Vampires of Avonmouth

by Tim Kindberg

“Well, what can I say… quite something, isn’t she. Of course, we wondered at first whether they… whether the men had kidnapped her, used her – but it soon became clear she was wrapped up in it just like they were. Poker-faced like them, i.e., zilch for us to go on. Except… oh, never mind.”

  “Go on.”

  “No, it’s nothing.”

  Breakage returned with Lenczyk’s bodais.

  “Sleeping quarters for ten, all used. Less than sixteen. Also blankets for one in cargo hold. No changes of clothes. No belonging items. In the galley, many opened cans.”

  “And they were sloppy buggers.” One of the officers was flesh after all. “Not much in the way of washing-up.”

  David raised an eyebrow, but at the thought of his own desres, which he had stayed away from since two nights ago. He had been with one of the girls at the Royal, the hotel in what they used to call The Village. He’d allowed himself to go there, thought better of it as soon as she had come to the door, but then entered the room in a driven gloom of weakness, his vodu’s weight in his mind. She was pretty, and solicitous. She’d let him stay afterwards, for a price he couldn’t afford, but he couldn’t go back to his desres and have to face himself alone, not that night. With her arms around him, they had slept awhile. With his vodu inside him, they had slept awhile. Before he had even closed the door, there was the rush of shame. And on the way back, a good self-beating in response, a promise to himself not to do it again. The clammy feeling on his skin, the thought of a hot shower, drove him quickly home. He made himself recall the girl’s face on the way back: she was a person, however trammelled by sensa, and didn’t deserve a life of being fucked by strangers. It would be easy to blame the vodu for his visits to the Royal: the vodu inside him, with its coal eyes. Well, it was true that without the vodu he would be back on the leafy streets of Westaf, with Yaa. And none of this would be happening. He could choose not to go whoring, he told himself. But he chose not to stop. His promises didn’t work. He carried a monster, was a monster. Could not allow himself to feel.

  He returned to the present moment. There, before him, was the bodai, waiting.

  “Breakage, you’re to organise a more thorough search. There must be clues somewhere on board. Some indication of what these people are doing here.”

  Lenczyk said, “What they were doing here on the ship, or what made them come to Avonmouth city?”

  “We don’t know whether they came here by accident,” said David, “or if they have designs on something or someone here. I’m waiting for forensics to report, but so far there’s nothing apparently unusual in their user journeys apart from the voyage, no sign of criminal activity.” Apart from her, with no user journey at all, with her vampiric absence of reflection in the network. “Equally, nothing links them. What we did notice was that they didn’t all go offline at the same time – maybe some were picked up along the way.”

  “You think they’re just obeying orders?”

  “Hard to say. If anyone’s got a mind of her own, it’s that female.”

  More than a mind, David thought, in the usual sense of a unitary consciousness. She was capable of extracting the minds from flesh, of that he was sure from his Accra.city days. He needed to find a way to neutralise her. But how? Even back there, in the land of electro-psychic sorcery, any reins upon her would be of dubious value.

  “I know this is vague,” said Lenczyk, “and I wasn’t going to mention it. But there was something about her I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I had the sense that she was trying not to draw our attention to something, something festering when they wanted everything to appear innocent. Like she’d just dumped a body overboard and she was specifically not looking where she’d pushed it over. Do you know what I mean?”

  “But what could it have been?”

  “I’ve no idea. I’m sorry, probably should have kept that to myself.”

  Above Avonmouth.city, the sky was white and low with heat. The wind turbines rolled around, only just. Everywhere, concrete, steel and tarmac exuded a dull skin prickle of thermal radiation; solar tiles did their best to absorb it. Of vegetation there was none.

