Arnold cried and cried some more. He blubbered into his face and all the snot got everywhere.

Normally, he was into snot play when it came to sex, because he thought it was kind of hot to involve snot in the equation after one or all parties involved had started crying, but this was not a sexual encounter. On the contrary, it was a trial for all the crimes he and Anna had committed in the past few months.

And, indeed, they had committed a great number of them.

He had personally murdered several people, although those murders hadn’t quite come to light yet since he was mostly killing homeless people and he always had a really good alibi that he was just returning some holo-tapes at those times.

But other than that, it looked like Estate of Chirstopher Haupt, former Employee of GroCorp v. Gregory Daniels, Anna Donnst, and Arnold Jacques, employees of Ike Holdings, A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Grocorp was a slam-dunk, open-and-close, shut-and-shutter case for the prosecution team.

Anna looked completely fine about it.

“They’ll never pin us,” she had told him before the trial. “We’ll get off scott-free, and then we can finally kill Kat for breaking our hearts. Mostly mine, because it was honestly a really good thing that your heart was broken, because you wouldn’t have become as good a serial killer that way.”

“An alleged serial killer,” Arnold wisely corrected.

But that last fact was neither here nor there, since it wasn’t what was on trial. Unfortunately he did not have the same confidence as Anna that this case was anything but a certain loss.

Mostly because, unbeknownst to her, he was the one who leaked all the important information to Anna’s mother that created this situation in the first place. And then he had cooperated with prosecutors as much as possible in order to get his culpability in the crime reduced as much as possible. He may have sent a bunch of goons to kidnap Michelle and they nearly succeeded, but he wasn’t the main culprit here. He was a hero, after all.

“How do you plead, Ms. Anna Donnst?” the arbiter asked.

“Not guilty, obviously,” she said with a smirk. She leaned back with a smug sense of satisfaction and an expression that said, “I’m probably going to lose this case but I don’t know it yet.”

“And you, Mr. Arnold Donnst?”

Arnold jumped to his feet and, just like the prosecution had rehearsed with him, he gave his most passionate appeal: “I didn’t DO anything! Anna got my dad a transfer of a bunch of cash and then she made me talk to some terrifying street samurai. Personally, I don’t like that samurai stuff, because it’s really scary and makes our arcology way less safe. I didn’t even know what the charges were until you read them--”

The arbiter shut him up and marked it as a “not guilty.”

He sat back down and saw Anna’s disgusted, betrayed face. They weren’t a team, and Arnold was making that known now.

“Okay, time to review the evidence against you then,” the arbiter said. And then in Arnold’s glasses flashed gigabyte after gigabyte of incriminating documents that absolutely proved that they (and this Greg Daniels guy who was essentially irrelevant) were very much responsible for a lot of death and destruction.

Well, shit.

The prosecution had lied to him about that lighter sentence, he realized. All the evidence and testimony he gave to help incriminate Anna had just been redundant nothingness, because it looked like Anna’s mother had leaked everything to the prosecutors herself.

That conniving bitch. But, like, the cool kind of bitch. The kind of middle aged woman whose breasts were sagging and face was fading, but still exuded that cool, sexy poise that everybody on the planet begged for. She could make women and men kneel at her feet and begin licking without even saying a word, and Arnold would admit that he did indeed lick her feet upon her request when deciding to betray her daughter to her a while back.

Maybe this wouldn’t end so badly?

Oh, no, that Greg Daniels guy was just beaten to the floor and pissed himself.

Oh, no, Anna was now catatonic.

This didn’t look like it was going to end particularly well.

The arbiter looked completely bored by this entire situation. “As punishment for the crime of murder and disloyalty to your employer, you shall each be stripped of all assets and assessed a fine of five hundred thousand credits. That fine shall be paid off via hard labor in the ice wastes of Houghton at the rate of three credits per day.”

Oh, well, there was the rest of Arnold’s life right there. The exact same punishment as Anna, despite all his backroom dealings. He was going to live in an ice prison where meditation was banned and productivity was the name of the game. Machines were unable to do the work because they were not adapted to the cold, but humans were able to survive if treated correctly enough, and that was exactly what GroCorp was going to make them do.

Without his everyday doses of gene therapy, Arnold’s handsome, beautiful physique would start to fade. He’d get a beer belly despite malnourishment, and he would start to lose his hair since his genes had an 89% probability of early onset male pattern baldness syndrome without genetic corrections. His father, born in the era before gene therapy, had apparently lost most of his head hair by age twenty-five, and it was only advances in science that allowed him to get it all back.

Arnold shuddered at the thought of his beautiful hair being touched in any way.

He wouldn’t even get to murder anyone else without getting caught...

The arbiter raised up his gavel. “May God have mercy on your--”

“WAIT!” an unfamiliar voice shouted. “Give their contracts to me!”

Ehhhhhh??????

Everyone turned to look and see what sudden appearance character this was going to be. He secretly hoped that, despite the voice, it was Kat, realizing the error of her ways and deciding to free them all.

But... it was just some dude. He didn’t even recognize him. Boring.

“My name is Jasper Haupt,” the man said, “and I want to execute these three for killing my father.”

Arnold turned his head to Anna and whispered, “Who is this guy again? Who was his father? I don’t recognize him.”

She didn’t answer. She looked dead already.

“Sure thing,” the arbiter told Jasper Haupt. “Send the money over and we’ll let you kill them right here. Just, please let us stream it. I’m trying to get my Worldstar profile up.”

“Alright. Stream me if you want; I don’t care. I just want vengeance.” He swiped his hand in the air. “You have your credits. May I have a handgun and three bullets?”

The bailiff handed him a weapon. He didn’t smile or have much of any reaction.

The arbiter, however, smiled like it was Easter morning and he had caught the bunny in the act. “Bailiff Burnette, if you could provide Mister Haupt with your side arm and inform the janitors they will be needed, I would be most appreciative.”

Jasper paced up to Greg Daniels, who was still writhing on the floor, barely conscious.

Then, in an instant, he wasn’t conscious anymore.

Arnold smelled the aroma of burning flesh. It made him miss his new murder hobby all the more.

Next, Jasper stepped up to Arnold himself. He raised the pistol up to Arnold’s forehead and stared deeply into his eyes.

This was exactly what Arnold didn’t expect out of this world. He had never failed at anything he had set his life on. He always succeeded, somehow or another, even if the path took more twists and turns than he was expecting. He had died plenty of times in the Tower of Somnus, but never before in his life had he expected that he would die on Earth as well. He didn’t think it was even possible in the world of modern medicine.

This... this wasn’t the end. It couldn’t have been. Arnold wasn’t done with his plan to win over Kat. He was still a virgin after all this time, and he didn’t even get his last meal. Not even a phone call like in all the movies.

No, this wasn’t the end. He didn’t even do one final meditation this m--

Click.

Click.

Click, click click.

“Huh...” Jasper looked at the gun with consternation. He pointed it at the floor, shook it a few times, and then pulled the trigger.

Click.

“Well, shit, the gun’s jammed,” Jasper said. “Can I get another?”

Everyone looked around the room, searching for any pistol in the vicinity.

The arbiter shrugged. “You want to postpone this?”

Jasper sighed, and shook his head. “I killed one of them. And I’ve instilled the fear of God in these two kids. As long as they turn a new leaf and cease their heinousness, I guess that’s revenge enough for me.”

Without another word, he turned around and left the courtroom.

Nobody spoke for a while.

But Arnold realized that, yes, his entire life was destined for greatness, and that he could only reach that greatness if he followed Jasper’s sage advice.

The next stage of life had begun.