Head On_A Novel of the Near Future

by John Scalzi

  I looked toward the side, at the trees, mostly maple, lining the road, bursting with the reds and oranges of fall foliage color. Each leaf was individually drawn and reacting to the gentle wind that wafted through them, carrying away their scent as it did. Then I turned forward and saw the chauffeur driving the Phaeton, or the back of him, anyway. The cut and weave of his suit fabric was exquisite, as was the detail of his skin, down to the individual short hairs of the back of his neck. The red leather of his seat back was richly grained and I was certain that if I leaned forward and sniffed, I would smell cow.

  I get it, Parker, I thought to myself. You spent a lot of money on your personal space.

  The Phaeton wasn’t real, nor was the chauffeur, or his uniform or the road or the trees or the woody smell of the breeze, or the breeze, for that matter. Nor, the impressively large mansion I was currently wending toward. It was a simulation created in Amelie Parker’s personal space, just like my outsized Waitomo Cave.

  What was different was the amount of processing power it took to generate Parker’s living space. Parker wasn’t generating just a room, or a house, or a single cave. She was generating hectares of land and modeling everything in it to an exhaustive degree. Not just trees but individual leaves. Not just individual leaves but the smell those leaves would create. Not just the smell but the wind that would take it to me, or anyone else, as we sped on by in a simulated car from the 1940s, complete with accurate thrum and crunch from the wheels connecting with fine gravel.

  It’s a level of detail for a personal space that’s possible only with money. It’s not difficult to create a room full of realistic detail. It’s not even difficult to create a passable large area if you know how to cut processing corners, by offering close detail only in a sphere that corresponds to someone’s field of awareness, with everything else generic shapes and patterns until you’re actively looking at it. My own cave is large but dark and self-contained. The only real detail in it is the platform I have over the river. Everything else—the cave, the river, the glowworms far above—is generated with just enough detail.

  But if you want more than just enough, if you want literally billions of leaves and blades of grass and gravel pebbles, then you have to pay for them all. And not only do you have to pay for them, you have to pay for their upkeep. You’re not paying just for their generation. When I was done with my cave, it collapsed into a waiting state. As I looked around Amelie Parker’s estate grounds, I strongly suspected she kept it running when she wasn’t in it.

  You pay for persistence.

  And every Haden knows you’re paying for it, too. In a community where everything is possible and anything imagined can be made real enough, persistence on a very large scale of detail is one of the few possible displays of actual wealth in a virtual world.

  Which is why, ironically, relatively few genuinely wealthy Hadens did it—or, more accurately, few did it in front of people who weren’t very close friends. Most wealthy Hadens created well-appointed but processorily modest areas to meet with business associates and acquaintances. It wasn’t until after they got to know you that they’d take you to the entire planet they’d modeled from the tectonic forces upward.

  Amelie Parker inviting me to this richly detailed personal space of hers suggested one of two things. Either she considered me a very good friend already, on the basis of a single meeting, or she was nouveau riche and didn’t know how Hadens with money did things.

  The Phaeton circled around the fountain in front of the mansion and parked at the steps. The chauffeur, who I saw now bore more than a passing resemblance to 1960s-era Robert Redford, opened the passenger door for me and tipped his cap as I exited the Phaeton. He drove off as I walked up the steps toward Parker, waiting for me on the marble landing at the top of the stairs.

  “Thank you for coming, Chris,” she said, extending her hand.

  I took it. “You asked, I came,” I said. “Although I didn’t expect to arrive by chauffeur.”

  Parker smiled. “Only the best for you. You like the place?” She motioned at the mansion.

  “It’s very impressive.” I could still hear the Phaeton receding into the distance.

  “You mean it’s a bit gauche, don’t you. Showing off an estate-sized personal space on a first meeting.”

  “It’s not really our first meeting,” I reminded her.

  “No, it’s not,” Parker agreed. “Also I think the thing rich Hadens do is hypocritical. You know I have money. I know you have money.” She motioned around her again. “We both can do this. There’s no point in pretending to you or anyone else that this is not how we live.”

  “You’ll scandalize the old money,” I said.

  “Fuck ’em.” Parker motioned toward the mansion. “Shall we?”

  The mansion continued the idle-rich vibe, with slightly more ostentation than was necessary but not enough to be entirely garish, but we didn’t stay in it long enough for me to peer into the details. We walked through to the back portion of the yard, which abutted a lake and a pier. Tied to the pier was a large sailboat.

  “Are we going out on that?” I asked.

  “I thought it would be nice. Unless you have a problem being on the water.”

  I shrugged. “It’s not like I can drown.”

  Parker laughed at this and waved me onto the sailboat. When we were safely on, the sailboat unmoored itself and headed into the lake.

  “I should tell you this space is still relatively new to me,” Parker said, as we sailed.

  “Is it,” I said.

  “I grew up like you, Chris. A rich kid. But unlike you my parents never fully accepted the Haden part of my identity. They kept me focused on the material world. Kept me in my threep most of the time and let me have only a basic connection to the Agora.”

  “That doesn’t sound great.”

