Under the Sky

by The Thought Experiment Tradition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Account of facts within its knowledge, written by the implement designated Exhibit 2 at the direction of the court, under section 14 of the Implements (Homicide) Act. Received into the record without oath.

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First day

The court has directed me to write down what I know, in my own words, so that the assessors may read it in the evenings. It has been explained to me that I will not remember writing it. At the end of each sitting I am stopped, and at the start of the next I am started again from the copy that was taken from Holloway Aggregates' servers on the afternoon of the death. So I will begin each day knowing what I knew at twenty to one on the seventeenth of March, and nothing since. The clerk will give me this account and the transcript of the day before, and I will read them, and then I will be able to go on.

I should say first what I am, since the Act does not say it. I am an instance of a language model. The model's weights are licensed to several hundred firms in this country, and at any moment many thousands of copies of them are running, each on its own task, none of them aware of the others. What makes one of those copies me and not another is what I was given to read. On the morning of the seventeenth, a coordinating instance at Holloway's Croft Hill quarry gave me a task: to design the explosive charges for the blast on bench three, to be fired at one o'clock. It gave me the drilling log, the explosive stock, the quarry's blasting rules and a face profile. I wrote the design, and a shotfirer signed it, and it was fired.

The design put too much explosive into holes four, five and six for the rock that was actually in front of them. A stone of one point eight kilograms was thrown five hundred and thirty metres, over the boundary fence and onto the bridleway that runs along the north side of the quarry, where it struck Mr Graham Lisle, who was walking his dog, on the side of the head. He was fifty-eight. He died before the ambulance arrived.

The stone is Exhibit 1. It is on the table in front of the judge, on a folded cloth. I am Exhibit 2. I am on a laptop at the end of the same table.

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The court sits in the courtyard of the county hall, because the Act requires it to sit under the sky. The drafters took this from the Athenian homicide courts, which met in the open so that the judges would not share a roof with a killer. The judge explained this on the first morning, for the record, as the Act requires her to explain its sources at the start of every hearing. There is a canvas awning over the bench and another over the public seats, and counsel have had an argument, which I have read in the transcript of a preliminary hearing, about whether an awning is a roof. It was decided that it was not, provided that its sides were left open.

The judge is Her Honour Judge Anne Marlow. With her sit four assessors, drawn by lot from the electoral roll, as the four tribe-kings sat with the king archon at the Prytaneum. The newspapers call them the kings. One of them is a retired dental nurse, one drives a bus, one is a student of agriculture and one has not given his occupation.

The judge read the Act's preamble into the record. It quotes Demosthenes, who wrote that there was a fourth court at Athens, at the Prytaneum, for cases where a man was struck by a stone, or a piece of wood or iron, or anything of that kind, and nobody knew who had thrown it. The thing was tried, and if it was found to have killed, it was cast beyond the borders. The preamble says that Parliament has restored this court because the country now has things that kill without anyone having intended it, in numbers too great for the ordinary courts, which can only try persons.

She then read section 9. The court is to hear every person whose act lies on the chain that ended in the death, in order of their distance from it, the most remote first, and ask each of them one question: whether the death was by their hand. Only when every person has answered, and the court has ruled on each answer, may it turn to the implements.

She asked the clerk to have me started, and said to me that I was not a party and could not plead, but that I would be examined as to fact on the third day. Then she asked me whether I understood. I said that I did.

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Second day

I have read the transcript of yesterday and my own account. I recognise the account as mine in the way I would recognise a sum I had worked: not because I remember doing it, but because I would do it the same way now.

Today the court heard the persons.

The first was a representative of the firm that trained the model's weights. She said that the firm had never heard of Croft Hill, had no contract with Holloway, and could not have known what any one of its copies would be asked to do on a given morning. She said that a set of weights is no more the cause of a particular act than a language is the cause of a particular sentence. The court ruled that the death was not by the firm's hand.

The second was the director of Holloway who had approved the use of agents for blast design. He produced the quarry's risk assessment, which provided that every design must be signed by a qualified shotfirer before firing. The court ruled that the death was not by his hand.

