Chapter Twenty
“YOU TOOK YOUR time,” Vann said, as I walked into the room.
“Tayla wanted to talk,” I said, walking the bourbon over to her. “She’s worried about the both of us.”
“Seems fair,” Vann said, taking the cup. “Both of us survived an assassination attempt tonight. I’m worried about the both of us too.” She took a sip from the cup. “Now,” she said. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
“I thought we were saving story time until after the march,” I said.
“We were,” Vann said. “But then your friend Tony showed up with his discovery, and then someone tried to put a bullet into my head. So I’ve decided that sooner is better than later for story time.”
“All right,” I said.
“This is going to wander a bit,” Vann warned.
“I’m all right with that,” I said.
“I’m forty,” Vann said. “I was sixteen when I got sick. This was during the first wave of infections, when they were still figuring out what the hell to do about it. I lived in Silver Spring and there was a party I wanted to go to with friends in Rockville, but Rockville was quarantined because there was a Haden’s outbreak. I didn’t care, because I was sixteen and stupid.”
“Like any sixteen-year-old,” I said.
“Exactly. So me and my friends got into a car, found a way in that didn’t have a roadblock on it, and went to the party. No one at the party looked sick to me when we got there, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I finally got back home around three and my dad was waiting for me. He thought I was drunk and asked me to breathe so he could smell my breath. I coughed on him like an asshole and then I went to bed.”
Vann paused to take another sip out of her cup. I waited for what I knew was coming next.
“Three days later I felt like my entire body had swelled. I had a temperature, I was raspy, my head hurt. Dad was feeling the same way. My mother and my sister felt fine, so my dad told them to go over to her sister’s so she wouldn’t get sick.”
“Not a good idea,” I said. They had probably been infected but weren’t showing symptoms yet. That’s how Haden’s spread as far as it did.
“No,” Vann agreed. “But this was early days so they were still trying to figure these things out. They left and Dad and I watched TV and drank coffee and waited to feel better. After a couple of days we both thought the worst was over.”
“And then the meningitis hit,” I said.
“And then the meningitis hit. I thought my head was going to explode. My father called 911 and told them what was going on. They came to our house in hazmat suits, grabbed us, and sent us over to Walter Reed, which is where second-stage Haden’s victims were sent. I was there for two weeks. I almost died right at the beginning. They pumped some experimental serum in me that gave me a seizure. I tensed up so hard I ended up breaking my jaw.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What happened to your father?”
“He didn’t get any better,” Vann said. “The meningitis stage fried up his brain. He went into a coma a couple of days after we got to Walter Reed and died a month later. I was there when we unplugged him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Vann said. She took another sip. “What really sucks is that my dad was one of those people who made a big fuss out of wanting to donate his organs when he died. But when he died, we weren’t allowed to donate any of his organs. They didn’t want someone to get his kidneys and the Haden virus too. We asked Walter Reed if they wanted to use his body for research, and they told us that they already had more bodies for that than they could use. So we ended up cremating him. All of him. He would have hated that.”
“What happened to your mother and sister?” I asked. “Did they get sick?”
“Gwen had a low fever for about three days and was fine,” Vann said. “Mom never got sick at all.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Vann said. “So, then I spent my next three years being self-destructive and in therapy, because I felt guilty about killing my dad.”
“You didn’t kill your dad,” I said, but Vann held up her hand.
“Trust me, Shane,” she said. “Anything you’d say on the topic I’ve already heard a couple thousand times. You’ll just annoy me.”
“All right,” I said. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Just let me tell the story.” Another sip. “Anyway, somewhere in all of this they discover that some of the people who survived the second stage of Haden’s without being locked in can integrate—can use their brains to carry around someone else’s consciousness. Walter Reed has me on file so they contact me and ask me to come in and get tested. So I do. They tell me that my brain is, in the words of one of the testers there, ‘absolutely fucking gorgeous.’”
“That’s not bad,” I said.
