Head On Read online

  “I liked basketball better.”

  “As you should,” Mom said. “Basketball’s done very well for our family. But that’s not the question.”

  I paused and tried to frame an answer.

  The long version of which would be:

  I have Haden’s syndrome. I contracted it when I was so young that I have no memory of not ever having it. Having Haden’s syndrome means you are locked into your body—your brain works fine but your body doesn’t. Haden’s affects about 1 percent of the global population and about four and a half million people in the United States: roughly the population of Kentucky, in other words.

  You can’t keep the population of Kentucky trapped in their own heads—especially when one of the victims of the syndrome was Margaret Haden, the then first lady, for whom the disease is named. So the United States and other countries funded a “moon shot” program of technologies, including implantable neural networks to let Hadens communicate, an online universe called “the Agora” to give us a place to exist as a community, and android-like “Personal Transports,” better known as “threeps,” that let us walk around and interact with non-Hadens on a near equal basis.

  I say “near equal basis” because, you know. People are people. Regrettably, many of them aren’t going to treat someone who looks like a robot exactly the way they’d treat a person who looks like a standard-issue human. See Mr. Smarmy Suit handing me a glass the second I walked through the door as an example of that.

  Not only that, but threep bodies are literally machines. Despite the fact they’re generally rated to operate within the usual human range of strength and agility, threeps in sports are generally a no-go. Have a co-worker in a threep for your office softball team? Fine. Playing shortstop for the Nationals? Not going to work. Yes, there were lawsuits. Turns out, in the eyes of the law, threeps are not the same as human bodies. They’re cars, basically.

  So here’s Hilketa. It’s an actual sport, designed to be played by people operating threeps—which meant Haden athletes. And it’s a popular sport, even (and, actually, especially) with non-Hadens, which means the Hadens who play the sport have become bona fide celebrities outside of Haden circles. In just a decade since its inception, the NAHL fields twenty-eight teams in four divisions across the United States and Canada, averages 15,000 spectators a game in the regular season, 95 percent of whom are non-Hadens, and has athletes earning millions and becoming posters on kids’ walls. That matters, for Hadens and for everyone who cares about them.

  Of course, I thought as I watched Duane Chapman’s head sail through the goalposts, giving the Snowbirds eight points, the reason Hilketa is so popular is that the players score points through simulated decapitation, and go after each other with melee weapons. It’s team gladiatorial combat, on a football field, with a nerdy scoring system. It’s all the violence every other team sport wishes it could have, but can’t, because people would actually die.

  In doing so, it makes the players something other than fully human. And that matters too, for Hadens and everyone who cares about them.

  Basically, Hilketa is both representation and alienation for Hadens.

  So: It’s complicated.

  Well, for a Haden. For non-Hadens, it’s just cool to see threeps pull off each other’s heads.

  “It’s okay,” is what I finally told my mom.

  She nodded, took a sip of her drink, and then motioned toward the field. “What’s going on down there?” she asked. Now that the play was done, Duane Chapman’s headless threep was being loaded onto a cart and sent off the field. From the Bays sideline, another threep came in for the next play.

  Before I could answer, I got an internal ping from Tony Wilton, one of my roommates. “Are you at the stadium?” Tony asked me.

  “Yes. In a VIP suite.”

  “I hate you.”

  “You should pity me. It’s mostly filled with corporate suits.”

  “Your life fascinates me. Be that as it may, you should access the stadium Haden feed if you can.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s something really weird happening with Duane Chapman. We’re watching the pay-per-view Haden feed. One minute he’s there and the next he’s not.”

  “He was taken off the field. His threep was, anyway.”

  “Right. But player stats and vitals are supposed to be live for the whole game whether they’re on the field or not. All the other player S&Vs are live but his. People are talking about it. I want to know if it’s just a glitch in the feed we’re getting.”

  “I’ll check,” I said. “Let me get back to you.” I disconnected and turned back to Mom, who had noticed the pause.

  “Everything all right?” she asked.

  “I have to check something,” I said. “Give me a second.” She nodded.

  I opened up the Haden view of the game.

  The game field, previously green and blank, exploded with data.

  Data on the players, on the field, and on the sidelines. Data about the play currently being executed. Data about the field itself. Data about the stadium and attendance. Current data, historical data, projections based on data coming in real time, processed with AI and by viewer sentiment.

  This view of the data, and the game itself, could be displayed from any angle, up to and including the first-person view from the players themselves. Thanks to the overwhelming number of cameras framing the game and the amount of data otherwise filling in and modeling any gaps the cameras missed, one could virtually walk the field while the game was afoot and plant one’s ass down in the very center of the action.

  That’s the Haden view of the game.

  To be clear, the Haden view was not accessible only to Hadens. Aside from being discriminatory, it would also be bad business for a sport whose fan base was massively skewed toward non-Hadens. People pay extra for the Haden view, and it would be stupid to limit access to 1 percent of the possible fan base. Even in the stands at the live event, the faces of non-Haden spectators glinted with the glasses streaming Haden view information into their eyeballs.

