Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome

by John Scalzi

  Duane Holmes:

  Nothing ever gets forgotten in Washington. David Abrams never forgot getting stuffed by President Haden over the HRIA and as soon as Haden was out of office, he started trying to get it trimmed back. A program here, a research initiative there, divots to the HRIA attached as riders to farm bills. The usual things. Sometimes he’d get something defunded, sometimes he wouldn’t. He was in a safe district, he could take his time about it.

  By the time he switched over to the Senate, he’d gotten some real momentum behind scaling back the HRIA. He campaigned on it and he almost got the Senate behind him, but then Ben Haden died and at the funeral Margie Haden started talking about the HRIA as her husband’s “enduring legacy.” And that was pretty much that for Abrams’ first try. It’d take him a couple more tries before he could get enough traction in the House and Senate to cut it down.

  But he did. The HRIA has been replaced by “Progress With Prosperity,” whatever the hell that means. Dave Abrams is enjoying his moment as the people’s champion—he’s lowered their taxes, which always plays, I mean, that’s how Haden got elected in the first place—but I think if you got Abrams alone with three or four drinks in him, the truth would come out. He got the HRIA defunded because he hated President Haden’s guts, end of story.

  Rebecca Warner:

  The HRIA didn’t have to end, not in the stupid way it did. And it wouldn’t have ended if the government would have allowed us to open sales of threeps, and other companies their neural networks, to non-Haden’s syndrome patients. The argument always was that implanting neural networks was too risky for people who were not already locked in and had their brains changed by the virus, and that the HRIA could only be funded, politically, if threeps and neural networks and everything else were medical devices.

  Well, I always thought it was bullshit, and I wasn’t shy about saying that. We had all sorts of people wanting neural networks and threeps—people who could benefit from them. People who were neurotypical but paralyzed. Older Americans. I had eighty year olds yelling at me to give them threeps so they wouldn’t be trapped in their nursing homes. And I wanted to give them threeps! But as long as we were taking the HRIA money, we had to play by their rules. Money you know you will get is worth more than the money you might get. It’s that simple. But at the end of the day Hadens are still only a few million people. There’s a multiple more senior citizens in the United States. Set them up with a threep as part of their Medicaid package and we’d have another boom economy overnight.

  The Abrams-Kettering Bill is the worst possible way to move from federal funding to private enterprise. We have almost no time to prepare. Our customer base is stranded because the federal funds they had incorporated into their budgets aren’t there anymore. We have no customer base outside the Hadens and the cost of R&D for designing products for new potential customers is going to kill us. I’ve never been ashamed to call myself conservative, and I don’t mind having the HRIA go away. But it should have been done intelligently. You don’t crater the economy just to make political points.

  It’s going to be a tough few years. We’ll have to see what happens now.

  Heng Chang:

  If you ask me what the most surprising thing was in the last twenty-five years, I’d say it was our discovery that the neural nets didn’t just allow Hadens the ability to use computers and body prostheses like personal transports, but that they could under very specific conditions also allow one Haden to actually overlay their consciousness on another’s, in the same brain. We discovered by accident, and it doesn’t have any value for most Haden’s patients since their bodies don’t move. But then we discovered that a small percentage of people who recovered from the second stage of the virus had their brains changed enough to do it too.

  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.

  Read on for Chapter 1 of John Scalzi’s upcoming novel, Lock In.

  Chapter One

  MY FIRST DAY on the job coincided with the first day of the Haden Walkout, and I’m not going to lie, that was some awkward timing. A feed of me walking into the FBI building got a fair amount of play on the Haden news sites and forums. This was not a thing I needed on my first day.

  Two things kept all of the Agora from falling down on my head in outrage. The first was that not every Haden was down with the walkout to begin with. The first day participation was spotty at best. The Agora was split into two very noisy warring camps between the walkout supporters and the Hadens who thought it was a pointless maneuver given that Abrams-Kettering had already bee
n signed into law.

  The second was that technically speaking the FBI is law enforcement, which qualified it as an essential service. So the number of Hadens calling me a scab was probably lower than it could have been.

