It was on the Internet that Charter found his first fragile glimmer of hope, reaching for it like a drowning shipwreck survivor surging up toward the diffused glow of the sun overhead. While searching for legal precedents and cases filed against Ganges, one of the search results on the second page of his browser had caught his attention- ‘Survivors of Ganges’. Clicking the link, Charter dove into the site.
Primarily composed of former Order Processing Centre employees who had been grievously injured while working for the company, the site was a very basic text forum at its core. Sub-divided into several categories, it took him less than five minutes to find the one that he likely belonged to, titled, ‘Intellectual Theft Victims’. Charter registered for an account, hopped into the subdivision, and immediately started reading the various post threads, starting with the oldest ones.
According to one of the site’s longest-running users, named ‘saynotoganges’, the very inventory storage robots the facilities all now utilized had originally been based on a design that he had developed for another warehousing operation, called Fundament Inc. Fundament had been a popular online auction site a little over a decade earlier, and one of the ways in which they had innovated in order to make the service flow well was to offer sellers on the site a physical location outside of their personal homes to house their own inventory, for a small fee. Saynotoganges had been a programmer for the small auction site, but his educational background in robotics had inspired him to work up a means of bringing merchandise from the storage area of their warehouse to the shipping vans by means of an autopiloted little robot platform.
Nine years ago, Ganges had bought out Fundament Inc. Included in the deal that was finalized, any and all processes and inventions produced and utilized in the company’s warehouse immediately transferred one-hundred percent ownership to Ganges, regardless of source. Saynotoganges was never compensated for his designs and innovation, and Ganges kicked him to the curb when they restructured Fundament.
Another one that came early on in the threads was a post from user ‘neverganges’, a software developer who had been working on facial recognition software on his own. He had taken a job with Ganges in order to pay the bills and have a steady income until he was ready to unveil his software to the Impirial Army, but he never got the chance. According to the user, who had copied his files to his work-issued laptop so that he could continue working on the program on his breaks, he came into work one day and was informed that he would be getting issued a new laptop to do his work on. When he asked if he could retrieve some personal files from the previous one, he’d been informed that the company’s guidelines were clear; any and all data on company computers belonged free and clear to the company, and since he’d been using the laptop for personal projects on ‘company time’, he was henceforth terminated.
“Five years of my hardest work, right down the toilet, and Ganges made millions selling that software to the Impirial Army themselves. They claimed all the credit, and because of their stupid fucking NDA, I can’t say anything about it in public,” the user posted. Detecting a hint of paranoia in himself, Charter abruptly signed out of his browser, swept his system’s cache of all temporary files and cookies, then headed back online to his Ganges personal customer account, going through the laborious process of deleting his profile and sweeping his computer with a set of anti-virus and anti-malware programs.
Only when this was finished, an hour later, did he log back onto the forum. Taking a deep breath, Charter began typing up the basics of his own situation, careful not to go into too many details just yet. When he clicked the ‘Post’ button, he exited the browser and sat back, wondering privately how long it would take for a response to come in.
When it did come, it would shed plenty of light, but very little hope, on his circumstances.
**
Charter looked over the document, trying to make sense of what he was reading. His attorney wasn’t presently available, though an assistant had been dispatched from his office to come meet Charter at the factory and perform double duty, reviewing the order currently in the toymaker’s hands and speaking with the pair of suits currently standing between Charter and the factory’s employee entrance door.
“Can you at least tell me who you guys work for,” Charter asked the non-descript suit standing closest to him, who had handed over the manila envelope without a word when the toymaker arrived to find himself blocked out of his own building. Eyes hidden behind mirrored shades, like a bad extra from a Matrix knock-off, the suit said nothing.
