by Tim Kindberg
Flashing by him through the window, the graffitied phrase that had begun appearing lately: Last Few Days. This time it was sprayed on a wall, not an N-car. There was a time when graffiti was rife, up to the quashing of the rebellion that came after the Disruption. When Last Few Days could have been a declaration – a hope – that the Disruption would end, or the name of a band of musicians, or a gang. But he hadn’t seen graffiti since he was a boy – since, along with all the other flesh, he’d started to receive sensa through his beads.
He was ten years old when the very first sensa hit him in 2050, along with the rest of bead-wearing humanity: the realisation that an image in his mind had not derived from him but was miraculously conjured from afar. Fill your mind with joy, it said in magisterial lettering, signed I&I. The phrase had moved across his field of vision then seated itself in a corner of his consciousness before disappearing altogether. A few days later a taste appeared in his mind, the sweetness of a chocolate bar, part of a sales campaign whose banners were all over the internet. Then, one boiling summer’s day, a new facility appeared: person-to-person telepathic transmission. Before long he was exchanging sensa with his friend, Mikey.
After just a few months, whatever the passionate – and violent – responses for and against, sensa were a fact of most people’s mental life. No one – no one except the powers that be – could turn IANI’s stream off. You could switch off friends and family, and many did after a row or two. But somehow they found themselves turning them on again. At that point, humans had become the fleshwork. And the power of the network over them was complete.
Now, in the new order of 2087, David wondered where the graffiti writers had found the spray paint. It represented highly unusual interest in the physical world, a departure from the collective consciousness. And what did it mean? Undercurrents were always stirring, new rebels of the Between, as they styled themselves, their mantra “The truth is offline.” A bunch of would-be nons causing minor trouble, hustling to disconnect. They were like flies to IANI. More would-be than actual nons, the ID police – and that included him; it was how low he had fallen – always picked them up, nipped them in the bud. David could never tell anyone, but he didn’t blame them for not wanting sensa from multinats and other flesh playing in their heads whenever they weren’t at work. The rebels considered the sensa to be an unreasonable intrusion. And that was where David would have stood – against it all – if he weren’t an ID cop with the stream switched off when he wanted. If he were himself again. If he hadn’t been numbed, overcome by the trauma of the vodu’s implantation and losing Yaa, he’d be hustling against it too.
But the incident with the ship didn’t sound minor. He felt an unusual stirring at the coming challenge of the investigation. More than that: an instinctive feeling, whose origin he couldn’t put his finger on, that the ship carried cargo from Westaf which would bring a change.
Telling himself not to manufacture false hopes, he looked around at his fellow travellers, felt some of them through his beads. All online, the fleshwork connected to the network, felt telepathically, propagating and receiving sensa, mind to mind and IANI to mind. But they couldn’t feel him, the ID cop. One of them, a boy in his late teens, was looking back at him. David loosened his collar. The sunlight filtering through the near-above was oppressive, its heat trapped in the clammy air. He thought of Yaa, back in Accra.city. She wasn’t much older than this boy. What was she doing at this moment? He stared back until the boy averted his eyes.
After climbing for a while beneath its monorail, the N-car came to a stop at an intersection. Flesh and bodais milled on the pristine platform, many of the faces incurious, sensa flickering within minds as they transited between nodes, psychblood running in veins. The glass, concrete and metal of the nodes all around was winged with the outspread lattices of solar panels. Despite the panels and the wind turbines, the risen water heaved against the reinforced quays in the down-below.
Cities had contracted laterally into themselves, fearful of migration and the rising seas. The multiple fortified tiers which David watched being constructed for the more wealthy became known as the near-above: a lattice of repurposable, logistically reprogrammable nodes for living, entertainment and work, all connected by transitways. They were a shiny escape from the climate-induced trauma of what had raged beneath. The nodes were all cuboids of varying proportions, some with Gothic touches in the shape and surrounds of their entrances and windows. The supposed nearness of their elevation was misleading double-think: despite the scaffolding that connected them, for all but essential purposes the nodes were isolated from those struggling beneath. Algorithms policed this plan of vertical segregation.
IANI had restored order in the down-below too, shadowed by the near-above. Nowadays it wasn’t so different from how it had been in the early part of the century. There were old-fashioned terraces of renovated brick desreses and carless streets of tarmacadam in an atmosphere of numbed peace, without a trace of the mid-century carnage that was the post-Disruption years. Equally, there were no longer any parks, gardens, galleries or museums, since those could be virtually, telepathically experienced via sensa delivered at optimum times.
In the late twenty-first century, flesh and bodais moved freely between the near-above and the down-below, going about their network-driven business. IANI excelled at order. Bodais kept the physical world of Avonmouth.city, one of the remaining habitable pockets of the still-overheated planet, perpetually clean and tidy while the network hummed. Unused bods leaned in charging bays arranged along the transitways. One of them emerged, readied with an AI, a female model in overalls carrying a toolkit, to board the N-car.
