Lock In (Lock In, #1)(68)

“Then she tries to move my arm and I just freak the f*ck 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 f*cking 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.