  David’s inhabitance had sucked almost everything out of him. He was lost, belonged nowhere, to no one, to none of the flesh and bodais standing around him in the cafe where he had dragged himself, his face puffy from sleeplessness and his frame heavy and weary. He had left himself behind in Accra.city, with Yaa. He existed here and that was all, a ghost impelled to live amongst the denizens of the network intersection that was Avonmouth.city: the birthplace, his deceased mother had once told him, of the father he had never met.

  He bought an espresso, sipped its frothed bitterness.

  “So, what have you got for me?”

  This morning his assistant was a young man. That is to say, Breakage was assigned to the bod of a young man. A substitution had been made in the night: either the network was replenishing his previous bod of a young woman or another AI had needed to utilise it.

  The young man had been waiting outside David’s desres, at the top of the concrete stairs. David knew it was his bodai assistant because of the scan he made with his beads and, to be sure in these early days of their association, the bodai’s passphrase, which matched the words mellifluously delivered into David’s earpiece: “I want to rain in the water.”

  David couldn’t quite put his finger on why, but somehow the male embodiment suited the AI better. Breakage was a “he”, whatever bod was assigned to him.

  Breakage said, “We got them all up in the night.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing new, except for one thing.”

  “Tell me about ‘one thing’.”

  “The female wants to see you.”

  “Did she say what about?”

  “No, but she said it was urgent.”

  Hence the desres had woken him from the final few dregs of sleep by letting in the light. The sheets were tangled around his sweaty body, the sun’s white rays burning on him. He’d sat on the bed’s edge, head in hands, staring first at his toenails, which needed a good trim, then the calamity of his piled possessions on the floor, things he’d purchased but without knowing why. And that was even without the urgings of telepathic commercials.

  “I’ll be along,” he said. “What did Parkin in forensics say?”

  “Female illegally nonned, category A. Others have fabricated IDs, category C. All is known. However, he requests to speak with you.”

  She was a category A* non, but that was deemed not to exist, would not be admitted. “No surprise there. But I’ll see her first.”

  The A/C had broken again. Through a window opened just a notch, hot air blew into the interview cabin, carrying its molecules of evaporated Severn, distending the brown curtain with its draught.

  The attraction was stronger. Lusting after suspects was part of the job for David, with the incontinent, ruinous libido that had risen inside him as a response to the vodu, but she had her volume cranked up to maximum. He let out a sigh, told himself to get a grip. His vodu, from its internment, watched in its constant silence. If the renegades had implanted it as a spy – always supposing it could communicate through his beads – there had been little in his routine policing life in Avonmouth.city for it to spy on. Until now. Did it, too, know what she was? Lying there poker-faced, he couldn’t be absolutely sure whether it heard his thoughts or saw what he saw. Whether it only felt to him like it did.

  The renegades must surely have meant the vodu’s release from its cage to be triggered by something other than love, by some other phenomenon more in line with their fuckery. Whatever it was, their botched electro-psychic algorithms had conflated it with tenderness for someone physically present. For Yaa.

  Sometimes he wished it would speak up. Speak its mind – no, speak itself, since it was a mind within his own mind. An aschizophrenic inhabitant. Aschizophrenic: that wasn’t a word; it hadn’t been needed before. His vodu was a silent implant, not a second voice, in the
head of a flesh, formerly known as a human being.

  David said, “Please, sit up straight. In your chair.” She had arranged herself seductively, leaning, chin propped on forearm, eyes bright with mentalmagic, lips full with malevolence. In control. She didn’t move.

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I have things to do and I’m not going to waste my time.” He stood up as if to leave, paused, placed himself behind the chair, shifted it, its legs scraping on the floor. “Come on, tell me. I’m not about to play games with you.”

  She raised herself. My God, he thought. Maybe I should just find a pretext to free her, then deal with her in the way only I know how. Kill her, that is. Smash her brain to a pulp.

  These Avonmouth.city cops knew nothing of vodus. He really didn’t give a damn anymore. The vodu inside pulled itself around; he could feel a tiny twist.

  “Sister,” he said. “Let’s not do this.”