David’s gaze alighted upon a reflection that turned out to be his own, thermally quivering in the polished glass outside the carriage like a phantom haunting him. Tall, thin in suit and shades. Rough around the edges. Saddened. The reason for cutting himself off from his precious daughter, Yaa, here in Avonmouth.city, thousands of kilometres from his Westaf home and completely incommunicado from the only person left alive he loved – the reason for his exile stirred itself.
Inside his mind, the vodu turned its back on him.
The ship that the sixteen crewed – if that could be said of people dressed in a grubby negation of smart casual wear, possessing little idea of how a ship functioned – was the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy: a 2,500-tonne cargo vessel built in the last century which had once plied its way around the Baltic. It was fetched up against a corner of the Avonmouth.city docks. The sixteen had sailed it unladen and it sat high in the lapping water, a long, rust-coloured hull reaching ahead of a scrappy white superstructure at the stern.
Due to the unresponsive and errant nature of its arrival, Stevens, the deputy harbourmaster, had reported a suspicion that the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy might be part of a physical – as opposed to cyber – terrorist attack, the type that used to take place in the early part of the century, still Elizabethan times – part of the disorder that existed then in the fleshwork.
However, despite the crew’s claim that the ancient radio had broken down, eventually, in the final moments of their approach, the group had responded to the port authority’s calls. They replied severally and incoherently, as though they had selected whoever had some idea of how to answer each question put to them.
And the ship, clearly steered by novices, came round in a path of wildly varying curvature and stopped offshore, amid approaching supertankers and cruise ships. The boarding party had found sixteen flesh waiting for them, one of them female.
David, the senior officer assigned to the case, was to interview the boatload of them. His intuition told him to start with her.
He entered the interview room where she was guarded by a bodai. In the terrifying final days he had spent living underground in Accra.city, consorting with witch-technologists and necromancers in a desperate attempt to find a way to rid himself of his own inhabitant, David had learned something about the horrific nature of what he learned were calle
d vodus, derived from an ancient spirit term. This woman had been squatted by one, he could tell at once. That is, they could tell: the vodu inside him, too. First, her eyes, live with mentalmagic. The veins on her bare forearms were another giveaway. Like a man’s, only more: they almost-blued and snaked beneath the glistening black skin of her arms, in an apparent effort to escape from her inhabitance. She had been beautiful, though, with spiralling locks, fine brows capping a sculpted visage; her teeth were perfectly white, if animal-sharp – sharper than when she had been all human. It was the tongue, though, that one had to watch out for.
He had the hots for her, he suddenly realised, for this young woman across the desk in the interview cabin. Well, David thought, that is how it works for us upon recognition. Only it doesn’t last. How could it, given what would happen if union took place?
The crew had been discovered in a state of exhaustion. Except for her. David knew her to be incapable of tiring, however fleshly she had presented herself to the boarding party. They were from Westaf. What was she doing here, in Avonmouth.city?
Recognition was quite possibly mutual. David was covered up in a suit, the Avonmouth.city ID cop in shades. But you never knew. She was smart with mentalmagic. Maybe she had other ways of sniffing him out.
“What do you call yourself?”
“Obayifa.” The way she said it, looking straight at him, it was her real name, whatever she was to the network.
He looked at her beads, the bracelet of moving dots implanted at her left wrist. He felt towards her, straining with the beads on his own wrist. Nothing. Really, nothing; just as a vampire has no reflection in a mirror.
She stared through him, projected a thin, mocking smile. He was sweating, faint. The A/C had broken down, was breathing warm air into the cabin. I can’t do this, David thought. Not now.
The vodu inside him concurred as to his weakness.
“Take her,” he commanded the bodai, “and make sure that only bodais supervise her and not flesh, understood? She’s not to come into contact with any flesh.” She couldn’t fuck with a bodai – at least, as far as he knew. A bodai would be like a stone to her, an object without psychic contents – without food inside.
He watched her being led away, cuffed. There wasn’t much he could do about her, a case of mentalmagic such as those he had experienced in Accra.city: her vodu driving her inexorably. If she got the chance, who would she take with her? Some soul. He meant that close to literally, give or take a philosophical nicety. And there was no room for niceties anymore.
At the same time, an instinct gripped him, as when he first heard about the ship’s arrival: somehow there was a connection between Obayifa and the trauma of his inhabitance, he was sure of it. Or perhaps he needed to make one. He couldn’t return to Westaf in his current state and imperil Yaa. But Westaf had come to him.
David went out for air. He stood in the heat, if only to escape from the cabin and the claustrophobia she had instilled in him, and looked around. This wasn’t a place, like his haunts as a boy in Liverpool.city, or the compounds he’d known in Accra.city; it was yet another node where ones and machines flowed. There was loading and unloading all about him.
A module swooped from above, sleek and highly manoeuvrable, with IANI insignia and tinted windows. You had to be important or at least on official business to ride a module and not an N-car. The chief climbed out. A chief. For this one was not flesh but a bodai. An artificial I assigned to a bod, the bod to a module, the module dispatched to David and consequently to this node. Anyway, there he – it – was.
