Vampires of Avonmouth

by Tim Kindberg

  “Who are you?” I pushed her up against the glass. My head spun. Trying to prove I was not as weak as I felt. “And what are you to him?”

  “David? Who am I to the cop? Ex-cop?” She laughed in my face.

  “You were waiting for him?”

  “Him? No. My gentlemen and ladies want something he’s got. Just like that thing who’s after it too.”

  “And what do you know about that ‘thing’?”

  “Nothing that I would tell you. Get your hands off me.”

  “I repeat. Who are you?” An ID felon, that was for sure. But in my hacked state I couldn’t register her true self: my beads had been manipulated by Swirling Suit; his implant was fucking with my consciousness.

  She did not answer me. I let her drop. Six inches from where I had pinned her.

  “Shit. You nearly killed me. What are you, freak? That’s the question you should be asking yourself.”

  “You’re lying. You have an interest in David.” The man who stood and watched quizzically as we sparred, as if wondering why we should think him worth it, him with his melancholy and sleeplessness.

  “Wrong. It’s the other way around, if anything – the way he came to see me, and it wasn’t only on ID police business, I can tell you.”

  She turned to David. “Are we done?”

  After she dissolved into the crowd he told me she was nothing, a mere ID felon who looked after his friend at the carie. Who had been there when Obayifa mind-sucked this friend. He had taken an interest in her for those reasons and no more. Was he lying? Was she more to him than that? Each had struck a combative pose. I had observed this many times: a defence against unwanted physical attraction.

  So many sex workers he had lain with, including the Royal women, standing numbed with torrents of sensa, under the robot’s guard. And now David had feelings for me, Pempamsie. Of what kind?

  I wanted my self back again. And yet I wanted this new, sweet feeling, too – which derived from my freedom from IANI; it yielded me up to the world and to him in particular. I wanted that too. But I was in confusion. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Pempamsie fucked men, moved on. Never lingered. It was terrifying. I wanted to flee.

  Despite the vodu inside I seemed to feel my fleshliness more deeply – what they used to call humanity. David had elicited in me a flesh-for-flesh unmediated feeling: of what I’d heard called sympathy. In Accra.city, I would have taken him to a resting place to heal, a spot by the shore, or perhaps the painting house. In Avonmouth.city, all was nodes and transiting between them.

  As were we, journeyers to the labnode of a man called Dirac, which David told me lay off-car along the shore. He drew me with him and beckoned to the rest of our group to follow into the docks.

  “How did you get that scar?” David asked amid the whirr.

  I touched its fine, jagged fault line upon my cheek. “I don’t remember,” I said. And it was true.

  “Ah, visitors.” Dirac threw David a look of faint annoyance. He had not shaved, and his face was pale. He glanced at the women arriving with David. Breakage was a female factory worker.

  Dirac’s gaze came to rest on Pempamsie, singling her out from the Royal girls. David watched him appraise her.

  “May we come in?” David said. Dirac’s stare was becoming embarrassing.

  “In just a moment, if you will. Seven bona fide presences from one bodai and seven flesh – including me, and of course not including a presence that you and I know about, David. I hope you don’t mind me calling you that now. As I’m sure you realise, I’ve known you were no longer a detective since you contacted me about the case. In fact you have no official role, and yet you appear with Breakage and an unencumbered mind – telepathically speaking, at any rate. Well done. I think.”

  Dirac raised an eyebrow as he spoke.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying all of that in this company.”

  “But they’ve not discharged you, on the other hand,” said David. “Curious. And they told me they knew I’ve been working with you. Not in a good way.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Dirac. “But I was doing some arithmetic, of presences in the flesh versus those in Big Mind. One of you is a non. The best I’ve come across.” Dirac was still staring at Pempamsie. An almost-smile distended his thin lips. Then he dramatically waved his hand at the landscape behind them, shading his eyes from the glare with his hand. “And the creature, is she on her way? At least one of your user journeys has converged recently with hers.”

