Lock In

by John Scalzi

  “And what do you think about that?”

  “Ask me after the march is done,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have an answer for you then.”

  Vann smiled again.

  “Look, Vann,” I said. “If you promise me that you’re not going to fall apart on me, I’m going to believe you. But don’t promise me that if you’re not going to be able to follow through. If you can’t promise, that’s fine. But it’s something I want to know up front.”

  Vann paused for a moment, looking at me. “Tell you what,” Vann said, finally. “When this weekend is done you and I will sit down somewhere, and I’ll have a beer and you’ll do whatever, and I’ll tell you why I stopped being an Integrator, and why my last partner shot herself in the gut, and why that asshole Trinh has it in for me.”

  “Can’t wait,” I said.

  “In the meantime: I’m not going to fall apart on you, Shane. I promise.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “Well, good,” Vann said, and took out her phone to look at the time. “That’s settled, then. Now come on. We have two more district houses to hit.”

  “I thought I was going to California,” I said.

  “No one’s going to be around until nine A.M. out there,” Vann said. “That’s still a couple hours away. Let’s see if we can punt a bunch more troublemakers back home before then. One of the threeps in the first district holding cell is there on a drunk and disorderly. I want to hear how that happened.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I LOOKED AROUND and I was in an evidence room in the FBI offices in Los Angeles. An FBI agent was looking at me. “Agent Shane?” she asked.

  “That’s me,” I said, and started to get up. Which is when I encountered a small problem. “I can’t move,” I said, after a minute.

  “Yeah, about that,” the agent said. “Our actual spare threep is being used by one of our local agents. Her regular one is in for some maintenance. The only threep we had available for you was this one. It’s been in storage for a while.”

  “How long is a while?” I asked. I found the diagnostic settings and started running them.

  “I think maybe four years,” the agent said. “Maybe five? Could be five.”

  “You’re letting me use a threep that’s evidence for a crime?” I asked. “Isn’t that, I don’t know, tainting the chain of possession?”

  “Oh, that case is over,” the agent said. “The owner of that threep died in our detention center.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “He got shivved.”

  “Someone shivved a Haden?” I said. “That’s pretty cold.”

  “He was a bad man,” said the agent.

  “Look, uh—” I realized I had not gotten the agent’s name.

  “Agent Isabel Ibanez,” she said.

  “Look, Agent Ibanez,” I said. “I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but I just ran a diagnostic on this threep, and its legs don’t work at all. There appears to be significant damage to them.”

  “It’s probably because the threep got hit with a shotgun blast,” Ibanez said.

  “A shotgun blast,” I repeated.

  “During a firefight with FBI agents, yes,” Ibanez said.

  “The owner really must have been a bad man.”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “You understand that having a threep that can’t move its legs is going to be a hindrance to the work I need to do today,” I said.

  Ibanez stepped to the side and then motioned to the wheelchair she had previously been standing in front of.

  “A wheelchair,” I said.

  “Yes,” Ibanez said.

  “A threep in a wheelchair.”

  “Yes,” Ibanez repeated.

  “You understand the irony, right?”

  “This office is ADA compliant,” Ibanez said. “And as I understand it you are going to a post office, which are also required by law to be ADA compliant. This should be sufficient.”

  “You’re actually serious about this,” I said.

  “It’s what we have available at the moment,” Ibanez said. “We could rent you a threep, but that would require approvals and paperwork. You’d be here all day.”

  “Right,” I said. “Would you excuse me a moment, Agent Ibanez?” I disconnected from the wounded threep before she had a chance to say anything else.

  Twenty minutes later I stepped out of an Avis office in Pasadena with a shiny new maroon Kamen Zephyr threep I had rented out of my own pocket, got into the equally maroon Ford I had also rented, and headed toward the Duarte post office. Take that, paperwork.

  The Duarte post office was an unassuming box of beige bricks, with arches at the windows to give it a vaguely Spanish air. I went in, stood in line politely while three separate old ladies got stamps and mailed packages, and when I got to the front of the line displayed my badge on my threep’s chest monitor to the postal clerk and asked to see the postmaster.

  A small, older man came to the front. “I’m Roberto Juarez,” he said. “I’m the postmaster here.”

  “Hi,” I said. “Agent Chris Shane.”

  “That’s funny,” Juarez said. “You have the same name as that famous kid.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I suppose I do.”

  “Was one of you, too,” he said. “A Haden, I mean.”

  “I remember that.”

  “Must be annoying for you sometimes,” Juarez said.

  “It can be,” I said. “Mr. Juarez, about a week ago a man came into your post office to get a money order. I was hoping to talk to you about him.”

  “Well, we get a lot of people asking for money orders,” Juarez said. “We have a lot of immigrants in the area, and they send remittances back home. Was this an international or domestic money order?”

  “Domestic,” I said.

  “Well, that will narrow it down a little,” Juarez said. “We do less of those. Do you have a picture?”

