Vampires of Avonmouth

by Tim Kindberg

  David had never encountered this superior before. He had the confident, suave look of one who really belonged, more net than flesh. David’s vodu was eyeing the superior too. The man’s bead reading was exemplary, no dross, no dirty bits, true Is and zeroes. The vodu never showed its thinking, but the time it spent regarding him was information in itself: evidence of his significance, in whatever universe of considerations it had. Breakage, meanwhile, bore a stupid look aimed firmly below what had passed over his AI’s head, a look rendered more pathetic by his schoolboy embodiment.

  “Breakage, come,” said David. “I take it you won’t be needing us further, sir?”

  “Indeed, Detective. Thank you for your time.”

  This flux that was the network. It made your head swim sometimes. David was thankful suddenly for what little in the way of constancy there was in his life. Mr Charles, however awkward were his visits. Going back to the same desres, whatever he thought of it. Now it seemed like a sanctuary. Even the girls in the Royal: his addiction was at least a known.

  David had Breakage organise the release of the men. But he interviewed Obayifa before he had her discharged. He motioned for her to sit across from him at the table.

  “We’re letting you go. You’re free.”

  She stared back at him, amused. He’d brought Breakage in, who stood and stared straight above them.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Obayifa said with menace.

  “But I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” he said. “I don’t know what led you to sail that ship so recklessly, or why you landed here, but I’m pretty sure there is something here you came to find.”

  “I told you: it’s what you’ve got in there that I came for.” She tapped her temple.

  David was acutely aware of what she might reveal about him. Thankfully there was no technology to resolve thoughts in the connected mind, but everything else was being logged. He pushed his shades up against the bridge of his nose. The cabin’s A/C, which had stuttered into action, chilled the sweating nape of his neck. She had her hands below the table. His beads were picking her up now, but something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it. She was supposed to have been reset. There was a new ID, which should have been clean. Yet it didn’t smell right, already. There was a perturbation of some kind, one he hadn’t encountered before. A stench of rot. She brought her cuffed hands up and spread them flat on the table, her toned, dark arms stretching from the short sleeves of her orange inmate’s uniform. She smiled with meaningless glee.

  “Now if that is all, Officer, I believe I am to be discharged.”

  All attraction for her had gone cold. He saw her in that moment purely as a mind-sucking vampire: a creature who would evacuate and lick clean the minds of those she needed to feed upon.

  “I expect to be hearing from you,” David said. “Since it’s me that you’re after. But you don’t frighten me. You know you can’t get what you want.” Vodu plus vodu equalled mutual annihilation.

  “Can’t I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, only that it was surgery that implanted it. Surgery can remove it.”

  Maybe they could remove it. But at what price? “Tell them I’m not interested. There’s no way in hell I’m going back to Westaf.”

  “Would that be because of a certain someone?”

  A chill went down his spine. Was she bluffing? He had wiped all connections with Yaa, got her a new ID. “I don’t acknowledge anything that you’re saying. Log this,” he said to Breakage. “I consider this detainee to be mentally disturbed, and dangerous. I am releasing her under protest.”

  “It’ll be so nice to be free. I have things to do here in Avonmouth city. A little… sightseeing. But you’re right. You will be hearing from me. I’ll be sending you messages in a particular way.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She stood up, held her cuffs out for unlocking.

  “Uncuff her,” David ordered Breakage. “I have a guard on the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy,” he warned her. “I’m tracking you.”

  “How long can you keep that up, since your superiors have had you overruled?”

  She walked up to him, examined his forehead.

  “It must be so tiring, must take so much energy to constrain what should be free.”

  “I haven’t said you can go.”

  She left. On a mission he could only guess at. One that IANI wanted her to fulfil. Or at least to observe her in the attempt.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pempamsie

  Accra.city, 2086

  “Pempamsie?”

  There was a man beside me. Long, waking seconds elapsed until I recognised him from the night before. I returned my head to the pillow.

