Head On

by John Scalzi

  * * *

  “That was one way to get their attention,” Vann said to me. The two of us were standing around in a now-deserted private skybox, waiting for a league representative to come talk to us. I had caught her up on recent events. “I was just threatening peons to get higher up the chain of command here, but what you did works too.”

  “I think it’s interesting that this Stodden character could simultaneously say they didn’t know why Chapman died and also blame him for his own death,” I said.

  “You said his job was franchisee relations, right?” Vann asked. I nodded. “Then it’s not his job to tell the truth. It’s his job to keep the money from bolting.”

  “I think I ruined that plan,” I said.

  “Yes, well,” Vann said. “Now you know why we finally have someone important coming to talk to us.”

  The door to the skybox opened and a man and a woman walked into the room. The woman came up to Vann, smiling, hand extended. “Agent Vann. I’m Coretta Barber, NAHL associate vice president for publicity.” Vann shook her hand, and Barber came over to me to shake hands as well. “Agent Shane. And this is Oliver Medina, general counsel for the league. Shall we sit?” She motioned to a small, round bar table. We sat.

  Barber turned to me. “I understand you caused a bit of a commotion at an investor meeting, Agent Shane.”

  “I didn’t intend to,” I said. “I was just curious what happened to that data feed.”

  “You’re aware that meeting was meant to be private and confidential,” Medina said.

  Vann jumped in. “One of your own people led Shane into the meeting.”

  “I wasn’t asked if I was an investor,” I said. “I was asked if I was in the skybox earlier. Which I was.”

  “You know who Shane’s parents are,” Vann said. “You can’t imagine they wouldn’t talk to their own kid.”

  “Nevertheless, I expect you to treat the information you learned as privileged,” Medina said.

  “You can expect anything you want,” Vann said. She turned to Barber. “But this is now an FBI investigation. Speaking of which, maybe you can explain why you were trying to cover up the details of Duane Chapman’s death by pulling his data feed.”

  “Of course we weren’t trying to cover up what happened to Duane Chapman,” Barber said. “We couldn’t have covered it up. We were simply protecting his privacy, and the privacy of his family.”

  “His privacy,” Vann said.

  “That’s right.” Barber nodded.

  “Forty thousand people in the stands watched Chapman die, Ms. Barber.”

  “Forty thousand people watched a threep being taken off the field,” Barber said. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “You broadcast your players’ heart rate and brain activity to eighty thousand people a game for $29.95 a pop,” Vann replied, “or $39.95 for three games in a single day. If you could sell the data on when your players peed, you’d do it.”

  Barber frowned. “I think you’re making light of a serious and tragic situation.”

  I jumped in. “What Agent Vann is trying to say is that data privacy isn’t something the NAHL has been very concerned about before.”

  “I don’t think that’s accurate.”

  I shook my head at this. “I checked to see whether the NAHL had ever redacted a data feed of a player before. You’ve got eight years of Haden view data available and in all that time you’ve never pulled a data feed.”

  “We’ve never had a player die on the field before this.”

  “Is that the protocol?” Vann asked. “Someone dies, you pull the feed? Is that in the NAHL bylaws somewhere?”

  “I would have to check,” Barber replied, flustered. “But my point is once it became clear that Duane was in trouble, it made sense to pull the feed.”

  Vann squinted at Barber. “Why?”

  Medina spoke up. “So his family wouldn’t have to learn he died from a goddamned data feed, Agent Vann. So that one of us could break the news to them, not a sportscaster or some random troll from the Agora.”

  Vann looked over to Medina. “Uh-huh.”

  “You don’t seem particularly sympathetic,” Medina said, to Vann. “Perhaps you would have preferred some troll tell his mother, or his sister.”

  “If you were trying to avoid that, you could have just cut the feed from that point,” I said. “But you took down the whole feed. Everything from the moment the game started.”

  “And?” Medina asked.

