by Tim Kindberg
Except that he knew David’s name.
“David a good boy,” he said, looking down at Breakage’s hand on his arm. “David will want to see juju.”
“What is juju?” David said.
“Good boy,” the man said. “Cunt. Good cunt. Fucker.”
Seven a.m. David made enquiries of the carie and waited outside for her to finish the night shift. The carie was a forlorn, single-story node surrounded by warespaces in the down-below. Birds sat in the few scrappy trees around it, not singing. Forests covered vast swathes of UK.land, but in cities the trees were few and far between. The only sound was the whine and sweep of N-cars and modules in the near-above, their tones changing as they climbed or descended between nodes. Everything was squeaky clean, scoured overnight by an army of bodais. What appeared to be public streets were owned by multinats. It had rained heavily in the night. Puddles of pseudo-tropical rain evaporated from the immaculate pavements in the morning’s white glare. David was starting to sweat in his suit.
When she left the building she saw him without seeming to. An expert, he thought, as he strode to intercept her.
“Hello,” he said. He had researched her easily despite her fabbed ID. Mary was the best he could arrive at by way of a genuine name. David looked at her, serious Mary in her blue uniform, her crisp ironed blouse, her hair in a bun beneath a tam-o’-shanter. Schooled in Nairobi.city, holding a PhD in he couldn’t remember what, working in a carie, a home for those in their forties and above with dementia. Like many others with or without a doctorate, she performed duties that no bodai was capable of and no one else in the fleshwork would do. Her willingness to do the work was deemed to outweigh her transgressions.
She finally looked at him. “I’m just having to rush somewhere, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, but I really must dash. Nice to meet you.”
“Wait—”
“I’ve heard it. What you’re about to say. Not interested. Now, I’m tired. It’s been a long night.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Mr Charles.”
“We’re not allowed to talk about the residents. Unless you’re a relative.”
“I’m not.”
“No, of course you’re not. In that case I can’t help you.”
“Look, it’s not a professional matter.”
“What isn’t?”
“My talking to you.”
“You’re talking to me unprofessionally?” She walked on. He was going to let it go, but he followed swiftly and walked beside her, the only two around.
“How did he die?”
She stopped. “If I tell you about it, will you leave me alone?”
“Sure.”
“We don’t know.”
“He was buried. There must have been a cause of death.”
“There was, only it wasn’t what they recorded.”
“Then who certified it?”
“You’d better ask the network.”
“And what makes you say they lied?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But he died in the carie, right?”
“Someone did.”
“What on earth do you mean? It might not have been him?”
“He had a visitor. Who took him out for the afternoon. Afterwards it wasn’t Mr Charles anymore. As though everything had been sucked out of him. They found him dead on the ground next to a dresser in his quarters. He appeared to have fallen off.”
“Mr Charles? In all that pain? How could he have climbed onto a dresser? Look. If this is some kind of joke then you’d better stop. You know what I am.”
“Yes, Mr ID Policeman. I know what you are, all right. Sorry if I’m confusing you. Sir. But you asked me. Sir. And I’m telling you.”
“I don’t want to take you in for questioning, but I will if I have to. Be more specific.”
“He was all sweaty. I don’t know where he’d been taken but he had been through exertions. I washed and redressed him. His skin was strange, pale like porcelain. He wouldn’t speak. Didn’t blink – his eyes were wide open.”
“You make him sound like a doll.”
“Yes. That’s what he was like. I don’t think he saw or recognised me. When I took him to his room the only thing he seemed interested in was climbing.”
“Climbing?” David pretended not to recognise what had become a familiar story in his last Accra.city days.
“On the bed. He tried to stand on it. Then he eyed the taller furniture in the room. I never thought he’d—I never imagined he’d have the strength to climb anything higher. You know what pain he was in, despite the medication. It was the end of my shift. I had to go. No choice but to leave him. One of the others brought him tea later and found him.”
“The visitor. What do you know about him?”
“Her, not him. I’d never seen her before. The profile said she was his niece but—”
“You didn’t believe her. Why?”
