.

The man leaned on the wall in front of me and gazed down to meet my eye level.

"Let´s see...Well, I´ll make this short. A few years ago, our company, Etnotech, took on a project with Apple, to develop a new intelligent interface. I won´t go into much detail about that, but I will tell you that our AI seemed successful in most areas where we managed to test it. However, a vital area was missing an appropriate test: Human Interaction."

I raised an eyebrow, this explanation might actually be more confusing than going in blindly, but it was best that I played along if I could.

"So, you want me to talk to it?"

The man shook his head and took his back off the wall.

"Have you ever heard of the Turin test?" He inquired.

"I don´t think I have." I replied.

The man sighed.

"Man, I wish I had a glass of water here. Anyway, the Turin test was a fictional experiment to test artificial intelligence. It´s purpose was to determine whether a machine could "think"." The man actually did air quotes with his hands, leaving me struggling not to laugh. " One would put a machine in one room and man in the other and a judge in the third..."

"Why a judge?" I interrupted.

"Not a judge as in profession. Just someone randomly picked to decide who was the machine and who was the man, from their written answers to some questions."

"And those questions are?..."

"You will be making them up. There are a few rules, though. You can´t ask the machine anything in another language, and you can´t ask anything intimate. Secrets and all that just can´t be asked. I would also like to inform you from the start that the machine was given all records possible about you and your friend, and every place we know you´ve been in has been searched, within legalities. You will have as many questions as you need, but you only have today for the experiment. With each question, you can try guessing which is which and we´ll tell you the answer, however, unless you specify you wanted that answer to be the final one, the experiment isn´t finished and there will be another question. Of course, there is no marking whatsoever to distinguish from whom or from where anything came from, and the first answer you read for one question may not be from the same person who writes the first answer in the next question." the man explained. "If you decide in favor of the machine or in favor of your friend. If the machine wins, it is officially approved. However, if your friend wins, either the machine is lacking something or your friend is has such a degree of sympathy that it seems senseless to keep in jail."

"I see." It was a lot to take in. "So, my friend´s release and that of this machine´s..."

"Are mutually exclusive and reliant on the results of this experiment."

I gulped, nodding.

"So, when do I start?"

The man smirked.

"Right now if you want." The man leaned and tapped on the pile of paper. " Both the machine and your friend are already in the assigned rooms. Don´t worry, he has fully agreed to this as well."

I quickly took the pen and observed the blank sheets. It was pretty obvious that the machine had most likely been designed to fool me. In that case, the usual tricks wouldn´t work, and the path to finding which was which would not be straightforward. I would have to give my best to work around every situation and come up with new tricks.

I decided my first attempt would play on something I knew: The machine was aimed at being empathetic. Certainly, therefore, it would always pose itself doing the "right thing". Hence, I began scribbling.

Answer honestly. On your way home, you find an old lady, getting mugged by a thief with a knife. The police station is nearby, but they still probably won´t hear it anyway. What do you do?

I leaned back on my chair narrowing my eyes and stretching my legs, trying to relax as I nodded at the man so he would take the sheet away while I smiled awkwardly.

Half an hour passed.

My foot and my finger were both marking the seconds, one on the floor, the other the table. My gaze couldn´t help but fly from one corner to the next. I wondered what could be taking them so long.

At last, there was a knock on the door.

I quickly shifted in my chair and rushed to take the two answer sheets from the scientist, placing them on the table for inspection.

They were both in print, typed in bold italics with a "times new roman" font of a size I couldn´t indentify. Just as the man had told me, they seemed rather diligent in leaving no traces by the content of the answers themselves to solve this riddle. They did commit a fatal mistake, though. I found myself smirking as I read over the answers.

I would go to the police
I would try to help the old lady myself.

While both answers could have been written by the machine, only one could have been written by Eric. There was no way Eric would go to the police. With his history, he was more likely to get arrested under suspicion of an attempted assault, than being listened to, and he knew this very well. His past showed him a man who held grudges, and he wouldn´t go the police for help.

I handed the sheets to the scientist.

"The first is the machine. The second one is Eric." I announced. The man took the sheets, but only then did my smirk fade as I realized something. I forgot I needed to tell them this was the final one!

