Head On_A Novel of the Near Future

by John Scalzi

  “So it was you!” the twins said.

  “No,” I said. “I was able to account for every second of my time. That’s one of the nice things about being a Haden. When you need it, you can produce documentation of your whole life.”

  “Any idea who might have?” Tony asked, slapping a card down in front of Tayla.

  “I might, but I can’t say.”

  “So professional,” Tayla murmured, and then countered Tony’s card.

  “Kim Silva wants her cat back,” I said to the twins as I moved past them.

  “It’s Duane Chapman’s cat,” they said.

  I shook my head. “Lived in Chapman’s illicit apartment. But is Silva’s.”

  “Well, he likes it here,” they protested. “You can ask him.”

  “He’s still her cat,” I pointed out. “I’m going to have to give him back soon.”

  “But Tony isn’t done with that data vault!”

  “Thanks for ratting me out, guys,” Tony said to the twins.

  “You can’t give the cat back before then.”

  “I have Kim Silva and her entire league mad at me for no reason of my own,” I said. “I suspect returning the cat will help.”

  “Hmph,” the twins said, and then stomped up the stairs, presumably to spend more time with their purloined cat.

  “I told you that cat was trouble,” Tony said.

  “Actually it was Tayla who said the cat was trouble,” I reminded him. “You were the one who complained we had not had a house meeting about the cat.”

  “I stand by that,” Tony said. “And also my complaint about the twins hogging the cat.”

  “It’s a cat,” I said. “If Donut wants to spend time with you he’ll show up in your room and sit on your important things.”

  “That’s my point. I keep trying to lure Donut in and then the twins scoop him up and take him back to their room.”

  “It’s delightful how childishly petulant you’ve become about it,” Tayla said.

  “I just feel cats are a community resource.” Tony laid down another card.

  “Uh-huh.” Tayla dropped a card of her own. “Just remember what I said about how I still get a dog out of this.”

  “That’s another house meeting,” Tony said to her.

  “I already have the votes.”

  “So, Tony, I hear from the grapevine that you have made no progress with the data vault,” I said, changing the subject.

  “Guilty,” Tony said. “But then I told you it was unlikely unless you found me the physical token that unlocks it. So I don’t feel too bad about it.” He pointed to Tayla. “She, on the other hand, may have found something useful to you.”

  “Oh?” I turned my attention to Tayla.

  “So you remember you asked me if there were any drugs for Hadens that are intentionally designed to increase pain,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “Two things about that. First, I hate you for putting that idea in my brain, because for the last couple of days all my downtime has been spent going down the rabbit hole of Haden-specific pharmaceutical therapies. It’s like you activated a nexus of my obsessive-compulsive disorder, my professional interests, and my love of weird trivia.”

  “Uh . . . sorry?”

  Tayla waved off the apology. “Second, I didn’t find any specific drug or therapy that is designed to increase pain in Hadens. But if you dig through the journals you can find references to experimental therapies that do a lot of weird shit. And I think I might have found something on point for you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “About fifteen years ago Neuracel developed a drug they called Attentex, which was designed for the general population to help kids with attention deficits to focus. It didn’t work very well with non-Hadens but it showed some promise with us, especially when paired with mild electrical stimulation of the inferior frontal junction of the brain. Without the stimulation it was inert. It didn’t have any effect. With it, some of the study subjects snapped to attention.”

  “And of course we Hadens have neural networks in our brains, which can be used to transmit targeted electrical stimulation,” Tony said. He slapped down another card. “It takes a little bit of programming but it can be done.”

  “I assume there’s a reason why I haven’t heard of Attentex before this,” I said to Tayla.

  “There is,” she said. “The side effects in the test subjects included intense nausea, vertigo, sensitivity to sound and light, and seizures.”

  “So your attention would be focused,” Tony said. “But it would be focused on how sick you were feeling.”

  “Basically,” Tayla said. She laid down her own card and Tony swore. Clearly this card game was not going very well for him. “And the problem for Neuracel, according to the paper I was reading, was that the side effects increased with the electrical stimulation.”

  “This is the part where my ears perked up,” Tony said, then motioned to Tayla. “Tell Chris about the plateaus.”

  “Plateaus?” I asked.

  “So, when the electrical stimulation was applied in conjunction with Attentex, stress reactions went up and were very slow to come back down, even when the electrical stimulation was withdrawn. So when electrical stimulation was provided again—”

  “It made the side effects even worse,” I finished. “Interesting.”

  “I assume this has some relevance to your investigation,” Tayla said, and motioned to Tony. “The soon-to-be loser of this round here wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “You know we’re doing two out of three,” Tony said.

  “You might be,” Tayla said. “But I know when I’ve won.”

  “This information about Attentex is out in the public?” I asked Tayla.

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, sort of. Once Neuracel discovered it might have application for Hadens it applied to have its research costs funded by the National Institutes of Health, which meant that under the Haden Research Initiative Act it had to publish all the findings, including the side effects, into the government research database. So it’s out there. But you really have to go looking for it. The database is immense. Literally millions of pages of research data. I found it by accident, just clicking through to something else. I’m probably the first person to read it since it was put into the database. Almost certainly the first since Neuracel went under.”