  “You had a player die. You have a live feed of data relating to his physical status. Then you took it down. Who knows what you’ve been doing to it since.”

  Medina smirked. “Because we would tamper with data that people already have.”

  “No one’s data feed but yours is official,” I pointed out. “Not even your broadcast partners’ feeds.”

  “And no one has any data from after the moment you pulled it,” Vann said.

  “Duane’s death was an accident,” Barber said.

  “Yes,” Vann said. “If only we had a verifiable data feed to help confirm that. But we don’t, so we can’t. Which is why we’re here, Ms. Barber. The minute the league pulled that feed, we had to assume something other than an accident.”

  “If you’re suggesting that the league is in any way implicated in a wrongful death, we’ll be stopping this conversation now,” Medina said.

  Vann turned to me. “Look, it’s a lawyer.”

  “I actually knew that,” I said.

  “Mr. Medina,” Vann said, turning back to the lawyer, “by all means, stop this conversation now. And when you do, I’ll do what I do, which is to get warrants for every single bit of data relating to Duane Chapman’s death, and also everything else I think is even vaguely related to his death, which will be many things. I will also tell the Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia Police Departments to warrant up as well, and between the three of us we’ll be very noisy about it. Which I’m sure is a thing that your league would love to have happen right now, while you’re trying to keep potential investors, who are already nervous about a dead player, from bailing and taking their money with them.”

  Barber looked appalled. Medina, on the other hand, just looked annoyed. He got it.

  “Or?” Medina asked, finally.

  “Or, for starters, you can tell us why you actually pulled that data.”

  Medina looked at Barber and nodded. She sighed. “Deputy Commissioner Kaufmann ordered it pulled,” she said. I looked up the name. Alex Kaufmann appeared in my vision, youngish.

  “Why?” Vann asked.

  “Because he’s stupid,” Medina said, and then held up a hand to preempt Vann’s objection. “I know. But it’s actually the truth. He saw the feed, realized Chapman was dying, and panicked. He ordered the technical director to pull the feed. She wasn’t happy about it but she didn’t have any choice.”

  “Who is the technical director?” I asked.

  “Giselle Hurwitz,” Barber said.

  “Is she here?”

  “I think so. She may be back at the hotel by now.”

  Vann turned to Medina. “And she’ll talk to us.”

  “I’ll let her talk to you, yes.”

  “And Chapman’s data?”

  “What about it?”

  “We’ll need it.”

  “Why?”

  “Did you miss the entire conversation we just had about the potential for the data to have been compromised?” Vann said.

  “We need our own people to look at it now,” I said. “We have to be sure. And we need to see what happened after the feed was down.”

  “I’m worried about it getting out,” Barber said.

  Vann smiled. “This is your privacy gambit again.”

  Barber flared at this. “Look, it’s not just a bullshit line. The last thing we want is Duane’s family to find this data feed floating around with people speculating about it.”

  “So you’re not going to put it back up?” I asked.
<
br />   Barber opened her mouth but Medina quickly put his hand on her shoulder to silence her. “We’ll be returning the game portion of Duane’s feed to the overall data set very soon. We can’t certify the game stats until they are in there. The rest of it I feel comfortable keeping out of the public eye for now.”

  “We need all the data,” Vann repeated.

  “Giselle will have it,” Medina said. “She’ll give it to you. You can verify it if you want. And, Agent Vann.”

  “Yes?”

  “Later, if I see it out there in the world, I’ll come find you.”

  Chapter Three

  THE LOBBY OF the Hilton looked like a press conference had exploded inside of it. The lobby itself was filled with reporters and other various grades of journalists looking for someone, anyone, to get a quote from, while outside the lobby, television and streaming journalists and their crews jostled each other for space to do their one-shots.

  “This seems excessive,” Vann said to me as we got out of the taxi we took to the hotel.

  “It’s the league’s first player death, at the last pre-season game,” I said. “And the league was actively courting new money. It’s national news.”