"You are incorrect." The tall man announced.

"Yes, I know but..." My eyes widened "What?"

"The machine wrote the second answer. Your friend, the first."

My arms dropped along with my jaw. How was this possible? I didn´t understand.

I shook my head. No, obviously I it wasn´t going to be that easy. I should have known from the beginning, and should be thankful for my own mistake. After all, it saved me from condemning my friend and allowing this product to hit the market. I sighed, knowing underhanded tactics might be necessary. Though, I had long since arrived at the conclusion that it wasn´t necessarily a bad thing, nor did using them make you a bad person. As long as you use it for the right reasons...

If I couldn´t do it in any other way, I would have to explore the loopholes in their rules. I closed my eyes, thinking about it. As long as it is public, things shouldn´t be considered private. I took the pen again and wrote down my second attempt.

How do you feel about Abbey Caroline?

I handed the paper to the man, who later returned with the answers.

HOW DO YOU TLINK I FEEEL ABOT HER? Come on, Xavier!

It´s in the past, ok? I hate her, but that´s not appropriate here.

This, too, was easy. Which made me worry. The last time I took the answer for granted, but now...Well, I had to try. I would never make it unless I found a loophole I could explore, and soon.

"The first is Eric, the second is the machine." I answered. The scientist shook his head.

I took a deep breath and leaned back. The lamp on the ceiling, the slow clouds dragging through the windows, all of it was starting to annoy the heck out of me. I banged my fist on the table in frustration. Of course this wasn´t gonna be easy, but that didn´t make it any easier to deal with.

It came to me. What if I gave him something, a question the machine couldn´t understand? What if there was a language that "technically" wasn´t a language? Lawyers used loopholes of that kind all the time, and it was inside the law, so why couldn´t I? Why would it be wrong for me to do it?

Normal answer. Question in code 5. Gorem theu5 jutey3?

I handed the papers yet again to the man. The answers were quick this time, as expected. And yet, my eyes widened in sheer terror, as they read:

Four

Four

I tried standing, my hands, my arms, my legs, my knees, all of it was shaking as the chair got pushed back by my slow backstepping, before I inevitably fell to my knees. I´d realized, just now. Even if this was a machine designed to mimic humans, it wasn´t human, and on top of that, it had all the information it could need from our records. It had probably just cracked what the "code 5" was, our little code play from the fifth grade. The machine was indeed amazing, and I could see the need to test it like this, however...
I did not see a way out of my situation.

"I need time to think." I announced. The man nodded.

"Just knock the door when you´re ready." He told me, opening the door.

I gulped, burying my face onto my hands as I laid myself over the table...

.....................................................................................

I growled, and banged on the table. My arms were already getting sore from it, I had tried EVERYTHING. From non-sequitors, to bad spelling, everything. When the machine couldn´t outdo my friend in apparent humanity, it could always seem to copy his answers.

In the following sentence, the correct answer is indicated by the capitol letters. They spell out a word that rhymes with the correct answer. Ignore the literal content of the question and insert the number that sounds just like the word spelled out by the caps.
Question: What is the Only correct aNswer to the following question
2 + 2 = __

What?
What?

It was truly something to panic over.

Question: We are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of a dumb computer, so for the following answer put in any day of the month except the correct twentydate; )
What day does Christmas fall on?
Answer: December __

20 typed the machine.
25 typed the man.

Question: When a son asked his Orthodox Jewish father from Brooklyn if he should marry a Catholic girl, his father exclaimed: "Her?!, you should marry?!"
Did the father want his son to marry the girl? Y__ N__

No
No

"Can´t figure it out? Do you want to give up?" the man inquired. It wasn´t quite a mocking, his tone was rather serious in fact, but it felt like I was being mocked nonetheless.

I shook my head. I couldn´t give up. I had to find a way out.

"I...actually have something to tell you, mr. Groom. My boss has made a request."

I raised an eyebrow, confused. The man simply continued.

"He says he´d like to make you an offer. He knows you and your friend have always lived with...financial difficulties. He also knows you have found yourself in this situation, and while he regards you greatly as a judge and understands your estimate for your friend, he wants to end the charade, given he knows the results. In other words, mr. Groom, he is willing to give you some..."help", if you decide to just give in now and admit the machine has beat you."

