Lock In

by John Scalzi

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “Yes, but you also heard that son of a bitch Hubbard running me down tonight,” Buchold said. “I have fifteen Haden researchers on my staff. None of them would be there if they thought I was treating them as subhuman, or what we were doing was bad for Hadens.”

  “Mr. Buchold,” I said, and held up a hand. “I’m not here to judge you. And I’m not here to run back to my father and whisper into his ear about you. Right now I am here investigating the bombing of your facilities. Our primary suspect at the moment is one of your employees. Our only interest is finding out if he’s really the bomber, and why he did it.” Buchold seemed to relax a bit at that.

  And then Vann tensed him all up again. “Did Dr. Baer ever talk about Cassandra Bell?” she asked.

  “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Jim,” Wisson said.

  “No,” Buchold said, shooting a look at his husband. “I never heard him speak about Cassandra Bell.”

  “What about the researchers around him?” Vann continued.

  “There would be casual talk about her because she’s on record opposing our line of research,” Buchold said. “We always wondered if protesters would show up like they do because of the animal testing we have to do. But none ever did and I don’t think anyone really gave her a whole lot of thought. Why?”

  I looked over to Vann to see what she thought. She nodded at me. “Dr. Baer left behind a suicide note,” I said. “He mentioned Cassandra Bell in it.”

  “How? Is she behind this in some way?” Buchold asked.

  “We don’t have any reason to believe so,” Vann said. “But we also have to follow up all the leads.”

  “I knew this was going to happen,” Buchold said.

  “What was going to happen?” I asked.

  “Violence,” Buchold said. “Rick will tell you. Those dipshits passed Abrams-Kettering and I said to him that sooner or later there was going to be a mess. You don’t just take five million people sucking on the government teat and punt them into the street and expect them to go without a fight.” He looked over at me. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true, but I let it go. “How far does this set you back?”

  “You mean our research?”

  “Yes.”

  “It sets us back by years,” Buchold said. “There’s data in the lab that wasn’t anywhere else.”

  “You don’t have multiple copies of your data?” Vann asked.

  “Of course we do,” Buchold said.

  “And you can’t pull it down off your networks?”

  “You don’t understand,” Buchold said. “We don’t ever put anything genuinely sensitive online. The moment we do that the hacking begins. We’ll put up dummy servers with nothing on them but encrypted pictures of cats, for fuck’s sake, and we won’t tell anyone we’ve put them out there. Within four hours we’ve got hackers from China and Syria cracking them open. We’d be idiots to put actual confidential data into an outside-accessible server.”

  “So all your data was stored locally,” I said.

  “Stored locally,” Buchold said. “Stored multiply on internal servers.”

  “What about archives?” Vann asked. “Data stored off-network.”

  “We did that, of course. And stored it in a secure room on campus.”

  “So all of it—local and archived data—went up with the lab building.” Vann glanced over to me with an expression that I suspect meant these people were sloppy.

  “Right,” Buchold said. “It’s possible we can piece together some recent data from e-mails and the computers in the office building. If they weren’t destroyed by either the blast or by the fire-suppression system. But realistically speaking—years of research. Gone. Dead. Destroyed.”

  * * *

  “Oh, look, it’s midnight,” I said, to Vann, as she drove me home. “My first real day on the job is over.”

  Vann smiled at this, the cigarette in her mouth bouncing as she did so. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “It’s been a little more hectic than most first days.”

  “I can hardly wait for tomorrow,” I said.

  “I doubt that.” Vann drooled smoke out of her lips.

  “You know that shit’s going to kill you, right?” I asked. “The smoking. There’s a reason why no one does it anymore.”

  “There’s a reason why I do it,” she said.

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “Let’s say we keep some mystery in our relationship,” Vann said.

  “Whatever,” I said, with what I hoped was just the right amount of casual flip. Vann smiled again. Score one for me.

  My phone went off. It was Tony. “Shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I was supposed to meet with my maybe new roommates tonight,” I said.

  “Do you want me to write you a note?” Vann asked.

  “Cute,” I said. “Hold on.” I opened the channel and spoke with my inside voice. “Hey, Tony.”

  “So we were all hoping that you might pop by tonight,” Tony said.

  “Yeah, about that,” I began.

  “But then I saw that Loudoun Pharma exploded and they think it might be a terrorist plot or something, and I thought to myself, I’m guessing Chris might be a little busy this evening.”

  “Thank you for understanding,” I said.

  “Looks like you had an exciting day.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Well, then, let me end it with a bit of good news,” Tony said. “The group tried you in absentia and found you guilty of being a probably worthy flatmate. You are hereby sentenced to the nicest room in the brownstone. May God have mercy on your soul.”

  “That’s great, Tony,” I said. “No, really. I appreciate it.”

  “That’s good to hear. And the rest of us appreciate you paying rent so that we’re not thrown out in the street, so we’re even. I’m sending your house code now. Once you’re here change it so no one but you knows it. I got your first and last and security deposit, so you’re good to go. Show up anytime.”

