Head On_A Novel of the Near Future

by John Scalzi

“I don’t remember any house meeting about getting a cat,” Tayla said.

  “The cat’s not permanent.”

  Tayla pointed to the cat box. “Your voice says one thing, and your purchases say another.”

  “The cat’s a witness,” I said. “In my case.”

  “A witness.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Only sort of.”

  “And we are, what? A safe house for the cat?”

  From the second floor there was noise and the door to the twins’ room opened and their threep emerged. “There’s a cat?!?” they squealed.

  “Oh Lord,” Tayla said.

  “It’s not a permanent resident,” I said to the twins, as they stomped down the stairs.

  “Why not?” they asked.

  “It’s a federal witness,” Tayla told them.

  “We have a witness protection cat?!?” The twins looked at Donut with obvious excitement. Donut gazed up at them.

  “Let’s all be calm, please.”

  “Can he stay in our room?” the twins asked.

  “What’s going on?” Tony yelled from his room.

  “We have a fugitive cat!” the twins yelled back.

  “What?”

  “It’s not a fugitive,” I yelled.

  “It’s just a witness,” Tayla said.

  “It sounds ridiculous when you say it,” I said to Tayla.

  “Yes, well.” Tayla reached down and scritched Donut.

  By this time Tony was making his way down the stairs. “We didn’t have a meeting about a cat.”

  “He’s not permanent,” I said.

  “He could be permanent,” the twins said.

  “Where’s his owner?” Tony asked.

  “He’s dead. This is Duane Chapman’s cat.”

  “The cat’s widowed,” the twins said.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “Why do we have it?” Tony asked.

  I reached down and unlatched Donut’s collar and gave it to Tony. “It’s a data vault,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said. “Do you think you can get into it?”

  “Are you paying me to get into it?”

  “Well, the FBI will be, yes.”

  “Then probably, eventually.”

  “And what about the cat?” Tayla asked.

  I looked over to the twins and handed them the cat box, kitty litter, and tuna.

  “Squeeee,” they said.

  “You actually said squeee,” Tayla said to the twins, disbelievingly, but they were already walking up the stairs with their cat-related booty. She turned back to me. “This is on you,” she said to me.

  “I accept all blame,” I replied.

  “You know they’re going to want to keep the cat.”

  “It’s only temporary,” I said again.

  “Right,” Tayla said. “Its owner is dead and the twins are acting like eight-year-olds over it. Sure it’s temporary.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just remember this when I ask for a dog. Because at a house meeting soon I’m going to ask for one.”

  “Seems fair.”

  “A big one.”

  “I like big dogs,” I said.

  “You better.” Tayla walked off.

  “I’m not a fan of dogs, personally,” Tony said.

  “Don’t tell Tayla,” I warned.

  “Way ahead of you. Anything else interesting today, besides acquiring a widowed cat?”

  I was about to say Yes, but I can’t tell you when an internal ping told me I had a call. I looked at the caller ID.

  And thought, Well, that’s certainly interesting. I held my hand up to Tony, to tell him I had something going on, and took the call.

  “Chris Shane.”

  “Hello, Agent Shane. It’s Kim Silva. I’m a teammate of Duane’s.”

  “Yes, I know. My condolences.”

  “Thank you. And I’m pretty sure by now you’ve figured out that Duane and I were lovers.”

  “It had come to my attention, yes,” I said. According to the information Hinson had given us, she had been logged in to the threeps in Duane Chapman’s apartment multiple times in the last year.

  “And I think you’re also aware that was me piloting the threep you saw in the apartment when it was on fire.”

  “I did know that, yes. I have some questions for you about that, and some other things.”

  “I’ve talked to my legal team and with the Bays organization, and we’ve all decided that it’s best if I cooperate fully with you. Would you be available to meet with me tomorrow? At eleven A.M. at the Bays’ practice facility?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Thank you, Agent Shane.” She hesitated for a moment.

  “Is there something else, Ms. Silva?” I asked.

  “This is kind of a strange question,” Silva said.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Go ahead and ask it.”

  “When you were in Duane’s apartment, did you happen to see my cat?”

  Chapter Ten

  I left Donut with the twins, headed to my room, laid my threep down on its induction lounge, and then opened up a passage to my cave.

  It was not a real cave, of course. My “cave” was the personal space I had created for myself in the Agora, the network Hadens used to live their nonphysical lives in.

  Every Haden defined their own personal space. Some Hadens, mostly the ones who contracted the disease later in life, created spaces that closely replicated their own houses or areas that were familiar to them in their non-Haden lives. Others, especially the ones who had contracted the disease early and whose main experience with life was the Agora, created personal spaces that were more abstract and often whimsical or even satirical to the idea of a “personal space.” I had a friend in college who described his personal space as a “non-euclidean camel stomach.” I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that description, but it was as annoyingly pretentious as it was described.

  My own personal space was somewhere in the middle—not a house, not a topological oddity, but a dark, quiet cave, based on the famous Waitomo Caves of New Zealand, only larger. Far above, simulated glowworms twinkled at me. Below, a subterranean river flowed by, offering up the perfect level of ambient noise for relaxation and quiet contemplation.

