Lock In--A Novel of the Near Future by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466849358
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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,

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