Story by Oneyearmuse
Title by Captain Awesome
My honours, ladies and gentleman of the jury this case is very simple indeed, my client's business and technology has been proven in this court to not only work and be very safe indeed. Opposing counsel would have you believe that it is anything but and the only safe method of long distance travel is via air travel and considering it is a conglomerate of Airlines and Oil companies that are paying counsel's very high salary it does not surprise me.
If we travel back in time to 1829 when Robert Stephenson built the Rocket which was one of the first steam engines of its period to ride on rails. Many of the public and scientific community were of the opinion that people would suffocate at such high speeds although its maximum speed was only 28 miles per hour not much faster than a horse at full gallop. It was not the speed that really was the issue back then it was the risk and the cost to existing methods of travel. Which proved to be non-existent, railroads shaped much of the planet throughout much of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Since the dawn of humanity we always been at risk when we travel, in fact most of the risk has been when we meet new people and decided their patch of land was greener. Humanity's worst creations have come from traveling across the land and killing other people. Airplanes for instance drop bombs and fire missiles not to mention crashing. Opposing counsel will say this does not happen anymore there are no more wars and the Space Patrol keeps us safe however whilst Jet and Low Orbit Airliners have an extremely high safety record they can carry up to a 1000 people at once. This means when they do crash they take far more people in a single instance. We may not have wars anymore but we still have the DST's who love to create chaos since they have become so disenfranchised with our stable world.
The Airlines are happy to misdirect the public which includes all you the members of jury and your honours from the simple truth air travel is not as safe as they make out. Remember my earlier point about risk, when it comes to driving nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. And yet people still drive everyday, all of us accept this risk as one of the many stresses of everyday living.
As you have seen in this court room yesterday my client can remove that risk at a fraction of the cost of driving, flying and sailing. Opposing counsel has already said we are opening Pandora's box, risking the creation of new D-Shifts despite assurances by the world government there has not been a recorded D-Shift in 10 years. My client Jane Everfall has built her business around understanding and making use of the D-Shifts. Portal Industries has the highest safety record throughout the solar system. The D-Shifts are gone but we have learned from them how to manipulate space to our considerable advantage.
This ladies and gentleman of jury this is a landmark case which will dictate how humanity develops as a civilisation. As I said at the beginning the case is very simple.
Do we finally remove the risk of travel!
OR!
Do we continue to allow ourselves and those we love DIE!
