:) It blew mine, too, when I realized. When I heard about the possible TV show, how they might handle casting Chris was my first thought. I would *love* it if the people who make the show could figure out some way to preserve the ambiguity.

What happened with the Haden's research and support industry taking off is detailed more in Scalzi's companion novella "Unlocked", which is available free on Tor.com. It wasn't quite as simple as "president's wife got sick and the country rallied behind her". The version of the story he tells in "Unlocked" read to me more like a moonshot or New Deal type situation, where a forceful leader used a perceived emergency to arm-twist Congress into giving him his way, which makes a little more sense to me. And I can understand why Chris, who has been locked in since age 2 or so, and has quite a lot of class privilege, might have a less nuanced view of a situation that would then come through in Lock In. But yeah, it's still not a perfect set-up.