  “Do what, Detective?” She pulled up her sleeves. Her veins were a river system of tumescence.

  He took a sip of his cold coffee, its taste now cardboard.

  “You told the bodai you had something to say to me. Well?”

  Her face suddenly lost its sexy languor, and the veins grew a little more under the fine skin. The pressure inside her, he thought, the pressure inside her. A hunger, to feed on minds. He adjusted his shades.

  “I’m going to count to ten, then I’m leaving.” He made a point of yawning, feeling ridiculous as he did so. Then, embarrassing himself further: “You’re making me want to do something exciting, like read you the officer’s code.” Elizabethan cop talk.

  “I want to tell you about the ship, about why we were offline. We could go offline now, too. You and I.”

  “You’re so online now, sister, as am I, at this moment.”

  Breakage entered, closed the door softly, stood by the table so that they faced one another. He was a child now, aged about ten.

  “We won’t be needing you, Breakage.”

  “But protocol—”

  “We won’t be needing you.”

  “Noted. Logged. Reported.”

  David smiled at the bodai, who looked uncannily embarrassed, and waved him out. Breakage clicked the door softly behind him.

  “The truth is offline,” she said. Her tongue came out a little too far between unnaturally incisive teeth, drew back and rested on her lip.

  “You’re not seriously going to try and convince me you’re one of the rebels, are you?” he said. “Spare me, please. I may not know who you are, but I know what you are. “

  “No, our truth. You and I. It’s offline, isn’t it?”

  David, as an ID cop, had the authority to null his beads and hers temporarily, to take them both offline. He did so, pressing the swarm of them on his wrist. It would be noted. He would have to submit a report. It had better be good: the code was insistent that offline was merited only in rare, justified circumstances.

  But he didn’t give a damn, not a damn anymore. He’d had it. Once his daughter, his only love, was lost to him, there was no one to be faithful to, certainly not IANI and least of all himself.

  He said, “When you say ‘truth’, according to which algorithm?”

  “None,” Obayifa said. “Semantic truth. Facts.”

  “And you’d like to lead me to this truth, no doubt. Alone, perhaps?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave in to a reckless urge. “Then we’ll go.”

  She stood in her orange jumpsuit, nearly as tall as him. He handcuffed her. She looked intently at him, standing a shackle away. They left to stares from his fellow officers. Breakage, the child, was waiting outside to report to him. With an exaggerated motion of his hand, David bade him to remain. They climbed into a module and sat in adjacent chairs.

  “You’re squatted,” she said.

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Can I speak to it? It appears to be in some sort of confinement.”

  “Go ahead.” David assumed she was like the vodu-inhabited he had come across in his last days in Accra.city: they were unable to enter or remove his mind, since he himself was squatted by a vodu. It appeared to be a universal rule: a vodu cannot or will not fuck with a vodu. Were he free, on the other hand, she would have a choice: either to extract his mind or to invade him, leaving one host for another.

  She lifted his shades, stared directly into his eyes. “There’s something wrong with you. What are you? Impure. Broken. You’ve been—”

  “What have I been?”

  She drew back into her chair. At least it was confirmed, so far at least, that she wasn’t going to try and steal his mind; he was immune to her. Unlike the genpop of Avonmouth.city, to whom he owed a duty of protection. Duty? He was going through the motions. He no longer knew what the exercise of authentic humanity could mean. To work for the network was to maintain the fleshwork as walking autobiographies, emitting and consuming sensa.

  He headed out along the coast, leaving Avonmouth.city to fall away behind them. David felt even more reckless. He did not know what he would do next, and it was exhilarating. She was exciting him, instilling a primitive and wild urge in his being without lifting a finger. He flew them through the above, like two ids in the collective unconscious.

  “I’m not,” she said, “whatever you assume I am. Not like the others of my kind. And not like you, in case you’re wondering. They know about you, by the way. IANI knows. You think they don’t, but they know. They’d never tell you, would they, they’d just observe. And now you’ve gone offline with me: it will just confirm it. You need me. Stop here.”

