by Tim Kindberg
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bite Not One Another
We walked. David paid four of the other women – fleshren – to accompany us. Flesh and flesh in the electric roar.
“Why are you bringing them?” I asked.
“I would invite all of them if I could. Out into the open. I’d have us walk naked through the streets. I’d—”
“But. They have beads, which shackles them to IANI. As do you. And you’ve paid them to come. They would never leave their domain just for you, would they now? Not to mention that you frequent the Royal; you are part of the system in several ways. Have you lain with any of them since we met?”
He kept trying to be cold and to show bravado but was infinitely sad, this David, and easily drawn from his shell.
“No.”
“You must stop.”
He looked at me, apparently lost for words. Lost for anything, in fact. I, Pempamsie, could consider such a man weak. But not him.
A robot came. ID police, like him. It stood, ignoring me.
“What have you told them about me?” I asked.
“That you were in the Royal when Obayifa dolled two of the crew. That I have reason to believe you, and they” – he gestured to the four women – “need my protection.”
“And can you protect me?” I found myself smiling. I.
“Whoever you are, and for whatever reason, she needs this construction of beads to do her work. Either she can’t doll you without constructing it, this…”
“Crocodile.”
He almost smiled back. “This thing made out of beads and—”
“And what?”
“Whatever she is constructing, you or your inhabitant or both are valuable to them.”
“Them?”
“Look, I’m not stupid. You are someone special. I’m just not sure what kind of special, or to whom.”
“Perhaps I work for Westaf. Consider how nonned I am. It’s what the vodu is for. You’re not doing your job. You should have arrested me. You’re not in Westaf now.”
“The vodu nons you?” David was shocked.
“Yes. The handiwork of Swirling Suit, a renegade.”
He stopped to consider me, the ID cop. “That’s as may be. I need you to be free.”
“Am I bait? To draw her out? Is that all you are interested in?”
He did not answer. “The thing inside,” he said. “Has it changed since you met me? Given what I have inside?”
“I do not know.” Truly, I did not know how to answer him. Something stirred in Pempamsie when I met this David. An itching. But was it I for him, or it for it? And the stirring itself lay under a cloud. I did not know this feeling. I, Pempamsie, did not know what Swirling Suit had infected me with. I knew only that it was invisible but present.
“What is this robot?”
“That’s Breakage. You don’t need to concern yourself about him.”
I stood in front of the robot, a squat man like an old-fashioned fleshren from UK.land with a hat and attaché case. It stopped, stepped to the side to pass. I blocked it. Blocked it again.
“Can you see me?” I asked it.
“Confession,” the robot called Breakage said. “Logged.”
“It’s nothing,” David said to me, while looking at the robot. “Breakage, continue. We are returning to Dirac after I’ve finished interviewing these sex workers.”
“Breakage log David offline.”
“I know, Breakage.”
These two were a strange pair. Normally flesh and robot were cold to one another. These two had a trace of Obi nka obi: unity; bite not one another.
“I meant, what is this robot to you?”
“Just a robot.”
No, it bore a peculiar relationship to him. But he seemed at ease with it. Had he hacked it?
We sweated as we walked on the pavement. The sky was low and white and burning. The near-above emitted a rattle now. My colleagues from the Royal had been silent.
“David, why do you not talk to them?”
He shrugged.
“Are they sheep?” I said. “Are you a sheep?” I asked one of them. Like the others, like all flesh in UK.land, she appeared drugged, as sensa played inside her mind. Updates from the network, as well as one another. Nothing much to complain about per se. But filled with bleakness. They were lost. Like David. No, not like him.
“Do you hear me?” I picked up her beaded wrist. “Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
She was about my age. Her mouth opened but said nothing. Their beads: Epa: handcuffs.
“You are slaves of IANI,” I said. “And you,” I said to David, “you carry shame for using them.”
“I do,” he said, and walked a little ahead of us. “Did. I’ve stopped now.”
“You’re supposed to be interviewing them. That’s what you told the robot,” I called to him.
“You can see for yourself, they’re numbed with psychic overload. They seem to be particularly affected by it. It might be an experiment specifically on sex workers. They’re of little value to the network. They might as well have been dolled already.”
“Switch off their beads.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
I let it be. I thought of what I had done in the name of IANI. I was not one to judge him. And I was no longer precisely I. I concentrated on the present, on the walk with other flesh, my footsteps on the heated pavement, lest the absence reappear where memories should be.
“And what of you? Do you feel something new – with me?” I said. I, Pempamsie, unable to contain the inside itch. The scratch. The itch again.
“Yes, something is different. My veins and your veins tell of our inhabitants. Mine is up and moving around. I’ve never experienced it like this. It has been charged.”
“The beetle in the box,” I said. One of the old books Pempamsie studied in the icestation.
“It’s shaking at its cage. It makes me wonder how strong the cage is.”
“Cage? What cage?”
“My vodu is locked up inside my mind. I see it, feel it. But it is constrained.”