  The reason it was called “Haden view” was that the user interface was designed with Hadens in mind—people so used to living in an alternate electronic reality that what seemed like mad chaotic data overload to non-Hadens was the Haden equivalent of a standard spreadsheet. Non-Hadens could use it and view it, but it wasn’t for them. They simply had to manage it as best they could.

  Ironically this became a selling point for the Haden view. It seemed “exotic” to non-Hadens and made them feel like they were getting a glimpse into what it was like to be one of us, and to get access into the deeper areas of our life and experience.

  And, well, sure. It was like that, exactly in the way going to Taco Bell is like living in a small village deep in Quintana Roo. But then, Taco Bell has thousands of locations, so you tell me.

  In the Haden view, I pulled up the player stats and vitals for the Boston Bays.

  Tony was right: All the data for every Bays player was there, in exhausting detail—every single possible in-game statistic, from meters run in the game to the amount of damage their threep had taken, and where, and how close they were to losing a limb or having their threep shut down entirely—to every conceivable bit of career or historical data, relevant or otherwise. Not to mention health data, including heartbeat and some limited neural activity.

  Which might seem strange at first glance. Haden athletes play Hilketa in threeps, not with their physical bodies. But threeps have full sensory input and output. A Haden feels what their threep feels, and that’s going to have an effect on their brains. And like anyone else, Hadens are affected physically by their emotional states. Our hearts race when we’re in the middle of the action. Our brain activity spikes when we feel danger or anger. It’s all there for us.

  And it was all there for every single player on the Boston Bays.

  Except for Duane Chapman. His stats and vitals were nowhere to be found.

 
I scrubbed back several minutes to when I knew Chapman had been on the field. His player box was there but the data from it was gone. Someone had retroactively gone back and pulled all the data for Chapman out of the feed.

  Which was stupid. Thousands of people would have been recording the game’s Haden view data for their personal use. They weren’t supposed to—“Data feeds provided by the North American Hilketa League are the exclusive property of the NAHL and may not be recorded or stored in any form or fashion without the express written consent of the NAHL and its governing bodies,” as the boilerplate read—but they did. Whatever the NAHL was trying to erase was almost certainly already being shared, in the Agora and other places online.

  But they did it anyway. They had to be doing it for a reason.

  I glanced over to where Dad was, surrounded by his throng, and saw a couple of the people there being grabbed by apparatchiks and pulled out of Dad’s adoring circles. I did a face recognition on a few. They were NAHL bigwigs.

  One of them, leaning in to hear the apparatchik whispering in his ear, noticed me looking at him. He turned his back to me. A minute later he walked out the door, followed by several others.

  “Uh-oh,” I said, out loud.

  “What is it?” Mom asked, looking up at me.

  “I think something really bad just happened on the field.”

  “With the player who had his head torn off?”

  “Yes,” I said. “His information was wiped off the Haden view feed and a bunch of NAHL executives just left the skybox.”

  “That’s not good,” Mom said.

  “I don’t know if it’s entirely legal,” I said.

  “Leaving the skybox?”

  “No.” I glanced at Mom to see if she was making a joke. She wasn’t, she was just trying to process what I was saying to her. “Removing data from the feed. If it was an official data stream for the league, they could be tampering with information they’re legally obliged to keep.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I might have to go to work,” I said, and then opened a line to my partner.

  She took her time to answer. “It’s Sunday, you asshole,” Leslie Vann said to me, when she finally picked up.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I think we’re about to get some overtime.”

  “What happened?”

  “I think something bad just happened to a player at the Hilketa match,” I said.

  “Jesus, Chris,” Vann mumbled. “That’s the whole point of the frigging game.”

  “Not this time,” I said. “I think this one may be a special case.”

  Vann grunted and hung up. She was on her way. I went back into the skybox to see the PR people begin to deploy on the would-be investors.

  Chapter Two

  “WELL, THIS IS fun,” Vann said, as she walked up to me. Around us, the corridors of the stadium were in chaos as league apparatchiks hustled would-be investors into private areas for discussion, Metro cops and stadium security managed crowds shocked to learn about the death of Duane Chapman, and press members flitted everywhere, looking for stories to file.

  “Are you caught up on the news?” I asked.

  “I heard about the player death on the way here. They did a live broadcast of the press conference. Did you listen?”

  I nodded. “Well, I did that between trying to get someone to talk to me.”

  “They shutting you out?”

  “Not exactly shutting me out. Just not paying attention to me as they run by.”

  “You need to be more forceful.”

  “I think I need to not be in an android body.”

  “There’s an irony for you, considering where we are.”

  “The whole day has been like this so far, to be honest.”

  “I bet.” Vann stepped back to avoid being collided into by a hurtling apparatchik. “Why didn’t you stick with your parents? I’m sure they’re somewhere in this maze being fluffed by a Hilketa league executive. You could have listened in.”