  “Obayifa, I’ll stop if you tell me your mission. Otherwise you leave me no alternative.”

  “Than to crash the module? Kill us both? Do it, Detective.”

  “I mean it.” He did. Oh, to die with someone who was his own kind, however repulsive he knew she was beneath the sexual magnetism – to put an end to his meaningless, Yaa-less life. He was no better than a bodai. In his vodu-ridden condition, exiled from his daughter, there was nothing left.

  She gave him a long look. “Very well. Stop and you shall be told.”

  He landed on a patch of stubble between two lots.

  “I’ve come for you,” she said.

  “No. I’m nobody.”

  “Release me. I’m here to take you back.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “To your own kind. You’ll be free. Free to be what you really are. To nourish and fulfil yourself. It’s no different,” she scoffed, “to the system you are part of now, which mentally rapes the genpop and convinces them it’s what they want.”

  Obayifa put her hand on his arm. “Come. Only those who did this to you can release you.”

  David suddenly realised she wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to the thing inside him. It was pulling on the bars that constrained it inside his mind, wrenching like a starving dog slavering for a bone.

  A cold light came on in his head, a tube flickering into dismal illumination. What had he been thinking? He hadn’t. He was altogether lost, his centre unheld. He turned the module back for Avonmouth.city.

  “We have to let her go.”

  Avonmouth.city’s ID police had no headquarters. The relevant ones – flesh and bodais – had been called to a hotnode on the thirteenth floor of a tower belonging, via a chain several levels deep of pyramid ownership, to one of the multinats. There was David, Parkin from ID Forensics, Breakage and the superior flesh who was addressing them, stiff in his drainpipe uniform, his collar pointing up into his crew-cut hair.

  “But she’s a non. They were all offline without permission. At the very least,” said David, “she’s one of a group of sixteen afloat in a vessel that surely had no permission to sail.”

  “And to whom did the vessel belong?” The superior’s brows knitted in impatience.

  “We don’t know.”

  “So you don’t kn
ow they didn’t have permission to sail. That’s your presumption.”

  “True, although I haven’t searched Big Mind thoroughly yet. And certainly they were offline.”

  “Certainly? Certainly who was offline? You know as well as I do, Detective, that these are not always simple matters to establish. You checked the ship, correct?” The superior looked at Breakage, who was a child again, like one of the plastic characters who used to populate model railway sets.

  “Comms were down,” said Breakage in schoolboy tones. “Faulty. Or hacked.”

  “And when had they last been active?” The superior appeared to be going through the motions, thought David, wanted to be gone. Flesh could be so difficult.

  “Too old to know, very old technology. All is known,” said Breakage.

  “They were knowingly disconnected from the network,” said David. “Their beads would have warned them.”

  “Knowingly,” said the officer. “But willingly?”

  “We can’t tell because they won’t answer our questions. Which is suspicious, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Or indicative of fear, Detective.”

  “There’s no fear in that female, with all due respect.”

  “Well, I have my instructions. No crime has been committed beyond doubt, and we are to let her go.”

  “You really want me to—”

  “Yes, Detective, I do.”

  “Parkin,” said David, “you found her to be a non, category A, correct?”

  “Yes, although I couldn’t positively say it wasn’t a malfunction.”

  David looked in disbelief at Parkin, to the superior and back again, causing Breakage to do the same, clumsily.

  “You’re changing your story.”

  “Am I? I’m not aware that I have given you any contradictory advice on this matter, Detective.”

  “You told Breakage—”

  “The bodai. Yes. Not you. A preliminary observation.”

  “I see.” David looked at Breakage. “And the fifteen others?”

  “We’ll let them all go,” said the superior. “Orders from the ID Prosecution Service. We’ll have their IDs reset and hardened. Job done.”