Read Online Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome by John Scalzi - Free Book Online
Authors: John Scalzi
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two years. He walks over the podium, looks at us like the cat that ate the canary, and before we can even sit back down, says “ladies and gentlemen, the First Lady of the United States of America.”
And in walks this golden robot, who strolls over to the podium, gives the President a hug, and then stands there, hands on the podium, and says, “So, how do I look?”
It was the first time I have ever heard complete, utter, dead silence at a Presidential press conference. And then ten seconds later we were all yelling at the top of our lungs, trying to get questions in.
Rebecca Warner:
The First Lady’s press conference was huge for us. That’s obvious. But it was the follow-up press conference with Chris Shane two weeks later that really sealed the deal for our company. You really can’t beat a child’s first steps happening because of your invention for making a good impression on the public.
We filed patents immediately, and since we hadn’t taken any HRIA funding, we didn’t have to accept the statutory rate when other companies came to license the technology, which they did immediately. Charlie and I were billionaires by the end of the month. I bought GreenWave from my dad, finished up or bought out remaining outside contracts and then converted the building over to making personal transports. Sebring-Warner was the first to market and the biggest name in the market from then until now. I wish Charlie had stuck around for all of it.
Summer Zapata:
Charlie Sebring is probably the classic example of a personality unsuited for success. What he was interested in was the work—the design of the personal transports, not all the politics that eventually swamped the pure joy of engineering that in the few interviews he gave he said he had felt. Sebring-Warner went from being a two-person shop to the cornerstone of an emerging industry almost literally overnight. Rebecca Warner navigated it just fine—she was born to run a company.
Sebring was less fine, and everyone I spoke to who knew him said it was remarkable just how quickly the pressure of overnight success and fame got to him. Within six months of the First Lady’s press conference he became something of a recluse, sending in his work by email and avoiding everyone but trusted friends. Six months after that he told Warner he wanted out and sold his interest in the company to her at a substantially discounted rate—which to be fair only meant he was a billionaire a couple of times over rather than several times over. Six months after that he took his own life because he felt hounded by family and friends who he thought were more interested in his money than him. His suicide note was five words. “I thought I was helping.”
Well, he did help. But there was everything else around the helping that drove him down. The irony is that the one person who did the most to let those who were locked in free themselves from their isolation, was the one person who ended up the most isolated and alone.
PART FIVE: THE NEW WORLD
Josefina Ross, author, “The Undiscovered Country: Hadens and Their World”:
Most people don’t know this, but the word “robot” comes from a 1920s play by Czech author Karel Čapek, in which humans create artificial people as workers and slaves, and eventually those slaves revolt and replace the humans as the masters of the earth. The robots in the play weren’t mindless automatons, or just machines, like what we call robots today. They were artificial people with minds and ultimately desires of their own. They were, in fact, very much like how people with Haden’s syndrome became, once they were outfitted with their personal transports.
And this presented the world, finally, with the “robot revolution” that it had always imagined, through science fiction and through all those films where the machines, sooner or later, tried to displace the humans. Only this robot revolution wasn’t about replacing humans, it was returning
And in walks this golden robot, who strolls over to the podium, gives the President a hug, and then stands there, hands on the podium, and says, “So, how do I look?”
It was the first time I have ever heard complete, utter, dead silence at a Presidential press conference. And then ten seconds later we were all yelling at the top of our lungs, trying to get questions in.
Rebecca Warner:
The First Lady’s press conference was huge for us. That’s obvious. But it was the follow-up press conference with Chris Shane two weeks later that really sealed the deal for our company. You really can’t beat a child’s first steps happening because of your invention for making a good impression on the public.
We filed patents immediately, and since we hadn’t taken any HRIA funding, we didn’t have to accept the statutory rate when other companies came to license the technology, which they did immediately. Charlie and I were billionaires by the end of the month. I bought GreenWave from my dad, finished up or bought out remaining outside contracts and then converted the building over to making personal transports. Sebring-Warner was the first to market and the biggest name in the market from then until now. I wish Charlie had stuck around for all of it.
Summer Zapata:
Charlie Sebring is probably the classic example of a personality unsuited for success. What he was interested in was the work—the design of the personal transports, not all the politics that eventually swamped the pure joy of engineering that in the few interviews he gave he said he had felt. Sebring-Warner went from being a two-person shop to the cornerstone of an emerging industry almost literally overnight. Rebecca Warner navigated it just fine—she was born to run a company.
Sebring was less fine, and everyone I spoke to who knew him said it was remarkable just how quickly the pressure of overnight success and fame got to him. Within six months of the First Lady’s press conference he became something of a recluse, sending in his work by email and avoiding everyone but trusted friends. Six months after that he told Warner he wanted out and sold his interest in the company to her at a substantially discounted rate—which to be fair only meant he was a billionaire a couple of times over rather than several times over. Six months after that he took his own life because he felt hounded by family and friends who he thought were more interested in his money than him. His suicide note was five words. “I thought I was helping.”
Well, he did help. But there was everything else around the helping that drove him down. The irony is that the one person who did the most to let those who were locked in free themselves from their isolation, was the one person who ended up the most isolated and alone.
PART FIVE: THE NEW WORLD
Josefina Ross, author, “The Undiscovered Country: Hadens and Their World”:
Most people don’t know this, but the word “robot” comes from a 1920s play by Czech author Karel Čapek, in which humans create artificial people as workers and slaves, and eventually those slaves revolt and replace the humans as the masters of the earth. The robots in the play weren’t mindless automatons, or just machines, like what we call robots today. They were artificial people with minds and ultimately desires of their own. They were, in fact, very much like how people with Haden’s syndrome became, once they were outfitted with their personal transports.
And this presented the world, finally, with the “robot revolution” that it had always imagined, through science fiction and through all those films where the machines, sooner or later, tried to displace the humans. Only this robot revolution wasn’t about replacing humans, it was returning
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