by Tim Kindberg
There was a long pause. David looked across the room. A smell of sour milk invaded his nostrils. A young woman in the blue uniform of the carie had spotted him before he noticed her. She quickly looked away, busying herself with the slouched gentleman she was attending to.
David tried to think of something to say to Mr Charles, a friend of the family who took an interest in him when he was growing up without a father in Liverpool.city. In a fit of loneliness as much as in friendship, David had looked Mr Charles up on returning to UK.land, as soon as he’d learned he was living in Avonmouth.city.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mr Charles said, seeing the struggle on David’s face. “The Lord looks after me here. Me and all these good people.” He swept an arm feebly round. Mr Charles – as David had always called him – was the only non-demented resident in the carie, brought here for a reason David could not determine, a glitch in the network.
“I need to get you out of here, David said. “You shouldn’t be here. You should be in a…”
“‘Gated community’? There’s no bytecoins for that.” Mr Charles tried a smile.
“No, not a gated community. Of course not.” David pictured the last such retirement resort he had visited, on official business: full of the well-heeled, barred away from the likes of Mr Charles – or David, for that matter. As full of faltering minds as the carie, only with more freedom to roam. Many of them weren’t much older than David and some were even younger, in their early forties, smitten by the dementia plague that had spread backwards like a wave through earlier and earlier stages of life.
“Where then?” Mr Charles’ eyes flashed. He held a small framed photograph of a woman he had never talked about, which he always carried with him. David tried not to look at it. It seemed to stir the vodu’s interest when he did.
There was a commotion in the adjacent lobby. A group of bodais were bringing in a fresh group of residents-to-be, taking them firmly but gently by the arms according to protocols and passing them to flesh. The incomers were dressed smartly. It wouldn’t be long before the carie’s entropy would take hold: their clothes would be mixed up, ill-fitting on the wrong bodies, like the assortment flapping or fitted too tightly on those in the chairs around them.
David looked back to the young woman, but she was gone. Mid-twenties, slightly older and shorter than Yaa, but with strikingly similar almond eyes.
“Still have your eye for beauty, then,” Mr Charles said.
“No, it’s not that. I…” He had never told Mr Charles about Yaa, much less the reason for abandoning her: that he was terrified of what the vodu trapped in his mind might do to her if it escaped. Mr Charles, too: what if it squeezed through the bars right now – what would it make him do to the old man, his only friend? And yet it did not escape. He had learned to harden his heart, to keep it locked up. But his daughter was another question. The cage had begun to open when he saw her, when the intensity of his love for her showed. It opened by just a chink, but he could never take the risk.
“You don’t have to explain, David. A pretty girl’s a pretty girl. And you’re a single man, aren’t you? A bit old for her, mind! Such things keep us flesh together. We know what it’s like to inhabit skin – real skin – together with the Lord. Anyway, you’d do all right with that one. She’s kind. She looks after me.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that.”
“What, now?”
“I wish you’d keep the Lord out of it.”
“And let the network have it all? Even faith?”
David looked at the beads on Mr Charles’ wrist. They had been deactivated, as had those of the dems around him. Beyond a certain point, the network deemed flesh unsuited to connection. Conversion to sales was unlikely, maintenance and psychblood were hardly cheap, and how to filter what came from their minds?
David said, “There are other, real things to vest our faith in.”
“Like what? You talk to me of faith? You? You’re devoid of it, David. If you’d take those stupid sunglasses off I’d see in your eyes what I know about you in my heart. Where is the David I knew before he went to Westaf? He never came back.”
“I have to go,” David said. “Never mind me. It’s you I’m worried about. Your mind is intact but you’re surrounded by—”
“The lost and the fractured, the broken. It’s the beads that did it, accelerated the onset of their dementia. I’m sure of it. I’m fortunate. Shall I come to live with you, then, David? Me and my pain and my aloneness and the Lord?”
“No, I—”
“No, indeed. They have cures for everything nowadays, except dementia and old age. They don’t know what to do with the broken but undemmed, so they act as though I’m one of my brothers and sisters here.”
“Look.” David was deeply uncomfortable by now, a product of the connection he both tried and tried not to sustain with Mr Charles. “I have to go.” All conversation around them had stopped. Other visitors were listening in, to gain respite from the unsettling talk of their relatives and spouses.
“Very well.” Mr Charles cast his eyes back down to the photograph and, without looking back up to David, said, “I’ll see you next week. Take care now.”
She had made herself scarce. She’d spotted him, the ID cop, he thought; that was the look he’d seen on her face, wariness behind a practised facade.
CHAPTER TWO
Pempamsie
Berekuso, Westaf, 2066
I had made a contraption – a toy, I suppose you would call it. The robots had received instructions in relation to me, instructions that were incomprehensible to one aged eight, although I now know what they must have been. They waited with me in the compound, ready to stop me running away. And I, snotty, tall for my age, acting out a contrived interest in the contraption – I, Pempamsie, stood with my heart beating hard. I sensed that I was in almost all respects beyond the ken of their algorithms. These robots were of a type unknown to me: glassy, mock-skinned; making small movements in crude emulation of flesh.