  Vann grunted at this and we went into the lobby through the revolving door. As we came out of the door, a couple dozen sets of eyes looked at us and a second later, through their glasses, identified both Vann and myself as FBI agents, and me as, well, me.

  “Oh, here we go,” Vann said, and then we were surrounded by press yelling questions at us.

  “Why is the FBI investigating the death of Duane Chapman?” shouted one journalist, as we trudged toward the elevator bank.

  “No comment,” Vann said.

  “Is there reason to believe there was foul play in Chapman’s death?” shouted another.

  “No comment.” Vann jabbed the elevator call button.

  “Agent Shane, your father may be investing in the league, is it appropriate for you to be part of the FBI investigation?”

  “No comment,” I said.

  “Chris, are you dating anyone?”

  “What?” I said. “Really?”

  “You’re still famous!”

  “Jesus. No comment,” I said. Vann grabbed me into the elevator and glared at the reporters to keep them from blocking the doors.

  “You’re still famous,” Vann said to me, mockingly, after the doors closed.

  “I’m really not,” I protested.

  “I don’t think it’s something you get to vote on.”

  “I’ll pass anyway.”

  “You used to do that every day?”

  “I had my share of press gaggles when I was growing up,” I said. “But not for something like this.”

  Vann nodded. “A firehose would solve the problem.”

  “In the short run,” I agreed. “In the long run it would just make more trouble. Reporters don’t forgive being firehosed.” We exited the elevator.

  Giselle Hurwitz was a Haden and her “room” at the Hilton was a charging closet with an inductive floor mat. We met in a conference room the league had reserved for meetings.

  “Thank you for meeting me here,” she said, after we had made our introductions and sat. “I didn’t want to bother with the lobby.”

  “Completely understandable,” I said.

  “Did Medina explain why we’re here?” Vann asked Hurwitz.

  She nodded. “You want Duane’s data feed.”

  “We also want to ask you about why it was pulled.”

  “Oh, that,” Hurwitz said. Her threep was one that had facial movement in it. She pulled a frown. “That was all Commissioner Kaufmann. I warned him against it.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He freaked out. Me and Taylor, my assistant director, were monitoring the player feeds in the broadcast booth when he came in and told me to pull Chapman’s feed out of the data stream. He slammed open the door and the first words out of his mouth were ‘Pull Chapman’s feed. Pull the whole thing.’”

  “You saw that Chapman’s vitals were all over the place by then?” I asked.

  “Sure, but we’ve had that happen before,” Hurwitz said. “I mean, we haven’t had anyone die before. But we’ve had players affected during games. Last season we had Clemente Salcido have a seizure during a game. He was with Mexico City. His threep just dropped and shook, and his brain activity was spiking all over the place.”

  “And no one told you to cut the feed then.”

  “We were told to highlight it,” Hurwitz said. “We can take any individual player data and pin it so everyone who has Haden view sees it. The broadcast director had us pin it and then feed it to our broadcast affiliates. He said it was great drama. He was kind of an asshole.”

  “What happened to the player?” Vann asked.

  “Salcido was benched for the rest of the season and then dropped. The league’s insurance carrier didn’t want to cover him for play. They were worried his next seizure would kill him.”

  “Did what was happening to Chapman look like what happened to Salcido?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember,” Hurwitz said, and spread her hands. “Sorry. It was a while ago. And I’m a tech person anyway, not a doctor.”

  “Can you get us the feed for Salcido’s event?”

  “Sure, but that’s my point. I don’t have to get you the feed for that. You can get it yourself. It’s in the league’s public data archive. We don’t pull feeds. Not before tonight.”

  “So why now?” Vann asked.

  “You’d have to ask Commissioner Kaufmann.”

  “You didn’t ask why?”

  “Of course I asked why. And he said, ‘Pull the fucking feed or you’re fired.’ He’s the boss. Or one of them, anyway. I wasn’t going to lose my job over it.” Hurwitz nodded to me. “You know why.”