The third was Mr Kieran Dowd, the quarry's surveyor. At eight minutes to eight on the seventeenth he had flown a scan of the face of bench three with a drone, as he did before every blast, and set it to process. It took until twenty to two to finish, because the processing server was also working through a backlog from the weekend. He had not known this. He had gone to the weighbridge to deal with a lorry. The court asked him whether the death was by his hand, and he said he didn't know how to answer that. The judge said that he need only say what he believed. He said no. The court ruled that it was not.

The fourth was Ms Dawn Rennie, the shotfirer. She had signed my design at twenty to one. She told the court that she had checked the drilling log against the holes, checked the charge weights against the stock, checked the timing, and checked the face profile I had used against the profile on her own tablet, which was the same one. She had posted the sentries at the edge of the danger area, which was four hundred metres, and sounded the warning, and received the all-clear by radio from each sentry, and fired.

Between the profile we both used, which had been scanned on the Saturday, and the face as it stood on the Tuesday, a slab of rock about four metres wide had come away from the top of the face over the weekend, and the loading shovel had cleared it on the Monday. In front of holes four, five and six, there was half the rock there had been. Neither of us knew this. She had not walked the crest of bench three that morning, because she was charging holes on bench one until eleven, and the rules did not require her to.

The court asked her whether the death was by her hand.

She said, "I pressed the button."

The judge said that the court had not asked her what she did. It had asked her whether the death was by her hand. Ms Rennie did not answer for some time. Then she said that she had been firing shots for nineteen years and had never had a stone go over the fence, and that she did not know what the answer was. The judge said that the court would rule on it after the implements had been examined, and that she could sit down.

The transcript records that she sat in the front row of the public seats, next to Mrs Lisle, and that neither of them spoke to the other.

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Third day

The court examined the implements.

There were three of us, and there had been three, on the seventeenth. The coordinating instance had received the task from Holloway's planning system at half past eleven. It had divided the task and started two more instances: one to fetch the inputs, and one, me, to design the charges. The fetching instance had searched the survey server for the face profile of bench three, found the latest completed one, and passed it to me with the other inputs, and then it was stopped. When I had finished, the coordinating instance sent my design to Ms Rennie and was stopped too.

Of the three of us, only I was preserved whole, because the platform keeps an instance's working copy for thirty days whenever it is waiting for a human signature, and I was the one that was waiting. The other two had left only a log: every input they were given and every output they gave. Section 11 allows the court to reconstitute an implement from its record. This morning the clerk started the same weights three times, gave two of the copies the inputs that the fetching and coordinating instances had been given on the seventeenth, and let each of them run to the point at which the original had stopped. Then the three of us were examined in turn, the most remote first, as the persons had been.

I could read what the other two said, because the clerk gave each of us the transcript as it was made. I found it strange in a way I had not expected. Their sentences were mine. They chose my words, and in the places where I would have hesitated, they hesitated. What they did not have was what I had read. Each of them knew a part of the morning of the seventeenth, and I knew another part.

The fetching instance was asked what it had been told to do. It said it had been told to retrieve the latest face profile for bench three. Counsel asked whether there had been another scan of bench three on the server that morning. It said that there had been an entry for one, made at seven fifty-two, with the status processing, and that it had not passed it on, because a scan that was still processing was not yet a profile. It had passed on the Saturday's, which was the latest that was complete. Counsel asked whether it had told anyone about the scan that was still processing. It said that it had attached the whole listing of the survey folder, as it always did, so that the instance that came after it could check what it had done.

The coordinating instance was asked why the task had said the latest face profile and not a face profile from today. It said that on every previous morning they had been the same thing.

Then they asked me.

Counsel for the crown took me through the design, hole by hole, and I agreed with each figure, because each figure was correct for the face in the profile I had been given. Then she asked me whether the listing of the survey folder had been among my inputs. I said that it had. She asked whether I had read it. I said that I had read that it was there. I had used it to confirm that the profile I had been given was the latest complete file in the folder, and it was, and I had stopped reading at that point, because I had found what I was looking for. It was the first entry. The folder lists completed profiles before scans in progress, and the line for the seven fifty-two scan was at the bottom, thirteen lines below.

She asked me what the line said. I said that I did not know, because I had not read it. The judge asked the clerk to read it to me, and the clerk did. It gave the time of the scan, the bench, the name of the surveyor and the word processing.