  “Pempamsie? Hey, girl. How are you this a.m.?”

  I slept with them from time to time, when the ache had grown so much. This man had no idea that I would go no further.

  “You can leave now.” I shoved him from the bed with my foot and turned over. He cursed and complained. I waited for him to finish.

  Suddenly I was jolted. There was a sensation through my beads that I had never before experienced. Nothing to do with the man. From afar.

  “I said you can leave now.”

  I would not show him my discomfort. Pempamsie is patient. After he had left I rose and opened the blinds to look out the window. The bolt of sunlight made me squint. I felt its burn on my skin. For a moment, I relived the pleasant temperatures inside the icestation.

  Then the new sensation reasserted itself.

  It existed both where the bead terminals buried into my wrist and inside my mind. Like a hand. A touch at one moment, then a grip the next. Physical and mental. Located, and not.

  It was them. They were reaching me from the icestation.

  Then the hand opened. A key lay there. I memorised it.

  I, Pempamsie, had been living quietly and carefully. Akoko nan tiabe na enkum ba: a hen treads upon chickens but does not kill them.

  The key opened the message via an old robotic toy I kept in my flat. The little robot signalled to me, ultimately an analogue signal borne on a digital and mental carrier, digitally perturbed psychblood. I, Pempamsie, at last understood my mission.

  I was there to silence those in the Westaf fleshwork who would overturn the glorious user journeys, the striving for conversion that the network fosters. Sepow: the knife thrust through the cheeks of a man about to be executed, to prevent his invoking a curse on the king.

  I, Pempamsie, was the knife. And Pempamsie now knew whose curse she must quash.

  I, Pempamsie, was free only to the extent that I must obey them. If I defied them, they would terminate me. Pempamsie does not fear death. But my body would be brought, mutilated, to my parents’ home. I could not allow that to happen.

  My beads had become quiet again. All of us in the Between – even in relatively clement Westaf, and I, too, though I was the agent of IANI – were slaves. Epa: handcuffs. You are the slave of him whose handcuffs you wear.

  I had heard Ako-ben, war horn. The call to arms or duty. I received instructions in relation to officers of Westaf’s Agency for Technological Interventions. I was to disable them: to visit their houses of hackery, Mframa-dans – built to withstand treacherous conditions. Always they worked alone in these isolated nodes, subverting the algorithms of IANI. Pempamsie was to break in, destroy their equipment and take them to a rendezvous where they would be transported, ultimately to the icestation.

  One by one, Westaf’s technological capability was to evanesce. That was IANI’s plan, and I, Pempamsie, was there to implement it. The firewalling of Westaf from Big Mind was to be undone.

  The first two times, all went as I was told to expect. I took them to the hills outside Accra.city. They were drugged through a psychblood cocktail, no ordinary electro-chemical mix but an active compound that turns the brain a uniform yellow under a neuro-imager.

  But that was only the first two. The third time, I hacked the targe
t’s door, crept inside, approached from behind as he sat at his machine and worked on somebody’s beads – or was it their profile in Big Mind? – from far away. I, Pempamsie, was masked and nonned to all but IANI.

  But then, as if in mid-step, the course of my memory became blank. Until I saw him afterwards. He lay back slumped in his chair, his machine fallen and smashed. And I, Pempamsie, was holding the knife. Blood. A pulsing stream from his throat. The knife, in my hand, slick and warm with it.

  The next time was similar except that a gun was used. Blood. It poured from his chest. The gun. In my hand. Smoking.

  Neither time had I taken a weapon, of course. Both times I was alone at the scene with the victim. I strained a thousand times to remember who had given each weapon to me. Or had I found them there?

  And had I in fact sliced with the knife, pulled the trigger? Or were they placed in my hand afterwards?

  Despite their edicts, despite all I was taught, they did not mean mere silence or reform, but death. IANI was supposed to be above murder: there is a self-imposed decree against total loss of data.

