Lock In (25 page)

“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.

Chapter Twenty-one

I
WOKE UP AT
nine thirty and for a moment panicked that I was late for work. Then I remembered that since I had been shot at twice last night, I had been told to take the day off, unless I wanted to talk to the mental health staff. I preferred the day off.

I skimmed through some e-mail, waiting to see if my brain would be willing to collapse back into sleep. No luck. Awake it was, then.

I got into my threep in the apartment and looked around. Vann wasn’t on the couch. I assumed that she had headed back to her place. Then I heard her voice downstairs.

She was in the family room, with Tayla and the twins, watching the monitor. On the screen there was a riot. It was happening on the Mall.

“What the hell happened?” I asked, looking at the monitor.

Vann looked over, cradling a cup of coffee. “You’re up.”

I gestured at the monitor. “Maybe I should have stayed asleep.”

“Then when you woke up it would have been worse,” she said.

“Someone firebombed a tour group of Hadens,” Tayla said.

“Seriously,” I said.

Tayla nodded. “The Hadens were grouped up, ready to go to the Lincoln Memorial, and then some assholes drove by and chucked a Molotov cocktail at them.”

“Which is less effective on threeps than on human bodies,” I said.

“The assholes found that out when the threeps took off after them.” Vann pointed at the monitor. “Look, they’re showing the video again.”

The video was from the point of view of a tourist phone. In the foreground a little kid was whining to her parents about something. In the background, a car swerved toward a group of tightly packed Hadens. A young dude popped up out of a sunroof, lit a Molotov, and flung it at the Hadens.

The tourist now turned his full attention to the flames. Several Hadens were on fire, flapping and rolling to put themselves out. The rest of the Hadens starting running toward the car. Whoever was driving—it was obviously on manual control—panicked, took off with his friend still half out of the sun roof, and rear-ended the car in front of him. The Hadens reached the car, pulled the young man out of the sunroof, and yanked the driver out of the car.

Then the beatdown truly began. By this time one of the threeps hit by the cocktail had made it over to the car. It began kicking the bomb thrower, legs still aflame.

“It would be funny if the entire Mall and Capitol Hill area weren’t now on lockdown,” Vann said.

“You can’t say the dudes didn’t deserve it,” I said.

“No, they deserved it, all right,” Vann said. “It’s still a pain in the ass for everybody else.”

“Do we need to go in?”