Head On: A Novel of the Near Future (Lock In #2)(7)
“She likes aimless.”
“Yes, well. If it makes her happy, I suppose. Look, here comes the problem child again.” She pointed to Stephens, who returned with Mom’s glass.
A roar went up from the stands. Not because Mom got her drink, but because on the field, Duane Chapman’s head was ripped clean off.
Mom grimaced. “I hate when that happens.”
“The player is fine,” Stephens assured her. “It looks violent, but that’s a threep body. The player and his actual head are as safe as can be. He’s a Haden, after all.”
My mother looked at Stephens, blankly and silently.
“Which, uh, you knew,” Stephens said, awkwardly.
Mom continued to stare blankly at Stephens.
“You know, I’m going to check in with my boss to see if she needs me for anything,” he said, and sprinted off again.
Mom watched him go, and then returned her attention to the game, where Duane Chapman’s headless threep sprawled on the Hilketa playing field. Meanwhile his head, carried off by the opposing team, was making its way down the pitch, one threep-crushing meter at a time.
“It disturbs me to see a headless threep body on the field,” she said. “It makes me think about you.”
“None of my threeps ever lost its head,” I said.
“There was that time you rode your bike out in front of that truck,” Mom pointed out. “When you were eight.”
“In that case it was less my threep losing its head than it was it hitting a truck and disintegrating and losing everything.”
“That’s my point,” Mom said. “Threep bodies aren’t designed to have body parts removed.”
I pointed to the field, where the Snowbirds and the Bays were literally going after each other with swords and war hammers. “Those threep bodies are,” I said. “Decapitations and severed limbs add to the drama of the game.”
As if to accentuate the point, one of the Snowbirds slashed viciously at a Bay, whose arm lopped right off. The Bay responded by bringing a mallet down on the Snowbird’s threep skull. Then both of the players ran off in the direction of Duane Chapman’s head. The entire exchange brought more cheers from the crowd.
Mom grimaced again. “I’m not sure I like this game very much.”
“All my flatmates do,” I said. “When they found out I was coming to the game they plotted about how to kill me and take my ticket. They’re fans.”
“But you don’t like it very much, do you?” Mom asked. “You shrugged when Stephens asked you if you were a fan. And I don’t remember you being much for it growing up.”
“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.