“Have to go,” I said. “My dad is about to make a speech.”

“Good,” Vann said. “I was about to hang up on you anyway.” And then she did.

*   *   *

Dad’s speech was his standard-issue “at home with donors who everyone is pretending are friends” speech, which is to say that it was light, familiar, casually intimate, yet at the same time it touched on themes important to the nation and to his not-quite-formally-announced senatorial campaign. It went over like it usually does, which is to say very well, because Dad is Dad and he’s been doing the public relations thing since he was in high school. If you can’t be charmed by Marcus Shane, you’re probably a sociopath of some sort.

But at the end of the speech there was a switch up from the text. Dad mentioned “the challenges and opportunities that Abrams-Kettering offers each of us,” which I thought was a little out of context, since only Hubbard and Schwartz and I had Haden’s. So I cheated and did a quick facial scan of the other people at the table. Five of them were CEOs and/or chairmen of companies that catered to the Haden market one way or another, with all the businesses headquartered here in Virginia.

That explained it, then. And also why Dad was especially keen to have me at the dinner.

Which meant, of course, that I was put on the spot.

“And what do you think of Abrams-Kettering, Chris?” one of the dinner guests asked me. The facial scan registered him as Rick Wisson, the husband of Jim Buchold, the CEO of Loudoun Pharma. Buchold, who was seated next to his husband, shot him a look, which Wisson either missed or ignored. I did not imagine their ride home that night would be especially pleasant.

“I don’t think it will be particularly surprising to you that my opinion closely matches my father’s,” I said, punting the conversational ball over to Dad.

Who naturally caught it easily. “What Chris is saying is that as with most topics relating to Haden’s, we talk a lot about it as a family,” he said. “So what I end up saying is a result of long discussions between the three of us. Now, I think everyone knows that I was publicly opposed to Abrams-Kettering. I still think it was the wrong solution to something that wasn’t a problem—we know as a group Hadens are contributing more to the national economy than they take out of it. But Abrams-Kettering did pass, for better or worse, and now it’s time to see how we make this new environment work for us.”

“That,” I said, pointing down the table to my dad.

“What do you think about the walkout? And the march?” Wisson asked.

“Rick,” Jim Buchold said, as pleasantly as a snarl could be offered.

“It’s not out of line for dinner,” Wisson said, to his husband. “Not for this dinner, anyway. And Chris here is an actual Haden.”

“There’s three of us at the table, actually,” I said, nodding over to Hubbard and Schwartz.

“With all due respect to Lucas and Mr. Schwartz, they’re not exactly going to be affected by the changes in the law,” Wisson said. Hubbard and Schwartz both smiled thinly at this. “You, on the other hand, have a job and are out there on the street. You have to have some thoughts on it.”

“I think everyone has the right to their own opinion and the right to peaceably assemble,” I said. When in doubt, fall back on the First Amendment.

“I worry about the ‘peaceable’ part of it,” said Carole Lamb, down the table. She was one of the people for whom the valet was hired. She was old and crankily conservative in the way only old liberals could be. “My daughter tells me the D.C. police are calling in their entire force this weekend. They’re worried about rioting.”

“And why is that, Ms. Lamb?” Sam Schwartz asked.

“She said they’re worried that the Hadens who are marching won’t be scared of the police,” Lamb said. “Threeps aren’t the same as human bodies.”

“Your daughter is worried about a robot uprising,” I said.

Lamb looked over at me and immediately blushed. “It’s not that,” she said, hastily. “It’s just that this is the first mass Haden protest. It’s different than any other protest.”

“Robot uprising,” I said again, and then held up a hand before Lamb got even more flustered. “Threeps aren’t human bodies, no. But they’re not Terminators, either. The ones we use to get around on a daily basis are intentionally designed to be as much like the human body as possible, in terms of strength, agility, and other factors.”

“Because it’s still a human running the threep,” Dad said.

“Right,” I said. “And a human is going to use a machine scaled to natural human capabilities better than one that’s not.” I held up my hand. “This is a machine hand, attached to a machine arm. But it’s rated for human power. I’m not going to be able to flip this table in a rage. The marchers aren’t going to be stomping down the Mall, tossing cars.”

“Threeps are still tougher than human bodies,” Wisson noted. “They can take a lot of damage.”

“Well,” I said. “I’ll tell you a story. Mom and Dad will remember this one. When I was eight, I got a new bike for my birthday—”

“Oh God, this story,” Mom said.

“—and at the time I had just found out about BMX stunts,” I continued. “So one morning I made a ramp out on our driveway and was jumping off of the thing, working up the courage to do a spin or something. I finally psyched myself up, pedaled as fast as I could, zoomed up the ramp, tried a spin, and flew ass over handlebar off the bike and into the road, right into the path of a panel truck doing thirty. It hit me—”

“I really hate this story,” Mom said. Dad grinned.

“—and I disintegrated,” I said. “The impact tore my threep apart. My head literally popped off and flew into the neighbor’s bushes. I had no idea what happened. I had the feeling like I was shoved really hard, the world spun around, and then all of a sudden I was kicked back into my own body, wondering what the heck had just happened.”

“If that had been your human body, you would have been dead,” Dad pointed out.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Which you or Mom mention every single time the story gets brought up. The point is”—I turned back to Wisson—“threeps might be tougher than human bodies, but they can still get damaged. And threeps aren’t cheap. They cost the same as a car. Most people aren’t going to want to let a cop whack on their threep with a baton any more than they’d want a cop to use a baton on their fender. So I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about that robot uprising. The robots cost too much money for that.”

“What happened after the truck hit you?” Schwartz asked.

“Well, I was without a threep for a while,” I said, and there was laughter to that. “And I think the driver of the moving truck threatened to sue Dad.”

“He said I was at fault because I owned the threep and the threep came into his path, and he had the right of way,” Dad said.

“He wouldn’t have had a case,” I said. “Personal Transports are a special class of machine under the law. Short of manslaughter, hitting a threep with a truck carries the same penalties as hitting a human body.”

“Right, but I didn’t want to have my name in the news over it,” Dad said. “So I bought him off. Paid for the truck damage and gave him floor tickets to the Wizards.”

“You’ve never given me floor tickets,” Buchold said.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Dad said, and everyone laughed again. “Besides, Chris is an FBI agent these days. Now you’d get in trouble if you hit my kid with a truck.”

“The other thing I remember is that the next threep I got was a real lemon,” I said, and turned to Dad. “What model was it?”

“A Metro Junior Courier,” Dad said. “A really janky model.”

“Uh-oh,” Hubbard said. “Accelerant owns Metro.”

“Well, then,” I said. “I blame you.”

“Fair enough,” Hubbard said. “Although this was twenty years ago, right?”