Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome Read online

  “Not really,” Vann said. “She was at the firing range and shot herself in the gut. There’s some debate about whether it was accidental or not. Took disability and retired. I didn’t mind.”

  “Well,” I said. “I promise not to shoot myself in the gut.”

  “Two body jokes in under a minute,” Vann said. “It’s almost like you’re trying to make a point or something.”

  “Just making sure you’re comfortable with me,” I said. “Not everyone knows what to do with a Haden when they meet one.”

  “You’re not my first,” she said. The lighter had popped and she fished it out of its socket, lighting her cigarette. “That should be obvious, considering our beat. Have you accessed the arrest feed yet?”

  “Hold on.” I popped into the Bureau’s evidence server and pulled up Vann’s box. The file was there, freshly arrived. “It’s here,” I said.

  “Run it,” Vann said.

  “You want me to port it to the dash?”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Autodrive is a thing that happens.”

  Vann shook her head. “This is a Bureau car,” she said. “Lowest-bidder autodrive is not something you want to trust.”

  “Fair point,” I said. I fired up the arrest feed. It was janky and low-res. The Metro police, like the Bureau, probably contracted their tech to the lowest bidder. The view was fps stereo mode, which probably meant the camera was attached to protective eyewear.

  The recording started as the cop—Timmons—got off the elevator on the seventh floor, stun gun drawn. At the door of room 714 there was a Watergate security officer, resplendent in a bad-fit mustard yellow uniform. As the feed got closer the security officer’s taser came into view. The security officer looked like he was going to crap himself.

  Timmons navigated around the security officer and the image of a man, sitting on the bed, hands up, floated into view. His face and shirt were streaked with blood. The image jerked and Timmons took a long look at the dead man on the blood-soaked carpet. The view jerked back up to the man on the bed, hands still up.

  “Is he dead?” asked a voice, which I assumed was Timmons’s.

  The man on the bed looked down at the man on the carpet. “Yeah, I think he is,” he said.

  “Why the fuck did you kill him?” Timmons asked.

  The man on the bed turned back to Timmons. “I don’t think I did,” he said. “Look—”

  Then Timmons zapped the man. He jerked and twisted and fell off the bed, collapsing into the carpet, mirroring the dead man.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “What?” Vann asked.

  “Timmons was barely in the room before he zapped our perp.”

  “Bell,” Vann said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Speaking of which, does that name sound familiar to you?”

  “Did Bell say anything before he got zapped?” Vann asked, ignoring my question.

  “Timmons asked him why he killed that guy,” I said. “Bell said he didn’t think he did.”

  Vann frowned at that.

  “What?” I asked.

  Vann glanced over to me again, and had a look that told me she wasn’t looking at me, but at my PT. “That’s a new model,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sebring-Warner 660XS.”

  “Sebring-Warner 600 line isn’t cheap,” Vann said.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Lease payments are a little steep on a rookie FBI salary.”

  “Is this how we’re going to do this?” I asked.

  “I’m just making an observation,” Vann said.

  “Fine,” I said. “I assume they told you something about me when they assigned me to you as a partner.”

  “They did.”

  “And I assume you know about the Haden community because it’s your beat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s skip the part where you pretend not to know who I am and who my family is and how I can afford a Sebring-Warner 660,” I said.

  Vann smiled and stubbed out her cigarette on the side window and lowered the window to chuck out the butt. “I saw you got grief on the Agora for showing up to work yesterday,” she said.

  “Nothing I haven’t gotten before, for other things,” I said. “Nothing I can’t handle. Is this going to be a problem?”

  “You being you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Why would it be a problem?” Vann asked.

  “When I went to the Academy I knew people there thought I was there as an affectation,” I said. “That I was just farting around until my trust fund vested or something.”

  “Has it?” Vann asked. “Your trust fund, I mean. Vested.”

  “Before I even went to the Academy,” I said.

  Vann snickered at this. “No problems,” she said.

  “You sure.”

  “Yes. And anyway, it’s good that you have a high-end threep,” she said, using the slang term for a Personal Transport. “It means that map of yours is actually going to have a useful resolution. Which works because I don’t trust Trinh to send me anything helpful. The arrest feed was messy and fuzzy, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “It’s bullshit,” Vann said. “Metro eyewear feeds auto-stabilize and record at 4k resolution. Trinh probably told Timmons to shitty it up before sending it. Because she’s an asshole like that.”

  “So you’re using me for my superior tech abilities,” I said.

  “Yes, I am,” Vann said. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s nice to be appreciated for what I can do.”

  “Good,” Vann said, turning into the precinct house parking lot. “Because I’m going to be asking you to do a lot.”

  Tor Books by John Scalzi

  Note: Within series, books are best read in listed order.

  —–

  THE OLD MAN’S WAR SERIES

  Humanity has finally made it into interstellar space. But the planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding. And they don’t want young people for fighters.

  Old Man’s War

  The Ghost Brigades

  The Last Colony

  Zoe’s Tale

  The Human Division

  Short Fiction in the series: “After the Coup”

  STAND-ALONE FICTION

  The Android’s Dream: Earth is on the verge of war with a vastly superior alien race. A lone man races to find the one object that can save our planet and our people from alien enslavement—a sheep. Yes, a sheep. And just wait until you read Chapter One.

  Agent to the Stars: Thomas Stein, one of Hollywood’s hottest young agents, knows a thing or two about closing deals. But negotiating for an entire alien race—a hideous and smelly one—is going to require all the smarts, skills, and wits he can muster.

  Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: Some of the best and most popular Whatever entries from the first ten years of the blog—a decade of Whatever, presented in delightfully random form, just as it should be.

  METAtropolis: Five original tales set in a shared urban future—from some of the hottest young writers in modern SF.

  Fuzzy Nation: ZaraCorp holds the right to extract unlimited resources from the planet Zarathustra as long as it’s certifiably free of native sentients. When the planet’s native Fuzzies turn out to be intelligent, language-using beings, well, ZaraCorp has a problem.

  Redshirts: Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel!

  The starship ensigns were expendable…until they started comparing notes.

  Lock In: Fifteen years from now, a new virus sweeps the globe. Most experience nothing worse than fever and headaches, but 1%—that’s 1.7 million people in the United States—find themselves fully awake and aware yet “locked in” in this novel of our near future.

  STAND-ALONE SHORT FICTION

  “The Pres
ident’s Brain is Missing”

  “The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue”

  —–

  www.tor-forge.com

  Copyright (C) 2014 by John Scalzi

  Art copyright (C) 2014 by Richie Pope

  eISBN 978-1-46687-179-3

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