Father was arguing with the flesh who had brought them. Mother came from her office to argue with them too. There was a lot of shouting through the open front door. Both my parents were violent of tongue at the best of times. They would have been wrangling about the price being paid for me. The visitors didn’t shout back. As I later realised, they didn’t need to. They had come to state certain facts established within the network and not the business of the fleshwork, especially not in Westaf. To this day my parents could never have known about the exact nature of their only child’s exploitation – by IANI, as it would transpire, not some mere multinat in the pyramid of the Between.
The flesh left in their module, and the robots took me away by the wrists in theirs.
IANI North, Arctic circle, 2076
I lived at one of the two shrinking ends of the earth. As the multinats extended their digital reach, which became telepathic reach, so they shrank their physical domicile to the poles. They made the robots to walk among the genpop on their behalf. Bez chose the North Pole, where I was, and sent his minions to the Antarctic. At each pole, a single station sprawls upon the ice sheet, surrounded by server farms whose hum is inaudible beneath the wind. The cables from the Between ultimately end at both poles. Exactly how symmetrical are IANI’s icestations at the North and South Poles is a subject of some thought but no discussion. Those who visit one of them never go to the other. However, their roles in the network are thoroughly understood: the two poles are a failover pair: if one were to cease to function, the other would continue. No one has told Nature not to claim both of them.
Bez died in 2050. I never came across anyone who had met him. But he was everywhere. In the long dormitories where we slept. In the vast corridors and atria we commuted through, from training session to training session. I and others like me who were kidnapped and brought there.
Bez existed still in the mentality by which IANI functioned, the total belief in algorithmic supremacy, despite its manifest inade
quacies; the provision everywhere of robots and automation for the merest tasks that might interfere with profitable user journeys, for the greatest efficiencies; Bez fostered the coldness beneath the forced, conforming good humour with which all was transacted.
My parents named me after an adinkra. I, Pempamsie, am that which cannot be crushed. I studied these symbols of my people when I was a child, each perfectly memorised in shape and meaning.
The instructors at the icestation showed me how to tone my body and taught me, and I obeyed. There was too much blood when I didn’t. Theirs and mine. Blood in the icestation, surrounded by howling wind and contracting ice.
Odenkyem: the crocodile lives in water, yet it breathes air. I trained in Bez’s icestation and I obeyed, yet I breathed the adinkras.
My teacher, Emmanuel, wore a white one-piece suit like me. His head was shaven like mine. His skin was pink and delicate in the whiteness all around us. He was flesh. I, black flesh.
“You’ll be sent back,” he told me soon after I arrived. “You’ll be sent back to the Between when you’re ready.”
“When I’m ready,” I mimicked back to him. “To stem the threat. The threat to order. To content delivery. To sensa. Mental content is king. All is known.”
“All is known.” He smiled at me.
Whence does Pempamsie derive her strength? From my parents’ treatment of me, to be sure. But also from somewhere deeper. From the bowels of the earth, spinning, magma-filled; its twin tops, the diminished poles, squatted by IANI; IANI, which lives in fear of what would happen if there were to be a loss of user satisfaction.
Apart from my sessions with Emmanuel, I trained with the others alongside robots and their flesh handlers. I didn’t talk to these others. I didn’t know where they were from. We spent hours exercising, reaching physical perfection. We learned to make algorithms. And to crack algorithms. They pitted us one against the other and against the robots. Day after day went by, learning efficiencies, information flows and server architectures; cost structures and statistical models of interaction with flesh; learning, above all, how algorithms seep into minds and extract data via beads and psychblood. I, Pempamsie, watched and learned. I was careful not to challenge. I was Pempamsie inside. Odenkyem.
If there is one thing Pempamsie truly understands, it is that they believe their own mantra: that they reach inside every corner of every mind. Whereas Pempamsie knows that they merely pass vapid sensa telepathically, to and from the minds of Betweeners: a software-controlled hallucination over the network that pleasures them and causes them to buy. The Betweeners are mere data feeds to IANI. But human consciousness, like true intelligence, remains beyond their grasp.
Sunsum: the soul.
All is known.
One day, Pempamsie was called to a meeting. Only flesh were present, Emmanuel and others I didn’t recognise. Pink flesh dressed in white. They told me it was time. My training was done. Time to re-Between me.
I asked them for my task.
They said there was no task.
Where was I to go, then?
Home. To Accra.city. Not to my house. I was never to see my parents again.
I asked when I was to report to them.
They said they would let it be known.
I examined my beads, none of which were the ones implanted at birth. Since I had arrived at the icestation, no messages had played in my head. Would they start again?
What would I do?
You will integrate, they said.
I re-examined my beads.
What am I? I asked.
They smiled. You are Pempamsie, they said.