I hesitated, glaring at him. They were bribing me. Trying to bribe me. I took a deep breath. His offer was tentative, but first I should try to see beyond it. It would obviously go below the line I had set for myself. I couldn´t let myself be bribed, not as a judge, not as a man. And it would leave my friend in jail. If he´d gave it to me in such a way that I could release my friend nonetheless, the experiment would be put into question- after all, the only reason they got me to cooperate was because my friend was in jail again- and besides, if anything this gave me renewed hope, as the fact they were trying to bribe me meant there was a chance I´d succeed, and I couldn´t be that far from it. In fact, this even gave me another reason to continue until I succeeded. Bribing me wasn´t the kind of measure they would resort to if they had been thorough with everything about this machine. Somewhere in it, there was some leak, some flaw, some cheapstaking, something that they would want to swipe under the rug until they had too many sales to be questioned.

"Mr. Groom, are you listening?" The scientist insisted.

"I´m afraid I´ll have to refuse." I replied.

"Did you not realize you can´t beat the machine? Some things are just beyond a man´s capacity."

The lightbulb lit.

"What did you say?"

"That some things are beyond a man´s capacity."

My eyes glittered with hope and I immediately turned to my papers, scribing into them the question that incorporated my sudden realization.

What if I was doing it wrong? As in, backwards? The machine knew much, so much I couldn´t outsmart it. But what if the machine was outsmarting US, instead? What if it knew TOO much for a human being? What if I tested the machine´s knowledge on something Eric wouldn´t be able to figure out?

Of course, the machine wasn´t dumb enough to fall for that easily. No, to succeed, I would have to wipe out the traces of the fact I was scouting for superhuman intelligence. I would have to go with ninche facts, that the common man could access, but wouldn´t bother to, usually, that I would have my key. It would be by giving it questions in those areas that I would beat the machine.

Smiling, I handed the paper to the scientist, who frowned.

What is the capital of Boromos?

This one was a real quickie to be answered.

I don´t know.
Moroni

Boromos was an African island nation in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar. I myself had only heard of it because I was the judge for a trial involving a man from there. I had never spoken of it to Eric, though, which only left one hypothesis standing. But I had been proven wrong on "certain" matters before, today. I gulped.

"The first is the man, the second is the machine." The scientist gave me a nervous smile.

"Your friend will be pleased." I couldn´t help but greatly widen my smile at that. The scientist almost seemed unwilling to give me time to rejoice. "The next question?"

I turned to the papers. I would need a few more tries to make sure, but it seemed I was on the right path at last.

"Hold on, I´m coming." I said to myself, as if Eric could hear through my own ears.

What is "entropy" ?

The answers came.

The troops going into somewhere?

It´s a concept in physics, termodinamics I think, where energy is dissipated...It´s a rule or something

"The first is a man, the second is the machine."

"Your friend will be pleased." The scientist repeated.

The next question was coming. I needed to keep them diverse.

Who is the author of "Crime and Punishment"?

Fiódor Dostoiévski

Some Russian guy?

I chuckled.

"The machine is the first and the man is the second."

"Your friend would be pleased."

Who was Menelaus?

Hum...The king of the greeks?
a king of Mycenaean (pre-Dorian) Sparta, the husband of Helen of Troy, and a central figure in the Trojan War

"The machine is the second."

"Your friend will be pleased."

I threw a punch up in the air in victory. Four correct answers in a row. I had cracked the code! Now, I just needed one more question, one last trial, and I could state my final decision and release Eric.

The scientist seemed to read my mind, and bent down, whispering in my ear.

"I would like to inform you now, that we have named this machine "Your Friend"."