  Aside from the Agora outrage, my first day was a lot of time in HR, filling out paperwork, getting my benefits and retirement plan explained to me in mind-numbing detail. Then I was assigned my weapon, software upgrades, and badge. Then I went home early because my new partner had to testify in a court case and wasn’t going to be around for the rest of the day, and they didn’t have anything else for me to do. I went home and didn’t go into the Agora. I watched movies instead. Call me a coward if you like.

  My second day on the job started with more blood than I would have expected.

  I spotted my new partner as I walked up to the Watergate Hotel. She was standing a bit away from the lobby entrance, sucking on an electronic cigarette. As I got closer the chip in her badge started spilling her details into my field of vision. It was the Bureau’s way of letting its agents know who was who on the scene. My partner didn’t have her glasses on so she wouldn’t have had the same waterfall of detail on me scroll past her as I walked up. But then again, it was a pretty good chance she didn’t need it. She spotted me just fine in any event.

  “Agent Shane,” said my new partner, to me. She held out her hand.

  “Agent Vann,” I said, taking the hand.

  And then I waited to see what the next thing out of her mouth would be. It’s always an interesting test to see what people do when they meet me, both because of who I am and because I’m Haden. One or the other usually gets commented on.

  Vann didn’t say anything else. She withdrew her hand and continued sucking on her stick of nicotine.

  Well, all right then. It was up to me to get the conversation started.

  So I nodded to the car that we were standing next to. Its roof had been crushed by a love seat.

  “This ours?” I asked, nodding to the car, and the love seat.

  “Tangentially,” she said. “You recording?”

  “I can if you want me to,” I said. “Some people prefer me not to.”

  “I want you to,” Vann said. “You’re on the job. You should be recording.”

  “You got it,” I said, and started recording. I started walking around the car, getting the thing from every angle. The safety glass in the car windows had shattered and a few nuggets had crumbled off. The car had diplomatic plates. I glanced over and about ten yards away a man was on his phone, yelling at someone in what appeared to be Armenian. I was tempted to translate the yelling.

  Vann watched me as I did it, still not saying anything.

  When I was done I looked up and saw a hole in the side of the hotel, seven floors up. “That where the love seat came from?” I asked.

  “That’s probably a good guess,” Vann said. She took the cigarette out of her mouth and slid it into her suit jacket.

  “We going up there?”

  “I was waiting on you,” Vann said.

  “Sorry,” I said, and looked up again. “Metro police there already?”

  Vann nodded. “Picked up the call from their network. Their alleged perp is an Integrator, which puts it into our territory.”

  “Have you told that to the police yet?” I asked.

  “I was waiting on you,” Vann repeated.

  “Sorry,” I said again. Vann motioned with her head, toward the lobby.

  We went inside and took the elevator to the seventh floor, from which the love seat had been flung. Vann pinned her FBI badge to her lapel. I slotted mine into my chest display.

  The elevator doors opened up and a uniformed cop was there. She held up her hand to stop us from getting off. We both pointed to our badges. She grimaced and let us pass, whispering into her handset as she did so. We aimed for the room that had cops all around the door.

  We got about halfway to it when a woman poked her head out of the room, looked around, spied us, and stomped over. I glanced over at Vann, who had a smirk on her face.

  “Detective Trinh,” Vann said, as the woman came up.

  “No,” Trinh said. “No way. This has nothing to do with you, Les.”

  “It’s nice to see you too,” Vann said. “And wrong. Your perp is an Integrator. You know what that means.”

  “ ‘All suspected crimes involving Personal Transports or Integrators are assumed to have an interstate component,’ ” I said, quoting the Bureau handbook.

  Trinh looked over at me, sourly, then made a show of ignoring me to speak to Vann. I tucked away that bit of personal interaction for later. “I don’t know my perp’s an Integrator,” she said, to Vann.

  “I do,” Vann said. “When your officer on scene called it in, he ID’d the perp. It’s Nicholas Bell. Bell’s an Integrator. He’s in our database. He pinged the moment your guy ran him.” I turned my head to look at Vann at the mention of the name, but she kept looking at Trinh.