  “Probably tomorrow,” I said. “I’m already close to my parents’ place. I’m going to crash here for the night.”

  “Sounds good,” Tony said. “Now get some rest. You sound beat. Good night.”

  “Night,” I said, and then switched back to my outside voice. “I got the apartment.”

  “That’s nice,” Vann said.

  “It’s actually a room in an intentional community,” I said.

  “Funny, you don’t look like a hippie.”

  “I’ll work on it,” I promised.

  “Please don’t,” she said.

  Chapter Nine

  THE NEXT MORNING every road in D.C. was jammed from 5:30 A.M. onward. More than a hundred Haden long-range truckers got onto the interstate loop around the city and arranged their trucks in geometrical patterns designed to induce maximum disruption to automatic driving systems, and drove at twenty-five miles an hour. Commuters, frustrated with the loop being more locked up than usual, switched over to manual and tried to get around the blockages, which of course only made things worse. By seven o’clock the loop was at a complete standstill.

  And then, for extra added fun, Haden truckers locked up Interstate 66 and the toll road into Virginia.

  “Late on the third day of your job,” Vann said to me, from her desk, as I got into the office. She pointed to the desk next to hers as she did it, indicating that it was my desk now.

  “Everyone’s late today,” I said. “I should be graded on that curve.”

  “How did you manage to get in from Potomac Falls, anyway?” Vann asked. “Tell me you borrowed your dad’s helicopter. That would be kind of amazing.”

  “As it happens, Dad does have a helicopter,” I said. “Or his company does. But it’s not allowed to land in our neighborhood. So, no. I got dropped off at the Sterling stop of the Metro and took the train in.”


  “And how was that.”

  “Unpleasant,” I said. “It was super crowded and I got a lot of nasty looks. Like it was my fault the roads were crushed. I almost said, look, people, if it were my fault, I wouldn’t be on the goddamn train with the rest of you, now would I.”

  “It’s going to be a long week with this shit,” Vann said.

  “It’s not an effective protest if it’s not pissing people off.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t effective,” Vann said. “I didn’t even say I wasn’t sympathetic. It just means it’s going to be a long week. Now, come on. Forensics has got news for us.”

  “What news?” I asked.

  “On our dead guy,” Vann said. “We know who he is. And apparently there’s something else, too.”

  * * *

  “First off,” Ramon Diaz said, “meet John Sani, your no-longer-mystery man.”

  We were back in the imaging suite, looking at a highly detailed, larger-than-life image of Sani on the morgue slab. It was cleaner and less annoying to the medical examiners to have field agents look at their handiwork this way. The model Diaz was projecting could be manipulated to examine any part of the body that the examiners scanned or opened. At this point the body did not look as if it had been cut into any more than it already had been at the neck. This was the “cover” scan.

  “So the Navajo came through for us,” Vann said.

  “They did,” Diaz said. “Looks like they sent his information to us around midnight their time last night.”

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “As far as the information we have tells us, he’s not anyone,” Diaz said. “The Navajo Nation have him on file for a single drunk and disorderly when he was nineteen. No time, community service. Other than that what we’ve got is his birth certificate and Social Security, a few medical records, and his high school transcripts, which run through tenth grade.”

  “How’d he do?” Vann asked.

  “The fact it stops at the tenth grade might tell you something.”

  “No driver’s license or other sort of ID?” I asked.

  “No,” Diaz said.

  “What else?” Vann asked.

  “He’s thirty-one and was in less than great health,” Diaz said. “Some liver damage and heart disease, and signs of incipient diabetes, which is not too surprising in someone with a Native American background. Missing a few teeth in the back. Also, that slash in his neck is consistent with a self-inflicted wound. He did it to himself and he did it with that broken glass you found.”

  “Is this everything?” I asked.

  Diaz smiled. “No, it’s not. I have something for you that I think you’re going to find really interesting.”

  “Cut the suspense, Diaz,” Vann said. “Get to it.”

  “They did an X-ray of his skull before they took out his brain,” Diaz said. He popped up the three-dimensional scan on Sani’s head. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Holy shit,” I said, immediately.

  “Huh,” Vann said, after a second.

  The X-ray of Sani’s head showed a network of thin tendrils and coils in and around the brain, converging on five junctions distributed radially around the interior surface of the skull, the junctions themselves linked to one another in a mesh of connections.

  It was an artificial neural network, designed to send and receive information from the brain, displayed in almost perfect detail.

  Two groups of people had structures like these. I belonged to one of those groups. Vann belonged to the other.

  “This dude’s an Integrator,” I said.

  “What’s his brain structure?” Vann asked Diaz.

  “The report says it’s consistent with someone who contracted Haden’s,” Diaz said. “And that’s consistent with his medical records, which show he had meningitis as a kid, which could mean the Haden’s variety. He’s got the brain structure to be an Integrator.”

  “Shane,” Vann said, still looking at the X-ray.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Problems with this scenario,” Vann said.

  I thought about it for a minute. “This guy didn’t get through high school,” I said, finally.

