Lock In (Lock In, #1)(67)

“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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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.