Living with the disease, and revisiting Haden's Syndrome: Revisiting Unlocked, by John Scalzi

 One of the predictable, but disheartening admissions that the medical community has finally made, and gotten the political world to acknowledge, is that COVID is not going away.  It is a fact of life, a fact of the world, and we must find a way to exist in a world with COVID knowing that it will not be eradicated.  There was once a time when we may have told ourselves that COVID could be eradicated, or at least contained, but that time has passed.  It has been clear for a while, but it is only recently that the epidemiological community, and from them, the political establishment, has made this message clear to the world, or at least, as clear to the world as can be when a large part of the world exists within an informational bubble divorced from fact.  And so we (I) revisit Haden's Syndrome.  I find it interesting and useful, or at least, a satisfying diversion, to spend my Sunday mornings, rambling about science fiction, and I have made semi-regular references to John Scalzi's Lock-In series since the beginning of the pandemic.  Actually, I think they are among the most social-scientifically interesting novels around, or at least, the first book was.  A terrifying disease sweeps the world, technology comes to the rescue, after a fashion, but the disease persists, and society is transformed by the continued existence of the disease in tension with the technological developments around it.  This morning, I revisit a very brief supplementary piece that Scalzi wrote, called "Unlocked: An Oral History Of Haden's Syndrome."  The first novel takes place in the near future, after society has been altered by the disease, socially and technologically.  "Unlocked" is a compilation of snippets, interviews, etc., set up like the script of a brief documentary, showing how the world gets from here to there.  There are some lessons, what Scalzi got right, what he got wrong, and how to think about the lessons learned.

First, what the hell is "Haden's Syndrome?"  It is a highly communicable virus that, for most people, manifests as something like a very bad flu.  For a small proportion, it proceeds to meningitis-like symptoms.  A bunch of them die.  Some, though, wind up with complete paralysis.  Complete.  Think Johnny Got His Gun, except without the war.  And they can't even tap Morse code.  Complete paralysis.  Yet MRIs show their brains are fully functioning.

A lot of people die, and a bunch of people wind up in this condition: being "locked in."  One of those people is President Haden's wife, after whom the syndrome is named.

What happens?  A lot of research.  The medical community can never manage a vaccine, but they manage the following.  Neural implants for those locked in.  They can connect to that VR thing that is always ten years away ("the agora"), and they can connect to a robot body, called a "threep," after C3PO, to interact with the physical world.  The world of the first novel is the world in which those locked in by Haden's Syndrome are either in the agora, or walking around in threeps.

But how does the world get from here to there?

That's where "Unlocked" comes in.  It's a quick read, but somewhat less interesting for those who haven't read the novels.  Nevertheless, it is worth revisiting as we consider the final admission that yes, we're stuck with COVID.

The United States alone is closing in on one million deaths from COVID and a large portion of the country is shrugging, inventing ludicrous conspiracy theories, and demanding that we do nothing.  What were Scalzi's numbers?  About 4 mill.  That's the number that scares the ever-living fuck out of everyone in John Scalzi's fictionalized US, versus the conspiracy theory-ridden place in which reality has settled itself.  The cost of the HRIA-- the bill to dump money into Haden's research and find a way to manage, if not a cure?  Everyone balks at $3 trillion in Scalzi-ville, and it is only President Haden's force, combined with and motivated by his wife's infection that manages against the terror of that number that gets it done.

Scalzi doesn't write about any of the other economic measures, but are you paying attention to the scale of the economic measures we're taking?

"Unlocked" describes the failure of the researchers to find a vaccine, their frustration and anger at that, and the continued infections that result even into the novel.  Yeah, they have the neural networks and threeps, and stuff, but no vaccines.

And here's where this really gets me.  As the documentarians and interviewers are describing this process, they blithely say that when Haden's outbreaks occur, they have no problems managing lockdowns.  Lockdowns are easy, they say!

But a vaccine?!  And those numbers.

Yeah, kind of infuriating, right?  Here we have a vaccine, and it works.  It works such that even those who contract break-through omicron cases appear based on current data to suffer not much more than cold or mild flu-like symptoms, and a bunch of conspiracy-minded fuckwits won't take it.  Lockdowns?  No way!  They won't even wear masks to minimize spread, instead preferring to maximize the rate at which the disease spreads and mutates out of some perverted sense that you show toughness to a fucking virus.  Like it cares.

We could spend $50 billion to vaccinate the planet, and we're spending trillions on... what?  And the left is furious that we aren't spending more, forget worldwide vaccination?

In "Unlocked," Haden is a... I hate this term... "fiscally conservative" Republican.  Scalzi doesn't use the term, and you shouldn't either, because there ain't no such thing, and anybody who uses it is pulling a bait and switch on you.  Here's what people want you to think.  They want you to think they are responsible with tax dollars, they balance the budget, and they don't spend very much.

That's all bullshit, and every single politician who uses the term is a liar.  Every.  Single.  One.

Here's what they all do.  Ignore spending, pass big tax cuts, and then when confronted with the deficits they created, use some bullshit rhetorical device like the following, "we don't have a tax problem, we have a spending problem."  (I don't have a specific attribution for that quote, but it is a precise quote from every Republican for the last 40 years because they're all mindless automatons.)  The deficit is as follows:  deficit = tax revenue - spending.  Period.  It's an equation.  It's the relationship between taxing and spending.  Do you want to talk about taxing and spending separately?  Fine.  Go for it.  But the deficit is the relationship between the two.  You cannot separate them, and talk about the deficit at the same time.  Anyone who tries is a liar, an idiot, or both.

And every single politician who describes him or herself as "fiscally conservative" meets that rule.

Anyway, Haden is only really referenced in the novels, but you meet him directly in "Unlocked."  He is presented as a hardnosed, "fiscal conservative."  But when his wife gets locked in, suddenly he's all for dumping as much money as he can find or print into research.  Understandable.  I'd do it.  His problem is political.  He's facing negotiations with a divided Congress, with a Democratic House that may go along, but a Republican Senate that is more intransigent, and a total, fucking douchebag backbencher who keeps trying to kill the research, mostly because he hates Haden.  Abrams, as in, Abrams-Kettering, which you'll know if you've read Lock-In.

And as all of this is playing out, there is the question of the origin.  Sitting in the background.  Does it matter?

It gets tracked to a conference of epidemiologists, ironically enough.  But how did it get to them?  Was it natural, or artificially created?  One of those mysteries.

Yeah, we can't solve that either.  The question is the extent to which it matters.  That question is of some importance, but of greatest importance for two reasons:  1) if it is artificially created, at some point we need to deal with those who created it as a protective measure (we kind of know the who, conditional on if), but 2) for those who would rather place blame than do stuff-- like vaccinate and wear masks-- having an adversary makes for a better way to play the story.  1 and 2 are very different.

Within Scalzi's world, the question just moves to the background.  Unaddressed.  Just because "the lab leak hypothesis" can be used as a distraction, and has been so, does not devalue the importance of 1.

Ultimately, the question is, what are we willing to accept?  Scalzi presents a world in which Haden's becomes something with which people can live, and in fact, those with Haden's debate whether or not a "cure" is even something to be sought.  Those with Haden's live their lives in the agora, they have threeps... they live.  They just live differently.  The world just becomes different.

The process of getting to that point deviated in some interesting ways from what we are seeing.  Lockdowns were easy, but no vaccine.  Which numbers were easy, and which were terrifying?  Here we are.  COVID is here.  Where could we be?  We have a vaccine.  What's our problem?

As usual, stupidity.  Stupidity just makes a lousy plot.

Trombone Shorty, "The Cure," from Backatown.