David Walton - Superposition

“No.”

“Have you ever been in two places at once?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have even one scrap of evidence that… what did you say?”

I smiled. “Yes, I have been two places at once.”

Haviland glanced at the judge and then back at me, unsure how to proceed. “Mr. Kelley,” Judge Roswell began in a stern tone, but I spoke up quickly.

“Your Honor,” I said, making sure everyone in the courtroom could hear me. “This is what I’ve been testifying to all along. Not only is it possible for a person to be in two places at once, I am doing so at this moment.” I glanced at Terry, who nodded. It was time. I pointed to the courtroom doors, which were just now opening to reveal a man dressed exactly as I was, in a simple black suit and tie. It was the other Jacob, my double. “In fact,” I said, “here I am now.”

There was a noise of shifting seats as everyone in the courtroom turned to look. Heads swiveled back and forth as they compared the other Jacob’s appearance to mine. I sat up straight, offering everyone a clear view of my face. My double walked confidently toward the front.

The showmanship was a risk, but it certainly captured everyone’s attention, and I knew the moment would be played on every feed in the country. Haviland was floored. He stared at Jacob and then back at me, for once at a loss for words. The jury looked back and forth as if they were viewing a tennis match.

Judge Roswell stood, her kindly face now rigid with fury. “Mr. Sheppard!” she barked. Terry stood, almost snapping to attention. “Is it your intention to turn my courtroom into a circus?”

“No, Your Honor. I apologize.”

“Bailiff, will you please remove this man from the building.”

“But Your Honor, this is one of my witnesses,” Terry said.

Her eyes narrowed. “You told the court that Mr. Jacob Kelley would be your last witness.”

“Yes. This is Jacob Kelley.”

“Which one, Mr. Sheppard?”

“Both of them, Your Honor. This is the defense’s case, and the whole point of Mr. Kelley’s testimony. This is no circus trick or identical twin—Mr. Kelley has no siblings. He is actually in two places at once, just as Brian Vanderhall was on the night of his death.”

“Your Honor, this is ludicrous,” Haviland said. He was red in the face and puffing. “I demand a mistrial.”

Judge Roswell used her gavel for the second time that day. “The jury will return to the deliberation room and await instructions,” she said, her voice cutting through the buzz in the courtroom. “Mr. Sheppard, Mr. Haviland, Mr. Kelley, and… the other Mr. Kelley. Come back to my chambers without saying another word.”

She left her dais with a swirl of black robes. The four of us followed her meekly through the doors and into a paneled office filled with the requisite shelves of law journals and mahogany furniture. There were only two chairs besides the judge’s. The lawyers took these, leaving Jacob and I to stand.

Roswell gave an exasperated sigh. “Terry, what’s come over you?” she asked, dropping the formality of address she used in the courtroom. “It was a tough case, but I didn’t think you were this desperate. I’m strongly considering a mistrial and slapping you with a heavy fine for wasting the court’s time and money.”

Terry laid a document on her desk, a few pages folded back to show a highlighted section. “It’s all true, Ann. I have the DNA results right here. These two are the same man.”

Roswell didn’t even look at the document. “Rubbish. Identical twins have the same DNA; you know that.”

“Look at them. Really look at them.”

Jacob and I moved so we were shoulder to shoulder and stood up straight. She looked. I knew the most remarkable thing wasn’t how identical we appeared, but the fact that, standing like this, you could see that we were mirror images. Our faces, side by side, were symmetrical in a way that neither twins nor any clever makeup could duplicate. She studied us carefully, but showed no sign of what she thought.

“David?” she said finally.

“It’s all nonsense, of course,” Haviland said.

“Don’t talk,” Judge Roswell said. “Look.”

He turned in his chair and studied us for a long moment. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “Really?”

We nodded in unison. “Really.”

I thought if Judge Roswell could be convinced, we would be home free, but it wasn’t so easy. She believed we were who we said, but she still wasn’t pleased. The worst of her glare was focused on Terry Sheppard.

“This is a miscarriage of justice,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “We’re innocent.”

Her eyes swiveled toward me like Gatling guns looking for a target. “I don’t know that. Seems to me you had twice as much opportunity to kill him if there were two of you. What I do know is that this is going to play havoc with the court system. Your little stunt went out on the national feeds. That means that by tomorrow every convict in the pen is going to have his lawyer filing appeals that it wasn’t him who did the crime, it was the other guy who looked just like him. How will any charge stick if there could be a doppelganger out there doing things in your name? It’s a disaster.”

“But we are the same person,” Jacob said. “One passport, one driver’s license, one social security number. If we did something wrong, we’re equally culpable. Eventually the waveform will collapse, and we’ll be in one place again, too.”

The judge’s eyes pinned Jacob for a moment, then turned back toward Sheppard. “A disaster,” she repeated. “Terry, I thought you had better sense.”

“I can’t help the legal precedent,” he tried. “It’s the truth. These two are the same man. And if they can be the same man, then their story that Brian Vanderhall was split in two is equally plausible.”

“Don’t give me your rationalizations. I don’t want to hear it.” Judge Roswell actually pointed a scolding finger at Sheppard like a mother might a naughty child. “You hid the truth from me and the prosecution to get an edge. You put up a gigantic smokescreen that will turn everyone’s attention away from the matter at hand: whether your client actually killed Brian Vanderhall. I’ve never been as disappointed in a former clerk than at this moment. When I hired you, you had principle. Promise. I never thought to see you resorting to cheap theatrics to win a case.”

“It’s not a smokescreen,” Terry said doggedly. “It demonstrates that Vanderhall shooting himself is a plausible story.”

“It was a vaudeville show, and it has drastic implications for the trial system, as you would know if you thought beyond this one case. It violated the spirit of the discovery process, if not the letter of it. It was cheating, Terry.”

“But, Ann…”

“Call me, ‘Your Honor,’” she snapped. “Or better yet, don’t talk at all. You could have brought this to me weeks ago. Both parties could have made arguments in private, and we could have decided how to proceed to ensure fairness. How can we have a fair hearing now? I’m tempted to declare a mistrial, but thanks to you, I don’t see how we can select another jury that will be any less biased than the one we have.” She considered for a moment. “I will instruct the jury that they are to consider the evidence as presented without reference to whom they may or may not have thought they saw coming through the doors. The other Mr. Kelley will not testify. Mr. Haviland, you will complete your cross-examination, and then we will move to closing arguments. Neither of you are to refer to this incident in the courtroom again.”

“Your Honor, Mr. Sheppard has made a mockery of you and this court with this charade. He should be removed from the case,” Haviland said.