  “Do you have a tablet I could borrow for a second?” I asked. I could display the picture on my chest screen but it turns out people feel uncomfortable staring into your chest. The postal clerk, whose name tag listed her as Maria Willis, gave me hers to use. I signed in and accessed the picture of Sani—cleaned up, eyes closed—and showed it to them. “It’s not the best picture,” I said.

  Juarez looked at the picture blankly. Willis, on the other hand, put her hand up to her mouth in surprise.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “That’s Ollie Green.”

  “Ollie Green?” I repeated the name. “As in Oliver Green, and like the color.”

  Willis nodded and looked at the picture again. “He’s dead, isn’t he,” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Sorry. You knew him?”

  “He would come in every week or so to get a money order, an envelope, and a stamp,” Willis said. “He was nice. You could tell he was a little slow”—she looked at me to see if I understood the implication—“but a nice man. Would make small talk if you let him and there wasn’t a line.”

  “What would he talk about?” I asked.

  “The usual things,” Willis said. “The weather. Whatever movie or TV show he’d seen recently. Sometimes he’d talk about the squirrels he saw on the walk here. He really enjoyed them. He once said he’d like to get a little dog who could chase them. I told him that if he did that, the squirrel and the dog would end up getting run over.”

  “He lived nearby, then,” I said. “If he was walking over to the post office.”

  “I think he said he lived at the Bradbury Park apartments,” Willis said. “Bradbury Park, Bradbury Villa. Something like that.”

  I immediately did a search and found Bradbury Park Apartment Homes about half a mile away. Next stop, then. “Did he ever talk about his work?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Willis said. “He mentioned it once but then said what he was doing was confidential, so he couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t think about it much at the time. I thought he was trying to make a j
oke.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t think he liked his job, though,” Willis said.

  “What makes you think that?” I asked.

  “The last few times he was in he didn’t seem really happy,” Willis said. “He was quiet, which was unusual for him. So I asked him if everything was all right. He said the job was getting him down. He didn’t say anything else other than that.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “And now he’s dead,” Willis said. “Did that have to do with his job?”

  “I couldn’t really say at this point,” I said. “We’re still looking at things.”

  Juarez cleared his throat. I looked behind me and saw two new little old ladies, waiting. I nodded to him in acknowledgment.

  “Looks like I need to wrap up,” I said. “Anything else about Oliver Green that sticks out in your memory?”

  “He asked about a post office box one of the last times he was here,” Willis said. “Wanted to know how much one was and what he’d need to get one. I told him the price and that he’d need two forms of ID. He seemed to lose interest after that. I told him he’d probably be better off with a security deposit box anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he said he had something he wanted to put somewhere safe.”

  * * *

  “Oliver Green,” said Rachel Stern, the Bradbury Park Apartments manager. “Nice man. Rents a one-bedroom ground floor, near the orchard and laundry room. Well, he doesn’t rent it directly. His company does.”

  I looked up at that. “His company.”

  “Yes,” Stern said. “Filament Digital.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve heard of it,” I said.

  “They do something with computers and medical services, I think?” Stern said. “I’m not really sure. I know they do a lot of work with City of Hope, which is why they rent the apartment from us. So the people they have working there will have a place to stay.”

  “So Mr. Green isn’t its first tenant,” I said.

  “No, there have been a few before him,” Stern said. “Most of them have been fine. One a couple of tenants back we had to tell to keep quiet after ten P.M. He liked to play his music loudly.”

  “But not Green.”

  “No,” Stern said. “Model tenant. Traveled a lot, especially recently. Hardly knew he was there.” She looked puzzled for a moment. “Is Mr. Green in trouble with the FBI for something?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  “Oh my God,” Stern said. “How?”

  “Ms. Stern, would it be okay if I looked at Green’s apartment?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Sure,” Stern said. “I mean, if he was alive I suppose you would need a warrant, but now that he’s dead…” She trailed off for a moment, apparently trying to decide how to proceed. Then she nodded to herself and turned to me. “Of course, Agent Shane. Come with me.” She motioned me out of the door of her office.

  “This is a nice complex,” I said to her as we walked, mostly to make chitchat, and to keep her from thinking about whether she really should ask for a warrant.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We have nicer complexes elsewhere. This one is in the middle of our portfolio. But Duarte’s a nice little town, I have to say. Agent Shane, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Go right ahead,” I said.

  “Are you related in any way to Sienna Shane?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Is she somebody famous?”

  “What? Oh, no,” Stern said. “I went to high school with her in Glendora, and when I went back to our ten-year reunion she said a cousin of hers got Haden’s. I thought maybe it might be you.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m not even from here. I was born in Virginia.”

  “Why did you ask me if she was famous?”

  “When people ask you if you know someone, they’re often someone famous,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “I can’t think of anyone famous named Shane,” Stern said, and then pointed at an apartment. “Here we are.”

  I looked up and then grabbed her arm. “Hold up a second,” I said.

  “What is it?” Stern asked.

