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

trivial things to be worrying about or to take to court. But they were actually hugely important. Almost overnight the world had developed what really was a new nation—a group of people whose commonality of experience was unlike anything anyone had ever experienced before. There were roughly the same number of Hadens in the US as there were religious Jews. More than the number of Muslims. They experience the world in a unique way, and because of how they present to the world—either in personal transports or as online avatars—they will experience things that no other people experience in quite the same way, including violations of their rights. We and other rights organizations had an opportunity that we hadn’t had before, to trim off discrimination
before
it developed. I think in the end we were more successful than we expected, but less successful than we’d hoped.
    Terrell Wales:
    When I was a kid I watched a documentary about the movie
Planet of the Apes
. The first one, with Charlton Heston. They were talking about how they would make up all the extras as various types of apes, like chimps and gorillas and orangutans, and then the extras would go to lunch and they would segregate. All the people made up like gorillas would sit with other gorillas, all the chimps would sit with chimps.
    It started being like that with other Hadens. Whoever you were before, you started being this other person too. Someone who none of your other friends could imagine being. It wasn’t their fault. They just never went through the process of being trapped in their own skull and never knowing if they would ever talk to anyone ever again. I suppose maybe it’s like being in a war. You had to be there, and eventually you start spending all your time with the people who
were
there, because they knew what it was like.
    I would see other threeps on the street and we would do a wireless handshake with each other where we would send each other our addresses as we walked by. Later on we would sign on into the Agora—the first version of it, the one that was like a quest-oriented video game without the quests—and find each other and just hang around and talk. On the Agora we had avatars that looked like our bodies did when we were healthy—hardly anyone faked their image at first—and you could be yourself, or something close enough to yourself that it felt normal.
    I’m not sure when it was that I started thinking of myself as a “Haden.” It snuck up on me. I think it started when I realized that no matter how much I tried to pretend that looking like a robot didn’t mean anything, it
did
mean something, in the way people thought about me and reacted to me. Not just about whether I could take a seat at Starbucks, but whether people treated me like an actual human being. I had some drunk son of a bitch break a beer bottle over my threep’s head once because he wanted to see if it would hurt me. I had to keep from breaking his nose with my metal fist, which I
knew
would hurt
him
.
    I think I finally knew I was a Haden one night when I went out with a bunch of high school friends to a bar, and they were just sitting there drinking and bullshitting each other, and I was sitting and bullshitting with them, but what I was really doing was checking into the Agora and making plans with friends there to run a game with them as soon as I could get away from my meatpals—”meatpals” meaning people you knew outside the Haden world. I was doing my time with my meatpals but waiting to get back to my real world.
    I had become a chimp, and wanted to go sit with the other chimps, I guess.
    Josefina Ross:
    One thing it would be wrong to do is to think of the Haden community as one homogenous group, just because they all had the same disease afflict them. In reality the only thing they all had in common was the disease. Otherwise, Hadens are one of the most diverse communities that ever existed. There are rich Hadens and poor Hadens, educated