Free Lock In by John Scalzi

abysmal sixteen-win season. A lot of people thought the team intentionally tanked their season to get a shot at Dad in the draft. Privately, Dad didn’t credit the coach or the GM with that much strategic planning. That coach was gone by the end of Dad’s first season, the GM by the second, and two years later, Dad drove the team into the playoffs. Two years after that, Washington won the first of three back-to-back-to-back championships.
    This wall featured lots of photos of Dad suspended in air, his league and series MVP awards, some of the more iconic objects of his professional endorsement career, a display case with his four championship rings (the final one coming in his last year playing), topped off by the long thin trophy you get when you’re inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame, which he was, in his first year of eligibility.
    The east side of the room begins with a magazine cover while Dad was still with the Wizards—not from Sports Illustrated but from a D.C. business magazine, which was the first to notice that America’s hottest rookie was not buying a stupidly large house and otherwise throwing his money around like an asshole, but was instead living in a modest Alexandria town house and investing in real estate in and around the District. By the time Dad retired from basketball, he was making more money from his real estate company than he was from playing and endorsements, and he officially became a billionaire the same year he was inducted into the Hall. This side of the room is filled with various business and real estate awards and citations. There are more of these than anything else. Businesspeople sure like to give out awards.
    The north side of the room was related to Dad’s philanthropy work and specifically his work with Haden’s syndrome—a natural cause for him after his only child (me) was stricken with the disease in its first, terrible wave, along with millions of others, including Margaret Haden, the first lady of the United States. Despite the syndrome being named after the first lady, it was Dad and Mom (the former Jacqueline Oxford, scion of one of Virginia’s oldest political families) who became the public face of Haden’s awareness—along with me, of course.
    And so this wall was filled with pictures of Dad testifying before Congress for the massive research and development required to deal with four and a half million U.S. citizens suddenly having their minds cut off from their bodies, being present when President Benjamin Haden signed the Haden Research Act into law, being on the board of the Haden Institute, and of Sebring-Warner Industries, which developed the first threeps, and being virtually present when the Agora, the virtual environment developed specifically for Hadens, was opened up for us to populate and to have a space of our own in the world.
    Interspersed with these photos were pictures of us: me, Mom, and Dad, in various places, meeting world leaders, celebrities, and other Haden families. I was one of the first Haden children to own and use a threep, and my parents made a point of bringing me everywhere in my threep—not just so I could have a childhood filled with enviable personal experiences, although that was a nice side benefit. The point was to encourage the unaffected to see threeps as people, not freaky androids that had just popped up in their midst. Who better to do that than the child of one of the most celebrated men in the entire world?
    So up until I turned eighteen, I was one of the most famous and photographed Hadens in the world. The photo of me handing a flower to the pope in St. Peter’s Basilica is regularly cited as one of the most famous photographs of the last half century—the image of a child-sized threep offering an Easter lily to the Bishop of Rome being an iconic juxtaposition of modern technology and traditional theology, one presenting a peace offering to the other, who is reaching out, smiling, to take it.
    When I was in