I turned and focused on the other other me in the room: my previous threep, which was my primary threep until I got the 660. It was a Kamen Zephyr, now sitting on an inductive charger chair. A very nice model. The body was ivory with blue and gray limb accents—I did undergrad and got my master’s at Georgetown, and it seemed the thing to do at the time. My current threep was an understated matte ivory with subtle maroon pinstripe accents on the limbs. I vaguely wondered if I was letting down the alma mater.

“Here we go,” Jerry said, and held up a small bottle. “Lidocaine. Should do the trick for a couple of hours. That’ll get you through the dinner and then after that I’ll put some extra-strength ibuprofen into your system. As long as you stay sense-forward on your threep you should be fine.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Interesting that you don’t always stay fully sense-forward on your threep,” Jerry said, as he prepped the lidocaine.

“I don’t like how it feels,” I said. “If I can’t feel my body it feels … off. Adrift. Weird.”

Jerry nodded. “I can see that, I guess,” he said. “Not everyone does it that way. My last client was full sense-forward on her threep all the time. Didn’t like feeling what was going on with her body. Hell, didn’t like acknowledging she had a body. She found it inconvenient, I think is the best way of putting it. Which was ultimately ironic.”

“How so?”

“She had a heart attack and didn’t even feel it,” Jerry said. “She found out about it from an automated alert to her threep. We start working on her to save her and she calls in from her threep with this pissy sort of voice, telling us that we just had to get her up and running again, she had a three o’clock session with her shrink that she couldn’t miss.”

“Did she miss it?”

“Yup,” Jerry said. He put on a pair of gloves. “She dropped dead mid-sentence, still pissy. On one hand, she really didn’t feel it, which I suppose isn’t a bad thing. On the other hand, well. I think it came as a surprise to her that she could die. She spent so much time in her threep I think she believed it really was her.” He opened my mouth and I could feel my jaw stretch. “Okay. You might feel a poke here for a minute.”

*   *   *

Dad’s trophy room is impressive, but then, that’s the point. Marcus Shane isn’t the kind of person to tell you he’s more important than you. He’s happy to let his hardware make the point for him.

The west side of the room details his early basketball career. This includes his junior high and high school jerseys, the four DCIAA trophies he won for Cardozo High, and the acceptance letter he received to Georgetown University, full scholarship. Then follows a ridiculous number of photos of him in action with the Hoyas, with whom he reached the Final Four three times, taking the championship in his junior year. The picture of him weeping as he cuts down the net is up there, with a piece of the actual net inside the same frame. It’s surrounded by the Wooden, Naismith, and Robinson awards, which he won the same year, and his championship ring on a pillow. The sting of crashing out of the NCAA Finals in the semi-final round in his senior year was ameliorated by winning an Olympic gold medal. Everyone agreed that the gold medals for his Olympiad were even uglier than usual. On the other hand, it was an Olympic gold medal, so everyone could just shut up.

On to the south side of the room, and we have Dad’s professional career, all of it with the Washington Wizards, into which he was drafted after a particularly abysmal sixteen-win season. A lot of people thought the team intentionally tanked their season to get a shot at Dad in the draft. Privately, Dad didn’t credit the coach or the GM with that much strategic planning. That coach was gone by the end of Dad’s first season, the GM by the second, and two years later, Dad drove the team into the playoffs. Two years after that, Washington won the first of three back-to-back-to-back championships.

This wall featured lots of photos of Dad suspended in air, his league and series MVP awards, some of the more iconic objects of his professional endorsement career, a display case with his four championship rings (the final one coming in his last year playing), topped off by the long thin trophy you get when you’re inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame, which he was, in his first year of eligibility.

The east side of the room begins with a magazine cover while Dad was still with the Wizards—not from Sports Illustrated but from a D.C. business magazine, which was the first to notice that America’s hottest rookie was not buying a stupidly large house and otherwise throwing his money around like an asshole, but was instead living in a modest Alexandria town house and investing in real estate in and around the District. By the time Dad retired from basketball, he was making more money from his real estate company than he was from playing and endorsements, and he officially became a billionaire the same year he was inducted into the Hall. This side of the room is filled with various business and real estate awards and citations. There are more of these than anything else. Businesspeople sure like to give out awards.

The north side of the room was related to Dad’s philanthropy work and specifically his work with Haden’s syndrome—a natural cause for him after his only child (me) was stricken with the disease in its first, terrible wave, along with millions of others, including Margaret Haden, the first lady of the United States. Despite the syndrome being named after the first lady, it was Dad and Mom (the former Jacqueline Oxford, scion of one of Virginia’s oldest political families) who became the public face of Haden’s awareness—along with me, of course.

And so this wall was filled with pictures of Dad testifying before Congress for the massive research and development required to deal with four and a half million U.S. citizens suddenly having their minds cut off from their bodies, being present when President Benjamin Haden signed the Haden Research Act into law, being on the board of the Haden Institute, and of Sebring-Warner Industries, which developed the first threeps, and being virtually present when the Agora, the virtual environment developed specifically for Hadens, was opened up for us to populate and to have a space of our own in the world.

Interspersed with these photos were pictures of us: me, Mom, and Dad, in various places, meeting world leaders, celebrities, and other Haden families. I was one of the first Haden children to own and use a threep, and my parents made a point of bringing me everywhere in my threep—not just so I could have a childhood filled with enviable personal experiences, although that was a nice side benefit. The point was to encourage the unaffected to see threeps as people, not freaky androids that had just popped up in their midst. Who better to do that than the child of one of the most celebrated men in the entire world?

So up until I turned eighteen, I was one of the most famous and photographed Hadens in the world. The photo of me handing a flower to the pope in St. Peter’s Basilica is regularly cited as one of the most famous photographs of the last half century—the image of a child-sized threep offering an Easter lily to the Bishop of Rome being an iconic juxtaposition of modern technology and traditional theology, one presenting a peace offering to the other, who is reaching out, smiling, to take it.

When I was in college I had a professor tell me that single image did more to advance the acceptance of Hadens as people, not victims, than a thousand congressional testimonials or scientific discoveries could have. I told him what I remembered about the pope was that he had wicked bad breath. I went to Georgetown. My professor was a priest. I don’t think he was very happy with me.