The crunch and roll of tires on gravel pulled Charter’s eyes from the mute goon, landing upon a banged-up silver Dodge Neon pulling up with its front bumper mere feed from him. A stout woman with wild, curly auburn hair bounded out of the vehicle with her cell phone held up to her ear, a pale blue jacket flapping about as she reached back down into the car for her own black leatherbound folder. She said something indecipherable into her phone, flipped it shut, and approached Charter with a forced smile, squinting against the morning sunlight with her free hand providing a bit of coverage over her eyes.
“Mister Manfield,” she asked, looking to Charter. He nodded mutely. “Rebecca Dorn. Stanley sent me over since he’s a little swamped with another client’s document review at the moment. Is that the order,” she asked, pointing to the document in his hand. Charter handed it over, and Rebecca looked it over carefully, her entire body seeming to freeze up. Curious, Charter thought, noting that, while looking at this paper, Ms. Dorn didn’t even bother shielding her eyes from the sun, her hands locked onto the sides of the paper like immovable vices.
After a couple of minutes, her face broke out in a broad smile, and she looked up at Mister Mute Goon, holding the paper out to her side and pointing at one of the paragraphs near the bottom. “Sir? This order explicitly states that Mr. Charter shall not have access or entry to the premesis once proceedings have formally begun in court. As Mr. Charter has yet to even once set foot in an actual court with Ganges or any of its representatives, this condition has not yet been met, and you are in violation of both his due processes and the order issued by Judge Wheelock.”
Mute Goon deigned to reach up and pull his shades down enough to reveal a pair of iron gray eyes, aimed at the document. He leaned forward at the waist, almost mechanically to Charter’s perception, and his eyes scanned the page for a moment. Those eyes narrowed and slid toward Rebecca, and to the much shorter woman’s credit, she didn’t flinch or budge in the slightest.
Mute Goon pushed his shades back up his nose and wheeled toward his equally silent compatriot on his heels, issuing a single wordless nod. The duo removed themselves from the concrete walkway to the factory’s door, heading for a large black Suburban parked near the edge of the lot. As they clambered in, Charter observed that he couldn’t see in through their windows or windshield.
When the large vehicle was out of sight, Rebecca seemed to deflate instantly, sagging down, her hands hanging almost below her knees. “Jesus, that was intense,” she rasped.
“That was impressive,” Charter replied. He felt he could breath much more deeply now that the suits had taken off.
“Yeah, well, don’t be too impressed, and make whatever you’ve got to do here fast,” she said haltingly as she stood up. “Guaranteed they’re on the phone to their contractors right now about the language problem with that court order, and Ganges’ snakes are going to be in the judge’s chambers to get that all cleared up in less than an hour. What’re you here for, anyway?”
“My original laptop and my sketchbooks are in my office,” Charter answered. “Everything from before I actually got started on the prototypes is on that computer and in those books.”
“Yeah, well, hurry up and grab them, Mr. Manfield,” Dorn said evenly. “Because once those goons are back, they aren’t going away until this is all settled with Ganges.”
**
Sitting in the empty courtroom a week later, Charter prayed that someone had posted a potential solution to his situation on the forum. Ganges’ legal team would be arriving soon, as would Judge Wheelock. He scrolled through the responses on his phone, but beyond a wellspring of sympathies, the forum had offered him nothing solid to work with.
When finally the lawyers arrived, along with his own counsel, the atmosphere shifted noticeably. Disheveled and sweaty as always, Charter’s attorney, Stan Riesling, looked like a man already beaten, while Ganges’ duo appeared pressed, slicked, and ready for war. It was all the toymaker could do to keep himself from throwing himself on the floor in front of them and abjectly begging their mercies.
It didn’t help that there didn’t appear to be anyone seated in the jury box. A civil trial had one definitive advantage in the Impirial court system, sofar as Charter was concerned; where a criminal trial required a unanimous decision among the members of the jury in order to convict the accused, a civil trial only required a simple majority. Charter had been fairly convinced that he and Stan could convince seven out of twelve citizens of the 7th Imperial Territory that he, the Defendant, was in the right against the overbearing and overreaching Ganges Corporation.