  “One, that’s an image I never needed in my brain and I will make you pay for it,” I said. Vann did not seem impressed by the threat. “Two, I foolishly thought that someone might actually be willing to help out an FBI agent.”

  “Yeah,” Vann said. “So, why don’t you try to locate your parents and find out what the league has been saying to them about this little event, and meanwhile I’ll grab one of these flunkies passing by and make them give me someone to talk to.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to find them in this place.”

  Vann stared for a minute. “It’s called a phone, Chris.” She strode off in search of someone to threaten.

  I have no idea where we are, my mother texted back when I sent to her. I felt a moment of real, if futile, vindication at this. But not too far from the skybox, I think.

  I’ll come find you, I sent, and then looked down the endless corridors. I remembered I was a trusted contact for my mother and pulled up her location on an internal screen.

  It told me she was at the stadium. Thanks, that was helpful.

  “Hey.”

  I looked up to see a young woman in a suit jacket staring at me. “Yes?”

  “You were in the skybox earlier, right?”

  “I was.”

  The young woman sighed in relief. “I was told to gather everyone. Come with me, please.” She beckoned me with a wave. I was curious enough to follow.

  She led me to a small conference room that was jammed with the German, Japanese, and other potential investors, none of whom looked particularly pleased to be there at the moment. “We’re going to begin the investor conference in just a moment,” the young woman said, and then slipped out.

  I looked around at the crowd. Middle-level rich people looked the same wherever in the world they were from. These ones were mostly male, mostly middle-aged, and mostly looking like they shouldn’t have to be here wasting their time.

  The door to the room burst open and a man walked in. He was the suit who had tried to give me his empty glass back in the skybox.

  “I’ve met most of you before but for those I’ve not, I’m MacKenzie Stodden, head of NAHL franchisee relations,” he said, once he’d gotten to the lectern set up near the far wall of the room. “And to begin I want to thank you for being with us here today at what is now one of most successful pre-season games ever.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” one of the would-be investors asked. He was not Japanese or, I suspected, German. He sounded like he was from Jersey. “You just had a player die on the goddamned field.”

  “In the final moments of the game,” Stodden said. “Prior to that moment, the game had the highest real-time and streaming numbers we’ve seen for a pre-season game, and the highest number of Haden view purchases by a significant percentage.”

  “And then your player fucking died,” Jersey said.

  “Yes,” Stodden said. “A tragic accident which everyone in the league feels shocked and deeply saddened about.” He said this in a tone of voice that registered neither shock nor sadness. I recognized the tone as one you would get out of a salesman of some really high-end product, trying to close a deal. Which I suppose was exactly what he was. “Duane Chapman was admired and respected across the league, and in the league’s season opener this Friday night in Boston, we’ll be doing a special pre-game segment to honor him and his career. But neither I nor the league want this accident to overshadow the investment proposition Hilketa offers to you as potential franchisees, both here and in the international leagues we plan to create.”

  “How did the player die?” someone asked, in what sounded to me like a Russian accent.

  “The medical examiner in Philadelphia will be examining Chapman tonight,” Stodden said.

  “That’s not an answer. You must already know.”

  “It would be irresponsible for me to speculate.”

  “And it would be irresponsible for me, or anyone else here, to invest in a league
that will not share information.”

  Stodden sighed. “Look,” he said. “This is not something we want to see in the press, but Duane and his wife were having trouble and he had taken to … well, I guess ‘self-medicating’ is the euphemism that we would want to use, here. It had begun to affect his performance in pre-season practices. He was given a warning, and we thought it was working. We may have been wrong.”

  “There’s a difference between being high, and dying during a game,” Jersey said.

  “I’m saying it’s possible that his usage affected his physical well-being long-term, and we saw the results of that today.”

  “So the problem is him, not the league,” someone else said, and it was impossible to tell whether the statement was meant to be sincere or sarcastic.

  “The league has been in business for over a decade,” Stodden said. “In all that time, with all the equipment and training that we use, and with all the product partnerships that we have, we’ve never had a player die. We’re confident that, as tragic as Duane’s death is, this is literally a glitch. An anomaly. And something you, as franchisees, will not need to concern yourself with as we move forward with expansion plans.”

  “You want us just to forget it ever happened,” the Russian said.

  “Of course not,” Stodden said. “We want you to have confidence that the league will investigate this tragedy and take steps to ensure it can’t happen again. We’ll come out of it quickly, both stronger and better.”

  “What happened to Duane Chapman’s feed?” I asked.

  “Pardon me?” Stodden peered over to me and seemed momentarily confused at the appearance of a threep in the midst of his investors.

  “The players have a data feed with their physical stats that streams through the entire course of the game, including heart rate and brain activity,” I said. “When Chapman’s threep was carried off the field, his data feed disappeared. Just his, no one else’s.”

  “You’re … you’re from catering,” Stodden said, recognizing me, sort of.

  “Actually, I’m from the FBI,” I said, and suddenly every head in the room locked on to me. “And I’d really like to know what happened to that data feed.”