“Unlocked” by John Scalzi

This is the second novella in the Tor.com trilogy of sci-fi stories. This one hit a little close to home. The conceit is that this is a collection of interviews about Haden’s Syndrome, a fictional pandemic that wipes out a decent chunk of the world’s population and leaves more “locked in,” a state where their brains are fully functioning but their bodies are completely immobile. It details the onset, progression, and how treatments were developed, as well as the future of the disease. Many experts and patients weigh in.

First thing’s first, this was definitely inspired by COVID-19 in the United States, you cannot convince me otherwise. Haden’s starts with an initial outbreak from an epidemiology conference and the symptoms are different, but otherwise it is so so similar. The initial failure of public health policy to contain it really feels awful having been through it in real life. What’s different through are the treatments that get developed. Haden’s never gets an effective vaccine, but the treatment ends up being that you can hook up a locked in person’s neurons to a lifelike robot suit that they can then move around. This leads to a great solution for the disease, but I really like how the author lays out the additional problems it creates. Now those using the robots get discriminated against, and you can’t use the robots for anything other than Hayden’s which gets into disability rights.

I couldn’t believe how short this story was, less than 80 pages and it hit a lot of different issues. There’s prison reform where inmates are initially used as test subjects for the neurons. There’s virtual social lives versus physical social lives with those locked in finding more supportive communities amongst themselves. There’s intense politics around the funding for research. It’s all so well crafted and well done.

The different voices did all sound pretty similar, no one had a distinctive turn of phrase or anything like that, but that added to the smoothness of the narrative so I don’t think it’s necessary. Overall it was a thought-provoking read and would highly recommend.