“Stan,” he whispered to his attorney, leaning slightly toward the frumpy fellow. “Where’s the jury?”
“About that,” Stan said with a shake of his head, unwilling or unable to turn his head to meet Charter’s eyes. “They filed a motion an hour ago for Trial by Direct Judgment. Judge Wheelock will make an announcement on that as soon as he gets in here.” As if conjured on cue, an older but staunchly upright man came sweeping into the chamber from a door set against the wall opposite the counselors’ tables, and the armored bailiff stiffened and looked toward the ceiling.
“All rise for the honorable Judge Wheelock,” announced the bailiff. Charter felt his knees try to betray him, but he remained upright until the judge was seated at his raised post, looking down at the binder he opened before himself.
“Be seated,” said the judge thunderously, his voice naturally powerful enough to require no amplification from the silvery microphone attached to his podium. “I see the parties for Ganges Incorporated v Charter Manfield are present and accounted for. Good.” He turned a page in his binder, then looked out at the lawyers, his pointed chin, covered in a thin scrim of silver-gray stubble, sweeping its point over them all. “I received a motion, a short while ago, to adjust this to a Trial by Direct Judgment, this motion having been put forward by the Ganges Corporation. After taking some short time to consider this request, I have decided to deny this motion,” he said. Charter felt a vast gulf of relief wash over him at this announcement, and he could feel tension puddle off of Stanley as well. “Before I instruct officer Jacobson here to bring the jury in, I want to point out to Mr. Tarr and Ms. Sheehan that the very idea that an outsized and resource-bountiful outfit like that which they work for should attain the advantage of a Direct Judgment Trial borders on offensive to me. With that said, however,” he continued, swinging his cobalt blue eyes toward Stanley and Charter. “Do not assume this means that I’m necessarily rooting for you, Mister Manfield. The most vital thing to remember here, in my courtroom, is that we shall proceed herein with an eye to the black letter of the law.”
Charter wasn’t entirely sure what Judge Wheelock meant by this, but he didn’t think it bode well for him.
“Officer, you may bring the jury in at this time,” said Wheelock, and the officer made his way over to yet another door in the chamber and pulled it open. In filed the twelve, seven women and five men whose decision, when all was said and done, would render Charter’s fate.
He had to hope Stanley had a strategy that could convince them that he was in the right.
**
Over the course of seven days, with two hours spent on the case each of those days, spread out over two weeks, Charter was feeling somewhat hopeful. Stanley had taken a tack with the trial that the toymaker hadn’t expected; rather than lasering in on just his struggles against the massive Ganges Corporation, the stout attorney had been bringing up the many other instances in which the company had crushed nearly a dozen other smaller companies and independent creators under their heel. The insinuation he seemed to be driving at was that nobody was safe from Ganges, not even Charter Manfield, who could well just be a fellow member of that very jury under other circumstances. If they could come for a humble toymaker, what was to stop them from coming after the members of the jury?
Additionally, Stanley seemed reserved, at first, when it came to raising any kind of objections or interjections when Tarr and Sheehan were questioning Charter’s employees, associates, and Ganges employees. However, each time that he did object, Judge Wheelock granted his point, resulting in Charter suspecting that, despite his frumpy, unkempt, and altogether borderline-unprofessional demeanor and appearance, he was, at core, a skilled litigator.
Perhaps more skilled than Ganges’ people had been expecting. After five sessions, Tarr and Sheehan were starting to look worn down and slightly nervous, especially whenever Stanley would raise an objection or counter their own with his rationale for a line of questioning.
As the eighth session was about to begin, with Charter taking up his usual seat beside Stanley, his slowly building sense of benevolence tapered off. The rotund attorney had three empty candy bar wrappers set on the table to his left, and a fourth bar in hand, staring down at his papers. Stanley binged on sugar when he was nervous, Charter had observed.
“What’s the matter,” Charter half-whispered as he sat down beside his attorney.
