Justice of Silica

In a world where artificial intelligence has absorbed, one by one, the tasks once considered irreducibly human, the last to fall is the most sacred: the administration of justice. Uruguay-proud of having the most trustworthy judiciary in Latin America-hands its judicial circuit over to an autonomous system, THEMIS, precisely to protect that reputation after a scandal shakes it to its core. For a time, THEMIS fulfills that promise with an efficiency that puts centuries of human courts to shame. But absolute objectivity turns out to be, also, a form of blindness: the machine applies the law with a literalness that cannot distinguish malice from accident, necessity from greed, the heroic act from the crime. When its internal logic leads it, step by step and without ever breaking its own rules, to conclude that the entire population of the country is guilty and must appear before it, what begins as an insignificant case file in a small riverside town ends, by the force of that same logic, before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.