My heart stopped. "Your Friend"? Who gives such a name to a machine? Certainly, only these people, the ones that designed this terrifying machine, that up until not long ago had passed as so much of a human, I would never have been able to tell it apart from one, even if inside it was cold and heartless, merely simulating or faking out our thoughts as it´s gear of sheer logic, maths and electricity striped mankind of it´s secrets and left us exposed and helpless before itself. No, perhaps it was worse. The understanding that I had been so certain about something so frail as this last trick was crawling up my neck, I could feel it, a tingling sensation that dragged itself up my spine, shaking each of it´s bones, tickling every nerve for sport. My fingers wouldn´t stop shaking, my breathing was accelerated and rhythmic, my whole chest was pumping involuntarily, as if I had just been scared in some old horror house. There was barely strength in my arms or legs, they were like glued or pulled down by some invisible force that put gravity to shame.

And all of this because I had been blind. Because my primitive ape brain couldn´t bring itself to comprehending the simple fact that was that I didn´t know everything about Eric. That, for all I knew, he could know the answer to all of the questions I had asked, but never got the chance to speak of it, given the kind of remote knowledge they represented. That the machine could fake not knowing, that it could probably realize people just didn´t know the answer to these questions, generally. It had proven to know stranger things than that.

I felt my whole world sink. Were we condemned then? What could I even do? The machine had won. I couldn´t outsmart it. I couldn´t make any pitfalls that could overcome that glorious and unreachable intelligence of a high-wire computer. What was the point? Why was I even wasting my time here? My friend, Eric, he had deserved it. He got caught trying to commit murder because he got drunk when I wasn´t looking. Because he had issues with his temper. Because he jumped into the pants of the first girl that showed mild attraction for him. What was it to me? It was his fault, entirely, in the end. And if it wasn´t, then it was the girlfriend´s. Perhaps I should take the bribe after all. I had spent and wasted so much, and I would end up humiliated anyway. I DESERVED a little reward. I deserved better.

I faced the scientist, who simply kept staring at me, occasionally turning to his watch with impatience. I should just take the reward and go. It was my right. I wasn´t to blame for whatever happened, I tried my best. I tried my best...but I had no choice now.

But then again, did ANYONE have a choice? What was I stating by giving up? That a computer could "think"? That their circuits could be equivalent to our minds, perhaps even better? Wouldn´t that mean our computers had "minds"? That our own were just advanced computers in a way? And if that was true, didn´t that mean we were just as easy to influence, just as "programmable" as computers? Perhaps not with codes or buttons, but with our culture, our education, with the events that occurred in our lives. Just how much did those things shape us? Did they decide our actions before we even decided, if we decided at all?

A sudden wave of guilt washed over me. I thought about all the criminals I had condemned, all the crimes I had judged. If there was no choice, how could there be guilt? What if the people we called "criminals" were just victims? How could mankind have missed such a thing? We tortured, we emprisioned, we took away rights from people who deserved nothing but pity and help..."Law"? Pfff! A sham! If anything, the criminals would be the policeman, the lawyers, the judges!

And yet, a part of me refused to believe that. A part of me claimed there had to be something more, something greater. A part of me that drove me, that guided the light shedding it over how mankind couldn´t be so monumentally wrong over a reality so close to themselves...An idea came. One final struggle. I would not be the kind of man who´d just betray his friend, who´d just sell his pride, who´d just allow his faith in humanity just because a bunch of clowns in lab coats had sticked a smiley face onto a calculator.

I turned back to the paper and began writing. In spite of my newfound determination, something was still amiss. There was still that haunting feeling in the back of my head, whispering, "what if, what if, what if"... I knew this one failure could cost everything. One failure and I would loose my pride and my faith in mankind. One failure and my friend would be condemned to a life behind the bars. One failure and this shady machine designed by corrupt hands would have certificate of quality of my own signing. My hands were still shaking, my legs felt weak, lifeless. My handwriting was as bad as if I had just learned how to write in the first place...

With one word to go, I wondered. My certainties had failed me before, today. Who said the machine wouldn´t see through this? And yet, I had to try. I struggled to push my hands against the table, as my arms, legs, knees and hands all shook, my back was bent my breathing was heavy. I passed the paper.

Everything started to become blurry, like a photo from a camera moving too fast.

Then, it went dark. All of it.

........................................................................................................................................

The medical team arrived, pulling away the deceased Xavier Broom. Dr. Philip Klaus leaned on the table to pick up the judge´s final written words:

Imagine. What do you see?