by John Scalzi
“I’ll be happy when the march is over and I can get back to busting college kids for peeing on the sidewalk.”
“Huh,” I said. “What can I help you with, Detective Trinh?”
“I was curious about what you think of your new partner,” Trinh said.
“We get along so far,” I said.
“You heard about her last partner.”
“What about her?”
“Did Vann tell you what happened with her?”
“I understand there was a mishap with a firearm,” I said.
“That’s one way of putting it,” Trinh said. “There are other interpretations.”
“Like what?”
“Like Vann’s partner decided putting a bullet in her gut was a better option than dealing with Vann anymore.”
“Seems drastic,” I said.
“Desperate times,” Trinh said. “Desperate measures.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said.
“No, I guess you wouldn’t,” Trinh said. “You also know Vann used to be an Integrator.”
“I’d heard that,” I said.
“Ever wonder why she quit?”
“I’ve known her for two days,” I said. “One of which I mostly spent in the mountain time zone. So we haven’t had time to exchange life stories.”
“Pretty sure she knows yours,” Trinh said.
“Everyone knows mine,” I said. “It’s not a big trick.”
“Let me catch you up on hers, then,” Trinh said. “She left because she couldn’t hack it. The government spent all that money making her an Integrator and she ended up being phobic about people using her body. You might want to get her to tell you about her last couple of integration sessions. The rumors about them are pretty dramatic.”
“I wouldn’t know about that either,” I said.
“It explains all the self-medicating,” Trinh said. “Unless you’ve missed the smoking and drinking and barhopping, looking for people to bang.”
“I’ve noticed it,” I said.
“She’s not hugely picky on that score.”
“Really,” I said. “Does that explain you, then?”
Trinh smiled at me. “I never fucked Vann, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not entirely sure about her and her old partner, though. I don’t suppose it will be an issue with you.”
“Do you have a problem with Hadens, Trinh?” I asked. “Because you don’t just punt in a crack like that last one right out of the blue.”
“I don’t think you understood me,” Trinh said. “I think it’s a good thing she won’t have an opportunity to fuck with you that way. But I won’t be surprised if she finds another way to do it.”
“Right,” I said. “Look, Trinh. It’s late and I’ve had a really long day. So if you could get to the point of this little conversation, I’d appreciate it. I mean, aside from you taking a dump all over my new partner.”
“The point is that you should be thinking about your partner, Agent Shane,” Trinh said. “She’s smart but not as smart as she thinks she is. She’s good, but not as good as she thinks she is, either. She talks a good game about what other people should be doing but when it comes to her own shit, she gets sloppy. Maybe you’ve noticed that already and maybe you haven’t. But speaking as a voice of some experience on that matter, if you haven’t noticed it yet, it’s something you’ll notice soon.”
“So she’s a ticking time bomb ready to explode, and I don’t want to be anywhere near her when she goes off,” I said. “Straight from the cliché checklist. Got it.”
Trinh held her hands in a way that expressed bored equanimity. “Maybe I’m wrong, Shane,” she said. “Maybe I’m just an asshole who had a bad experience with her when I had to deal with her. And maybe the two of you will get along just fine and you won’t feel like putting a bullet into your gut, or whatever. In which case, great. I hope the two of you are happy together. But then, maybe I’m not wrong. In which case, watch your partner, Shane.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“There’s some weird shit going on with Hadens,” Trinh said. “That thing at the Watergate. And I know you’re involved with whatever’s happening with Loudoun Pharma. If the two of you are working on something big, then the last thing you’re going to need is her falling apart. When she goes down you don’t want her to take you with her.”
“More clichés,” I said.
Trinh nodded. “It’s a cliché. Fine. On the other hand, you’re one of the most famous Hadens out there, aren’t you. Or used to be, anyway. Still famous enough that people called you a scab for showing up to work the other day. How will it look when you fuck up because of Vann, Shane? How will it look for your dad, the next senator from Virginia?”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
“Just a little something for you to think about,” Trinh said. “Take it however you want. Have a good night, Shane. Hopefully you don’t have to save anyone else before you get home.” She walked off.
* * *
There was a welcoming committee of threeps waiting for me when I got to the town house. They tossed confetti at me when I walked through the door.
“Whoa,” I said, fending off the tiny bits of paper.
“We wanted to make you feel at home on your first night,” Tony said.
“I don’t usually have confetti thrown at me when I come home,” I said.
“Maybe you should,” Tony said.
“Why do you have confetti anyway?” I asked.
“Left over from New Year’s,” he said. “Never mind that now. We also wanted to thank you for stepping in with Tayla’s little problem out there. She told us about it when she came home.”
“It’s not the usual way to meet your new housemate,” Tayla said.
“Let’s not make it a regular thing,” I said.
“I would be okay with that,” Tayla said.
“And these are your other new flatmates,” Tony said, pointing at the two remaining threeps. “That’s Sam over there—”
“Hey,” Sam said, raising a hand.
“Hello,” I said.
“—and this is the twins, Justin and Justine,” Tony said, pointing to the remaining threep. I was about to ask for clarification when a text popped into my field of vision, from Tony. Go with it, I’ll explain later, it said.
