Janis Massey:
The President broke down. Just broke down and collapsed knees-first to the floor. Mario started toward him, but Margie said “no,” and went to him, kneeling and holding him and stroking his hair, talking softly into his ear.
For a minute or two it was strange, that here was this machine, this robot, or whatever you want to call it, kneeling down and comforting the President of the United States. And then after that minute or two, it stopped being a robot and the President and became just a wife, holding her husband, telling him that she loved him.
Rebecca Warner:
It was a beautiful and unexpected moment. It really was. And because I am who I am, while I was standing there watching this gorgeous, moving moment, I had to fight not to burst out laughing. Because the one thought that was going through my head, over and over and over, was holy shit we’re going to make so much money off this. And we did.
Irving Bennett:
I was invited to the White House press conference by [White House Press Secretary] Adrienne McLaughlin, which was unusual and which annoyed our regular White House correspondent, but when you’re told you should be at a press conference by the White House, at the White House, you go.
I was there and I noticed a number of other science and technology writers and reporters from other organizations, so I thought that we might be getting one of those occasional space-related announcements, like we’re going to go Mars or something, which never pans out, and especially wouldn’t pan out now, because we were spending so much money on Haden’s.
Then the President comes out, and I notice that for the first time in nearly two years the man actually looks happy. He’s smiling, he’s waving to the press corps, and he looks like he’s actually slept, which is also something that hasn’t happened in 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 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.