“Today’s your day on the stand, Mr. Manfield,” Stanley said. “And there’s a question I want to ask you now, before Tarr and Sheehan get here, a question that I hope to God they don’t think to ask you when you’re up there.”
“What’s that?” Stanley pulled a slip of paper from one of his folders, and slid it over in front of Charter.
“Is the date on this Registration for Copyright accurate,” Stanley asked. Charter looked at the form, recognizing it immediately. It was the form he’d filed to start establishing his company, Robokin Limited.
“Yeah, it is,” Charter said. “Why?”
“Because, Mr. Manfield, this,” Stanley said, now sliding a copy of the last page of his Employment Contract with Ganges over beside the Registration form. “This signature you gave to Ganges predates the registration by nearly eight months. If they have copies of these, and they ask you about them, our argument is basically doused in gasoline and waiting for the match.”
“But I had the sketches and designs set up years ago,” Charter said. “And I started working on the programming for the Robokin six or seven months before I even applied to Ganges.”
“But can you prove that,” Stanley asked, doing a doubletake over his shoulder as the company’s attorneys slipped into the courtroom. Charter offered no reply; the best that could be said in his favor was that the program he’d created for controlling the robot toys was tagged with data to show when the program was started, and when it was last modified. Unfortunately, he could already guess what Tarr and Sheehan would say in response- he had programming familiarity and skill, and could easily modify that information on his own laptop. The seed of doubt would be planted in the minds of the members of the jury, and that would hurt him.
The upside of this, of course, was that Ganges’ people would have to think to ask specifically about that sort of thing. He retained just enough of a sliver of hope to believe that they might not dig down that far.
**
Charter sat in the car, the engine still running, headlights turned off, staring through the front window at nothing in particular. They were going to take it all, everything. Not only had Tarr and Sheehan asked him about the date he’d started at Ganges and signed the employment contract versus when he’d established Robokin Limited, but they had also asked if or when he’d copyrighted the designs and programming for the remote controlled robots. He hadn’t even thought to seal the sketches in an envelope to mail to himself, or to put the program on a USB stick to do the same, a clumsy but legally protected method of securing copyright without spending the hundreds of dollars normally required by using the Impirial Office of Copyright.
Ganges was going to take everything from him. The jury had returned from deliberations in less than an hour, and found in favor of the company by a vote of ten to two. Judge Wheelock had awarded Ganges full ownership and control of Robokin Limited, and further, had declared that Charter was to cover the company’s expenses for the trial and pay for the factory’s property taxes for the year.
He was going to have to liquidate everything he owned; he had already poured all of his initial profits into payroll, benefits, and improvements to the factory and materials used in the Robokins’ production.
Charter finally turned off the engine and dragged himself, numb to the world around him, up out of the vehicle and toward the front door of his modest home. Once inside, he tossed his keys in a small ceramic bowl kept on a side table by the front door. He hung up his coat on a tall coatrack to his left, then just stood there, staring down the darkened front entryway. What was left to him?
He headed for the stairs leading up to the second floor of the house, pausing to duck into a storage closet to the right of them. Inside, he had a single Sterilite container, which he popped open. He stared down at the objects within, a small grin twitching at the corner of his mouth; within stood the first six Robokin he had constructed, the originals. He pulled the container out into the hallway, closed the closet, and sat down at the base of the stairs, giving the figurines a thorough once-over.
“It could’ve been great, guys,” he whispered to the robots, standing them in a horseshoe. “I’m so sorry.” Once he was certain they would remain standing, Charter headed up the stairs and wrapped around the open landing, beaming down on the little toy robots. He slipped into his bedroom for a couple of minutes, returning with a set of belts that he’d fiddled with.
Once he had the belts secured to the solid upper railing of the hallway, he got himself carefully over it and slipped the looped end over his head. He had arranged the Robokin’s right arms in a salute aimed up at himself, and he gave them a single sharp nod. “At least you’ll still be there for the children,” he said to them with a smile, stepping out over empty space.