“Mine is not so. It is a fluid, pervading me. I can’t see it, only a shadow, shifting in shape all the time. There to non me and that is all, supposedly.”
“Fascinating,” he said. “I researched them, gathered every scrap of knowledge I could right after my inhabitance; but I never heard of vodus as anything other than monsters before. Mine’s more like Obayifa’s, I suspect; only so far, at least, it can’t get out to do its filthy work. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Hurt me?”
“I know you have a vodu inside, but it’s different; I don’t know for sure what would happen if mine escaped.”
“David, tell me about David.”
“You say that as though I were a construct, not a person.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No. I’m damn well a person. I’m—”
“You?”
“Yes. Somewhere inside is me.”
The robot Breakage walked its uncanny walk beside us. “Can we really speak with this thing accompanying us?”
“This ‘thing’ is Breakage. Yes. He’s promised me he won’t report.”
“Promised?”
“It sounds ridiculous, but yes, he’s different. He logs but doesn’t report.”
“And why do you even need ‘him’?”
“He can reach parts of Big Mind I don’t have access to.”
“Namely?”
“They all can. Only he’s on my side.”
“You’ve turned a robot? Impossible!”
“I didn’t turn him. He just is the way he is.”
“You’re not serious! A robot just turns up, says he’s your friend. And you believe it! You’re naive. Are you that lonely?”
Breakage looked straight ahead as we discussed him, face like a baby except that he was dressed as grown flesh pursuing a business that no longer existed, a business with an office, a desk t
o lay his attaché case upon.
His actual business: ID crime. And there we were: Pempamsie nonned, David offline.
“Where do you come from?” I asked David.
“Here, in UK land.”
“But your inhabitant: where were you when it was implanted? Here?”
“Accra city. I returned here because of the vodu.”
The heat pressed upon us. David took off his jacket. I gripped his forearm and felt the veins running thick just beneath his sweat-soaked shirt.
“Who did this to you?”
“I told you, renegades.”
“No, you didn’t tell me that. Which individual? Swirling Suit?”
“I don’t know who that is, or who did it to me. They captured me, drugged me. It was night-time. I saw nothing.”
“Owo foro adobe: snake climbing the palm; performing the impossible.”
“I’d been pursuing one of their chiefs. I turned up at a house. They operated on me. I woke up lost, two weeks later.”
“They wanted their man on the inside.”
“Perhaps, controlled by this.” He pointed to the thing inside his mind.
“And they failed?”
“It’s just there. Inside. Looking.”
“It can’t steer you.”
“I don’t think so. I told you, it’s caged.”
“But you were concerned that it might leave the cage.”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I think it might be able to.”
“How does it survive?”
“It feeds off me, I guess. A trickle current of psychic energy.”
“Just a trickle?”
“I think so.”
“And no one has observed its presence?”
“I didn’t say that. You have, for a start.”
“Tell me more about why you left Accra city.”
“I had to get away from someone. Someone I was afraid of hurting.”
Ah, the sadness. “Are you going to tell me?”
He was weighing up whether he could tell me, Pempamsie. Yet he had told me so much already.
“My daughter, Yaa.”
“And how would your daughter come to harm?”
“I stayed away from her, from everyone at first. You have to understand. I had no idea what they had done to me.”
“They had implanted a vodu. A vampire spirit.”
“You say that like it’s obvious.”
“A spirit who would use you.”
“Eventually. I recognised that it was caged. I allowed myself to visit her. She had called and called. I couldn’t not see her. I was weak.”
“And?” David was allowing himself emotions. I, Pempamsie, was not used to such males. Rather, I was unfamiliar with not feeling contempt for such males.
“And when I saw her, I could tell it wanted her.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know what way. I just knew I couldn’t stay with that thing wanting to… I don’t know, leap across. Into her. Or consume her. The cage seemed to come ajar, wider even in the seconds I remained with her. But only with her – the one person I love. With everyone else it has remained firmly shut. There’s no one else I care about, you see. Or have let myself care about.”
“I see. So you left her behind. And now you’re here. In Avonmouth city. An ID cop with a vodu inside.”
“That about sums it up.”
And I? My story? I tried not to recall my parents, because I knew I would fail. I would try again later.
David stopped. “Look. I have to go.” He did not look me in the eye. Shifting his weight uneasily from foot to foot. Perhaps regretting how much he had shared with me.
I needed to ask this David about Super Mare. But now was not the moment. Patience. Let this day end. I walked with the robot and the mute sex workers back to the Royal. Night was falling. I looked up hoping to see the stars. But there was only the near-above in Avonmouth.city, hulking and climbing above us in the dusk beneath a blanket of colourless sky. We were of the fleshwork, in the network. We existed, perambulating. All around us, beads registered and sang in a glare of network light.
David and I: invisible and yet not free.
Despite his doubts about the professor, David felt drawn to Dirac’s labnode, to where he could sit and discuss the case with him by the risen sea. What he told himself not to do was tell Dirac about Pempamsie. He could picture the sour look Dirac would throw while asking who she was and what David had shared with her. And the professor would have been right: he had been foolish. Basic training had been for nothing.
