Head On

by John Scalzi

  “Because of all the threeps in the place,” Vann said.

  Ramsey nodded. “There were several there. If they were all drawing power into the induction plates at the same time, there could have been an overload. Or enough of a strain that when anyone else drew power, it tipped the system over.”

  “This building didn’t have circuit breakers?” I asked.

  Ramsey shrugged. “Not up to code, remember.”

  “Has anyone talked to the old lady yet?” Vann asked.

  “Shaniqa Miller,” I said.

  “She’s still out of it,” Ramsey said. “The hospital will call when she’s conscious and able to talk to us. The fire department and the police want to talk to her too.”

  “What about the landlord or the property manager?”

  “We can’t find either,” Ramsey said. “The landlord’s apparently on vacation in Amalfi, wherever that is.”

  “Italy,” I said. My family had vacationed there before.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Ramsey replied, in a tone that suggested the opposite. “The manager, named Woody Poole, is also gone, although probably not to Italy. He told the police he was going to stay with his sister but didn’t give an address or number. We’ll find him.”

  “You impounded the threeps from the apartment?” I asked.

  “We have them. Do you need them right now?”

  “Just the serial numbers and VINs. For the moment.”

  “I’ll send those to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “And now, unless we have anything else to discuss, I think we’re done here,” Burgess said, reasserting herself in the conversation. “And, Agent Shane?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “From now on, when you visit this office, requisition a rental.”

  * * *

  “We should be talking to Alton Ortiz now,” I said to Vann.

  “I wanted to see this first,” Vann said. “It was on the way.”

  “Not really.”

  “It was on the way enough,” Vann amended.

  We were standing in front of the burned-out building where Chapman’s love nest used to be. Debris from the fire littered the front of the building and the sidewalk.

  Vann took out her cigarettes.

  “Smoking at a fire wreck,” I said. “That’s nice.”

  “Everything that was going to burn already did,” she said, and lit one up. She looked around. “This isn’t a great neighborhood.”

  “I think the euphemism is ‘gentrification ready,’” I said.

  “Why do you think he would put a love nest here?” Vann asked. “Professional athletes aren’t known for their financial prudence.”

  “Hey now,” I said. “My dad lived in a tiny town house when he was making millions, because he was investing.”

  “I think we can agree your dad was an outlier in a number of ways, Chris.” Vann took another drag on her cigarette.

  “Chapman was a professional athlete but he wasn’t a star,” I said. “He was getting paid well but not a ridiculous amount like some of the league’s franchise players. So maybe this was what he could afford.”

  “Or maybe this wasn’t a groupie trap like you assumed,” Vann said.

  “I can shoot you the map of the apartment again,” I said. “It looked like it was designed for play.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t. But maybe just not for an endless parade of people.” Vann took another puff and looked around. “This isn’t the place you go to impress people with your star power. This is a place you go when you want to keep a secret.”

  “I think you might be reading too much into an address,” I said.

  “Maybe.” Vann looked like she was going to say more but stopped.

  “Wha—” I started to ask, but Vann held up a finger. I shut up and started to listen too. Then I heard it.

  A meow.

  “It’s the cat,” I said, and walked toward the direction of the meow.

  I needn’t have bothered. A tuxedo cat burst out of the shadows of the trash cans two buildings over and ran up to me, meowing insistently and rubbing against me.

  “It remembers you saved it,” Vann said, watching the cat.

  I knelt down to pet the cat and it jumped up on my back and shoulders. “No,” I said. “It remembers its owner is a threep.”

  The cat jumped back down and looked up at me, expectantly.

  I looked at it and then looked up at Vann. “We can’t leave the cat here,” I said.

  Vann registered a small smile. “Because the cat is a material witness?”

  I picked up the cat and scratched its neck, the cat obligingly arching its neck back, showing the collar and the tag that dangled from it. A tag my threep identified as a small data vault.

  “It might be,” I said.