CHAPTER THREE
David
David decided to interview the fifteen males a second time. The female could wait until he had worked out what measures he could possibly take against a vodu-driven creature. Especially here, where vodus were not known at all – unlike in Westaf, where the effects of their psychic vampirism, at least, were known only too well: the fallers from the trees, their minds consumed.
There was a knock. A young female officer entered without waiting to be asked. Not flesh, but a relatively good simulation. More bio than electro in the mix. She looked from the interviewee to David, and back again.
“Can I help you?” David was annoyed by the entrance.
“Reporting for duty.”
“And your flesh is?”
“You.”
“Indeed.” He could do with all the help he could get, even a dopey bodai. “And what do I call you?”
“Breakage.”
“Breakage?”
The rarer nouns weren’t all that uncommon as names, but this choice was particularly random. She didn’t respond, not hearing the question mark. He changed his mind.
“I think I need to work with flesh on this case.”
“Not available. Can be helped by Breakage.”
“Sit.” She pulled up a chair beside him, across from the interviewee. David motioned to her. “Go ahead.”
Breakage faced the man from the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy. He was filthy and unkempt. She wouldn’t be able to smell him like David could.
“What is your name?” she asked.
The man ignored her, looked at David and said, “I’m tired. I have been through an ordeal. Weeks at sea. I have rights.”
“We don’t know who you are,” she said. “One or more ID crimes suspected. You cannot be processed until.”
The man continued to look at David, waiting for her to finish her sentence, which she didn’t.
“Until what? Go ahead and do whatever it is you’ve decided to do. Deport me. In the name of—”
“Where do you come from?” Breakage asked. She sat stock still, supposedly about twenty-five years old, neat in blouse and baggy trousers. David’s beads told him she worked for the ID police like him; she would have the same circuitry to pick up his beads but had failed momentarily to tell whose emanations were whose between the two flesh when she entered, a common inability of the artificial.
“Look,” he said to David, smiling defiantly. “I won’t talk to your robots, to anyone who’s not flesh. Can I rest now? Don’t you have somewhere to take me where I can sleep? And shower?”
David said, “Give me something about her. I know a lot about her, including what she is capable of. I think you do too. But I need more. You need to give us a cause to keep her locked up. What if we were to let all of you go? What if she was loose, in a position to do to you what she has not done so far only because your mission is not complete?”
“Mission?”
“Yes. Don’t try to tell me you don’t have one. What did they do to you to get you on board? Were you press-ganged, or your family threatened, or both? Was it total loss of data? Was that what they said they would do to you or someone you love if you didn’t go along with this charade?” David made as if to slit his own throat with his finger. Total loss of data: in network terms, the most serious ID crime of all. They used to call it murder.
“I know of no mission,” the man said. “We were sailing the ship for pleasure. I do know that the pleasure is not over. Hers, that is.”
“Oh? What do you mean?”
“Let us all go and you’ll find out. I wouldn’t frustrate her, if I were you. It’s better to let her take her pleasure and leave. You won’t regret it. Her leaving, I mean.”
“I’ll do what I fucking well please. You’re all mine at this moment, and I intend to keep it that way until I find out what you’re up to. Take him,” David commanded Breakage. “But we’re keeping them separated. And I’ll get them all legal representation. Do you know anyone here in UK land?”
“No. Of course not. Not in this forsaken place.” The smile disappeared, but not the defiance. This one was strong, David thought; he wasn’t scared. The other males were afraid, were doing what they’d been told. By him, or Obayifa, or their masters?
“Breakage take?” The bodai had risen, expressionless, in her immaculate pink top and pinstriped
trousers – in the bod that had been found for the AI expediently, transiently, optimally, according to the logistics of which bods, of which types, were needed where.
“Breakage take. And make sure they are all run by Parkin in ID Forensics. We need the details on their ID infringements.”
David needed to have a look at the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy for himself. Lenczyk, the harbour cop who took David on board later that night, was the head of the boarding party who had arrested the crew.
“They were just standing there on the bridge,” Lenczyk told him as they entered the spotlit hulk. “We’ve searched. No one else was on board. No cargo, either. They wouldn’t speak to us but they gave themselves up calmly. They’d shut everything down, engines and comms. We couldn’t ID them. The ship was hacked, so we didn’t even know when they came on board.
“Fifteen men and one woman,” he continued. “None in crew uniform, like they’d walked on board off the street, or from some office meeting more like. You couldn’t tell them apart in terms of rank, nothing in the body language to suggest who was the leader. Proper bloody anarchists if you ask me, bloody throw-backs to just after the Disruption. Most likely Westafs, the lot of them, but since they didn’t speak we couldn’t be sure. We don’t know what sophistication of ID infringement there’s been, but it’s major. We left that to you, the experts. I assume you’re running them by forensics. And you might want to talk to Afripol.”
Which David had once worked for. “And the ship?” he said.
“The ship came from nowhere. Supposedly scrapped in the twenties. It’s ancient, late-twentieth-century construction. Look at the state of it. I’m amazed it’s afloat. It’s a big bastard. Where would you put it and have no one know about it all this time?
“Tell me about the female,” said David.
