“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.”