  Chapter Nine

  “JESUS,” VANN SAID, as we drove to Alton Ortiz’s town house. “You’ve had that cat for fifteen minutes and you’re already spoiling it.”

  “I’m not spoiling it,” I said, petting it as it sat contentedly in my lap, purring. The name on the tag said “Donut.” I assumed it was the cat’s name.

  “You just fed it tuna. You made me stop so you could get tuna, and you fed it to the cat.”

  “That’s not spoiling the cat. It’s feeding it.”

  “Feeding it tuna. As opposed to cat food.”

  “It’s had a rough day,” I said, petting Donut.

  “You don’t understand,” Vann said. “Once you feed a cat tuna, it doesn’t go back to regular cat food. You try to feed that cat regular food now, it will just stare at you accusingly. And if you don’t produce the tuna, the cat will go and shit in your shoes.”

  “Are we speaking from experience, here?”

  “I might be.”

  “I’m in a threep. Threeps don’t generally wear shoes.”

  “The cat will find something else to crap on.”

  “I will warn Marla Chapman about the tuna incident,” I said.

  Vann stared at me briefly, then put her eyes back on the road. “You’re planning to leave the cat with Chapman’s widow?”

  “We don’t need the cat,” I said. “We’ll take the data tag.”

  “And you think Marla Chapman will be happy to see the thing? ‘Here’s the cat your husband kept at the secret apartment where he was fucking other people, Mrs. Chapman. His name is Donut.’”

  “It’s possible I didn’t think this one through entirely,” I said after a minute.

  “It’s possible,” Vann agreed.

  “You want a cat?” I asked Vann.

  She glanced over for a second. “I’m not the one whose lap the thing is sitting in,” she said.

  “That’s because you’re driving. Put the car on autopilot and get some of this action.”

  “No.”

  “Is this because of past trauma involving tuna?”

  Vann said nothing to this as we turned off of Cresson Street and onto Levering, where Ortiz lived.

  “Look,” I said, pointing. Alton Ortiz was walking up the street, in the same direction we were driving. He was carrying grocery bags. We passed him without him noticing and went up the street a few doors from where he lived.

  We parked and settled the cat, who to be fair showed no interest in leaving the car. By the time we walked up to him he was on the small front deck of his apartment, standing by his door.

  “Mr. Ortiz,” I said, “I’m Agent Chris Shane of the FBI.” I popped my badge up on my chest screen. “We talked yesterday.”

  “You were wearing a different threep then,” Ortiz said.

  “Yeah, I do that sometimes.”

  “What happened to the other one?”

  “It burned up in a fire.”

  Ortiz smiled. “You’ve had an exciting twenty-four hours, Agent Shane,” he said.

  “I have,” I said, and motioned to Vann. “This is my partner, Agent Vann. We have a couple of follow-up questions we’d like to ask you.�
��

  “About Duane?” Ortiz asked.

  “Yes, and a couple of other things.”

  Ortiz nodded. “All right. Give me a couple of seconds to open this door.” Ortiz set down his groceries and fiddled with his keys as Vann and I walked up onto his deck. When we were entirely on the deck Ortiz dropped his keys. He grabbed his deck railing and launched himself southward, toward his neighbor’s porch landing. He was making a run for it.

  Unfortunately Ortiz did not factor in his neighbor’s door awning, which was at face height because Levering Street was at an incline. His neighbor’s town house was slightly lower than his own. Ortiz caught a forehead full of awning, twisted weirdly, and missed his footing. He fell down his neighbor’s concrete steps and collapsed into a heap on the sidewalk, moaning a little.

  “I don’t even know what to do with this,” Vann said, after a moment.

  I walked down from the deck and over to Ortiz, who by this time was sitting up, clutching his arm. “How are you?” I asked.

  “I think I broke my arm,” he said.

  “That’s because you were attempting to flee the two of us,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask you why?”

  “I’m not talking to you anymore without a lawyer, Agent Shane,” Ortiz said.

