Head On: A Novel of the Near Future (Lock In #2)(8)

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 plants 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.