  Which I was about to completely ruin by opening up news about Duane Chapman’s death.

  To be clear, not just the news about Duane Chapman’s death, since most of the pertinent information I was already aware of, or would be soon enough. I was also looking at commentary, opinion, speculation, and just plain old rumor-mongering.

  I didn’t have to look very far.

  First, to The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and other established media outlets, print, audio, and video. Their stories broke down into expected bins: straight reporting, follow-up reporting, feature stories for color, mournful opinion pieces, the occasional piece looking at how Chapman’s death might impact the business of the NAHL. The straightforward pieces featured anodyne quotes from the FBI press spokesman saying nothing of any substance. He was good at that. The Post and other local media made note that Vann and I were on the case, and that my dad was considering taking part ownership in the NAHL’s as-yet-unnamed future D.C. expansion team. No dark mutterings about what that might mean.

  That was saved for the Hilketa News and some other second-tier outlets. Cary Wise in particular was trying to connect the dots between my involvement with the investigation and my dad’s potential business dealings. They were coming up short because there wasn’t anything scandalous there. I marked it as a potential issue anyway. Just because there was nothing to a story didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a story.

  Which brought us to the less reputable sites, which were positively awash with written and spoken speculation from fans, wannabe journalists, and the occasional politically motivated screamers. I scrolled through these
quickly, pulling out some of the charmers for later examination.

  Among these:

  That Chapman was killed because he knew too much about the NAHL’s dirty business practices.

  That he was murdered because he leaked the Boston Bays’ playbook to other teams for money.

  That he committed suicide to protest the commercialization of Hilketa, from its earlier, purer stance as a league run for the sheer bliss of the sport.

  That he was killed so that there would be room on rosters for non-Haden players, and that his death would just be the first.

  That he was dispatched by his wife because he was cheating on her. This one I put a star on not because I thought Marla Chapman had her husband killed but because I was curious just how widespread rumors of Chapman’s infidelity might have been.

  That Chapman had been killed for the league’s insurance policy on him, because it was cash-short and needed the liquidity. I starred this one too, to remind myself to look up the league’s and the Boston Bays’ finances.

  That Chapman’s death was God’s judgment for a Haden marrying a non-Haden.

  That Chapman’s death was God’s judgment for the immorality of the North American Hilketa League and the licentiousness of major league sports in general.

  That Chapman’s death was the work of terrorists trying to destroy the American way of life (and one assumed, tangentially, the Canadian and Mexican ways of life, as the NAHL had teams in both countries).

  That Chapman’s death was related to what caused Clemente Salcido to be dropped from the league. This was a theory put forward by a Mexico City Aztecs fan. I starred this one, too, and dropped a quick ping to Tony.

  He picked it up immediately. “I haven’t cracked the data vault yet,” he said.

  “I wasn’t going to ask about that,” I said. “Actually I was going to ask you what your final write-up on Duane Chapman’s data feed was going to be.”

  “As it happens I was literally just about to send it to you and Vann,” he said. And, like magic, a ping popped up letting me know he’d sent along an encrypted file containing the report. “My final determination is that the data feed wasn’t tampered with in any way. It was just taken out of the public view. Also that it doesn’t show anything that we didn’t already know from this morning.”

  “Would there be any feeds that might show more than what we know now?”

  “Sure. I told you this morning this data feed is mostly for entertainment purposes. But the league has more detailed feeds for bodily functions. Heart, brain, other systems. They keep them for examination to make sure there’s no doping or other issues.”

  “We can get those?”

  “Probably. You might need a warrant.”

  “Okay, I’ll work on it. In the meantime, could you do something for me?”

  “When?”

  “Anytime.”

  “I’ll do it now, since I’ll get overtime. What is it?”

  “Could you pull the public feed for Clemente Salcido’s last game? He was with the Aztecs.”

  “I know who Salcido was,” Tony said, chidingly. “What am I looking for?”

  “Just look at it and if you see anything that pops out at you, let me know.”

  “Fine, be mysterious.”

  “It’s not a problem, is it?”

  “No, it’ll just take longer. I’ll pair it up with trying to crack this data vault.”

  “What’s the holdup?”

  “‘What’s the holdup.’ Anytime you want to dig into a heavily encrypted piece of hardware, Chris, you let me know.” Tony dropped the connection. I went back to reading scurrilous rumors.

  The point of reading the rumors and nonsense was not to give credence to any of them. It was to get an idea of the emotional lay of the land around the story of the first Hilketa player to die on the field.

  A couple of hours of reading established that the story had captured the national imagination. Every major news outlet that covered sports had pieces on the story, and the chattering masses were actively and enthusiastically blabbing away on it. But so far nothing stood out as genuinely shocking or surprising. Even the wacky conspiracy theories were pretty normal, as far as conspiracy theories went.