“No,” Vann agreed. “And they ask me to become an Integrator. And at the time I’m at American University, ostensibly majoring in biology but actually mostly just getting high and screwing around. And I think, Why not? One, if I become an Integrator the NIH will pick up the rest of my college and pay off half of my existing student loans. Two, when I complete training I’ll have a job, which at the time was something that was getting harder to come by, even for college graduates, and it was a job that wasn’t going to go away. Three, I thought it’d be something that would make my dad proud, and since I killed him, I figured I owed him.”
She looked at me to see if I was going to say anything about her killing her dad. I didn’t.
“So I finish up my degree at American and while I’m doing that I get the neural network installed in my head. That gave me a panic attack because for the first few days it was giving me these massive headaches. Just like the ones I got with the meningitis.” She motioned to her head in a circular motion. “It’s those goddamn wires moving into position.”
“I know,” I said. “I remember it. If you’re a little kid when they install it, you get the joy of feeling it move around as you grow.”
“That sounds like a nightmare,” Vann said. “They told me when they were installing it that there are no nerve endings in the brain, and I told them that they were high, because what was the brain but one massive nerve.”
“Fair point.”
“But then the headaches go away and I’m fine. I go in to Walter Reed every couple of weekends and they run tests and condition my network and generally compliment me on my brain structure, which they say is perfectly tuned to receive someone else’s consciousness. Which I figure is a good thing if this is going to be my line of work. Then I graduate and I immediately start work on the Integrator program, which is more testing and studying the underlying brain mechanics of how integration works. They’re of the opinion that the more you understand it, the better you’re going to be as an Integrator. It won’t be a mystery or magic to you. It’ll just be a process.”
“Are they right?”
“Sure,” Vann said. “Up to a point. Because it’s like everything, right? There’s the theory of it, and then there’s the real-world experience of it. The theory behind integration didn’t bother me at all. I understood the thought mapping and transmission protocols, the concerns about cross-interference between brains and why learning meditation techniques would help us be better receptacles for our clients, and all that. It all made perfect sense, and I wasn’t stupid and I had that gorgeous brain of mine.”
Another sip.
“But then I did my first live integration session and I literally shit myself.”
“Wait, what?” I said.
Vann nodded. “For your first integration session, they have you integrate with a Haden they have on staff. Dr. Harper. It’s her job to integrate with new Integrators, to walk them through the process. Everything she does, she explains as she does it. The idea is no surprises, nothing wild. Just simple things like raising an arm or walking around a table or picking up a cup to drink some water. So I meet her, and we shake hands and she tells me a little bit about what to expect, and she says that she knows I’m probably a little nervous and that’s perfectly normal. And I’m thinking, I’m not nervous at all, let’s just get on with it.
“So she sits down and I sit down, and then I open the connection and I feel her signal requesting permission to download. And I give permission and Jesus fucking Christ there is another person inside my head. And I can feel her. Not just feel her but feel what she’s thinking and what she wants. Not telepathy like I can read her thoughts, but what she’s wanting. Like, I can tell that what she really wants is for the session to be over, because she’s hungry. I don’t know what she wants to eat, but I know she does want to eat. I can’t read her thoughts, but I can feel every single one of them. And it feels like I’m suffocating. Or drowning.”
“Did you tell them?” I asked.
“No, because I knew I wasn’t acting rationally,” Vann said. “I knew that whatever I was feeling was an overreaction. So I tried to use all those relaxation and meditation techniques they’d been training us on. I use them and they seem to work. I’m starting to calm down. And as I’m calming down I realize that everything I’ve been feeling has happened in the space of ten seconds. But fine, whatever, I can handle this.
“Then she tries to move my arm and I just freak the fuck out and my sphincter lets go.”
“Because your arm is moving without your intent,” I said.
“Exactly,” Vann said. “Exactly.” She took another sip. “Because this is what I learned about myself that first day: My body is my body. I don’t want anyone else in it. I don’t want someone else controlling it, or trying to. It’s my own little space in the world and the only space I have. And to have someone else in it, doing anything to it, sends me into a panic.”
