I remember when it took months, sometimes years, for the result of litigation concerning an automobile smashup to be announced.

This morning, while I reprogrammed the connections between my synapses and the autonomous transport vehicle carrying my physical presence to another location on our home planet, I caused the vehicle’s guidance system to malfunction, resulting in a smashup on an offramp of the local highway.

I stare at the hole in my labour/investment credit account where I was billed a large sum to be paid off in installments to cover the cost of the smashup as well as medical bills and the usual “fee” for pain and suffering to prevent someone like me from thinking about toying with transportation vehicles en route.

Yes, the news was filled with photos and diagrams of the smashup, claiming a new record — five seconds — was set between the end of the smashup and the guilty verdict given to me, a few nanoseconds before my account was sucked dry.

I’m lucky.  I can remember a time when we had real lawyers and judges who worked out deals in judge’s chambers or argued cases in newspaper headlines in order to sway a jury of one’s peers.

Now, our fully connected surveillance and transport system monitoring equipment can sort out the cause-and-effect event instantaneously, leaving a small assortment of people to plea their legal issues in front of computerised/crowdsourced adjudications.

A child dies from a bee sting.  The bee’s venom is traced to a natural hive.  The parents have already banked on their child’s future earning potential.  They want justice.

To whom do they turn?

I am the last of my breed.  It’s my job to decide if the natural hive has thrived because of a local farm or the nearby section of the globalised network of natural parks.

Should I award the parents their citizenry “fee” based on the limited earnings of the farmer or the seemingly unlimited earnings of the global government’s Natural Park Management Foundation?

As judge, jury and lawyer for both sides, I take every case handed to me seriously.

Besides, I have a new subculture to pay for over the next five decades, since in a subsequent ruling, it was decided that my smashup caused a future reconfiguration of the small neighbourhood in which the smashup took place.  I have to foot the bill for the whole shebang?!  Wow!

After monitoring the tracers I inserted in 20% of the beehive workers, it appears that nearly a 50/50 split exists between bees who visit the natural park and bees who pollinate the farmer’s crop.

Hmm…

Do I follow previous rulings that say a party which has even the slightest responsibility over 50%, no matter whether it’s 99.9999% or 50.0000000001%, is automatically guilty of the whole thing?

Do I rule that minor accessories to a crime are just as guilty but only responsible for their slice of the pie?

Do I rule the parents are at fault for letting their child, known before birth for susceptibility to fatal bee stings, walk through a strip of grass between her domicile and the transportation device which took her from one parent’s workplace back home during Take Your Child To Telework/Shared Office Space Day?

I have three seconds left to decide this case.

I’ll take a one-second nap and then submit my ruling for crowdsourced refinement, which usually only takes a few more seconds before the case’s outcome is officially stamped and approved, the sting of a single bee changing the course of our whole species in an instant.