It’s also important to thank Ethan Ellenberg, my agent, and Evan Gregory, who handles my foreign sales. They do a frankly fantastic job for me, and I’m lucky to have them.

Thanks also to Steve Feldberg at Audible and to Gillian Redfearn at Gollancz.

Many thanks to friends and readers who have cheered me on and/or been there as welcome distractions when I needed to be distracted. This list is very long, so rather than list it out, assume that you’re on it. Thanks, y’all.

I really mostly just want to thank my wife, Kristine Blauser Scalzi. I wrote this book in 2013, which was in many important ways a really amazing year for me (I won a Hugo for Best Novel in it, for Redshirts, as just one salient example), but also very, very stressful. Simply put, she was the one who had to put up with me. That she did so with love and patience and encouragement instead of strangling me, throwing my remains into a wood chipper, and then pretending she had never been married to me at all is a testament to the fact that she is, in fact, the single best person I know. I love her more than I actually express in words—an irony for a writer—and am every day genuinely amazed I get to spend my life with her.

I try to let her know how much I appreciate her, as often as I can. This is me letting the rest of you know, too. You have this book because of her.

—John Scalzi, 11/29/13

Tor Books by John Scalzi

Note: Within series, books are best read in listed order.

THE OLD MAN’S WAR SERIES

Humanity has finally made it into interstellar space. But the planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding. And they don’t want young people for fighters.

Old Man’s War

The Ghost Brigades

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

The Human Division

Short Fiction in the series: “After the Coup”

STAND-ALONE FICTION

The Android’s Dream: Earth is on the verge of war with a vastly superior alien race. A lone man races to find the one object that can save our planet and our people from alien enslavement—a sheep. Yes, a sheep. And just wait until you read Chapter One.

Agent to the Stars: Thomas Stein, one of Hollywood’s hottest young agents, knows a thing or two about closing deals. But negotiating for an entire alien race—a hideous and smelly one—is going to require all the smarts, skills, and wits he can muster.

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: Some of the best and most popular Whatever entries from the first ten years of the blog—a decade of Whatever, presented in delightfully random form, just as it should be.

METAtropolis: Five original tales set in a shared urban future—from some of the hottest young writers in modern SF.

Fuzzy Nation: ZaraCorp holds the right to extract unlimited resources from the planet Zarathustra as long as it’s certifiably free of native sentients. When the planet’s native Fuzzies turn out to be intelligent, language-using beings, well, ZaraCorp has a problem.

Redshirts: Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel! The starship ensigns were expendable…until they started comparing notes.

Lock In: Fifteen years from now, a new virus sweeps the globe. Most experience nothing worse than fever and headaches, but 1%—that’s 1.7 million people in the United States—find themselves fully awake and aware yet “locked in” in this novel of our near future.

STAND-ALONE SHORT FICTION

“The President’s Brain is Missing”

“The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue”

www.tor-forge.com

About the Author

JOHN SCALZI is one of the most popular and acclaimed SF authors to emerge in the last decade. His massively successful debut, Old Man’s War, won him science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, and Redshirts, which won 2013’s Hugo Award for Best Novel. Material from his widely read blog, Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com), has also earned him two other Hugo Awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

LOCK IN

Copyright © 2014 by John Scalzi

All rights reserved.

Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Cover photograph by Peter Lutjen

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Scalzi, John, 1969–

    Lock in / John Scalzi.

        p.  cm.

    ISBN 978-0-7653-7586-5 (hardcover)

    ISBN 978-1-4668-4935-8 (e-book)

  1.  Virus diseases—Fiction.   2.  Epidemics—Fiction.   3.  Isolation (Hospital care)—Fiction.   4.  Virtual reality—Fiction.   5.  Paranormal fiction.   I.  Title.

    PS3619.C256L63 2014

    813'.6—dc23

2014015247

e-ISBN 9781466849358

First Edition: August 2014