“Hello,” I said, to the twins’ threep.
“Hello,” at least one of the twins said back.
“Can we do anything for you to make you comfortable?” Tony asked. “I know you’ve had a fun-filled couple of days.”
“Actually, all I want to do right now is get some sleep,” I said. “I know that’s not very exciting, but it’s been a really long day.”
“Not a problem,” Tony said. “Your room is like you saw it the last time you were here. The desk chair has an induction pad in it. It should work for you until you get something better in there.”
“Perfect,” I said. “In that case, good night, everyone.”
“Wait,” said the twins, and then handed me a balloon. “We forgot to throw this at you when you came in.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking it.
“We blew it up ourselves,” the twins said.
I thought about the implications of that statement. “How?” I finally asked.
“Don’t ask,” they said.
Chapter Twelve
AND OF COURSE I couldn’t sleep. After three hours of trying I finally gave up and went to my cave.
For a Haden, personal space is a touchy subject. In the physical world there has always been a debate on how much space a Haden actually needs. Our bodies don’t move and most of them are in specialized medical cradles of greater or lesser complexity. A Haden needs space for their cradle and the medical equipment that attaches to it, and strictly speaking that’s all we need.
Likewise, for our threeps, space shouldn’t be an issue. Threeps are machines, and machines shouldn’t need personal space. A car
doesn’t care how many other cars are in the garage. It just needs space to get in and get out. Put both of those together, and when people first started designing spaces for Hadens and their threeps, they were all like the efficiency apartments LaTasha Robinson showed me: small, clinical, no-nonsense.
Then people started noticing that Hadens had developed a spike of major depression, independent of the usual causes. The reason was obvious if anyone took any time to think about it. Haden bodies might be limited to their cradles, and threeps might be machines, but when a Haden was driving a threep, they were still a human being—and most human beings aren’t happy feeling like they live in a closet. Maybe Hadens don’t need as much physical space as naturally mobile people, but they still need some. Which is why those efficiency apartments were the Haden residence of last resort.
In the nonphysical world (not the virtual world, because for a Haden the nonphysical world is as real as the physical one) there is the Agora, the great global meeting place of the Hadens. Dodgers—the people who aren’t Hadens—tend to think of it as something like a three-dimensional social network, a massively multiplayer online game in which there are no quests, other than simply standing around, talking to each other. One reason they think this is because the public areas open to Dodgers (and yes, we call them Dodger Stadiums) work very much like that.
Explaining how the Agora works to someone who is not a Haden is like explaining the color green to someone who is colorblind. They get a sense of it, but have no way to appreciate the richness and complexity of it because their brains literally don’t work that way. There’s no way to describe our great meeting places, our debates and games, or how we are intimate with each other, sexually or otherwise, that doesn’t sound strange or even off-putting. It’s the ultimate in “you have to be there.”
For all of that, in the Agora proper, there is no substantial sense of privacy. You can close off the Agora for periods of time, or temporarily create structures and rooms for exclusivity—people are still people, with their cliques and groups. But the Agora by design was built to create a community for people who were always and inevitably isolated in their heads. It was built open on purpose, and in the two decades since its creation it had evolved into something with no direct analogue to the physical world. It’s an openness that leaks into how Hadens deal with each other in the physical world as well. They leave their IDs visible, have common channels, and swap information in a way that would strike Dodgers as promiscuous and possibly insane.
Not all Hadens, mind you. Hadens who were older when they contracted the disease were tied more deeply into the physical world, where they had already spent almost all of their lives. So after contracting the disease, they lived mostly in their threeps and used the Agora—to the extent they used it at all—as a glorified e-mail system.
The flip side of this were the Hadens who contracted the disease young and were less attached to the physical world, preferring the Agora and its system of living to forcing their consciousness into a threep and clanking through the physical world. Most Hadens existed between the two spaces, both in the Agora and in the physical world, depending on circumstance.
But at the end of the day, neither the physical world nor the Agora could provide what most Hadens really needed: a place where they could be alone. Not isolated—not the lock in that Haden’s syndrome forced on them—but by themselves, in a place of their own choosing, to relax and to think calmly. A liminal space between worlds, for themselves and the select few that they chose to let in.
What that liminal space is depends on who you are, and also the computing infrastructure you have to support it. It can be as simple as a house from a template, stored on a shared server—free “tract housing” supported by ads that presented themselves in picture frames, which computationally collapsed once the Haden went out the door—to immense, persistent worlds that grew and evolved while the very rich Hadens who were the worlds’ owners resided in floating palaces that hovered over their creations.
My liminal space was something in between those two. It was a cave, large and dark, with a ceiling from which glow worms hung, imitating a nighttime sky. It was, in fact, a re-creation of the Waitomo Caves in New Zealand, if the caves were about ten times larger and had no traces of being a tourist attraction.
In this cave, cantilevered out over a dark, rushing subterranean river, was a platform on which I would stand, or sit in the single, simple chair I put there.
