Free Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome by John Scalzi Page B

had settled out immediately afterward.
    Also it was the first case I ever got to argue in front of the Supreme Court, so I have good memories there.
    Lawana Dellinger:
    We named our first daughter Evangeline. It was a way of saying thank you.
    And yes, being Haden parents to non-Haden babies was a challenge. It’s very hard to describe how strange it is to be in your threep, holding your infant steady while she nurses at your breast. And whether or not we won the court case, we still got lots of looks when we’d take Eva to the park. More than once we got asked by police to prove she was ours. It took everything I had sometimes to keep from hitting someone.
    We got flack from Hadens too—I get notes saying that because our children were non-Haden, we were not committed enough to the Haden cause. And I was like, excuse me? There’s a cause? Look, I’d like to help you with your cause and all, but right now I’ve got a diaper to clean out. My daughter takes precedence over your
cause
.
    Eventually people forgot about us, which was fine. Now we have two daughters and a son, and my son likes to joke that he has two sets of parents, but one of them doesn’t get out much. He thinks the joke is funnier than it is. We’re a normal family, really. And I think that this tells you that even in this new world of Hadens, or however you want to put it, there’s still people in it, just trying to live their lives. That’s the real story of any world you live in, isn’t it.

PART SIX: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
    Monique Davis:
    Does it feel like twenty-five years? No, but I don’t think long stretches of time ever quote-unquote feel like however long they are. My daughter was born eighteen years ago. I look at her sometimes and it feels like she was toddler yesterday. Everything in the past gets compressed together. It’s compacted for easy sorting, maybe.
    But every once in a while I remember how long it’s been. This year’s crop of internists includes a doctor who contracted Haden’s in the womb. She’s smart as they come, and her entire life has been spent in a threep. I think about that and I shudder; she doesn’t think about it at all. It’s just always how her life has been. Most of her fellow internists, none of whom remember life before Haden’s, don’t think it’s that unusual, either.
That’s
when it feels like twenty-five years.
    Natasha Lawrence:
    What bothers me after twenty-five years is that we still don’t have an effective vaccine. We still don’t have a cure. What we have are established protocols for locking down the spread of the virus when it surfaces, and a whole array of therapeutic machines to mitigate the effects of lock in. We can’t stop the disease. We just make it less awful when it happens.
    And yes, that feels like a failure to me. In the last two and a half decades we’ve learned so much about the brain. We’ve made enormous steps in integrating these brain prostheses and have built entire industries around serving Hadens and making their lives easier and more tolerable. And still every year hundreds of thousands of Americans get sick with the latest strain of the Haden virus. Tens of thousands die. Tens of thousands experience lock in.
    You know what it’s like now? It’s like car accidents. Even with automated cars, people still get into car accidents, because they try to overrule their autodrive or refuse to engage it. We still lose ten to twenty thousand people a year in traffic accidents. No one thinks of it as an epidemic. It’s just the cost of doing business. The cost of living our lives. Haden’s syndrome has become that now. A chronic disease of our nation, and of the planet.
    Thomas Stevenson:
    My understanding, or at least the way it was explained to me, was that the Haden virus is simply a highly adaptable and easily mutating virus; that enough changes about it from year to year and season to season that we simply have a hard time keeping up. One of the questions I had early