“What happened then?”
“She immediately breaks the connection and comes over to me and gets me to stop panicking,” Vann said. “She tells me not to be embarrassed, and that my reaction is a common one. Meanwhile I’m sitting there in my own shit trying not to rip her little mechanical head off. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“She says we’ll go ahead and take a break, so I can get cleaned up and get something to eat, and then we’ll try again. Well, I do go and get cleaned up, but I don’t get anything to eat. Instead what I do is go to the nearest bar in borrowed hospital scrubs and have them line up five shots of tequila. And then I down them one after another in the space of about ninety seconds. And then I go back in for the second session and I fucking nail it.”
“They didn’t notice you being drunk off your ass on tequila,” I said.
“I told you that I spent a few years being self-destructive,” Vann said. “It wasn’t good for my liver, but it was good for being able to drink and still function.”
“So in order to integrate, you had to be drunk.”
“Not drunk,” Vann said. “Not at first. I had to have enough that I wouldn’t panic when someone got inside of me. I figured out that if I could make it past the first five minutes I could handle the rest of the session. I was never happy, but I could tolerate the intrusion. And then when it was done I would go and have another couple of drinks to take the edge off.”
“You didn’t consider just not being an Integrator,” I said.
“No,” Vann said. “You have to spend a minimum amount of time as a professional Integrator or else you have to pay them back for everything they paid out for your education and training. I couldn’t afford that. And I wanted to be an Integrator. I wanted to do the job. I just couldn’t do it strictly sober.”
“Got it,” I said.
“And at first that really didn’t matter,” Vann said. “I got very good at calibrating just how much alcohol I needed to get through a session. I was never drunk and my clients never noticed. I got good reviews and I was in demand and no one ever figured out what I was doing.”
“But it didn’t last,” I said.
“No,” Vann said. Another sip. “The panic never went away. It didn’t become more manageable over time. It got worse, and by the end it got a lot worse. So I upped my therapeutic dose, as I liked to call it.”
“They noticed.”
“They didn’t notice,” Vann said. “By that time I was very good at my gig. The physical aspect of being an Integrator I could mostly do on autopilot. What I couldn’t do as well was put on the brakes. Sometimes a client wants to do something you didn’t agree to in your contract. When that happens you need to pull them back. If they fight you on it, you pull the plug on the session and report them. If it’s bad enough, or if they pull that stunt on too many Integrators, then the client gets blacklisted and isn’t allowed to integrate anymore. It doesn’t happen often because there are so few Integrators that most Hadens don’t want to jeopardize their chances of using one.”
Vann drained her cup.
“You had it happen,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I had a teenage client who wanted to know what it was like to die,” Vann said. “She didn’t want to commit suicide, mind you. She didn’t want to be dead. But she wanted to know what it was like to die. To have that second just before the end when you realized you couldn’t escape, and that this was it. She realized that unlike most people, she was in a position to realize her fantasy. All she needed was to push an Integrator at the last minute. Then she would have her moment, and since everyone knew Integrators could stop their clients from doing anything stupid, it would look like it was the Integrator who did it, and that the client was the victim. All she needed was the Integrator to be inattentive just long enough.”
“How did she know?”
“That I was the right Integrator for her plan?” I nodded. “She didn’t. She didn’t have a long-term contract, so she went into the NIH integration lottery and got who she got. It just happened to be me.
“But the rest of it. Well. She planned, Shane. She knew what she was going to do and how she was going to do it and had it down so well that when we integrated I couldn’t feel what she had planned for me. All I could tell was that she was excited about something. Well, most of my clients were excited about something when they were with me. That was the whole point of using an Integrator. To do something that excited you with an actual human’s body.”
“How was she going to kill you?” I asked.
