Read Online Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome by John Scalzi - Free Book Online Page A

humans who had been lost to their rightful places, in robot bodies. It was a peaceful robot revolution, and that was something almost no literature, from Čapek forward, had ever prepared us for.
    So it’s not entirely surprising that at least at first it was rough going.
    Terrell Wales, Haden’s syndrome patient:
    You noticed the looks but at first you really didn’t give a damn because, in my case, after a year trapped in my own head, I was able to walk and talk and see and touch things again. You could have made my threep look like a 200 pound sack of manure and I wouldn’t give a crap, no pun intended. So, yeah, I noticed the looks, but I didn’t care. I was out.
    And anyway, at the start people would stare but they would smile and ask to take a picture with you, or take a picture even if they didn’t ask. Because threeps were new and still a novelty. For a couple of months there it was like being a minor celebrity. Like a character actor on a TV show or something. Then after a few more months there were more threeps around and everyone got used to us. It’s like, yes, you’re a robot, okay, move out of the doorway so I can get into the store. Which was fine, too, because after a while being a minor celebrity is a little annoying.
    I think people started to be annoyed with threeps about maybe a year or so after I got mine. Like this: You’d go out with your friends and let’s say you meet at a coffee shop. Well, the coffee shop is crowded and people are looking for somewhere to sit, and they see you sitting with your friends and they think, “That thing’s metal ass is taking up a chair I could use.”
    I remember the first time I was out with friends at a restaurant and someone asked if they could take the seat I was sitting on. I stared at her like she was asking to strangle my cat and I told her I was using it. She said to me, “But you’re not really here. You shouldn’t need it.” I told her to fuck off. She must have complained to the manager because the next time I went there they had a sign saying that threeps had to give up their seat if asked by a human customer. Get that—a
human
customer. I left and didn’t come back but soon enough it was standard practice at most places: If you were a threep, you lose the seat.
    Evangeline Davies, counsel, American Civil Liberties Union:
    I was just starting at the ACLU when we got the first queries from Hadens about these incidents where they were being made to give up their seats to able-bodied people, and there were even a couple of municipalities that were passing ordinances to the effect that people with personal transports were, in a sense, second-class citizens.
    You would think that would be an open and shut case with regard to the Americans with Disabilities Act, but there some wrinkles we had to consider. For example, someone with a personal transport who goes to a restaurant isn’t going to eat there—their body is somewhere else, being fed something else. In effect that person is a free rider, taking up space and, some shops and restaurants argued, costing them money. They argued they had a right to ask people in personal transports to free up space for paying customers.
    For another thing, if the personal transport is made to stand, is the person controlling the personal transport actually inconvenienced? They aren’t being physically inconvenienced, because their body isn’t there. Having the personal transport stand won’t tire out the person controlling it. The argument could be made—and was—that asking personal transports to stand was no more inconveniencing to them than requiring able-bodied people to wear shoes. You could argue it’s humiliating to make someone stand when the rest of their party is sitting, but bars and coffee shops could point to groups of able-bodied people crowded around a single table, some standing and some sitting, and say that none of them were being humiliated. And so on.
    In one sense these seem like