“Instinct.”
Mr Charles had no relatives. And he was the kindest man he had ever met. There was no one who could possibly want to harm him for any straightforward motive. It must be her, Obayifa, the thing from the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy. David resolved not to report what the nurse was telling him. He would investigate the death himself.
“Go on,” he said.
“Well, Mr ID Policeman, it’s what she said, okay, that she was his niece and that’s what the carie said she was. She took him out for lunch – that was what she told us. I wasn’t comfortable with it, but what could I do? When she brought him back it was obvious something was wrong, so I asked her what had happened. She just shrugged, waved at him, one of those tiny waves like to a child.”
It was a message. For him, David.
“The carie read her beads and said she was his niece when she couldn’t have been.”
“Yes, I told you. The carie’s been acting up. I’ve reported it. You can look in the logs. No one listens to me.”
“She’s beyond the powers of any carie. Don’t worry. You won’t get into trouble for this. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? Can I go now, Mr ID Policeman?”
David didn’t want her to leave. He tried to keep her straight in his mind, distinct from Yaa. The physical resemblance wasn’t strong but was close enough. It was how Yaa talked to him when she was feeling bolder. Yaa also thought he was being interfering, wanted him not to be so close. And now he was far.
Loneliness hit hard. Yaa was lost to him; Mr Charles gone. And this young woman was departing. Mr Charles had meant something to her; it made him want to spend time with her even more.
But she couldn’t wait to get away from him. And he could find no words of his own to persuade her to stay, only the commands of an Avonmouth.city ID cop that he couldn’t bear to pass through his lips.
He stopped and watched Mary go. Through his beads he scanned the carie records and saw Obayifa dropping off Mr Charles.
Why had she done this? To get his attention. Well, she had it, all right. Now it was personal.
CHAPTER SIX
Pempamsie
Cocooned in a glass elevator, I ascended the thirty-seven floors of Dame-Dame Towers with the group of men who had met me, pushing up its outside flank into the white sky. They had Ohen Tuo symbols stitched into the lapels of their baggy black suits, the skyward guns of the king, and flaunted the Chanel beads – as if! – living on their wrists. There were four of them, four pairs of eyes turned who knew where behind shades. I didn’t know anything about them, really, beyond the little Kwame had said, or rather implied – and I wondered for a second if these men weren’t going to non me, which was the idea; I wondered if they were going to try to assault or even rape me. I readied myself in defence. These were renegades from the government of Westaf, after all, and their beneficence to the people was lacking, to put it mildly.
There was no turning back, so I did my best to put the thought as
ide and not let it disturb my composure.
The lift doors swished to let us into impossibly ice-cool air beneath sheets of glass, the sun hammering photons down on an open floor of low couches and tables, empty except for a waiter leaning against a bar. Then, after I’d concluded his was the only presence, there was a figure who must have risen from one of the plush settees.
As we walked towards him in the wide space, I noticed signs of hackery – tiles and hatches moved aside or opened, the original devices removed or replaced with others patched in. The man had been basking in the sun’s rays, but the skylight filters turned on, dimming the scene slowly as we entered; my eyes, which had been screwed up against the white intensity, gradually relaxed.
The waiter came to take our order. I became calmed, the rape threat evanescing as I sensed the authentic Nsaa nature of the scene, its excellence.
“Respect,” I said to the man, who was emblazoned in a scripted suit of swirling shapes. “I, Pempamsie, would be a non.” I stretched out my right arm. We touched beads. They swam and mutually configured, wrist to wrist.
I couldn’t help thinking about what he was equipped with, all wrapped up in that suit. The shifting patterns, like clouds in a sky, accentuated his muscular frame, crawling over the big shoulders, drifting down towards his groin and veering away. If these Ohen Tuos weren’t around, why I’d…
“You waan me fi non you, sistah?” A boomerang: his ancestors sold from Westaf to Carib, and now he had come back to the homeland. He sounded almost jolly but didn’t smile. “Dassa whole heap a credits, y’know.” The Ohen Tuos stood behind me in an arc. “Show me da bead ting again,” he said.