  “Just because he’s got the same name doesn’t make him an Integrator,” Trinh said.

  “Come on, Trinh,” Vann said. “Are we really going to do this in front of the children?” It took me a second to realize Vann was talking about me and the uniformed cops. “You know it’s a pissing match you’re going to lose. Let us in, let us do our job. If it turns out everyone involved was in D.C. at the time, we’ll turn over everything we have and be out of your hair. Let’s play nice and do this all friendly. Or I could not be friendly. You remember how that goes.”

  Trinh turned and stomped back to the hotel room without another word.

  “I’m missing some context,” I said.

  “You got about all you need,” Vann said. She headed to the room, number 714. I followed.

  There was a dead body in the room, on the floor, facedown in the carpet, throat cut. The carpet was soaked in blood. There were sprays of blood on the walls, on the bed, and on the remaining seat in the room. A breeze turned in the room, provided by the gaping hole in the wall-length window that the love seat had gone through.

  Vann looked at the dead body. “Do we know who he is?”

  “No ID,” Trinh said. “We’re working on it.”

  Vann looked around, trying to find something. “Where’s Nicholas Bell?” she asked Trinh.

  Trinh smiled thinly. “At the precinct,” she said. “The first officer on the scene subdued him and we sent him off before you got here.”

  “Who was the officer?” Vann asked.

  “Timmons,” Trinh said. “He’s not here.”

  “I need his arrest feed,” Vann said.

  “I don’t—”

  “Now, Trinh,” Vann said. “You know my public address. Give it to Timmons.” Trinh turned away, annoyed, but pulled out her phone and spoke into it.

  Vann pointed to the uniformed officer in the room. “Anything moved or touched?”

  “Not by us,” he said.

  Vann nodded. “Shane.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Make a map,” Vann said. “Make it detailed. Mind the glass.”

  “On it,” I said. My recording mode was already on. I overlaid a three-dimensional grid on top of it, marking off everything I could see and making it easier to identify where I needed to look behind and under things. I walked the room, carefully, filling in the nooks and crannies. I knelt down when I got to the bed, turning on my headlights to make sure I got all the details. And there were in fact details to note under the bed.

  “There’s a glass under here,” I said to Vann. “It’s broken and covered in blood.” I stood up and pointed over to the room’s desk, which featured a set of glasses and a couple of bottles of water. “There are also glass shards on the floor by the desk. Guessing that’s our murder weapon.”

  “You done with your map?” Vann said.

  “Almost,” I said. I took a few more passes around the room to pick up the spots I’d missed.

  “I assume you also made your own map,” Vann said, to T
rinh.

  “We got the tech on the way,” Trinh said. “And we’ve got the feeds from the officers on the scene.”

  “I want all of them,” Vann said. “I’ll send you Shane’s map, too.”

  “Fine,” Trinh said, annoyed. “Anything else?”

  “That’s it for now,” Vann said.

  “Then if you don’t mind stepping away from my crime scene. I have work to do,” Trinh said.

  Vann smiled at Trinh and left the room. I followed. “Metro police always like that?” I asked, as we stepped into the elevator.

  “No one likes the feds stepping into their turf,” Vann said. “They’re never happy to see us. Most of them are more polite. Trinh has some issues.”

  “Issues with us, or issues with you?” I asked.

  Vann smiled again. The elevator opened to the lobby.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Vann asked. She was driving manually toward the precinct house and fumbling for a package of cigarettes—real ones this time. It was her car. There was no law against it there.

  “I’m immune to secondhand smoke, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said.

  “Cute.” She fished out a cigarette and punched in the car lighter to warm it up. I dialed down my sense of smell as she did so. “Access my box on the FBI server and tell me if the arrest feed is there yet,” she said.

  “How am I going to do that?” I asked.

  “I gave you access yesterday,” Vann said.

  “You did?”

  “You’re my partner now.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “But what would you have done if you met me and decided I was an untrustworthy asshole?”

  Vann shrugged. “My last partner was an untrustworthy asshole. I shared my box with her.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “She got shot,” Vann said.

  “Line of duty?” I asked.