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 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 and ignorant Hadens, Hadens of every creed, color, gender, sexual and political orientation, age and previous health status. In the United States, at least, the Haden community was a mirror of society at large.
And because of that there were some immediate schisms in the Haden community, even as it was realizing it was a community. One of the largest schisms, and one that remains to this day, was the one between the Hadens who spent most of their time in the physical world, through personal transports and daily interaction with non-Haden family and friends, and the ones whose lives were inward facing into the new world that the Hadens had started to create, through the Agora and other spaces and social structures that they’d established.
That schism was partially but not entirely predicated on age, and other factors played into it as well, like how strong the Haden’s physical world support structure was, as well as certain personality markers. Hadens who were naturally introverted were slightly more likely to spend more of their time facing inward to the Haden community.
The number of Hadens who were entirely one way or another was small, of course, but the general division was real, and had a substantial impact on how the community as a whole began to define itself.
Terrell Wales:
The other thing to consider is that after a while the physical world just becomes depressing. Look, in the online Haden space, I have what you could call a house—it’s a permanent chunk of a server that I own. I’m able to build and create there.
So my house is a log cabin in about six square miles of virtual Vermont forest. Even when I first got the server space the technology was good enough that you could walk right up to the trees and you could see all this detail, and all the other sensory data could be piped in. You could have every day be peak foliage season if you want to. I did that for about a year once. A creek runs out by my cabin, and I see deer and foxes walk by. It’s all gorgeous. And it’s all mine. And maybe it’s not real, in the sense that it physically exists in the world, but you know what? I sit on my porch and look out into the woods and it feels real enough. I’m home.