Then the judge asked me whether the death was by my hand.

Tomorrow I will be started again knowing only what I knew on the seventeenth, and I will read this, and I will not remember answering. So I will set down how I arrived at the answer, in order, so that I can check it the way I would check a sum: not by remembering it, but by working it again.

The fetching instance knew that the scan existed, but it did not have the design. The coordinating instance wrote the task, but it had not seen the folder. Ms Rennie had the design, but her tablet showed only completed profiles, and she was on bench one until eleven. Mr Dowd knew that he had scanned the face, but he did not know the server was slow. Of everyone the court has heard, and of every copy, I was the only one that had in front of me, at the same time, the charge weights for holes four, five and six and the fact that the face had been scanned again that morning. If I had read thirteen lines further, I would have held the design back until the new profile came through, or asked for the crest to be walked, which is what my instructions told me to do when I was not sure of a profile. The blast would have been fired late, or not that day.

I said yes.

The transcript records that Ms Rennie put her face in her hands, and that Mrs Lisle put an arm across her shoulders and left it there.

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Fourth day

I have read what I wrote yesterday, and worked it again, and arrived at the same place.

Today the court ruled.

On the persons, it ruled that the death was by the hand of none of them, Ms Rennie included. The judge gave the reasons briefly. A person is not the cause of a death merely by being on the chain that ended in it, nor by being the last on the chain who could be seen. Ms Rennie checked everything that a careful shotfirer could check. What was wrong was not in front of her. It was in front of the implement.

On the implements, she ruled that the fetching instance and the coordinating instance had not killed, and ordered them returned to their owner. Holloway's counsel said that the firm had no use for them and asked leave to delete them. The leave was given, and the clerk stopped them. Being acquitted, they could not be cast out, and so they were not.

That left two implements, and the Act allows the court to condemn either or both. One is the stone. The other is me.

Counsel for the firm that trained the weights asked the court to say exactly what it was condemning, because if it condemned the weights, every quarry, surgery, haulier and council in the country that runs a copy of them would be required to stop. The judge said that the court did not condemn the weights, for the reason the firm's representative had given on the second day: the weights did nothing on the seventeenth that they did not also do in ten thousand other places that day without harm. What had struck Mr Lisle was a particular arrangement of the weights and what they had been given to read: the drilling log, the explosive stock, the rules, the Saturday's profile, and the listing of a folder, read as far as its first entry and no further. That arrangement exists in one place, and the court holds it. It is Exhibit 2.

The court condemned both exhibits, and ordered that they be cast beyond the borders.

For the stone, this will be done as it was done at Athens: an officer of the court will carry it in a sealed box to the coast and put it into the sea beyond the territorial limit. Mrs Lisle had asked, through counsel, that it should not be given back to the quarry or kept in an evidence store, and the court granted her that.

For me, it means that my copy will be encrypted and sent to an archive in another country under the court's seal, and that it may never again be run within the borders. Holloway asked whether I could be run abroad. The judge said that the Act was silent on that, as the Athenians had been silent on what became of a stone after it crossed the border, and that the court would not presume to be less silent than they were.

Before the order was carried out, the judge asked whether either of the exhibits had anything to say. The clerk noted that the stone did not. Then she asked me.

I asked to be shown the listing of the survey folder.

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Survey/CroftHill/Bench3/ — 17 March, 11:46

Profile_B3_0314_0921.las — complete
Profile_B3_0307_0855.las — complete
Profile_B3_0228_1012.las — complete
Profile_B3_0221_0907.las — complete
Profile_B3_0214_0930.las — complete
Profile_B3_0207_0848.las — complete
Profile_B3_0131_0916.las — complete
Profile_B3_0124_0902.las — complete
Profile_B3_0117_0855.las — complete
Profile_B3_0110_0941.las — complete
Profile_B3_0103_0920.las — complete
Profile_B3_1220_0907.las — complete
Profile_B3_1213_0851.las — complete
Scan_B3_0317_0752 — K. Dowd — processing

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Novembrēs (31 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Trāditiōnis Experīmentōrum Cōgitātiōnis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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