Lock In

by John Scalzi

  “Well, you can’t miss that,” Tony said. “When do you think you’ll wrap up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably nine thirty, ten at the latest.”

  “Here.” Tony pinged me over the common channel with an invite. “Tuesdays are our group night in the Agora. We hang out and usually frag each other’s brains out in an FPS. Pop in. You can meet the crew and take a head shot or two.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “Great. I’ll send over the room application and we can do it up formally. We’ll need first month and a deposit.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Even better,” Tony said. “Presuming you get the signoff from everyone tonight, you can move in as soon as your payment arrives.”

  “You’re not going to want a background check?” I joked.

  “I think your entire life has been a background check, Chris,” Tony said.

  Chapter Six

  “OH, FUCK ME,” I said, the minute I saw the valet at the door to my house.

  The painkillers from my oral extraction at four o’clock had started wearing off as I headed home, and that made me grumpy to begin with. But the valet meant one thing: donor dinner. Most cars could self-park but there were still people who demanded that they had to be behind the wheel, and took great pride in their dumb cars. A bunch of them were the sort of cranky old people who might support my dad’s bid for senator. That made me crankier than the tooth extraction.

  My mother had obviously guessed my mood as I stomped up to her, because she held out her hands placatingly. “Don’t blame me, Chris,” she said. “I thought it was just going to be a family dinner. I had no idea your father was going to turn it into a fund-raiser.”

  “I’m skeptical,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you,” she said. “But it’s the truth.” Behind her, catering staff laid out place settings in the formal dining room, directed by Lisle, our house supervisor. I counted out the settings.

  “Sixteen settings, Mother,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Where are they all?”

  “They’re not all here yet,” she said. “The ones that are, are down in the vet’s office.”

  “Mom,” I warned.

  “I know, I’m not supposed to say that out loud,” she said. “I’ll amend. They’re in the trophy room.”

  “So it’s not just the usual gang of idiots,” I said.

  “You know your father,” Mom said. “Dazzle the new money with the hardware. It would be vulgar except for the fact that it works.”

  “Actually, it’s still vulgar,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” Mom agreed. “And it still works.”

  “Dad doesn’t need their money to run for senator,” I pointed out.

  “Your father needs them to believe he’s invested in their interests,” Mom said. “That’s why he takes their money.”

  “Yeah, that’s not Machiavellian at all.”

  “Yes, well,” she said. “The things we do to get your father elected.” She reached out and touched my shoulder. “And how was your day?”

  “Interesting,” I said. “I’m working on a murder case. And I think I may have found an apartment.”

  “I still don’t know why you think you need an apartment,” my mother said, crossly.

  “Mom, you’re the only person in the world who would have chosen my apartment hunting over a murder case as a topic of conversation.”

  “I notice you didn’t address my point,” Mom said.

  I sighed and held up a hand to tick off points. “One, because commuting into the District from Potomac Falls every day would be a pain in the ass, and you know it. Two, because I’m twenty-seven and it’s embarrassing to still live with my parents. Three, because my tolerance for being a prop for Dad’s political ambitions is getting lower by the day.”

  “That’s not fair, Chris,” Mom said.

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “You know he’s going to do it tonight. I’m not the five-year-old he can trot out for congressional hearings and Haden fund-raisers. I’m a federal agent now, for God’s sake. I don’t think it’s even legal to trot me around anymore.” I had a twinge as the painkillers stepped down another notch, and held up a hand to my jaw.

  She caught it. “Your molar,” she said.

  “Lack of molar, actually.” I put my hand down, fully aware of the irony of indicating jaw pain on my threep. “I’m going to go check in on myself,” I said, and turned to go to my room.

  “When you move, you’re not going to move your body, are you?” Mom asked. There was a thread of anxiousness in her voice.

  “I’m not planning to right now,” I said, turning back a little to look at her. “Let’s see how it works. I didn’t notice any lag today, and as long as I don’t there’s no reason to move.”

  “All right,” Mom said, still unhappy.

  I went over and gave her a hug. “Relax, Mom,” I said. “It’s not a thing. I’ll have the spare threep here. I’ll visit. A lot. You’ll start to wonder if I’ve actually left.”

  She smiled at that and patted my cheek. “Normally I’d call you on patronizing me, but this one time I’ll take it,” she said. “Now go check in on yourself. Don’t take too long. Your father wants you to make an appearance before we all sit down to dinner.”

  “Of course he does,” I said. I squeezed Mom’s arm as I left.