  “It went under because of this?”

  “No,” Tayla said. “The research on Attentex was subsidized by the government and then they probably took a tax credit on the rest of their research when it didn’t pan out. This failure didn’t hurt them.”

  “This is why when any company before Abrams-Kettering found themselves blowing a wad of cash on something stupid, they’d find a late-stage application to Hadens for it,” Tony said. “It was a well-known, well-loved tax hedge. Which is one reason why Abrams-Kettering passed.” He put down his last card.

  Tayla slapped a card over his and then raised her arms in victory. Then she turned her attention back to me. “No, I looked it up. A few years ago a new CEO tried to move Neuracel away from pharmaceutical development and into consumer goods like sports drinks and supplements based on their already existing products. It went very poorly. The stock crashed, Neuracel went bankrupt, and it was sold for parts. The CEO walked away with a fifty-million-dollar golden parachute, so that was nice for him.” She turned to Tony. “You’re paying for the movie tomorrow.”

  “So unfair,” Tony said.

  “If by ‘unfair’ you mean ‘lost entirely fairly because you suck,’ then yes. Otherwise, no.”

  Tony turned to me. “Want to play cards?”

  “I’ll play with Tayla,” I said. “She seems better at them.”

  “Oh, good, soon I’ll have two free movies,” Tayla said, then kicked Tony lightly to get him out of his chair. “Have a seat, friend.”

  “Is . . . that a tank threep?” the twins asked, looking out the house’s windows into the street, and t
he rest of us had roughly a second to look up from our game before the tank threep tore through the windows and into the house, spraying glass everywhere.

  The twin’s threep put up its arms and was quickly punched aside by the tank, who then dropped something on the floor and moved quickly away.

  “Fire!” Tayla yelled. What the tank had dropped was an incendiary device of some sort. It set fire to the floor and rug and the flames were moving quickly toward the couch. Tayla unfreezed and ran to the fire extinguisher on the living room wall. There were fire extinguishers in nearly every room of the house. When you’re a Haden, you have fire extinguishers everywhere in your living space. It’s hard to move an immobile body.

  Tony ran to the twins, who were struggling to get up off the floor. The hit had damaged their threep. I looked as the tank lumbered, quicker than expected, toward the stairs.

  Toward the stairs that would take it upstairs to where our bodies were.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, and ran to block it from the stairs, running straight into it, center mass.

  I had no illusions that I was going to be able to defeat or damage the tank on my own. What I wanted was to keep it on the ground floor until one of the other flatmates could help me.

  I hit the tank and shoved hard. It wobbled slightly and then punched me directly in the head. I heard and felt something in the neck of my threep give way at that and suddenly couldn’t turn my head to the left anymore. The tank punched again and this time I avoided the punch and wrapped my arms around its neck to drag it to the floor.

  It didn’t follow me. Instead it turned, picked a wall, and drove me into it, shoving me deep into the drywall. I lost my grip and fell. The tank turned to head toward the stairs—

  —and was clocked in the head by Tayla with the fire extinguisher. She had put out the fire and was now swinging freely. Tony by this time had stopped bothering with the twins and was looking around for something to hit the tank with.

  Tony! Upstairs! I sent to him on the house’s local communication channel. We set it up to talk to each other when some of us were watching movies or playing games on the downstairs monitors, or needed to talk to each other at night when we’d already retired. Easier than yelling and in this case also more secure.

  Tony got what I was saying to him. He raced to the stairs while I jumped into the kitchen and grabbed the fire extinguisher there.

  I came back out just in time to see the tank duck Tayla’s wide swing with the fire extinguisher and then absolutely hammer her threep, lifting it up and hurling it all the way across the room.

  Shit—Tayla sent, and then her threep collapsed onto the floor.

  The tank turned again, and I raised my arms to swing my fire extinguisher. The tank moved to block the blow, which was when I let it have it in the head with the contents of the extinguisher. The dry chemical in the extinguisher generously coated the tank’s head, blocking its vision. It tried to wipe the chemicals off its head and discovered the tank’s hands were not great for the purpose. I went in and started swinging hard at its arms.

  What are you doing? Tayla sent to me. She was back up.

  It’s a Hilketa threep, I sent back. When they take damage parts fall off.

  She got it immediately. She picked up her fire extinguisher and ran over, squirting it in the face to put a new layer of blinding chemical on, and then swinging at the tank’s nearest leg. The three of us danced around for a few seconds, the sound of my and Tayla’s extinguishers beating out the time.

  Then Donut the cat came out of the twins’ room and meowed down the stairs, as if to say, What the actual fuck, humans?

  The tank threep lashed out, knocking me and Tayla off balance, and lurched up the stairs toward Donut. Donut took one look at the rampaging tank and bolted, running in the direction of my room at the far end of the upstairs. I righted myself and took off up the stairs after the tank, grabbing at its legs.

  Call the cops, I sent on the house channel.

  Already did, the twins answered, and then I got a head full of tank fist, dislodging me from the leg.