“Maybe Obayifa has dolled C15 already,” David said. “Maybe he’s fallen from the near-above by now into some unused corner. Maybe he’s… I don’t know, in a basement somewhere.”
“I find little point in this exercise of your imagination, Detective.” Dirac leaned back in his chair in the conservatory. His eyes were downcast.
“You seem troubled,” David said. “Surely you should be enjoying this puzzle.”
“It’s not just a puzzle, is it, Detective. Something about this case is profound. It’s a shift away from what we’ve known. Have you dealt this closely with a psychic vampire before? And when was the last time you had to search physically and not algorithmically for a suspect?”
“Profound? You mean like psychblood, which also shifted everything?” David felt a trickle of sympathy for the professor. “But not the shift for which psychblood was intended. It was meant to be a cure. You wanted it to be a cure for dementia. That’s what you’re upset about.”
“Yes, a cure – and not a catalytic agency used to pump sensa into and out of the genpop. Let’s change the subject back to C15, shall we? Physical search is a thing of the past. We’re out of practice.”
“And his beads have been hacked in a new way to obfuscate his journey, mixing it up with those flesh in the warespace. So we’re stuck.”
“Not quite. Follow me.”
Dirac picked up an ornament on a shelf in his office and shook it in a complex choreography of moves. He paused, looking frustrated, then danced the ornament again. A section of the wall slid away.
A clinical bed on wheels stood in the centre of a room, surrounded by equipment which looked improvised, pieced together from found components, many of which looked Elizabethan, or Disruption at the latest.
“This is where you strap me up and torture me, is it, Dirac? Reveal yourself to be the serial killer I already half supposed you might be?”
Dirac reacted coldly. “A journey, Detective, is essentially digital, however material is the brain underlying it.”
“You’re telling an ID cop his business.”
“Please, listen. You don’t seem very good at that.”
“Very well. By the way.” David looked around him. “You don’t mind me bringing my inhabitant in here?”
“Believe me, even if it can see, I’m not about to explain how this equipment works in sufficient detail to you or anybody else. This machine is not what it appears to be. Now, wherever C15 is, however his beads have been hacked, there is a signal implicit in the data flowing to and from the beads. It’s connected with the psychblood perturbations within his organism, which are partly a function of the brain itself.”
“I think I see what you mean. And we have at least some data which we know to be from him, while he was in our custody,” said David.
“Not merely data from his beads, Detective. We never use it nowadays, but there are recordings of brain functions taken at the same time. The signal of which we speak is opaque to machines. But if you play it back into flesh with the brain signature used as a key, it can be discerned as a kind of meaning.”
“What kind of meaning?”
“Hard to describe. A bit like a smell, even though it’s carried over the network. All we have to do is play the network feed and the brain signature into someone.”
“Someone like you, Professor?”
“Someone like me. And I may be able to smell – trace – him
over the network.”
Dirac lay on the bed. “I require your assistance.”
“Is this dangerous?”
“To me or to you? You have no need to worry.”
Dirac bade David to connect electrodes to his head. Then he touched his beads to beads on the machine. After several attempts he relaxed. “There. I’m associated with the machine. Now you must stay and watch me for a while. If anything happens, just pull me away from the bed and out of here. And don’t speak to me.”
“Very well. I’m intrigued.”
Dirac closed his eyes. David folded his arms and let his mind wander. Thoughts of Pempamsie rushed in. They had touched and that was all. He would have felt clean for once as he left the Royal except that he had revealed his inhabitance to her. His ID cop’s instincts told him he should have arrested her, even if he couldn’t say why. Was it the vodu making him reckless, or his increasing contempt for the network he worked for? No, he had to admit it was more than that. There was something about her. She was inhabited like him: not rampantly like Obayifa with her crazed voltage. Pempamsie’s vodu must also be constrained. More constrained than his, for her eyes betrayed nothing, even if the veins on her forearm were distended.
Judging by the painting in her room, Obayifa was pursuing her – with IANI’s blessing, it seemed, since they had wanted him to let her go. Presumably Obayifa could not suck out Pempamsie’s vodu-inhabited mind, but she intended harm. Pempamsie was in danger.
His vodu prowled in its cage. Its footsteps were like someone walking on the floor above, in an attic that should have been empty.
Dirac had lain still for about ten minutes when his limbs began to twitch like a dreaming dog’s, his eyeballs rotating beneath his lids. David drew closer. Lines crossed Dirac’s leathery face. His hair was thinning; there was dandruff on his collar. His fists were tightened. The beads reconfigured rapidly on his wrist.
David wondered whether to wake him.
Dirac’s slight movement suddenly grew. His back arched. He was having a seizure, his tongue poking out and eyeballs bulging.
“Open,” David said to the room, removing the electrodes from Dirac, and struggled with him back into the office, with its ornaments and Elizabethan books.
