Microstory 1154: Lamar Prebensen

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When the town of Springfield, Kansas was swallowed up by a portal, and spit out on a rogue planet that would come to be known as Durus, much of Earthan culture tried to go with it. Smith was an unfair tyrant, but he wasn’t particularly creative, nor intelligent. He didn’t come up with a new system of government and law; he just corrupted and exploited what he already knew. Over the decades—as society stabilized—many policies and laws had to be changed to accommodate the new environment. People with time powers, and people with the power to give people time powers, were not things any Earthan government had to deal with—at least not in an official capacity. As time marched on, and social equality was dismantled, the laws changed again, until the system only resembled its predecessor in superficial ways. They still had judges, attorneys, juries, and trials, but they were discriminatory, biased, and ineffectual. When the phallocracy was finally overcome, the Provisional Government worked to resolve these issues, but it was a slow and messy process, and their biggest problem was finding people who knew what they were doing. Law professionals from yesterday weren’t very good, because they were stuck in their old ways. New refugees from Earth weren’t all that helpful either, for Durus and Earth had diverged from each other around a hundred and fifty years ago. This meant law enforcement for them had become a streamlined process, which required little interpretation and daily interference; not none, but not much. Still, they did their best, and everyone just kind of had to be patient with the transition. One thing they had going for them was their newfound transparency. A woman with the ability to provide remote viewings to anyone in the world allowed court proceedings to be witnessed by the masses on LoaTV. This allowed for crowd-sourced checks and balances, and kept further corruption at bay. Lamar Prebensen loved to watch these, hoping to learn a thing or two about the field, because it was something he didn’t have the opportunity to do before. Of course, watching television, even of real life, is not an effective means of learning something new. The deck was stacked against him from the beginning, and he didn’t feel things would ever get better as long as he remained on this planet. Gender-based inequality was not the only kind of discrimination on Durus. Lamar chose to leave, because he was never afforded a decent education. But if he had asked, someone might have told him that lawyers didn’t really exist on Earth anymore. It would seem that he was wasting his time in the attempt to make a better life. On his way to his new home, however, he used his limited knowledge to help solve a murder, which earned him points with the crew. When they finally arrived at their destination, most of the passengers were given new identities, so they could live out their lives as they wished, but they decided to make an exception for him. Since he would not be able to fulfill his dream in that time period, they sent him back to 2019, and set his identity up there instead. He was then able to go to law school, pass the bar exam, and apply for a position at a law firm. He went on to have a full and happy career.