Head On_A Novel of the Near Future

by John Scalzi

  Well, now was not the time to speculate. The fire was still gathering strength. I bent down, picked Miller up in a fireman’s carry, and headed down the stairs as quickly as possible, individual steps groaning under the weight. I had to open the ground-floor doors this time to get through with her on my back.

  Crowd members rushed up and relieved me of Miller, carrying her away to a safe distance from the burning building. I turned my sense of smell back on and was hit by a wave of scorched plastic and hot metal scent. I figured the Philly FBI branch was not going to be happy with what I did to their threep.

  Someone touched me on the arm. It was a kid, who solemnly pointed to the windows of the second floor of the building. There was something moving there. I looked closer.

  “Chapman had a goddamn cat?” I said, out loud, to no one in particular.

  “Are you gonna go get it?” the kid asked.

  Oh, come on, I thought, but did not say out loud, and turned to the nearest adult. “How long until the fire department gets here?” I asked.

  “Come on, this is Strawberry Mansion,” she said to me. “By the time they get here, this building’s gonna be gone.”

  Well, I needed to get in there anyway, I thought, and then found the manager in the crowd. “What color key for the second floor?” I asked.

  “Green,” he said. “You’re going back in there?”

  “There’s a cat,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t,” he warned.

  “Yeah, but you’re an asshole,” someone said from the crowd. The manager scowled and shut up.

  The second trip up the stairs was hotter and more precarious and smoke-filled than the first. I fished the green keys into the door lock, unlatched the door, and prepped myself to open and close it as quickly as possible to keep the burst of oxygen from adding another layer of ignition to the flames, cracked the door—

  —and then saw a flash at my feet as the cat shot out of the apartment and zoomed down the stairs. I slammed the door shut and raced back to the stairwell in time to see the cat rocketing out of the shattered front doors of the building. I looked dumbly to where the cat had exited and then remembered where I was. I went back to the apartment door and quickly let myself in.

  The apartment was filled with smoke and threeps, and the threeps on display in the front room made it clear what they were meant for. One of them was anatomically male, a second anatomically female, and then there were two threeps that were neither but had an area on their lower abdomen that featured ridges and grooves—three grooves separated by two arcing ridges. That was new to me.

  I photographed them as I mapped through the apartment as quickly as I could, seeing that it was, after all, on fire. The plan was to map now, examine closely later. Which was a good thing when I got to the bedroom, which was filled with toys, and the spare room, which was a dungeon, and the kitchen, which was less of a kitchen and more of an erotic art gallery.

  I wasn’t judging. It’s just that there was a lot to take in.

  But I was also aware that on the surface, and through the smoke, there wasn’t much here that was going to be useful. Chapman clearly had his kinks, but kinks were probably unrelated to his death. This visit had been dramatic but only really that.

  But you don’t really believe that, some part of my brain said.

  And I didn’t. Coincidence does happen, but Chapman dying and a Hilketa league executive killing himself and Chapman’s secret love nest burning down all within a span of eight hours was a little much to take.

  “I’m missing something,” I said, out loud, and decided to take another swing mapping through the apartment on the way out. I looked up to start mapping.

  One of the threeps from the front room was standing in the hall, looking at me through the smoke.

  What the hell, I thought, stepped forward, and then was deeply confused as the floor gave way from underneath me. Gravity dropped me into the first-floor apartment of the Waverlys, which was substantially more on fire than Chapman’s had been. I rolled over and looked up through what remained of the Waverlys’ ceiling, and Chapman’s floor, to see the threep looking down at me. Then it disappeared.

  My threep informed me I was on fire.

  Well, there’s a sign, I thought. I picked myself up to get out just in time for my threep’s internal systems to warn me I had another thirty seconds of power available to me.

  “Fuck,” I said, and sprinted toward the front windows. The plan was to jump through them and get the threep clear of the fire and collapsing building.

  It was an excellent plan, marred somewhat by the fact that the threep’s power management system had egregiously overestimated the power left in the threep. I made it as far as the Waverlys’ front room, tastefully appointed in modern-era furniture, and fire, before the threep collapsed. The last thing I saw through the threep was the Eames lounge chair the threep had collided with, which was on fire, and which was now spreading the fire to the threep. Then I was kicked out of the threep entirely, left to float in my liminal space, the private area all Hadens had in the Agora, our online network.

  I hovered in my liminal space for a couple of minutes. Then I sighed inwardly and pulled up a window to Avis, the rental service I had an account with.

  “Welcome to Avis,” the rental bot in the window said. I wouldn’t get a human until and unless my request got complicated. “How may I help you?”

  “I need to rent a threep,” I said. “And a car. Both in Philadelphia, and as close to the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood as you can get.”

  Chapter Six

  “You look tired,” Vann said to me the next morning, as I wandered into the FBI’s basement imaging room. She, along with Tony Wilton and Ramon Diaz, the imaging lab technician, were waiting for me.

  “I’m in a friggin’ robot body,” I said. “How do I look tired?”

  “You’re slumping.”

  “I’m not slumping.” I straightened up.

  “Uh-huh.” Vann went back to her coffee.