  “You sure you want to do that?” Vann asked, from the deck. “We weren’t coming to arrest you, Ortiz. We just had a couple of questions. Now you’re on the sidewalk with a messed-up arm because you tried to run from us. That’s some highly suspicious behavior. If you talk to us we can clear it up, easy. We can all agree you just accidentally fell, instead of trying to run from a couple of federal agents.”

  Ortiz looked up at her, still holding his arm. “Nice try,” he said. He turned his attention back to me. “No more talking without a lawyer. Am I under arrest?”

  I looked up at Vann. “Do we want to arrest him?”

  “Well, he is technically a fugitive,” Vann said. “He ran from us when we tried to question him.”

  “I don’t think what he did counts as running,” I said. “More ‘jumping and falling.’”

  “Your choice,” Vann said, to me.

  I looked at Ortiz, who looked back, cradling his injury. “Let’s call him an ambulance and figure it out from there.”

  “You know what this means, don’t you,” Vann said.

  “Tell me.”

  Vann pointed to Ortiz. “We’re going to have to come back up here tomorrow to question this asshole.” She fished in her pocket for her smokes. “Christ. I hate this town.”

  * * *

  Demarcus Hinson was the chief design officer of Van Diemen Concepts, and he was chatty and charming and determined to tell us everything about his work, which involved building threeps with simulated sexual organs.

  “Some people are offended by what we do here,” he said, as he gave us a tour of the factory floor. “Factory floor” was perhaps a grand term. Van Diemen’s shop consisted of a dozen fabricators. The fabricators could run off the hard and soft parts of the threep with appropriate printers, and then join them together via robot arms. Somewhat bored-looking human workers stared at status monitors to make sure the construction process was going to specification. Two of the monitor stations appeared unattended but closer examination showed they were not. They were staffed by Hadens, working remotely.

  “Because you give threeps genitals?” Vann asked.

  “Yes, but not only that,” Hinson said. “It’s more that we give Hadens sexuality. Or more accurately, we make it clear that Hadens have sexuality. Obviously they had it before this.” He waved at one of the fabricators, where a threep was being pieced together. “And of course it’s not just about genitals either. Our models have full nerve sensitivity across their entire forms, like most threeps do, but with special emphasis on areas known to help contribute to sexual arousal. When you do that you make a few enemies.”

  “Why do people care?”

  Hinson shrugged. “The usual. Some people have religious or so-called moral issues with sexuality. Other people are uncomfortable with people they see as being disabled having strong sexual drives and fulfilling erotic lives. We have some folks who see Hadens as sexless, in all senses of the term. They get upset when Hadens refuse to live down to their preconceptions. And then there’s just the people who get weird about what they see as robots with dicks.” Hinson laughed at his own joke. “So basically, we get all kinds.”

  “Do you ever get complaints from Hadens?” I asked.

  Hinson pointed at me. “We do, actually,” he said. “We get static from a few Haden purists, the ones that refuse to use threeps for anything. Those folks accuse us of trying to make Haden sexuality conform to non-Hadens’ standards.” Hinson shrugged again. “I don’t see how that works, personally. We serve customers who want our threeps. If you don’t want them, you don’t have to use them. But even those who do use them don’t have to use them in ‘conventional’ ways. Our threeps allow them to explore their sexuality in ways they might not otherwise get a chance to. And in some cases, in ways that are not actually possible with standard biological gender models.”

  “You mean your threeps with the ridges.”

  This got a furrowed brow. “I don’t know how you know about those,” Hinson said. “Those are still in beta. The testers all have to sign nondisclosure agreements.”

  I pulled up a picture of the threeps in Chapman’s apartment and sent it to Hinson, who looked at it on his tablet. “I saw them personally,” I said.

  Hinson looked at the photo and then blinked. “Is … is this room on fire?”

  “It is,” I confirmed. “So these are all your threeps?”

