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.
That Cassandra Bell was alive, intelligent, and sane qualified her as some sort of minor miracle.
But to call her “normal” might have been stretching. She had been raised almost entirely inside the Agora, first by her mother, who ended up being locked in. When she died from unrelated factors when Cassandra was ten, the girl’s upbringing was shepherded by Haden foster parents and her older brother, Nicholas, who had been infected at the same time as his mother and who developed his Integrator abilities then.
In her way, Cassandra was as famous as I had been, another public curiosity among the Hadens. Far from being intellectually stunted, Cassandra showed remarkable mental acuity, passing a high school equivalency test at age ten and then rejecting admission to MIT and CalTech because they would have required her to use a threep, which she refused to do.
Instead she became an activist for Haden separatism, arguing that Hadens should let go of the limitations of the physical world, imposed on them by use of threeps, and embrace and extend the metaphor of living that the Agora afforded. She didn’t suggest Hadens not interact with Dodgers—just interact with them on their own terms, rather than on the Dodgers’.
One’s receptiveness to Cassandra Bell’s arguments correlated significantly to how much time one spent in the physical world versus the Agora. But the number of Hadens willing to listen to her had increased significantly once Abrams-Kettering picked up traction and was then signed into law. It was she who suggested and instigated the walkout. It was also rumored that she was finally going to breach the physical world to speak at the march on the Mall this upcoming weekend.
Basically, at the tender age of twenty, Cassandra Bell was compared to Gandhi and Martin Luther King by her admirers, and to various terrorists and cult leaders by her detractors.
Baer’s and Kearney’s actions at Loudoun Pharma would not be helping her image at the moment, and people were already beginning to thump on Hadens, including her, for the walkout. I scrolled through her recent comments and proclamations to see what she had to say about the bombing.
On that, she was, for the moment, silent. This was not helping her in the media. Still, possibly better to be silent than to say something stupid.
On reflection, it seemed strange that I had never met Cassandra Bell. We were two of the most notable young Hadens in existence. But then the majority of her notoriety began to accrue around the same time I was trying to step away from the limelight and to have something like a private life.
Also, be honest, I said to myself. You’re the establishment. She’s the radical.
And that was true enough. Through my father and his activities, I was in the physical world more than most young Hadens. Cassandra Bell, on the other hand, was never in it, other than by reputation.
I set aside Cassandra Bell for a moment and went back to Jay Kearney, who had blown himself up on Karl Baer’s behalf. A scroll through his client list confirmed, as Vann had said, that Baer was indeed a client of Kearney’s, with three appointments in twenty-one months. The last of these was eleven months ago. According to Kearney’s appointment notes, they went parasailing.
But aside from brief notes on the nature of their appointments, there was nothing apparently connecting the two that I could see. Three appointments in two years was evidence of a prior relationship, but it wasn’t much of a relationship.
The FBI had gotten warrants for every scrap of Baer’s and Kearney’s lives the instant it was clear they had done the bombing. I reached into that data trove to pull out messages and payment records. I wanted to see how much cross talk there was between them, either in personal correspondence or in a financial trail of crumbs that suggested that the two of them interacted in any significant way.
There was very little. The messages clustered around integration appointments and discussed things like potential activities, how much Kearney would charge for his time, and other pedestrian affairs. Likewise, their financial records coincided at integration appointments only, when Baer would pay Kearney for the appointment.
This lack of a trail didn’t mean that the two of them didn’t meet or plan the bombing. It only suggested that if they did, they weren’t idiots about it. But it didn’t seem a lot to go on.
I stopped and looked up, and stepped back from the wall of images and searches I had constructed, looking for the structure in it, and in the connections. I imagine to a lot of people it would look like complete chaos, a mess of pictures and scraps of news.
I found it calming. Here was everything I knew so far. It was all connected in one way or another. I could see the connections out here in a way I couldn’t see them when they were jumbled in my brain.
Next steps, I heard Vann say in my head. I smiled at it.
One. There were two nexuses of interaction that I saw. One was Lucas Hubbard, to whom Nicholas Bell, Sam Schwartz, and my father connected, and with whom Jim Buchold argued on a matter related to their mutual business.
The other was Cassandra Bell, to whom Nicolas Bell, Baer, and Kearney were connected, whom Buchold was antagonistic toward, and Hubbard, possibly, based on his argument with Buchold, was sympathetic toward.
So: Dive into both, particularly Cassandra Bell. She was the only person in all of this whom I had not physically met. Arrange an interview if at all possible.
Two. Baer and Kearney: Still unconvinced about the connection here. Dig deeper.
Three. Johnny Sani. Find out what he was doing in Duarte and if anyone knew him there. Learn if there was a connection between him and the City of Hope.
Four. Two outliers in this tangle: My dad and Brenda Rees. I was pretty certain my dad was not up to no good, running for senator notwithstanding. In any event I had a massive conflict of interest if I wanted to investigate him.
As for Brenda Rees, might as well get an interview with her and see if she had anything useful to say.
Five. Nicholas Bell. Who said he was working when he met with Sani, but also appeared to have been there to integrate with Sani, even though it was impossible, because they were both Integrators and because the headset was fake.
So what the hell was really going on in there?
And why did Johnny Sani commit suicide?
Those were the two things that taking all these data points out of my brain and spreading them out into space didn’t make any clearer.