“I need your report ASAP.”
“You’ll have it today.” David deliberately looked as though he didn’t mean it, a casual and common expression of fleshly dissent that had stayed with him from his youth. The bodai probably wouldn’t recognise David’s mild disrespect, and what did it matter if it did?
“Who have you talked to?”
“Just network and her.” He gestured at the departing detainee. The chief didn’t look.
“Flesh.”
“Yes. Why?”
“Like you.”
“Indeed.”
There was a pause. One might have said there was a rumination on the chief’s part, a pondering on the role of flesh in the network and what the chief could expect from David, especially in the way of intuition, which lay beyond them. Bodais relied on flesh to interpret flesh. But could they trust flesh?
In fact, the pause was just a timing routine, a ruse to slow them down so they could talk to flesh, and not freak flesh out with sheer speed. David sensed this one might be a little iffy on the network-to-fleshwork interface.
“Give me headlines,” it said.
He cringed at the phrase. “From somewhere in Westaf, is all I know – suspect, anyway. She’s the first of sixteen. Long day ahead of me. What they’re doing in a crate like that fetching up in Avonmouth city, I have no idea. Flesh travelling that far should be taking modules, right? Not getting wet. It’s not as though they don’t have them out there.”
“You’ve been.”
“You could say that.”
Another timing routine. The uncanny blankness of a bodai pause, despite the engineers’ best efforts.
“I spent my twenties and thirties there,” David continued, as if to himself.
“Send me your report.”
This one had a peculiar gait. If he’d been flesh David would have said he grew up on the street. Off he went to be sliced, rebodded, reassigned, moved, whatever. The combinatorics weren’t worth thinking about. That was what the network was for.
But why this interest from the network? More specifically, something told him it came all the way up from IANI. As a result, his curiosity was pricked all the more. He was so used to the bleak impassivity by which he had just managed to survive since his arrival in Avonmouth.city, the dull ache of self-exile from Yaa, the denial of any emotion towards those around him lest his vodu escape to ravage. Did he have it in him, he asked himself, to rise to the ship’s incursion, and more to the point, Obayifa?
Above him, wind turbines whumped against the hot white sky.
At least you could say it was better than going home.
It took until night-time to interview the remaining fifteen crew, the sky filling with blinking craft, the muddy smell of the estuary drifting across the plots, bays and warespaces and in through the window of the stuffy cabin.
The fifteen males ranged from late teens to fifties. None of them was squatted like her, Obayifa, and, David noted, none of them mentioned her. How many days had they spent together in that ship, the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy? Each claimed not to know anything about anyone else. None had a valid ID.
“So you left Port-Harcourt city a month ago,” David said, disbelieving the last of them, as he had disbelieved all the others. The previous member of the crew, if you could call them that, had said they’d left Majorca.island, en route from where he wouldn’t say, six weeks ago.
“Correct, sir.” Like the others, this detainee was flesh and smelled from weeks without washing. The female was in a boiler suit when they found her, but the men had all worn the semi-casual dress of business people: suits but no ties, pale blue or pink shirts, Oxford shoes. The shoes were scuffed, their clothes bore greasy dirt marks from the journey. It was as though they had left a corporate meeting to immediately board a boat – however strange a choice the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy would be – for an away day, but something had gone terribly wrong.
“And you were headed for…?” The man smiled senselessly at David, but didn’t respond. David continued. “You came to shore in Avonmouth city, wherever you were headed. Why here? If you were in trouble – and you aren’t a trained crew, so you must have got into difficulties in a craft like that – there were plenty of opportunities to land before now, surely. Or stop and radio for help.”
The man shook his head. “The ship malfunctioned. No radio. The engine would work for a while, then cut out unpredictably. We’d drift, then mak
e for land when we regained control of it. A zigzag. None of us are—”
“Sailors? Whose idea was it to get into a ship without anyone who could sail it?”
The man shook his bent head. He closed his eyes. David had noticed him before they were taken away for processing, or rather he had noticed the expensive-looking watch that showed from under his filthy cuff. The watch was on the right wrist, of course; beads were on the left.
“Tell me about her.”
“Who?”
“You know who. The female with you on the ship. Obayifa.”
“Obayifa?” Evidently he had not heard the name before. “We never spoke.”
“How many days on board, and you never spoke? What was her role? What do you know about her?”
The man did not reply, his face scrunching.
“You’re afraid of her.”
He gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“That’ll be all for now.”
The following morning. Visiting time. Conversation in the carie was proving difficult. All the wing-backed chairs around them were occupied by residents and family. Mr Charles was in too much pain to move to a quieter corner, so they’d had to remain where he sat, and David had to stand. David did his best to talk with his friend from long ago, despite the stares and half-cocked ears, the occasional yelps and muffled incoherencies around them: emanations from demented brains. Dems, they called them.