  “They certainly do look like our models,” Hinson said. He pointed to the one with the penis. “This one is a ‘Gable’ model.” He pointed to the one with a vulva. “This is the ‘Bette’ model. We name the explicitly gendered models after golden age cinematic actors.”

  Vann nodded at the genitals. “Based on real life?”

  “Oh, no. I mean, no, not of the actors specifically. Our base models are configured through statistical modeling of various populations. But we also do special orders. We can model your own genitalia, or you can choose from shapes we’ve licensed from adult performers and other notables. You’re smiling, Agent Vann.”

  “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try on someone else’s genitals,” Vann said.

  “Welcome to the future,” Hinson said, smiling back.

  I tapped Hinson’s tablet. “What can you tell us about the other two?”

  Hinson stopped smiling. “These two don’t have an official title yet.”

  “No golden age actor these resemble?” Vann cracked.

  “We’re trying to get away from that particular branding identity,” Hinson said. “Some of our clients asked us for models that would allow for full sensuality without any lingering issues surrounding gender roles. We tried several designs and this was the one that’s worked the best, both aesthetically and functionally.”

  “Functionally?” I asked.

  “Yes. Some earlier nongendered designs asked testers to move in ways they didn’t find very sexy. The ridged design allows for conventional thrusting in a number of positions.”

  “Unconventional genitals for conventional sex,” I said.

  “Sure,” Hinson said. “We pride ourselves in catering to our clients. But humans are still often creatures of habit, in a threep or in their own bodies. And while we can do custom work for clients, we do have the mass market to think about.”

  Vann looked at the factory floor. “How mass are you thinking?”

  “We have a select clientele now but we have expansion plans for the future. Abrams-Kettering passing means that in a few years we’ll have a new class of customers. Non-Hadens of all sorts. Some of them will want threeps for their sexual lives. Because their bodies are aging, or have a disability. Because they want to engage in fantasy play. Or just to try something new.” He motioned to the table
t. “Some of them will want to try something new in a nongendered body. We’re prepared for whatever they want, for whatever reason they want it.”

  “You think that many people will want sexbots,” Vann said.

  “We think we’ll do fine,” Hinson said. “But we’re also realists.” He motioned to the fabricators. “When we have downtime or low orders, we lease out the fabricators. Sometimes we subcontract for major manufacturers for specialized models. Sebring-Warner subcontracts to us for some of their Hilketa models, for example. And right now we’re doing a tidy business subcontracting the production of basic threeps for a major manufacturer. It’s for a new rental start-up.”

  “MobilOn?” I asked.

  Hinson looked momentarily stunned, then recovered. “I probably shouldn’t say,” he said, which I took as a confirmation.

  “Then let’s get back to these,” Vann said, pointing back to Hinson’s tablet.

  “What about them?”

  “One of them activated while I was in this apartment,” I said.

  “You were in this apartment,” Hinson said.

  “Yes.”

  “While it was on fire.”

  “Yes.”

  Hinson looked at my threep critically.

  “Different threep,” I said.

  “I was going to say,” he murmured. “Well, I’m not sure what you need me for, I’m afraid. I assume that if you were in the apartment at the time, then you know who our tester was.”

  “He was dead at the time,” Vann said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “These are Duane Chapman’s threeps. He died on Sunday. This threep was walking around in a burning apartment later that evening. We have a reasonable suspicion the threep might be involved with the apartment fire. At the very least we have questions.”

  “I see,” Hinson said. “Because Chapman was testing these threeps for us, you want us to open his account for log-ins to see who else was accessing them.”

  “That’s right.”

  Hinson spread his hands. “I’m afraid I can’t do that without a warrant. Our clients expect privacy, for obvious reasons. And that privacy extends to those they invite to test our products with.”

  “Here’s the thing about that,” Vann said. “Duane Chapman bought those test units from your company and kept an account related to them on your servers, so you could get feedback on them. But it turns out he didn’t buy them personally. He got them through his pass-through company. Which he co-owned with his wife. And as the owner of those threeps, she wants the information. She asked us to come get it for her.”