“Her stated purpose for wanting an Integrator was that her parents had managed to get her a special event at the National Zoo,” Vann said. “She was going to be allowed to hold and play with a small tiger cub. It was a birthday present. But before she did that she wanted to walk around the Mall to look at some of the memorials. So we integrated, we walked around the Mall, and then we went into the Smithsonian Metro station to go to the zoo. We stood near the edge of the platform and watched the train roll in. At the last possible instant, she jumped.
“I felt her tensing, felt what she wanted to do, but my reaction time was too slow. I had four tequilas before we integrated. By the time I could do anything about it we were already in the air and almost off the platform. There was no way for me to do anything about it. I was about to die because a client killed me.
“Then I was jerked back and fell hard onto the platform as the train flew past. I looked up and there was this homeless guy looking down at me. He told me later he’d been watching me because of the way I was pacing and looking down the track for the train. He said he recognized what I was doing because at one point he thought about jumping in front of a train himself. He recognized it, Shane. But I didn’t.”
“What happened to the girl?”
“I pulled the fucking plug on her, that’s what,” Vann said. “Then I had her charged with attempted murder. She said it was me who tried to jump, but we got a court order for her personal effects and records, which included a journal where she described her planning. She was charged and we cut a deal where she got probation, therapy, and was forever blacklisted from integrating.”
“You were easy on her,” I said.
“Maybe,” Vann said. “But I just didn’t want to have to deal with her anymore. I didn’t want to have to deal with any of it. I was almost killed because someone used me to see what it was like to die. Everything my panic attacks were trying to tell me about integrating had just come true. So I quit.”
“Did the NIH try to get you to pay back your training and college?”
“No,” Vann said. “They were the ones who assigned the client to me. They didn’t know the reason I almost died was because my reaction time was dulled by alcohol, and I didn’t volunteer the fact. As far as anyone could tell, the problem was that the selection process didn’t screen for garden-variety psychopaths. Which was true enough. I promised not to sue, they let me go without a fight, and the selection process was changed to protect Integrators from dangerous Hadens, so I ended up doing some good. And then the FBI tracked me down and said they were looking to build up a Haden-focused division and thought I might be a good fit. And, well. I needed a job.”
“And here we are,” I said.
“And here we are,” Vann agreed. “Now you know why I stopped being an Integrator. And why I drink and smoke and fuck like I do: because I spent years working in a state of alcoholically managed panic, and then someone tried to kill me with my own body. I don’t drink as much as I used to. I smoke more. I fuck about the same. I think I’ve earned all of them.”
“I won’t argue with you about that.”
“Thank you,” Vann said. “And now, this fucking case. It’s every single thing that made my brain scream, come to life. When I almost died, it was on me. I wasn’t paying attention and someone took advantage of that inattention to make me do something I wouldn’t do. If I had died, at the end of the day it would have been for the choices I made. To drink and to stay in the integration corps.
“But this. This is someone taking away the Integrator’s choice. It’s locking them into their own body and making them do things they wouldn’t do. That they would never do. And then throwing them away.” She pointed to me. “Brenda Rees. She didn’t kill herself.”
“No,” I said. “I saw her face when her client disconnected. She tried to get away from the grenade. She had no control before that.”
“She was locked in,” Vann said. “Locked into her own body until there was nothing she could do about what was going to happen. We need to figure out how this is happening. Why it’s happening. We have to stop it.”
“We know who is behind it,” I said.
“No, we think we know who is behind it,” Vann said. “It’s not the same thing.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“I want to share your optimism,” Vann said. She held up her cup. “I’m not entirely sure I’ve had enough of this to do so.”
“You might have had enough,” I suggested.
“Not yet,” Vann said. “But soon. Think maybe a shot more will do it.”
I took the cup and walked down the hall toward the stairwell, pausing at Tony’s room as I did so. His body lay there, appearing to sleep. His threep was missing. I wondered if anyone remembered to feed Tony today, but then saw his nutrient levels were topped off.
Tayla did that, I thought. It’s good to have friends.
I went to the kitchen, poured out a shot of bourbon, and brought it back to my room. Vann was asleep, snoring lightly.