  Which was surprising to me. There were actual conspiracy-worthy things going on. For example: Alex Kaufmann’s death, so quickly after Duane Chapman’s. It was no secret we were investigating Kaufmann’s death along with Chapman’s. But aside from the Post and the Globe, and an Associated Press report, few outlets were following up on his death, outside of printing the AP story. The Post had the most extensive story, a feature-y write-up titled “Alex Kaufmann’s Death Could Have Been Big News. Then Duane Chapman Died.” I thought that was a little on the nose and basically the Post admitting Chapman’s death was the sexier story so they weren’t going to do much with Kaufmann’s.

  It also meant that the NAHL’s press people were doing a very fine job keeping the spotlight off Kaufmann, an actual league executive. The Chapman story wasn’t a better story for them—a player death story is not a best-case scenario in any formulation—but it meant they really had to manage only one story.

  Well, so far, anyway. We had the forensics on Kaufmann’s hotel bed and the information on the neighboring room coming in the morning. We’d see what happened then.

  I let the video and audio and comment posts babble on for a bit, taking in the takes, and then wiped them simultaneously, muting them all so quickly that the resulting silence was almost physical. Then I pulled up a single screen, to an all-purpose fan-run information site on the sport, called, appropriately enough, Hilketapedia.

  I accessed Duane Chapman’s page. His avatar, based on his physical body, popped up, along with a photo of him piloting his game threep in a match against New York in his first season, vaulting over New York’s Marcello Gibbons. That was one of his better games, and an early one, when it looked like he might break out and become a star. It never happened for him. He was good enough to stay on the roster of the Boston Bays, but not good enough to make the team nervous that his free agency was coming up on the horizon.

  That would be Kim Silva, his teammate and now, apparently, lover. Her Hilketapedia page scrolled for quite a while, listing her accomplishments, records, awards, and various career achievements. Chapman was a player for a franchise. Silva was the franchise player, the one around whom the rest of the team was built.

  As well she should have been. She had basically dragged a mediocre Bays team to the championship last season over Los Angeles, which had a better record and a far more balanced set of talents. With her, the Bays were an elite team. Without her, they were middling at best.

  Silva’s dominance of the league had paid off well for her. In addition to a record-breaking contract, she had scores of product endorsements, some relating to Hilketa and some not. She endorsed Pepsi, as an example, a drink whose particular charms would mostly be lost on a Haden. We could ingest soda. Most of us did not. Silva had gotten Haden’s early enough that she probably didn’t have a residual fondness for the stuff. But I guess if Pepsi wanted to have her as a spokesperson, that was their business, and hers.

  The Hilketapedia page had a full list of her product endorsements, with a rough idea of the value of each annually. Like a fair number of elite athletes, Silva’s league salary was worth less than the yearly endorsement take. I scrolled through the list, counting up the dollars in my head.

  And stopped when I saw that Silva had an endorsement deal with Labram for their IV supplements. The same specific brand, in fact, that Chapman was using the day he died.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. We had our people looking at the supplement bag for anything out of the usual. If they found anything, and Silva was indeed sharing her stash with Chapman, then this could have some pretty substantial implications for her. This among everything else might have been why she was suddenly so interested in speaking with us.

  I wiped t
he Hilketapedia from the air and called up images of everyone we’d had contact with during the investigation to date. Duane Chapman. His wife, Marla. His assistant, Alton Ortiz. Alex Kaufmann. MacKenzie Stodden, Oliver Medina, and Coretta Barber, apparatchiks of the North American Hilketa League. Wendell Gordon, the NAHL commissioner. Reluctantly I put my parents up as well. This point of the lineup here wasn’t to list suspects or people who were engaging in suspicious activity but to try to see all the connections between them. To see in the connections something that I or Vann might otherwise have missed so far.

  I definitely felt like we were missing things. The word I would use for our investigation so far was “frustrating.” Two suspicious deaths, one apartment fire, a yanked data stream, an interviewee bolting, a cat with a data vault for a collar, and kinky threeps galore. And yet, at the moment, nothing solid to show that Duane Chapman died of anything other than natural causes. The most we had right now was the NAHL data stream showing Chapman’s brain activity ramping up. But it didn’t mean anything if we couldn’t connect it to an outside cause.

  I stared up at the faces, drawing lines of connections between them. Something about the lineup was bothering me.

  I’m missing someone, I realized. I was about to add another face when I got a ping.

  “Chris,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Amelie Parker. We met earlier today at your parents’ place.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “I was wondering if you were busy at the moment.”

  “Just looking through some pictures.” I floated up an image of her into my lineup. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’d like to invite you over for a discussion,” she said.

  “Now?”

  “If you’re willing, yes.”

  “Is this concerning our investigation?”

  “No. I’m not going to go anywhere near that.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “It’s about the future. Mine, and, perhaps, yours.”

  Chapter Eleven

  A white brightness, the impression of autumn air against my face, and then I was in the back seat of a 1940 Chrysler Newport Phaeton, cruising down an estate road, headed for an impressively large mansion, the sort you have if you’re the descendant of an earl or a robber baron.