  The tank crested the stairs, and then immediately flew back simultaneous to a very loud bang. It came from Tony’s shotgun, which he kept in the house for home defense. The pellets struck the tank in the shoulder, spinning it counterclockwise and detaching its left arm from its body, which flew into the wall and then tumbled down the stairs past me.

  Tony’s shotgun was a single-shot and before he could reload the Tank was up and barreling toward him, shoving him into the wall and knocking the shotgun out of his hands. Then the tank was past him, running toward my room.

  “What the hell?” Tony said out loud, picking himself up as I crawled up the stairs to him.

  The crashing sounds from my room were immense and I suspected very expensive for me. The door slammed shut but refused to close. It was a sticky doorknob that I kept meaning to fix but hadn’t gotten around to, because inasmuch as my body wasn’t in the room, there was no great concern about privacy. The door rebounded back and out of the open crack Donut fled, running into the next room over, Tony’s room.

  The door swung open and the tank’s bulk showed in it, looking directly at us. Behind the tank were my room’s best feature, the bay windows, looking out onto the street.

  “Run at it,” I told Tony.

  “What?” he said.

  “Hit low. Keep going.” And then I ran at the tank as fast as I could. A millisecond later Tony followed, yelling as he did.

  We twisted to get through the doorframe together and hit the tank simultaneously, low on the chest. The tank lifted and our momentum carried all three of us back to the bay windows and the little reading nook there, and then through both, utterly wrecking the prime selling feature of my room.

  We three fell all the way down to the street, tank on the bottom. It hit with the force of its own impact and the force of the two threeps on top of it. It hit so hard that all its remaining limbs popped right off, skittering across the asphalt.

  The tank twisted its head back and forth, trying to inch away from me and Tony. It wasn’t getting very far.

  And then it stopped. Whoever was piloting it was gone.

  “How are you?” I asked Tony.

  “I think you owe me a new threep,” he said. He was pulling himself upright and it was clear he’d taken damage. He looked over at me. “And I think you owe yourself a new threep, too.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. I slowly sat up and could hear various things grinding. Maintenance alerts were beginning to populate my field of view.

  Tayla came out, her threep cracked. “What just happened?” she asked.

  “We jumped out of a window, tank first,” I said.

  “No, I mean, what just happened?” She made arm movements to encapsulate the entire incident.

  “I think someone was trying to kill Chris,” Tony said. He has standing up but his threep was wobbly.

  I shook my head. “Not me,” I said.

  “They ran into your room,” Tony said. “They trashed it. If your body had been there like the rest of ours, it could have killed you.”

  I shook my head again. “They weren’t looking for me.”

  “Then who? Me? Tayla? The twins? Elsie?”

  “Someone else.”

  “There is no one else,” Tayla said.

  I shook my head and looked at Tayla. “There’s someone else currently living in the house,” I said.

  It took her a moment. “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me,” she said, figuring out who I was talking about.

  I turned Tony. “Donut went into your room,” I said. “Do me a favor and go check if he’s there. And if he’s there keep him there, please.”

  “The cat?” Tony said. “You think they were coming for the fucking cat?”

  “Go, please,” I said. Tony got up and limped away. I looked back over at Tayla. “You okay?”

  “It’s never a dull moment around you, Chris,” she said.


  “I know. I’m sorry.” By this time other people on the street were coming around to see what the fuss was about. The Metro police would be along presently, I knew.

  “You think they were really after that cat?” Tayla asked.

  “The tank went after Donut as soon as he meowed,” I said. “You were there.”

  Tayla laughed. “I don’t know if you realize it, Chris, but in the moment I wasn’t really paying attention to the cat. I was trying to beat the crap out of a monster threep.”

  “Fair point.”

  “The thing is, if you’re right, then whoever this asshole is, they would have been happy to kill all of us to get at that cat. They set our house on fire.”

  “I think that was meant to be a diversion,” I said.

  “I know what it was meant to be,” Tayla said. “I also know that if we didn’t have extinguishers in every room, we’d all be dead now. Including that stupid cat. I almost got murdered over a pet, Chris.”

  “I didn’t mean to put any of you in danger,” I said. “I’ll take the cat out of here tonight.”

  She laughed again and then motioned to the house, with its fire damage and wrecked windows. “I mean, we’re all out of here for a while, don’t you think?”

  “We have insurance, right?” I joked.

  “I think the real question is whether the insurance covers rampaging threeps.”

  Hey, Chris, I think you should get in here, Tony sent to me, directly.

  Everything okay? I sent.

  Relative to the last ten minutes, yes. And the cat is fine, if pissed off. But you want to get in here. I have something to show you that you’re gonna want to see.

  “Tony wants to see me,” I said to Tayla.

  She nodded. “Go on in. I’ll wait for the police.”

  I pointed to the threep torso and head. “Don’t let them impound this,” I said. “It’s official FBI evidence.”

  “I’m sure they’ll listen to me when I say that,” Tayla said.

  I got up slowly and hobbled into the house, through the wreckage, and up the stairs. I stopped briefly at the twins’ room. “You two okay?”

  We’re fine, one of them answered, and again the weirdness of the two of them deciding to share a communication channel struck me. Our threep is trashed, though.