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.