  “They didn’t mean any harm in it. But of course not meaning harm isn’t the same as not doing harm. I missed out on a lot that my Haden contemporaries took for granted. And the irony is that my parents’ company has done very well catering to the Haden market along with everything else it does. But Mom and Dad were both definitely of the ‘we don’t like what we don’t understand’ stripe, you know? Very conservative that way. They thought the Agora was somewhere I’d get taken advantage of, or where I’d get radical, heretical ideas.”

  “To be fair, both can happen there,” I said.

  “The Agora is home to millions of people,” Parker pointed out. “Of course it could happen there. But it could happen in the so-called real world, too. In that respect the two are not that different from each other.”

  I glanced around the lake. “So when did you get this?”

  “A couple of years ago. After the first company I founded went public, and I could afford to build something like this without family money. It’s persistent, you know.”

  “I guessed.”

  Parker nodded. “So you know what that’s about. It did it on my own, so Mom and Dad couldn’t complain about it. Well, that’s not true, they did complain about it. We compromised by me never inviting them here.”

  I laughed at this. “Seems fair.”

  “And now you know why I was fine flouting the rules about showing off this place to you, Chris. It’s not about trying to impress you. I know you’re not going to be impressed by it. It’s me showing you who I am. My declaration of independence, if you want. And maybe you’ll be impressed by that.”

  “Why do you want to impress me?”

  “I have my reasons. I’ll get to them in a moment.”

  I didn’t press it. Instead I motioned to the simulation. “And how do you like your declaration?” I asked.

  “Well, to be honest it’s kind of a pain in the ass,” Parker admitted, laughing. “Persistence is expensive. There’s code rot, which means there are places all over the map that need maintenance. Last week the code that governs wind messed up and everything froze for two days until I could get the programmers to
figure out what was going on. Leaves and birds, frozen in the air. And even when it’s running at full capacity I had to cut some corners.” She pointed to the lake. “Go further down than three meters in the lake and you’ll clip out of the simulation. You’ll fall right out and be punted from it entirely.”

  “That’s no good.”

  “I have to warn people if they go swimming, otherwise they get very confused.”

  “You could always downsize.”

  “I could but I don’t want to. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s my pain in the ass, you know?”

  I nodded at this and we spent a few moments silently, enjoying Parker’s pain-in-the-ass simulation.

  “As much as I’m enjoying this, this isn’t why you asked me here,” I said, eventually.

  “It’s not,” Parker said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Do you like working for the FBI, Chris?” Parker asked.

  “I like it just fine,” I said. “It has its ups and downs like any job, but most of the time it’s interesting, and I like the people I work with.”

  “It’s not especially glamorous.”

  “That’s a feature, not a bug. I got tired of being the poster child for an entire people.”

  “But you know you didn’t stop being that, right?” Parker said. “I know you’ve spent the last few years pulling away from the public eye, but even as a lowly FBI investigator you still make waves. You and your partner have a way of making waves with your investigations. That thing with Lucas Hubbard last year. Sending the most famous Haden in the world to jail isn’t exactly laying low. And now investigating Duane Chapman’s death. That’s headlines for days.”

  “We didn’t choose the cases,” I said. “We take them as they come.”

  “Right, but the ones that come to you keep putting you back into the spotlight,” Parker said. “So, you know my company. MobilOn.”

  “The one you want Dad to invest in,” I said. “The one we talked about earlier today. With the rental threeps.”

  “That’s right. On-demand threeps, yes. When we were starting up we thought about who we wanted to partner with. Not just in terms of funding, although obviously that’s important. Also in terms of who we wanted to associate with our brand, as endorsers or even possibly spokespeople. So we paid Ginsberg Associates to make a poll for us a few months ago of the most admired Hadens in the United States.”

  “I didn’t hear of this poll.”

  “It was an internal poll, not for the public. Would you like to know where you showed up on the poll?”

  “Since you brought me here to talk about it, I’m guessing pretty high.”

  “Leaving out Hilketa players, who really are their own category, you’re the fourth most admired Haden in the United States, Chris. Specifically you’re tied for fourth among Hadens, and you’re third among non-Hadens. Which is pretty amazing.”

  “It’s residual goodwill from being a kid,” I said.

  Parker shook her head. “We thought that too,” she said. “But we followed up. Turns out your current job feeds into your ranking. Ironically people like that you’re spending your adult life having an actual job, rather than floating on your unearned wealth. Turns out arresting bad people and sending them to prison makes you look really good.”

  My brain suddenly flashed back to the reporter in the hotel lobby, telling me I was still famous. “There are other Haden FBI officers,” I said, to Parker.

  “Sure. But none of them are you. Which is my point. Your fame persists. And it’s even growing. You’re still you, Chris. As far as celebrity is concerned.”

  “Okay, and?”

  “And, I’m wondering how you like your current job.”

  “It appears to be making me famous.”

  Parker smiled. “I think we can do better.”

  “Ah. Now we’re coming to it.”