He held me by the tips of my fingers and turned my wrist around, examining my configuration closely.
“You can replace them, correct?” I said.
He made a clicking sound of contempt.
“Surgery. Electrobihalogical. Me can do it yes but it nah perfek. Seen? A wha ya tek me for, now? Anyway, what da sistah need nonning for? A wha she do?”
“You don’t get to ask me that question. You were saying, about the surgery?”
“Tek more dan dat. Depen’ who she a non to, y’understan’? Wid de surgery, she be a non to a likkle donkey. But not to multinats wid a special interest in her, ya see? Not ta mention IANI. Dem have fi dem algorithms, we have fi we algorithms, we mix dem up. But only so far if ya just change da beads. Ya get me?”
“So, what, you want to change something in the rest of me? Cosmetically? Are you joking me?”
“Nah, nah, don’t get me wrong now. We all know da old-fashion’ disguise be useless, although if it’s flesh you a hide from, a nuh nuttin’ to change ya face, ya breasts, fuh example.” He took a good look. “But child’s play fuh dem algorithms to see through it. You know it. I know it. Ya tink me nah fuh real now?”
“You’re also saying it’s pointless to non my beads – then what can you do?”
“Don’t get me wrong, we’ll non ya beads, it’d be good so far fuh some tings. Mebbe not the big boi dem as I was sayin’. But here, ya came to us, right, not to dem others all over town? Here, we got speciahlism.”
The Ohen Tuos left me near Independence Square, melting away into the crowds. I touched my beads, wondered whether he could have interfered with them in any way, reprogrammed them somehow with his beads or that hacked-up penthouse res of his.
I took a three-car tro-tro back to James Town, swishing through the Accra.city streets overflowing with my people, streaming past the Chinese robots standing around, delinquent and menacing. Bad robots, cut off from the motherland, stitched in a pirate network. We leave them to their fuckery, or deal with them in our stride. The fleshwork is Nkonsonkonso, human links in a chain, never break apart. The telepathic traffic of messages is entirely under the people’s control and relatively light compared to the rest of the Between.
But I, I couldn’t swim as I in these streets. Not for long. Hence the visit to Mr Swirling Suit, he of drifting shapes, atop the Dame-Dame Towers, hunkered up for all to see and yet invisible. He’d let me know a plan. To be nonned: that is, proof against the algorithms of all entities that would ID me. Multinats and, yes, IANI. He had a specialism all right, one I’d never come across before but which my ancestors would have shaken no leaves at.
I received a message instructing me to rendezvous at an address in East Legon. The tro-tro dropped me off at a half-finished building, like a relic of the old days: its ground floor comprised an anonymous, seemingly respectable business premises; above it rose bare concrete pillars that might never be completed, like a wish that someone had uttered.
A girl came to the door, little more than a child, naive and blank-looking, showing little comprehension of what went on inside. It occurred to me that I was venturing where no one knew my whereabouts, consorting with men whose honour I could hardly rely upon.
She left me in a room that smelled of damp. In my bag was a disabler I was prepared to use if it became necessary. I thought about the semblance of a life I had cultivated in Accra.city: the veneer of a highly successful business woman, my reputation impeccable. Men wanting me, like children. A life that meant nothing to me.
And now: waiting to be nonned, to leave it behind. In this room whose walls were rough plaster, its door and windows constructed with crude carpentry. The few pieces of furniture hailed from another age. Wall hangings were suspended in dust. Blinds let in little of the searing light outside. It was quiet.
I touched my beads. Nothing since our last meeting had led me to believe that Swirling Suit had tampered with them. I had no idea what his price would be. I would listen and agree.
The girl had shown her beads on her bare arm and I had sensed them when she showed me in. The sensation was gone. Had she left, then? I had not heard the front door.
After about five minutes I heard it open, a heavy approach of steps. The door to this room swung clear.