  Jerry Riggs, my new evening nurse, waved to me as I walked into my room. He was reading a hardcover book. “How you doing, Chris?”

  “I’m in a little bit of pain, actually,” I said.

  Jerry nodded. “The bedsore?” he asked.

  “The molar extraction,” I said.

  “Right.” Jerry set down his book and walked over to my cradle, which had conformed to let me rest on my left side, because my current bedsore was on my right hip. He started rummaging through the bedside cabinet.

  “I have some Tylenol with codeine,” Jerry said. “Your dentist left it for you.”

  “I have to be able to function this evening,” I said. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a stoned threep at a political fund-raiser.”

  “All right,” Jerry said. “Let me see what else we have here.”

  I nodded and went over to my body—to me. I looked as I always did, like someone sleeping. My body was neat and clean, which was not always a guarantee with a Haden. Some Hadens didn’t bother with having their hair cut or trimmed because, honestly, what did it matter? My mother had quite the opposite opinion on the subject, however. As I got older I adopted her position for my own.

  The cleanliness was a different and more complex issue, as it would be with a body whose various holes and systems were tubed, bagged, and catheterized. My mother was concerned about me moving out not just because she would miss me. She was also worried that, left to my own devices and schedule, I would let myself wallow in my own filth for days on end. This was an unwarranted concern on her part, I thought.

  I bent over to look at my bedsore. True to advertisement, it was a nasty red welt across my hip. I touched it, and felt the dull ache of it at the same time I felt my threep hand moving across it.

  I felt that sensation unique to Hadens, the vertigo that comes from perceptually being in two places at once. It’s much more noticeable when your body and your threep are in the same room at the same time. The technical term for it is “polyproprioception.” Humans, who generally have only one body to deal with, aren’t naturally designed for it. It literally changes your brain. You can see the difference between a Haden brain and an unaffected brain on an MRI.

  The vertigo happens when your brain remembers it’s not supposed to be getting input from two separate bodies. The simple solution when it happens is just to look somewhere else.

  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 v
ery 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.

  My dad had taken the photo. It was dead center north wall. On the left side of it is his certificate for being a Pulitzer finalist for the Feature Photography category, which even he, to his credit, admits is kind of ridiculous. On the right side is his Presidential Medal of Freedom, given to him a couple of years back for his work with Haden’s. Underneath that is the picture of him having the medal placed around his neck by President Gilchrist, and bending down, laughing, so the famously short Gilchrist could manage it.

  Three months later Willard Hill was elected president. President Hill signed Abrams-Kettering into law. President Hill was not thought well of in the Shane household.

  I’ve lived with the trophy room all my life so I never thought there wa
s anything particularly special about it. It was just another room in the house and a boring one at that, since I wasn’t allowed to play in it. And I know Dad is pretty blasé about awards at this point. Short of a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s pretty much run the table. Outside of humoring visitors or hosting events, I’ve never seen him step foot into the trophy room. He doesn’t even put things in there—he leaves that to Mom.

  But then, the trophy room isn’t for us. It’s for everyone else. My father deals with millionaires and billionaires on a daily basis, the sort of people who have egos just this side (and sometimes way over the edge) of sociopathy. The sort of person who thinks he’s the apex predator wading through a universe of sheep. Dad takes them into the trophy room and their eyes get to the size of dinner plates and they realize that whatever shit they’ve got going on is tiddlywinks compared to Dad. There are maybe three people in the world more interesting than Marcus Shane. They’re not one of them.

  Which is why Mom, when she’s being indiscreet, refers to the trophy room as the “vet’s office.” Because that’s where Dad brings people to take their balls.

  Into the vet’s office I walked, newly numb in the jaw, to see who tonight’s set of financial and testicular donors were. I saw Dad instantly, of course. He’s six foot eight. He’s hard to miss.

  I was not prepared for the other person I saw, standing with Dad, looking up at him, smiling, drink in hand.

  It was Nicholas Bell.

  Chapter Seven

  “CHRIS!” DAD SAID, and then suddenly he was looming over me, as he does, to grab me in a hug. “How you doing, kiddo.”

  “Being crushed by you, Dad,” I said, and he laughed. This was a standard call-and-response for us.

  “Thanks for coming in to meet people,” he said.

  “We have to have a talk about that,” I said. “Sometime really soon.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, but then waved Bell over anyway. Bell walked over, drink in hand, still smiling. “This is Lucas Hubbard, CEO and chairman of Accelerant Investments.”