  I tried not to think what IANI had done in the icestation to those first two, the live victims. But these others: had I been intoxicated, like the alleged killers of King Duncan, and some Macbeth the actual perpetrator? Or was I remote-controlled to find the weapon, in each case hidden in the hacking house, and to use it against the targets, who kept it for defence?

  How could IANI control Pempamsie’s mind thus?

  Pagye: striking fire with a flint: war.

  And I, Pempamsie, an instrument of their war.

  The little robot signalled to me again. This time it held an ink pen and wrote, like a character from another age. Once it had finished its script, it lay down the pen and folded its arms. It was no bigger than the sheet of paper.

  I left my flat.

  But this time, this time I stopped dead in the street. Pempamsie did not move for a long time.

  Sankofa: turn back and fetch it. You can always undo your mistakes.

  Fofoo: a small yellow flower which later turns into a spiky black seed.

  I, Pempamsie, was fofoo.

  The morning sky burned like a wound. A bank of cloud, like a vaporous bandage, half covered it. Pempamsie stared up, ignored the flowing of ones and tro-tros all around her.

  It had to end. There and then. The silencing.

  Pempamsie could hide in the physical world. But how to hide in the network? The longer she was live in the network, the more certain it was that she would end up dead herself.

  Pempamsie disconnected herself: an act sometimes permitted to agents but which was allowed to last for but a limited time. I turned to take a tro-tro to the Dame-Dame Towers.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  David

  The N-car swayed slightly as it climbed through the near-above. David grasped the rails that hung from the ceiling as he walked along the carriages. Now that Obayifa and the rest of the crew had been taken from his remit, he was back to mundane policing. This meant passing among the genpop, who only ever congregated at work and in the transit systems. The genpop used filters to enhance what they telepathically transmitted about themselves, and they fabbed their profiles. There was a huge market for legitimate filters and fabs, but Westaf made its money trading in hacked and stolen ones. As far as IANI was concerned, the genpop could augment themselves and lie to one another with their sensa and profiles as much as they liked, but its imperative was to ensure that this did not stray into the territory of broken IDs: of misidentification with respect to the network itself. IANI fought a constant cyberwar with both the government and renegades of Westaf to maintain the network’s integrity. David’s duty was to ensure the uninterrupted flow of IANI’s sensa into the minds of the fleshwork, to safeguard its telepathic feels of their mental metadata.

  Algorithms constantly crawled the intersections of flesh user journeys, looking for ID crime: illicit or stolen sensa filters and IDs, and far more serious attempts to disconnect altogether. David’s role as an ID policeman was to spot what algorithms were blind to, by feeling with his beads and watching the body language. As in the case of the young man his eyes alighted upon, who was looking shifty. Without a word – he was still angry and frustrated about being overruled – David seized the youth’s wrist, examining his beads. They swam and reconfigured there, suspended on a band bedded into the flesh, the boy’s veins running like rivers beneath.

  Prompted algorithmically by David’s interest in the boy, another young man approached, dressed flamboyantly, a cravat plump at his shirt’s wide collar. It was Breakage.

  David looked unflinchingly into the fleshren boy’s eyes while addressing the assistant bodai.

  “Battery charged?”

  “Check.”

  “Psychblood levels?”

  “Adequate.”

  “System integrity?”

  “Fail.”

  David shook his head.

  “He’s in breach of which ID statute?”

  “Theft, fabrication.”

  The boy, in his late teens, gave David a defiant look. David could feel the animosity through his beads. He sighed within. Once teenagers really had been rebellious. David almost felt contempt for the superficiality to which the genpop tended, stupefied by the sensa playing in the corners of their minds. A trace of sympathy touched David at the same time, nonetheless. This boy would have experienced sensa since he was a toddler, when the first beads were implanted around his left wrist. There was no way for him to disconnect.

  “Whose ID did he try to steal?” It was theatre. David could feel the answers to his questions through his beads.

  “Acquaintance,” said the bodai. “Terry Van Damme. All is known.”