I almost never let people into my cave. One of the few times I did was when I was dating another Haden in college, who looked around, exclaimed, “It’s the Batcave!” and started to laugh. The relationship, already a bit rocky, blew up not long after that.
These days I think the comment was more on point than I would like to admit. Up to that point I had spent a lot of my time being a public person whose movements were followed no matter where I was. My own space was dark and silent, a place where I could be an alter ego—one who could methodically hack away at homework, or muse on whatever notions of mine were posing as deep thoughts at the time.
Or in this particular case, attempt to fight crime.
Over the last two days, too much had been happening to allow me to spin out all the connections among events, to process the data and maybe get something useful out of it. Now was the time. I was up and awake anyway.
I started pulling images out of memory and throwing them up into the darkness. First, the image of Johnny Sani, dead on the carpet of the Watergate Hotel. This image was followed by the image of Nicholas Bell, hands up, on the hotel room bed. Samuel Schwartz and Lucas Hubbard followed, represented here not by threeps or Integrators but by file photos of their approved media icons—images based on their physical body’s facial features but altered in such a way to give them the appearance of mobility and vitality. The icons were artificial, but I couldn’t fault them for it. They weren’t the only Hadens with approved media icons. I had one. Or used to, in any event.
Next up, Karl Baer, from an image taken from his Loudoun Pharma ID, and Jay Kearney, from his Integrator license. I paused for a moment to access the Integrator database, to find the woman Schwartz had integrated with the night before.
Her name was Brenda Rees. Up went her image.
After a moment of consideration, up went images of Jim Buchold and my father, the latter mostly for my own internal sense of navigation. Finally I put up a placeholder image for Cassandra Bell, who had no approved media icon.
Now to add connections. Sani connected to Nicholas Bell. Nicholas Bell to Hubbard, Schwartz, and his sister, Cassandra. Hubbard to Schwartz and to my father. Schwartz connected to Hubbard, my father, Brenda Rees, and Jay Kearney. Kearney to Schwartz and Baer. Baer to Kearney and Buchold. Buchold back to Dad. It was a cozy little sewing circle.
Background now. Off of Sani I placed his last money order to his grandmother, paused for a moment to access the FBI server to make a request to search the serial and routing numbers to get its location of origin. That done, I popped up the Window Rock Computing Facility, and drew a line off of it for Medichord, and connected that back to Lucas Hubbard.
From Buchold I connected a line to Loudoun Pharma. I did a search on the news stories of the day about the bombing. Baer’s confessional video had been first leaked and then officially released, so intense speculation was now falling on Cassandra Bell for being either explicitly or implicitly connected to the bombing. I put a line from her to Loudoun Pharma.
Off of Cassandra Bell I ran a search of stories on the Haden work stoppage and the upcoming march on the Mall. Trinh hadn’t been lying—in the last day there were twenty attacks on Hadens in Washington, D.C., alone. Most of those came in the form of attacks on threeps. There were some bashings like the one I had broken up, but also a couple where people took manual control of their cars and ran them into threeps. One person pushed a threep into the path of a bus, damaging both the threep and the bus.
I wondered what the thinking was there. “Killing”
a threep didn’t do anything but wreck the hardware, which was replaceable, while the person attacking the threep was still on the hook for physically assaulting a person. Then I recalled Danny Lynch to memory and remembered that logical thinking was not the strong suit in many of these encounters.
In at least a couple of these attacks, it was the Haden who ended up on the winning side of the encounter, which had its own set of problems. Videos of android-like machines thumping on human bodies called up something atavistic in the dumber, usually male, usually young, quarters of humankind. I didn’t envy the Metro police the next several days.
A ping from the FBI server. The money order had come from the post office in Duarte, California. I popped up an encyclopedia article on the city and learned that its civic motto was “City of Health,” which seemed pretty random until I saw that it was the home of the City of Hope National Medical Center. The City of Hope helped develop synthetic insulin, and was deemed a “Comprehensive Cancer Center” by the National Cancer Institute. Also, and more relevant for my purposes, it was one of the top five medical institutions in the country for Haden’s syndrome research and treatment.
If Johnny Sani was going to get a neural network installed, that would have been a good place for it.
But then, if he had gotten a neural network installed there, he would have popped up in our databases.
I went back to Cassandra Bell and opened up a search on her, plucking out an encyclopedia biography and recent news articles not attached to Loudoun Pharma.
Cassandra Bell was one of the very few Hadens who had never not been locked in. Her mother contracted Haden’s while she was pregnant with Cassandra and passed it on to her in the womb.
Normally that would have been fatal. In the large majority of cases where a pregnant woman contracted Haden’s, the virus slipped past the placental barrier like it wasn’t there and ravaged the unborn child.
Only about 5 percent of the unborn who contracted Haden’s survived to birth. Almost all of them were locked in. Half of those who survived childbirth died before the first year, due to the virus suppressing the infant’s immunological system, or other complications brought on by the disease. Nearly all those who survived after that experienced severe issues brought on by the damage the virus did to the early brain development of the child, and by the isolation Haden’s created, stunting their early emotional and social development.