  “Chris didn’t come back to the house until two A.M.,” Tony said.

  “You’re telling on me?” I said to Tony, incredulously.

  “I’m giving context.”

  “You were up then too,” I protested.

  “He’s not slumping.” Vann pointed at Tony’s threep.

  “In Chris’s defense, I was not the one leaping into burning buildings, rescuing little old ladies and cats from flames,” Tony said.

  “And then having to file police and fire reports because your borrowed threep burned up in the fire,” I said.

  “Which reminds me that when we go to Philadelphia later, we have an invitation from the director there to pop into her office and explain why you let a fifty-thousand-dollar threep burn down to the metal,” Vann said to me.

  “You can tell her that if they had the fucking induction plate plugged in, this wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “No, you get to tell her. This should be fun.”

  “Guys, we should get started,” Diaz said. “The room’s booked in an hour and you have lots you want to get through.”

  Vann nodded and turned to Diaz. “Bring up the hotel room.”

  Diaz fired up the imaging equipment, and out of the projectors came what I had mapped the day before: Alex Kaufmann’s hotel room, translucent and half-sized, including the bathroom, which featured Kaufmann’s body hanging from the showerhead.

  “Whoa, Jesus,” Tony said. His hand went up in front of his face.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I think I should get extra for having to see that.”

  “Quiet,” Vann said.

  “You were there after our people and Metro police arrived,” I said to Vann. “How did it go?”

  “Well, Metro police didn’t fuck it up, which was a miracle.” Vann pointed to Kaufmann’s virtual corpse. “Our people, Metro police, and the ME’s people all agree it looked like a suicide. No obvious marks on his body that suggest a struggle or fight with a th
ird party, no indication in the room of anything like that either. We have to wait for an official ruling, obviously. We got into the room a little more than ten minutes after we had texted, and he was dead when we got to him.”

  “So basically he would have sent me a text and in the next minute or so taken his belt and strung himself up,” I said.

  “You think we pushed him over the edge?”

  “Maybe?” I pointed to Kaufmann’s phone, on the toilet lid. “But I think he might have already been in process, and picked up the phone when I texted.”

  “He interrupted killing himself to answer a text,” Vann said, skeptically. “Not to mention bringing his phone with him into the bathroom when he killed himself.”

  I pointed to the pocket I knew Vann kept her phone in. “You take your phone with you everywhere.” I looked at Ramon. “I bet you do, too.” I didn’t bring Tony in on this one because he had a threep. Our phones were built in.

  “I definitely take my phone with me when I’m in the bathroom,” Ramon confirmed.

  “Yeah, but you’re going to the bathroom to take a crap, not kill yourself,” Vann said, to Ramon. He shrugged.

  “My point is that it’s an automatic behavior,” I said. “He probably didn’t even think about it.”

  “So Kaufmann freaks out about the feed, has it pulled, goes back to the hotel, undresses, takes his belt and his phone into the bathroom, wraps the belt around the showerhead pipe and his own neck, responds to a text, tells us to come up in fifteen minutes, then kills himself.”

  “Right.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Vann said.

  “Does it matter?” I asked. “Whether he was planning to kill himself before we called, or after?”

  “We’re trying to figure out why he might have killed himself, so yes. Also, there’s this—” Vann pointed to the door, with its extended bolt. “He wanted to make it easy for someone to get into his room. Was that meant for us? Or for someone else? And if someone else, who? And why?”

  “You interviewed the NAHL people,” I said. “What did they have to say about it?”

  “They were all shocked,” Vann said. “As in actually shocked, not just saying they were shocked. Apparently Kaufmann was on the bottom of anyone’s list of people to hang themselves in a hotel bathroom.” She pointed to Kaufmann’s image. “No history of depression, generally enthusiastic about life, all that. Apparently a ‘go-getter.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it means he was an asshole, just an enthusiastic one that did his job and got things done.”

  “We he married or in a relationship?” I asked. “If something was going wrong there it might have contributed to his hanging himself.”

  Vann shook her head. “No. Has parents and a sister. The league notified them. I’ll touch base with them today or tomorrow.”

  “Did anyone check his phone?” Tony asked. “If he was wanting to be in touch with his family or someone else, he might have called or texted before . . .” Tony waved his hand in the direction of the apparent suicide scene.

  “The phone was locked,” Vann said.

  Tony glanced over at the phone. “I can think of several ways to get into that sort of phone.”

  “I think with two different law enforcement agencies on the scene, no one wanted to be the one to attempt an unconstitutional search.”

  “Point,” Tony said.

  “I put in a warrant request before I got here,” Vann said. “When it clears we’ll take it to his service provider.”

  “If the phone was given to him by the league, you might not need the warrant,” Diaz said.

  Vann looked toward me at this and raised her eyebrow. “I’m on it,” I said. I gestured to the room again. “Was there any chance anyone came into the room before us?”

  Vann nodded to Diaz, and a virtual screen popped up that showed the hallway outside of Kaufmann’s room, running on fast forward. “This is the security feed from the floor for the hour ahead of our arrival. This is Kaufmann—” She pointed to a sped-up version of him popping into his room. “No one else in or out of his door until we show up. Other people going in and out of rooms, but it’s just him and us here.”

