citrus limon veritatis
Description: The Justice Fruit tree is a tree that produces very sweet, very large, slightly blue-tinted lemons.
Powers: The juice of a Justice Fruit temporarily (one hour per lemon) unlocks a latent human psionic ability to detect spoken falsehoods. It’s not perfect, but even otherwise untrained people will still be able to tell when somebody’s lying to them. As for people with formal training? Well, trial attorneys absolutely love this stuff.
This particular variant of the humble lemon is officially banned nowhere; but a lot of political entities have come up with a remarkable number of excuses for limiting, prohibitively licensing, discouraging, or regulating out of existence the large-scale cultivation, production, and (most assuredly) distribution of Justice Fruit. Even locales that informally permit the relatively free use of Justice Fruit typically don’t let it be used in the courtroom. The combination of an almost but not-quite perfect lie detection method, coupled with the general instinctive resistance to permitting psionics in the legal system, acts as a powerful practical deterrent. The public’s also less enamoured with the stuff these days than they were at first, either. Sometimes you actually don’t really want to know whether you’re being told the truth-truth, OK?
But it’s also still within the interests of governments to have truth-detection abilities; interrogations in particular operate a lot more smoothly when the interrogators can back up their suspicions with Justice Fruit. It’s also useful in a variety of situations where people need to prove that they’re really telling the truth*, which can be handy in both intelligence and counterintelligence operations. So people still grow Justice Fruit. And other people diligently research a way to neutralize the effects of Justice Fruit, too. It’s the obvious counter, right? Only the neutralization research has to be kept quiet, because if people know that there is one then they’ll just work on how to power through the neutralization method and the merry-go-round starts up again.
So that’s why the neutralization research is printed on unhackable paper and has been put in a physical briefcase and why your team is going to drive it all to the actual production facility. Analog is the new black, don’t you know? Much safer all around. We won’t tempt fate by saying that it’ll be an easy run, but we’ve done what we can to make it as easy as possible. And we’re sure you can handle any problems that crop up along the way.
*Which paradoxically makes it even harder to use Justice Fruit as a method of determining innocence in the American legal system, thanks to existing case law about self-incrimination. It’s just too laborious to combat the average jury’s (or parole board’s) assumption that anybody who refuses to answer questions from a Juice drinker must be guilty.
So it’s a world where poker doesn’t exist and marriage ceremonies with binding vows are a much different experience
They play poker over CCTV and the marriage vows are less affected than you’d think; it doesn’t detect whether or not you’re wrong, just whether you’re lying.