Lock In

"So Lock In takes the idea of locked-in syndrome, which is a thing that actually happens to people; but he’s imagining that there’s a highly contagious virus called Haden’s syndrome. There’s been a global pandemic that caused people to get locked in. So instead of having a small handful of society who’ve been locked in by something like Lou Gehrig’s disease, this is a huge, huge amount of the population. People are still completely awake and alert. They come up with these C-3POs, they call them ‘threeps,’ which are basically robots that people can put their brains in. Their body still exists, but they can wirelessly connect and move the body around so that they can interact and move through the world. There’s also a kind of virtual space that people can be in. Finally, there are integrators: an integrator can let someone with Haden’s syndrome borrow their body. So instead of just having a robot body, you have a flesh and blood body. You get to have different sets of feelings. Chris Shane, a rookie FBI agent, gets assigned to this murder. It’s committed by an integrator – so, the integrator had a client. You have to figure out who the suspect is: is it the integrator? Is it the client, and then which client is it? It gets so much more complicated as it goes on. There’s a bigger problem. Every answer that Chris finds unlocks a different question. It’s sitting somewhere in the police procedural , hardboiled detective area. He plays fair in that, if you read it a second time, all of the things are there; but often you are in a this-is-very-confusing state, which he borrows from the hardboiled detective novel. Yeah! Speaking of identity, one of the things that I particularly enjoy and admire in these books is that Scalzi has chosen a deliberately androgynous name, Chris, and he never genders the character. You do not know at any point where Chris lands on the gender spectrum. When they did the audiobook, they had two different versions, one with a male narrator and one with a female narrator. And different readers will make different assumptions. Yes, so there’s a couple of things. One is the technology that my main character Tesla uses. She was in a horrific accident in her backstory, so she has what’s called a deep brain pain suppressor. It’s based on a device that my mother had in her head, which was a deep brain stimulator for Parkinson’s. When Mom activated it for the first time, I said, “Oh, this is a miracle.” Because she had been tremoring; she had needed to use a walker to go in into the building; her voice, her speech was slushy… and they activated it, and her symptoms just stopped. The tremor just cut off. Her speech was back to the way it was before the disease. So I thought, “What happens if we could manage pain that way?” It’s one of those technologies that is around the corner. And at some point, this book will not be science fiction anymore – at least that part of it won’t be. I wanted to give her that, but I also wanted to honour the choices that you still have to make – any medication, any device, any sort of adaptation always has a side effect. With Tesla, her side effect is she feels pain-less, but she also feels sensitive touch-less. So she has to make a decision: back doesn’t hurt, or can feel my husband touched me. So that was fun to play with. In the ways that novelists like to torture characters. For gender – the book is set, in my brain, in about 2074. I wanted to be far enough in the future that I could imagine things having changed, but also choose a time when people who are alive today would still be alive, so that you have more than one generation of experience. I’ve been struck by the way, at science fiction conventions and over Zoom, we do pronouns – when you do a panel, you say, “My name is Mary Robinette Kowal, she/her.” It’s listed on my Zoom account. So I thought, maybe that just becomes part of natural speech – you just do that when you introduce yourself to someone. The way we’re headed with AI , one of the things that I would love is something that would immediately tell me someone’s name, because I’m terrible with them. And they would also just tell me the gender so that there’s no guessing. Someone who had grown up in that would then grow up with the default that you don’t make any assumptions until the person tells you. So I wanted to play with that. I had to hire a sensitivity reader to work with me on that, because I’m also a 54-year-old woman who grew up in the binary and still have things that I default to, completely unconsciously. So I wanted to get someone in there to help me not do that. For instance, a small thing, but my main character’s husband did not do needlepoint in the original. In my first draft, Tesla did that. My reader, Christine Sandquist – who is available for hire, and very, very good – she said, “You know that this is gendered? Everybody who’s doing crafts in this book is female presenting.” And I had not noticed that! So I just shifted which spouse was doing it – and then it gave me opportunities later. Yeah. So it is a locked room murder mystery, technically, but also this spaceship has around 3000 people on it that I just ignore. Part of it is that my characters are in the very fancy suite section, which does limit it to eight cabins of passengers that could have been at the scene of the crime. But otherwise, I just ignore exactly how many people are on that ship."