  “Did the forensics people have anything to add?” I asked.

  “They said that it’s a hotel room, so it’s going to take them a while to process fingerprints and other data. The hotel chain has the service staff fingerprints on file so that at least will help us trim down the number of people who we’ll know were in the room. But at least for now there’s no reason to think this is anything other than what it looks like.”

  “Where is Kaufmann’s body now?” I asked.

  “With the D.C. medical examiner’s office. They’re processing him today. They’ll send along a preliminary report including initial toxicology scans. So we’re waiting on warrants, forensics, and the medical examiner.”

  “Yes,” I said. “To be fair it’s nine thirteen on a Monday morning. We’ll probably get the warrants first. And I’ll check with the league as soon as we’re done here.”

  Vann nodded and looked over to Tony. “You’re up.”

  Tony looked over to Diaz, who wiped the hotel room from the viewing area. In its place a long teal-and-orange ribbon popped up, with two columns, one for heart rate and the other for brain activity, one on top of the other. Vann looked over at Tony, questioningly.

  “It’s the visual design the league does for the stats,” he said. “It was easier to use it than extract out the raw data to present it visually.”

  “It’s ugly,” Vann said.

  “It’s meant to pop.”

  “Ugly does pop,” Vann agreed.

  “Okay, so, there’s three places I want to show you on this data.” The visual data scrolled forward quickly and then slowed. “Duane Chapman was goat three times in the game. That means he was the defensive player whose head was selected as the ball.”

  “You’re mansplaining Hilketa to me now,” Vann said.

  Tony held up a hand, imploringly. “Look, not everyone follows the game.”

  “I don’t,” Diaz volunteered. Tony motioned at Diaz, as if to say, See.

  “Go on,” Vann said.

  “So, here’s the first time.” Tony pointed. “You see the heart rate go up and the brain activity jiggle around a bit. That’s because it hurts a little when the head gets pulled off. Not a lot, they dial it down, but enough that it motivates the player to avoid it. So right around the level of an open face slap, painwise. It’s reflected in the vital signs—a sharp spike, which comes back down because once the head’s off the threep, the threep’s sensory system is shut down.”

  “Why?” Diaz asked.

  “Because in the early days of the game they found out if they didn’t do that, some opposing team players would stomp on the downed threep just for the hell of it. Because some people are real dickheads.”

  “So the heart and brain activity go up, and then they come back down,” Vann said, getting Tony on track.

  “Right, but now look at the second time Chapman’s the goat.” The data flashed by and then stopped. “This time the heart and brain activity spikes are substantially higher, and they don’t come down as far as they did the first time, once the head is off the threep. To the extent this data correlates with pain, he’s in a whole lot more of it, and it’s not entirely going away.”

  “Someone dialed up the pain receptivity in his threep,” I said. Hadens with threeps can increase or decrease the threep’s pain receptivity. It’s stupid to dial it down to zero—as with a human body, you can damage yourself really badly that way, and repairs are expensive—but reducing that receptivity can come in handy at times. You can also go in the other direction, but, really. Few do.

  “You would think so, but the Bays’ sideline tech director says the threep checked out. At least that’s what he says in a story I read about this morning. And that’s data the league would have. They’re always auditing threep adj
ustments and data feeds because the temptation to tweak the threeps out of standard setup is huge.”

  “So it’s like car racing,” Diaz said. “Everyone has to race basically the same-model car.”

  “Right,” Tony said. “In this case it’s one of four models and there are some other modifications that are allowed, but everything has to be within a certain range. Step out of the range, and everyone gets penalized. And in this case the tech guy would probably get fired. He’s not going to lie about it in a press conference.”

  “If it’s not the threep then what is it?” Vann asked.

  “I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it’s significant.” Tony started the feed scrolling again, but more slowly. “Chapman’s stats never really settle down after the second time he’s the goat. In fact, they start being more erratic and on an upward stress path. So when he’s goat for a third time, right here”—Tony pointed to a third, substantial spike in the data—“his vitals were already close to what they were in the second spike. And after this third spike, things get really messy.”

  Tony was right. After the third spike, Chapman’s vitals kept spiking, wildly and chaotically. “Here’s where the feed was shut off,” Tony said, pointing to a marker in the data stream. He pointed to another marker past the first. “Here’s where he went into cardiac arrest. And here”—another marker—“is where his brain activity shut down entirely.”

  “When he died,” Vann said.

  “When death was likely inevitable, yes.”

  “So you’re saying Chapman died from too much pain,” I said.

  “Well, no,” Tony said. “We know he was in pain because at the press conference last night we were told that.” He waved at the ribbon, now still. “These data don’t explicitly show any sort of pain, but strongly imply it. But these data are incomplete. Especially the ‘brain activity’ data, which measure a sort of generalized brain state, not any system or section of the brain in particular.”

  “It’s for show,” Vann said.

  “Basically,” Tony agreed. “It gives the league something to sell. It lets you see something was going on with Chapman’s brain. But nothing specific enough to say anything with accuracy.”