  I pointed at the apartment’s patio. Most of it was hidden by a privacy wall, but the top of the sliding glass patio door was visible. It was open, just a crack.

  “Does Green have roommates?” I asked, quietly.

  “Not on the lease,” Stern said.

  “Was the patio door like that before?”

  “I don’t think it was,” Stern said.

  I reached for my stunner to flick the clasp on my holster and then realized I was wearing a rental threep. “Shit,” I said, looking down at where my stunner wasn’t.

  “What is it?” Stern said.

  “You have your phone on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay here,” I said, and then pointed to the apartment door. “If I don’t come out of that door in exactly one minute, call the police. Then get back to your office and stay there. Got it?”

  Stern looked at me like I had just turned into an octopus or something. I left her, went to the patio wall, and heaved myself over it, landing as quietly as possible on the bare patio. I crouchwalked over to the patio door, turned on my recording mode, slid the door open enough to slip through, and entered the apartment. I stood up.

  A matte-black threep was there, standing in the dining nook, twenty feet away, an envelope in its hand.

  We both stared at each other for a good five seconds. Then I closed the patio door behind me and locked it. I turned back to the threep.

  “FBI,” I said. “Freeze.”

  The other threep bolted for the front door.

  I went after it, leaping over a couch to do it, and collided with the threep about three feet short of the entrance, ramming it into the wall. The drywall cracked but held.

  The threep tried to hit me in the head but had no leverage. I grabbed it and heaved it, sending it stumbling back between the living room and dining nook. The envelope it had in its hand fell to the ground.

  “You’re under arrest for breaking and entering,” I said, walking toward the threep in an arc to keep it from thinking about trying for the patio door. “You’re also under arrest for assaulting a federal officer. Give up now. Don’t make this more awkward than it already is.”

  The threep feinted toward the door and then headed into the kitchen, which was dumb, because it was walled in on three sides. I came around to the open side. The threep looked around, saw a set of knives in a butcher-block holder, grabbed one, and held it at me.

  I looked at it and then looked at the threep. “Are you kidding me?” I said. My threep’s body was carbon fiber and graphene. A knife was gonna do dick to it.

  The threep flung the knife at me, and I flinched involuntarily. It pinged off my head and back onto the kitchen floor. When I came back up, the threep had pulled a large pot out of the pile of dirty dishes in the sink and aimed it directly for my head. There was a gonging sound as it connected, twisting my head aside and caving in a portion of it.

  It was then I realized that my rental threep’s pain receptors were dialed up really high. Some part of my brain recognized this made sense, since the rental place wanted to keep its customers from doing anything stupid with the threep, and dialing up the sensation of pain would certainly do that.

  The rest of my brain was going ow jesus fuck ow ow.

  The threep raised its arm back for another swing and brought it down again. I made a fist and punched the pot as it came down and then shoved myself into the threep, driving my elbow into the threep’s neck as I did so.

  That’s what I wanted to do, anyway. What I ended up doing was a lot less kung fu and a lot more drunken scuffle. But on the other hand I managed to push the threep backward and make it stumble. Which was the point.

  On the stove was a skillet with the remains of some scrambled eggs in it. I grabbed it and looke
d back at the threep, who was back up, pot in hand.

  “Come on,” I said. “Are we really going to do this?”

  The other threep spun the handle of the pot in its hand, waiting.

  “Look,” I said. “The police have already been called. They’re on their way. You might as well—”

  The threep went high with its pot and swung down heavy. I backed up and stepped to the side, avoiding the pot. The threep’s arms came down, leaving its head exposed. I smacked my skillet into it like I was a tennis player returning a volley. The threep fell back flat on its ass.

  I took advantage and kicked it in the side as it tried to scramble back up, sliding it farther back and to the right, into the kitchen. Its right arm, the one holding the pot, was splayed out. I drove my legs into it, immobilizing it, pushed the body into the stove, driving the other arm under the threep body. I raised my skillet.

  The threep looked at it, and then at me.

  “Yeah, I know, a goddamn skillet,” I said.

  Then I drove it into the threep’s neck, edgewise, seven or eight times, until the carbon fiber casing cracked. Then I reached over and picked up the knife from the floor and slid it under the cracked casing, until I could feel the tip resting against the bundle of control fibers that went from the threep’s processor to its body systems.

  “See, this is how you use a knife in a threep fight,” I said, and then hammered the knife on its handle with the skillet.

  The knife severed the bundle fibers. The threep stopped fighting me.

  I wedged the knife in and cracked open the neck a little more, looking in until I could see the cord that carried power from the battery back to the processor in the head. I reached into the neck and wrapped a finger around it. Then I looked at the threep.

  “I know you’re still there and I know you can hear me,” I said. “And I know this threep can still talk. So why don’t we do this the easy way.” I looked around at the mess. “Well, the easier way, anyway. Tell me who you are and why you were here. I have your threep. I have its onboard memory. I’m going to find out all of it sooner or later.”

  The threep said nothing. But whoever had been controlling it was still there, still looking at me.