  I nodded back. A year ago Congress passed the Abrams-Kettering Bill, drastically cutting back government assistance and coverage for people with Haden’s. It’s not a cheap syndrome to have, even with government assistance.

  A year isn’t a lot of time, but it’s enough time for a lot of Hadens to notice the economic floor was suddenly tilting out from under them. Hurwitz’s gig as a technical director for the NAHL probably paid well, and it wouldn’t do for a league that relies on Haden athletes to give its Haden employees a rough ride on benefits.

  But these days she and most other Hadens were working without a net. The rationale behind the Abrams-Kettering Bill was that advances in technology and medicine meant Hadens were now playing on a more even field along with everyone else, and that the government could scale back the services it had provided them over the last couple of decades.

  It was a nice theory. Hurwitz’s comment suggested in practice there were some issues.

  But what did I know. I was a government employee with excellent benefits. And a ridiculous trust fund.

  “You didn’t worry that you’d get in trouble for pulling the feed?” Vann asked.

  “No,” Hurwitz said, then amended, “Well, a little. But there were six other people in the broadcast booth. They all heard Commissioner Kaufmann order me to pull Chapman’s feed. I figured it would be hard for him to pin it entirely on me if it became a problem.” She paused. “Is it a problem? I mean, I know it’s a problem, or you wouldn’t be here. But I want to know if it’s a problem problem. I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “There’s a problem,” Vann said. “I don’t think it’s your problem. It might be Alex Kaufmann’s problem, though.”

  Hurwitz seemed to relax at that. “Well, he’s staying here at the hotel. In case you wanted to ask him.”

  Vann smiled at Hurwitz. “Did you just throw your boss under the bus, Ms. Hurwitz?”

  There was the smallest of mechanical noises as Hurwitz’s threep made a smile. “He threatened to fire me today, Agent Vann. I think it’s okay to make him sweat a bit.”

  * * *

  Kaufmann didn’t answer his phone but texted back t
o me a minute later. Apparently he was screening his calls. I’ve been expecting you, he texted. I’m literally just about to hop into the shower. Can you come up in fifteen minutes? Room 2423.

  “He’ll meet us in fifteen minutes,” I said, to Vann. We were returning to the lobby.

  “Good, I need a smoke.”

  “Have you thought about quitting?”

  Vann gave me a look.

  “You should quit, you know,” I said.

  “I’m going to keep giving you this look.”

  “Yeah, I know.” The elevator opened up and we exited the lobby so Vann could have her cigarette. The journalists who accosted us earlier were occupied with a league executive. We escaped the lobby unscathed.

  “Have you looked at the data yet?” Vann asked me as she puffed.

  “No,” I said. Hurwitz sent it to me directly, threep to threep. She pulled it straight out of the NAHL’s data cloud and I downloaded it directly into my threep’s local memory. “I was going to contract Tony to look at it. He’d know whether it’s been tampered with.”

  Vann nodded. In addition to being my flatmate, Tony Wilton was a high-end computer nerd who regularly contracted with the federal government. He was smart, easy to work with, and already in the vendor system, and when he got paid, some of the payment went toward the communal rent. So in a way it was like getting cash back.

  “But it’s all there,” Vann said.

  “It’s all here as far as I can tell,” I agreed. “And soon enough we’ll see what it has to say about Chapman dying.”

  “It’s going to show that Chapman had some sort of seizure, like that other guy.”

  “Salcido,” I prompted.

  “Right.” Vann puffed again. “Hadens have a higher incidence of seizures because of what the syndrome does to the brain and because of the neural nets we stick in there.” She looked at me. “Have you ever had one?”

  “A seizure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. How about you?” When Vann was a teenager she had contracted Haden’s and suffered through both the early flu-like stage, and then the much more painful second phase, which resembled meningitis. Unlike many whose progression went that far, she was not locked in, nor did she suffer significant mental damage or cognitive impairment. To all outward appearances, she came out of it just fine.