  “MobilOn is a great company, Chris. It’s going to be serving a market that needs it now, and it’s going to be growing into a market that doesn’t exist yet, but will. It’s also a market where being first to the field matters. First not only with having product, but with having awareness.”

  “You’re capitalizing off of people being too broke to afford their own threeps,” I said.

  Parker shook her head again. “I know you think that. It was obvious from our conversation this morning. But let me say it again: I didn’t pass Abrams-Kettering, Chris,” she said. “Congress did. So now we’re in a situation where Hadens have a choice of having to spend more than they can afford for a threep, or staying completely within the Agora.” She motioned to her lake. “And that’s not a problem for some of us. But you made the point yourself that most Hadens still have to take part in the physical world. MobilOn will let them keep doing that.”

  “And you want to hire me to make people feel good about downsizing their lives.”

  “I would say I’d want you to help people realize that there are other options between mortgaging their lives or being shut in again.”

  “We’re saying the same thing.”

  “I don’t think so,” Parker said. “And anyway, that would only be part of it. The other part, when non-Hadens start using threeps, as we both know they will, very soon now, is to be someone they trust, holding their hands while they try the technology for the first time.”

  “Ah,” I said. “And that’s your real market.”

  “Of course it is.” Parker looked mildly testy now. “Chris, let me put it this way. This market is going to be served. The technology that’s been Haden-only is going to be available to everyone. Threeps are going to be used by everyone. Now, who do you want to see profiting from it? A company run and operated by Hadens? Or by non-Hadens who will waste no time marginalizing us because there’s money to be made? We deserve to be here, Chris. We deserve to be the ones at the front of this particular line.”

  “We deserve to get rich first.”

  “Yes! Well, richer.” Parker paused for a moment, looking off. Then, “I get it, Chris, you know. You have ethical issues here. Things about MobilOn that bother you. But that’s one of the reasons I want you on our team. To keep us in line. And to let others know you’re keeping us in line. That’s good for us, internally and with messaging.”

  “And it will help you with Dad,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean Dad hasn’t decided to invest in you yet.”

  “That’s not it,” Parker said, and then held up her hand. “I mean, yes, obviously, if you’re on the team, that helps. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by suggesting otherwise. But this is independent of that. Whether or not your dad invests, I want you on the team.”

  “I’m really not in the endorsement market right now. It’s against the FBI rules.”

  “Again, that’s why I’m asking whether you’re happy with your job.”

  “Happy enough not to want to leave it for endorsement money.”

  “How about for endorsement money and equity?” Parker asked. “Two and a half percent. We’re projecting that when we take MobilOn public a few years down the road, a market capitalization of a hundred billion dollars is not outside the realm of possibility. You’d be your own billionaire, Chris. Not just a trust funder.”

  “Two and a half percent for being your celebrity endorser.”

  “Well, no. For that large of a pie slice, we’d get to own you. You have other uses too. We’d have you lobby congresspeople. Write op-eds. Basically go where we tell you. You’d work, not just smile and wave. But the payoff would be worth it.”

  “If you succeed.”

  Parker smiled. “Like I said, this market is going to happen. Is happening. Right now it’s a matter of who gets there first. We’re well-placed. If you’re part of it we’re better off.”

  “And how do I explain running off with someone who is hoping to be an owner in a league I’m currently investigating?”

  “Well, how do you explain investigating a league your
father is currently thinking about being an owner in? If you can square one, I think you can square the other. I want to be clear, Chris, that this offer has nothing to do with your investigation. My Hilketa ownership stake comes out of an entirely different pool of money. Family money. And it’s not like your investigation wouldn’t continue without you. Agent Vann is on top of things, isn’t she?”

  “This tells me you want an answer soon,” I said.

  “I have a series of meetings next Monday with potential investors. I would love to be able to tell them you are on board.”

  “I can’t quit in a week.”

  “No, but you can give notice. That’d work for my purposes.”

  “So you want an answer by next Monday.”

  “I’d love an answer now.”

  “That’s a little rushed for me.”

  “Then I will take Sunday afternoon. Even better would be by Friday evening. I’ll be at the Boston Bays’ season opener then. But I’d take your call.”

  “You said you ran that poll of yours a few months back,” I said.

  “Yes,” Parker said.

  “So, why get hold of me only now? When I’m in the middle of an investigation that you’re at the very least adjacent to? Why not a couple of months ago, when none of this ever happened?”

  “Do you want the truth?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You’re the fourth most trusted Haden in the United States. We went after numbers one through three first.”

  I smiled at this. “Well, that’s fair.”

  “Sorry,” Parker said.

  “I said I wanted the truth.”

  “Yes you did,” Parker agreed. “And now you know. Hopefully that will convince you I’m not up to anything sinister with the timing.”

  “It helps.”

  “You sure you don’t want to give me an answer now?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. I stood up on the deck of the sailboat. “Three meters down?”

  “What? Oh. Yes. Or you can wait for me to turn the boat around.”

  “I think this will work.” It was impolite in Haden personal spaces to magically appear or disappear. Most of us used doors for people to walk in or out of. Parker used a car on the road. That seemed drawn out to me.