That’s how we got Integrators—the people who can carry other people around in their heads. Here in the lab the word we used to describe at the time it was “spooky.” It was spooky. Even now I have a hard time imagining what it must be like to be an Integrator. I understand how it works, technically. But I don’t feel it.
Terrell Wales:
This sounds funny coming from a man who spends a lot of his life inside a robot, but the moment I really knew I was living in the future was when I got a chance to use an Integrator. There aren’t many of them, so the NIH puts you in a lottery and if your name comes up, you get a day. My name came up and I got ported in and then for the first time in years I was in a full-fledged, no-bullshit functioning human body.
You want to know the first thing I did? I went to the International House of Pancakes and ate so many damn pancakes and sausage links I just about made the Integrator throw up. Then I had an ice cold Pepsi. Then I had a cigarette.
Uh. I don’t think I should probably say what I did after that. I’m not entirely sure it’s legal.
The weird thing—well, weirder thing—is that all the time I was running around with the Integrator’s body, he’s in there with me. And I wondered, what the hell does this guy do when people are using his body? Doesn’t he get bored? I’m pretty sure every Haden who gets to use a real live human body does what I did, which is to eat, drink, and get laid. Except for the last part, it must get monotonous. Also, because I’m sure I almost made him puke, I wondered how often that happens, right—someone pushes the Integrator’s body to an extreme point.
I didn’t wonder about it too much, though. I was on a clock, and I had things to do. But, yeah. Of all the things since Haden’s first hit, that was the one that made me think, wow, things really are different. And weird.
Chris Clarke:
Well, my life hasn’t changed a damn bit, to tell you truth. I’m still not eligible for parole for another five years.
Irving Bennett:
When I retired from the practice of journalism and started teaching it instead, I began using Haden’s syndrome as an example of the fact that sooner or later, everything simply becomes daily life. When Haden’s first struck, it was the most important news story of the century. Everyone knew it. Everyone felt it. But then it just… became part of the fabric of the American story, day in and day out. Something commonplace. Something quite literally quotidian. The half-life between story of the century and not even the story of the day is quicker than you would ever guess.
But then I ask my students: does this mean that it stops being a story worth telling? And I say to them the real journalists among them know the answer even before I ask the question. And the answer is that the story is worth telling every day. The trick is not to find the story of the century. You won’t miss that story when it happens. No one will miss it. The trick is to find the story of the day and for that day make whoever reads it or hears it care about it so intensely that it doesn’t leave them. Then it becomes a story of their life. Maybe even the story of their life.
Some of the students look at me like I’m trying to pull a fast one on them. Others don’t even care. But in every class there’s one or two who get what I’m trying to tell them. They’re who I’m teaching to. They’re the ones who after they leave this place, are going to go out in the world, take a look at Haden’s, or whatever, and discover there are still so many stories there yet to tell.
I’m looking forward to those stories.