There comes a time in every man’s life when he must be tried for a murder he didn’t commit in a Revolutionary Courtroom in front of a Studio Audience. All your life, you think you know how it’s gonna play out.

  You practice your indignant posture, your lengthy diatribes about the nature of justice, your clever quips:

  “Who asked the persecuting attorney?”

  It was all pretty standard stuff. You played the part that was expected of you, and ultimately (at the risk of rehashing a tired cliché), you were found guilty and executed in a massive Intergalactic Pay-Per-View Event.

  I had prepared for something like this for as long as I could remember. And yet, somehow, nothing could have equipped me for the reality of the judge finally uttering those fateful words:

  “Mr. Brax, how do you plead?”

  I knew what I was supposed to do. Admit my guilt. String the court along for days in a deep delve into the inner reaches of my troubled criminal psyche. Become the subject of a popular cult.

  But I couldn’t do it. I clammed up. I couldn’t speak.

  My brain and my tongue, two of my favorite organs, now conspired against me in a manner befitting my accursed liver.

  From the rafters, I could hear producers prognosticating ominously about my prospects as a made-for-TV martyr. My agent sweated through his shirt.

  Even Neel, the friendly intern who had brought me my coffee, shook his head and averted eye contact. Pfft. That’s showbiz, I guess.

  My state-appointed attorney, having spent most of the trial scribbling crude doodles of me at the guillotine on a yellow legal pad, suddenly snapped to attention. He was a sight to see when he got going: Krollint Mezzsplag, the go-to lawyer for defendants in Kangaroo Courts in every law-abiding galaxy.

  And I was lucky enough to have been forced to have him represent me.

  He approached the bench in a hurry, stopping only twice along the way to give brief interviews to the sideline reporters.

  He pulled me to the side, yanking me in a manner so violent that—had he not assured me constantly, in the time I’d known him, that his was a kind and peaceable species—I might have thought it intentional.

  “Ludo, baby, we practiced this. The nice judge asked you how you plead. That’s where you say guilty. Say it with me. Guil-ty.”

  His gaze softened even further. His one eye, fixed handsomely in the center of his face, looked deeply into mine in alternating shifts as he implored me with his expression (and the increasingly painful way his claws dug into my hand) to do as he said.

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  We had been through a lot together; there was no denying that.

  To this day, I treasure the visits he paid me in the SuperSuperMax Prison Facility, where he—my only contact with the outside world aside from my daily Tauntings—would come and regale me with stories of famous executions he’d been important enough to watch from “The Splatter Zones.”

  I’ll never forget how he tried, best as he could, to take my mind off my dark fate in those agonizing days.

  “Don’t you remember, Ludo? We worked it all out. I struck you a deal. A real beaut. You plead guilty, admit to the utterly irredeemable nature of your soul, implicate a few of your closest confidants on spurious grounds…”

  He cupped the side of my face with his scaly, manicured hand.

  “And in exchange, the executioner’s gonna use the gentle scythe. Or what was the language? One of the gentler scythes.”

  He folded a piece of paper and slipped it into the breast pocket of his suit.

  “Not to mention, they’ve promised not to display your body publicly as a warning to others. It’s really more than we could’ve ever asked for.”

  I mulled it over for a moment.

  A quick, painless death had its appeal. Who among us could deny that? And to be saved from the embarrassment of being made an example of? To have my body, like an innocent man’s, simply repurposed into fuel on the day of my death? That was a privilege not many in my position got to enjoy.

  I can’t lie to you, dear reader: there was a part of me that wanted to take the deal.

  There was only one problem. A thought had begun—just moments before, origins unknown—to ring out in the back of my mind:

  I didn’t deserve to die.

  The notion hit me like a ton of bricks. I had, to be quite honest, never considered this angle. I fashioned it quickly in my mind into an airtight, legalistic argument. And not a moment too soon.

  The basic premise was this: I, a person who did not commit the crime I was being accused of, did not deserve to die for it. (Or, for that matter, any of the embarrassing social faux pas detailed by the endless character witnesses paraded out against me in the second week of the trial.)

  I was emboldened, a new man entirely. I stiffened up, looked directly into the TV cameras, and grabbed the microphone. The jury, composed entirely of my very worst enemies, began to shift in their seats.

  “I didn’t do it. I’m not guilty.”

  The studio audience gasped. A producer hastily created a cue card asking instead for “Incredulous Murmuring.” But to no avail.

  A roar of activity and disbelief engulfed the room as Krollint’s head dislodged from his thorax in a gesture of surprise so violent they had to cut to commercial.

  In the time it took him to reconstitute himself, my brain kicked into overdrive, searching for some coherent plan of action. My eyes darted around the room, sound drowned out by the beating of my heart in my head as the rush of what I’d just done dawned on me.

  As if in a montage, I saw before me a succession of faces in the room, overwhelming my senses, engulfing me. I steeled myself for their ire, flinched instinctively from what I expected to be anger, indignation, the bloodthirsty cries of a mob.

  But what I saw before me wasn’t that at all.

  What I saw on every single one of their faces instead was the very same expression.

  Each and every one of them—even Krollint’s head, making its way independently back to the rest of his body in a disgusting display of the wonder of the Universe’s creation—looked strangely excited.

  That’s when it dawned on me.

  The next batch of Sham Trials wasn’t due to film until the beginning of next year, owing to a recent contractual dispute between the Revolutionary Council and some of the crew over the quality of craft services.

  The reality was this: everyone—the house band, the actress playing my mortified mother, and, above all, the zillions of entertainment-starved viewers across the cosmos—wanted me to tell my story.

  Needed me to, really.

  For their own livelihoods. Their own amusement.

  And the longer it took me, the longer I stayed alive.

  So, I began to tell it.