“Sistah!” He was wearing the same suit, only now there were birds flying across the material, from cherry blossom branch to cherry blossom branch and soaring to cloud fragments.
He was carrying a case.
My beads still sensed no one around me, and lay still. In the Dame-Dame Towers they had responded to him and his men, although I had not trusted what they were given to sense.
Sense-data. Intuition. In the icestation they had taught me to feel through my beads the ones around me. To feel their real data, beyond any paid-for facade they presented in the genpop. They also taught us how, in probing, to keep secret both ourselves and the presentiments of the network.
He made a point of showing off his beads. They configured and even glowed.
But, at the same time, they were not there.
He smiled, knowing I felt an absence.
“A me sistah! Ya got me!”
I said, “What’s in the case?”
“Nuttin’ ya need fi ask about. A fi me business.”
“I don’t want to be like you, absent. It’s creepy. I said I wanted to be nonned – to be someone but no one.”
“Nah, it’s necessary for da procedure, yah understan’? First me have fi do dat ta yah, too.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Me tek ya offline wid a sign-out, one a them maintenahnce protocols, seen? I an engineer, first class. Me have privilege. Ya nah go tah none a dem bead clinics? It’s what dey do, sistah, only dem nah tell you.”
He looked at me with blood-shot intensity. What did he know of me? Not that he was facing an ex-agent of IANI. He trusted that I was not undercover. If I were still an agent, everything he thought he knew of me would be meticulously and convincingly contrived. It was a dangerous game he played.
I said, “Why do you trust Pempamsie?”
“Trust who now?”
“Me.” Like any other, mine was merely a name uttered in the fleshwork, of no great significance in his domain.
He laughed momentarily then looked at me with deadly seriousness.
“Yah tink me trust you? Sistah, me nah need no trust. No trust in my game at ahl. Assume da worst a what me a say.”
“Can I have a glass of water, please? It’s hot in here.”
There was no A/C and only a thin breeze puffed occasionally from behind the slatted blinds. He looked at me quizzically. The birds fluttered among the cherry blossom branches while he held himself still, gazing into me. He was a little shorter than I remembered.
I, Pempamsie, would be a non. I, Pempamsie, needed to have faith in myself. And yet faith was draining away from me, now that I was mentally, if not yet in practice, removed from the icestation’s remit. I wanted to run. I didn’t know where.
Still he stared at me strangely, pondering and motionless. Could he be a robot? Surely not. Apart from anything else, I could smell him: his male fug in the hot room, the sheen on his dark skin.
One of the Ohen Tuos – he looked like one of the men from the Dame-Dame Towers – came in with water. Swirling Suit had not, apparently, beckoned him.
The Ohen Tuo handed me the glass and closed the door softly behind him, as though there was someone nearby who slept and must not be wakened.
“Nah, drink ya water an’ we start.”
He opened the case. In it were parts of what appeared to be a human skeleton: a skull and bones, part of a ribcage. A tracery of wires connected them.
His suit suddenly switched; the blossom, birds and sky vanished, to be replaced by a texture of grey blanket.
I put down the glass and extended my beaded arm.
CHAPTER SEVEN
David
“Discovery on ship. Flesh remains. Circuitry.” It was noon. Breakage was a middle-aged man, this one balding. “I absolutely feel sure that’s what they found.”
“You what?” David was swilling the last of his espresso down. The red sun was climbing behind the blades of a wind turbine, ascending to where soon it would be swallowed by the thickening white vapour that was the late twenty-first-century Avonmouth.city sky. Flesh shuffled in and out of the Spoons. He sat next to the window with his coffee, looking out. A man pushed a baby past in a buggy. David was reminded of the youth he’d cautioned a few days ago on the N-car. As soon as the buggy’s occupant could walk, the man would take his child to have beads fitted, and the two would begin to communicate as much through the telepathic stream as they did offline. One day the child would find itself experiencing sensa from IANI, from every channel it could wish for, every sweetener to its humdrum physical world. Just as one day it might fall in love with the wrong person. And so its mental subjection would begin, with full parental consent.