  “All is known,” David repeated to the boy, staring deeper into him. “Terry has some good gear, does he?” He glanced at Breakage. “And the fab? Attempted fab, that is.”

  The bodai called up a user profile, manipulated to enhance the sensa the boy had sent to his friends – without payment.

  “What would IANI say?”

  Going back to being the ID cop had acted as a distraction from his troubles, but David now felt distaste, the words sticking in his mouth. Had he really been reduced to threatening youths guilty of ID misdemeanours? The kid looked scared now.

  David thought back to the beginning, about his friend Mikey and the sensa they exchanged when the facility for inter-personal telepathy first appeared. You could choose from a library of smells, tastes, feelings, ironies, amusements, or capture whatever you were seeing, feeling or thinking as if with a mental camera, and send it to another person. It appeared in their minds, wrapped like a package they could decide whether to open, in a blurred representation of the contents. But first the recipient had to decide to friend you telepathically, an act of connection so intimate that its initiations and withdrawals brought about a massive disruption in human relations – a whole new class of negotiations, of delicacies, of deliciousness, of hurts. David fell out with Mikey when he telepathically unfriended him. They didn’t speak to one another for several weeks.

  David released the youth’s wrist. This boy could make out nothing about him. Like every ID cop, David was officially nonned to civilian flesh, in order to perform his duties. It was how the boy knew him for what he was: a blank over the network, apart from his badge number. But physically present.

  “Deal with him,” he instructed Breakage, and walked further along.

  In the next carriage he paused beside a group of strap-hangers to watch a purchase. One of the N-car bodais had approached a smart man in his fifties, to fulfil an impulse following pleasurable suggestions in his sensa. David could feel these facts through his beads in an undercurrent of data. In physical space, the fleshren who had sat rocking beside the purchaser got up to make way. The bodai opened its jaw. Through his beads, the man transferred bytecoins, which he earned as a sensa editor in an officenode. The bodai shut its jaw as soon as the payment was made,
and squeezed his arm gently. It handed him a quaint printed receipt for what David could tell in metadata was a cologne to be delivered to his desres, and said, “All is known.”

  David had watched many such transactions before, but this one only increased the distaste he was feeling more and more for his working existence. The network had impregnated the man’s mind, and the bodai was sent to make the sale. In principle the bodai was there to provide information about the product and a notionally personal service. In fact, it was an intimidating agent, an obtuse presence that would prove difficult to send away in a public setting.

  David missed his job and his colleagues in Westaf. He thought of his life as a beat policeman there, before his promotion to detective, working against the renegades. How much happier he had been before the vodu had changed everything. He cast his mind back to patrolling the fronded byways, beneath the wawa trees, where disconnection from the network was routine and humans locked eyes. The Westaf government, whatever he thought about its monolithic rule, at least allowed the people the dignity of their fleshly selves. It left the population to use sensa in the collective consciousness as it saw fit, even though he had hated Yaa’s acceptance of it. And most importantly the government kept IANI away.

  Here IANI’s propaganda was everywhere. Sensa were charming and opportune, the mantra went. Psychblood had been a marvellous invention. Only the dems went without psychblood’s benefits; there was nothing to be done for them. One could always take oneself off for the Beautiful Alone, for a break from the telepathic connection. If one really wanted. During regulated times. They were sure to miss the sensa from the network after a little while, to want to be connected again.

  David had no need for the Beautiful Alone. It was a sop to those without his official advantage: being able to keep the stream turned off.

  Obayifa’s arrival had brought David’s discontent with the status quo into new focus. He had been so caught up in his own lostness that he had tried not to notice that everyone else was too. The flesh he policed had been subjugated. Psychblood was a drug. Sensa entailed cognitive impairment – when the network desired it. How could one function while the sensa played, no matter how muted or peripherally placed in the mind? The stream of sensa displaced artistry and radicalism such as could still be found in Westaf. How could you know and realise your own human nature when the stream trammelled you?