The Audience Knows My Address
A jury consultant discovers an audience voting on every decision she makes at home. The votes are coming from people whose testimony she taught juries to distrust.
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How it begins
The first vote concerned my breakfast.
Seventy-three percent preferred that I eat the pear.
I found the result on a small screen beside my front door, where the building manager had promised a new thermostat.
The pear sat untouched on my kitchen counter.
I turned the screen over. No cable. A rechargeable battery. A sticker with my flat number written in tidy block capitals.
Below the vote was a comment.
She always chooses what looks harmless.
I had said that in court. Not under oath. In a private preparation room, to a witness who kept folding his hands.
I took a photograph of the screen and called the building manager.
"Is this some kind of survey?"
"Which survey?"
"The thing you installed."
"We haven't installed anything."
A new question appeared.
Should Mina open her curtains?
The numbers moved while I watched.
I closed the curtains.
The vote vanished.
A message replaced it.
That was not the agreed outcome.
Someone knocked on my door.
Not the intercom. The actual door, four floors above the locked entrance.
Through the peephole I saw Owen Lake.
He had aged differently from the way I remembered. Less frightened. That made him harder to recognize.
"You've seen it," he said.
I kept the chain on.
"What is this?"
"I was hoping you could tell me."
On the screen behind me, a little bell rang.
The next vote was live.
Should she let him in?
Owen looked past my shoulder and went very still.
"Don't," he said.
Eighty-one percent disagreed with him.
Down the hallway, the lift doors opened. I could not see who stepped out, but the tiny screen began counting backward from thirty.
I unhooked the chain.
For the first time in my career, I did not know which version of an audience I was supposed to persuade.
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Outline and characters
Develop this idea
This revenge-thriller idea works through the difference between accountability and spectacle. Make the audience's first intervention small enough that Mina can rationalize it. Then let one vote cross a concrete boundary. The people watching need distinct motives, including someone who refuses to participate. For an original version, change Mina's former profession and the evidence she helped suppress. Keep the final decision in her hands instead of resolving the story with a sudden platform shutdown.
- Mina finds strangers voting on an ordinary choice in her flat
- A winning vote changes the building's security access
- The platform audience quotes phrases from her courtroom work
- Owen admits he was invited but did not join
- Mina traces invitations to cases her consultancy helped win
- The organizer demands a public admission that would expose protected witnesses
- A former client tries to turn the audience against her
- Mina separates legitimate grievances from an engineered revenge campaign
- She gives verifiable records to the people affected rather than performing a confession
- The audience dissolves after one victim refuses to let voting replace evidence
Characters
- Mina Keel, 37. Jury consultant targeted by an anonymous audience
- Owen Lake, 45. Former witness whose testimony Mina once discredited
Series possibilities
- Owen receives a new jury summons for a trial that ended twelve years earlier.
