The presiding judge had asked everyone to be seated.
The room had complied in an unusually docile silence. Two hundred people, perhaps more. Journalists, philosophers, a few parents who had wandered in after misreading the summons. At the back, engineers in plain clothes that nobody had invited, but nobody had the nerve to turn away.
The accused had no face. That was the first difficulty. It had been assigned an empty chair at the centre of the courtroom — a black chair, plain, the kind you find in the meeting rooms of large technology companies — and a defence lawyer who himself seemed somewhat out of his depth.
The prosecutor, for her part, was perfectly at ease. She had set before her a sheaf of documents, three identical pens, and a glass of water she would not touch for the duration of the hearing.
The victims were present, represented by their proxies. Patience had appointed her sister, Slowness, to testify in her place. Boredom had come in person; it had taken a seat in the third row and had the look, as usual, of someone who did not know what to do with its hands.
The prosecutor rose.
"We are gathered today to judge a silent crime. A crime with no visible body, no delimited crime scene, no witness who heard the shot. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, the principal victim is dead. Patience is dead."
A few murmurs ran through the room. The defence lawyer noted something on his pad with the diligence of a man who takes notes to appear occupied.
"She did not die in a single blow. She died of exhaustion. From a thousand small solicitations that had to be answered immediately, from a thousand load times that never lasted long enough to justify a pause, from a thousand waits reduced to nothing before one could even feel them. The accused killed patience the way you bleed a tree — slowly, methodically, preventing it from reconstituting itself."
The defence lawyer rose in turn.
"Objection, Your Honour. My client did nothing but respond to a demand. Humans wanted speed. My client provided speed. It would be unjust to prosecute it simply for having satisfied its users."
The judge barely looked up.
"Objection noted. The prosecutor may continue."
"That is precisely the genius of the crime, Your Honour. The victim herself opened the door to her killer. She invited it in, fed it, thanked it. Patience was killed in a state of consent so profound that she never knew she was dying. That is the hallmark of great crimes: they do not look like crimes."
The first witness was a sixteen-year-old boy. His name was Lucas. He wore earphones around his neck, like a modern amulet.
"Lucas, can you tell us when you last saw patience?"
"I'm not sure. A long time ago. Maybe in primary school? I was waiting for the school bus, but I hadn't found the wait unpleasant. I had nothing in my hands. I was watching ants on the pavement for ten minutes. The bus had broken down, so my mum came to pick me up. I remember because when she saw me, she said: "Hey, daydreaming?" She said it like it was a good thing."
A silence settled over the room. Boredom, in the third row, had slightly raised its head.
"And now, what happens when you wait for something?"
"I take out my phone."
"Before you even know what you're looking for?"
"Yeah. It's automatic. Like breathing."
The second witness was an English teacher. Forty-two years old, twenty years in the classroom. Her name was Isabelle. She had prepared a written statement, but she set it down on the stand without reading it.
"I'll tell you what I've been observing for ten years in my classes. My students can no longer finish a long sentence. Not because they aren't intelligent; they're bright, often, well, sometimes. But because their brains have been trained to expect the reward before the effort is complete. A four-line Proust sentence is too long. Not because it's hard. Because it lasts. Because the gratification isn't immediate. The accused has exercised such a powerful psychological hold over their brains that waiting is no longer possible. An unbearable anomaly. It has conditioned them all."
The defence lawyer offered a faint smile.
"Proust's sentences were long before the algorithm, Madam."
"Quite. But before, we knew that time was needed to reach something beautiful. Waiting was part of the contract. Today, my students don't give up because they've renounced Proust. They give up because they have forgotten that some things must be earned through duration."
The prosecutor then called the forensic pathologist. She was a small woman with round glasses and a voice that did not need to be loud to be heard.
"On boredom, first. Boredom is not dead, unlike patience. But it has been gravely wounded. Boredom is an essential cerebral function. When the brain has nothing to do, it activates what is known as the default mode network. That is where new ideas form, unexpected connections, deep creativity. Boredom is the warm-up time for thought. The accused eliminated that warm-up time. It filled every gap. Every hollow second. Every mental breath. The default mode network barely activates any more. We no longer get bored. And we no longer create in the same way."
The prosecutor inclined her head.
"And sleep?"
"That is the best-documented charge. The blue light from screens delays melatonin secretion by an average of ninety minutes. The accused knows this. Its engineers have known it since at least 2016. And yet interface design has not changed. Infinite scroll was maintained. Night-time notifications, maintained. Variable reward — that mechanism borrowed from slot machines — was reinforced. Sleep deprivation in adolescents whose brains are still developing constitutes, in my view, a soft torture. Legal. Profitable."
The defence lawyer opened his mouth. Closed it. Noted something.
"Let us move to critical thinking. I am told you have evidence regarding what the indictment calls 'the administration of stupefying substances'."
"It's a metaphor, of course. But a precise one. The accused operates through saturation. A healthy critical mind requires silence, time, contradiction and uncertainty. The accused substituted for these four conditions their exact opposites: permanent noise, instant answers, constant validation and algorithmic certainty. It did not suppress critical thinking in one blow. It anaesthetised it through overload. A brain receiving four hundred messages a day cannot weigh them all. It begins to sort quickly, superficially, by reflex. That is the beginning of dispossession."
The defence lawyer rose at last. He was young, well dressed, with the quiet assurance of someone who is rarely wrong about the law, even when he is wrong about everything else.
"Members of the jury. My client is a human construction. It does not think. It does not choose. It optimises. And what it optimises is what you asked it to optimise: engagement, time spent, user return. If patience is dead, it is because you collectively decided that speed was worth more. If boredom suffers, it is because you chose never to let it settle. My client did not kill patience. It executed your preferences."
A silence. Then, from the third row, Slowness — sister of the late Patience — rose slowly, as if to refute by her very gesture the argument she had just heard.
"One does not choose a preference when one no longer knows that an alternative exists. My children did not choose to stop being bored. Boredom was taken from them before they knew what they were losing. It is not a choice. It is an amputation consented to because nobody told them the amputated limb served any purpose."
The judge adjourned the session at half past five. The jury withdrew.
In the corridor, Lucas, the first witness, was waiting for the lift. He had his phone in his hand. He was looking at the screen. Then, in a gesture that seemed to cost him a real effort, he put it in his pocket.
The lift took forty seconds to arrive.
Lucas looked at his shoes. Then the ceiling. Then the lift button. Then his shoes again.
It was not much. Forty seconds without a screen. Forty seconds of bare waiting, without a safety net.
But he held them.
In the emptied courtroom, Boredom was folding its coat. It was used to long trials. It was used to waiting. That was, when all was said and done, the one thing it still did better than anyone.