  “So?” Vann said.

  “So Integrator training is a post-graduate thing,” I said. “You undertake it after getting a suitable undergraduate degree, like psychology. What’s yours?”

  “Biology,” Vann said. “American University.”

  “Right,” I said. “Plus there’s supposed to be a raft of psychological and aptitude tests you have to clear before they let you into the program. It’s one of the reasons there’s so few Integrators.”

  “Yes,” Vann said.

  “It’s expensive, too. The training process.”

  “Not for the student,” Vann said. “The NIH covers the costs.”

  “They must have been pissed at you when you left,” I said.

  “They got their money’s worth from me,” Vann said. “Bring it back around.”

  “Okay, so the question here is, here is a guy who didn’t finish high school and who we have no record of anywhere outside of the Navajo Nation, which means he didn’t have Integrator training.” I pointed to the X-ray. “So how does this guy get all that wiring in his head?”

  “That’s a good question,” Vann said. “It’s not the only question. What else is wrong about this picture?”

  “What isn’t wrong about this picture?” I asked.

  “I meant specifically.”

  “Why would an Integrator want to integrate with another Integrator?” I asked.

  “More specific than that.”

  “I don’t know how to get more specific than that,” I said.

  “Why would an Integrator want to integrate with another Integrator, and bring a headset?” Vann asked.

  I looked at her blankly for a couple of seconds. Then, “Oh, shit, the headset.”

  “Right,” Vann said.

  “That reminds me,” Diaz said, to me. “I got inside that headset like you asked, to see if there was any useful information on those processor chips.”

  “Was there?” I asked.

  “No,” Diaz said. “There were no chips inside the headset.”

  “If there are no chips inside, then it wouldn’t work. It’s a dummy headset,” I said.

  “That would be my thinking, yes,” Diaz said.

  I turned to Vann. “Seriously, what the hell is going on here?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Vann asked.

  “I mean, what the hell is going here. We’ve got two Integrators, one of whom shouldn’t be an Integrator, and a dummy headset. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Vann turned to Diaz. “Fingerprints on the headset?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They match Sani, not Bell.”

  “So Sani brought the headset to the party, not Bell,” Vann said, then looked back at me. “What does that suggest to you?”

  “Maybe that Bell didn’t know Sani was an Integrator,” I said. “And that Sani didn’t want him to know he was one, either.”

  “Right,” Vann said.

  “Okay, but again, why?” I asked. “What possible use is there for Sani to convince Bell that he’s just a tourist? Without the headset he can’t even be that. Unless there’s some Integrator-to-Integrator ability I don’t know about.”

  “No,” Vann said. “There’s a sort of neural feedback loop that happens when you try to put one Integrator into the head of another. You can fry people’s brains that way.”

  “Like Scanners?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “An old movie. About psychics. They could make your head blow up.”

  Vann smiled. “Nothing that outwardly dramatic. But inwardly it’s not supposed to be pleasant. It’s blocked at the network level in any event.”

  “So it couldn’t have been that,” I said. “Plus the whole suicide thing again.”

  Vann was quiet again.

  Then: “What time
is it in Arizona?”

  “It’s two hours behind here, so about eight thirty,” I said. “Maybe. Arizona is weird about time zones.”

  “You need to go out there today and talk to some people,” Vann said.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” Vann said. “You can get there in ten seconds for nothing.”

  “There’s the small fact I will have no body,” I said.

  “You’re not the only Haden on the FBI staff,” Vann said. “The Bureau keeps spare threeps at the major field offices. Phoenix will have one for you. It won’t be fancy”—she motioned to my threep—“but it will get the job done.”

  “Are the Navajo going to cooperate with us?” I asked.

  “If we let them know we’re trying to figure out the death of one of their own, they might come around,” Vann said. “I have a friend in the Phoenix office. I’ll see if he can make things easier. Let’s get you out there by ten their time.”

  “I can’t just call?” I asked.

  “You need to tell some family their son or dad is dead and then ask them a bunch of personal questions,” Vann said. “Yeah, no, you can’t just call.”

  “It’ll be my first trip to Arizona,” I said.

  “Hope you like hot,” Vann said.

  * * *

  At 10:05 I found myself in the Phoenix FBI field office, looking at a bald man.

  “Agent Beresford?” I asked.

  “Damn, that’s creepy,” the man said. “This threep’s been in the corner for three years without moving, and suddenly it gets up. It’s like a statue coming to life.”

  “Surprise,” I said.

  “I mean, we’ve been using it as a hat rack.”

  “Sorry to deprive you of your office furniture.”

  “It’s only for the day. You Shane?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tom Beresford.” He held out his hand. I took it. “I don’t mind telling you I’ve never forgiven your dad for crushing the Suns in four.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. He was talking about Dad’s second NBA title. “If it means anything, he always said that series was closer than it looked.”

  “It’s nice of him to lie like that,” Beresford said. “Come on, I’ll take you down to meet Klah.”

  I started walking and stopped. “Jesus,” I said, and started jerking my leg.