  “You see what I see, Professor. We’re away from other nodes, by the sea.”

  A gull cried, as if on cue.

  “We came in a boat and no one followed that way. And here there’s just grass and what’s left of the beach visible all around. Do you see her?”

  “Her traces are upon yours. My instruments can detect when a known party comes across her network absence, although I cannot detect that absence per se – it being an absence.”

  “Are you going to let us in?” repeated David. “It’s baking hot out here.”

  They filed into the labnode’s reception area. Pempamsie and the four Royal girls looked around at the nondescript furniture and scant decor: its banal physical reality.

  “Please, have a seat. All of you.” There weren’t enough chairs.

  “If we can’t use it ourselves then we should destroy the bone circuitry,” said David, wasting no time. “However secure we think this place may be, there must be no chance that Obayifa can pursue whatever purpose she has for it.”

  “‘We’ should destroy it?”

  “Yes, Professor. You’re going to help.”

  “I have a duty to preserve archaeologically significant remains. Not to mention that I don’t take orders from civilians.”

  “Duty to whom? IANI? A multinat? You know as well as I do that however deeply one were to dig into the network, you’d find nothing worthy of your duty. Not as we understand it. Let’s not go through the motions anymore. I’m no longer with the ID police.”

  Dirac appeared mildly offended. “Duty to science, David. To what used to be called human knowledge. According to my Elizabethan sense of right and wrong.”

  “We’ll image them, record everything possible about them, then destroy them. And try to make something similar ourselves, if you’ll help. I feel a personal duty to preserve lives.”

  “What do you speak about?” said Pempamsie. “What is this bone circuitry? I have seen a contraption that might be thus described. Show me.”

  “Ah, the non talks,” said Dirac. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Dirac.” He took her hand, which she withdrew too late to prevent his kiss landing. “Charmed to meet you.” He was desiccated, thought David, lonely for far too long.

  “I, Pempamsie, am indeed a non.”

  “Quite. You’re someone, as we can all see, but no one – no one actual, anyway – in Big Mind. Congratulations. May I ask why you’re here?”

  “You may ask,” said Pempamsie.

  “David?” Dirac turned to him for an answer.

  “We believe that Obayifa is after Pempamsie: specifically, that she wants her inhabitant back.”

  “Ah, I see. At least I think so. Quite remarkable. I do believe that with Pempamsie Westaf has succeeded, where with you they failed. My dear, is it a problem for you, then, to be a non? One might have thought it was what you wanted.”

  Pempamsie held him with an insouciant stare. “This is not the work of Westaf’s Agency for Technological Interventions. Evidently David has lodged the bone circuitry here with you. He trusts you, in other words, but I’m far from convinced by you. Kramo bone amma yanbu kramo pa: the genuine and false look alike because of hypocrisy.”

  Dirac shrugged. “I ask no one to trust me. I can say, however, that your nonning, however impressive, is manifest to me. I knew that you were inhabited, like he is. Yours is a subtle affair, designed to create a perturbation which thwarts the network’s identification algorithms. Only perhaps not
as subtle as you’d like. Is that the problem? My instruments sense that a balance has been overturned.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” said David, looking from one to the other as they locked eyes. “Professor, let me have the case.”

  “You have a moral right, it could be argued, to do with the bones as you wish. You brought them as evidence and left them with me for safekeeping only, after all. They are yours – insofar as they can be said to be anybody’s, apart from the former owner of the bones. But I would counsel against their destruction.”

  “Maybe I’m being reckless again. Let’s just show them to Pempamsie, shall we? See whether she’s seen something like them before.”

  Dirac fetched the case and handed it to David, who lost no time in opening it. The almost complete skull once again appeared to throw its look at David as he revealed it. An ulna and radius, with beads on the wrist. The upper half of a ribcage. Fine circuitry woven between these skeletal remains.

  Pempamsie drew a sharp breath at the sight of them. “What is it?” David asked.

  “I have seen them before. The one who nonned me: I don’t know what he did with them because my memory of the procedure is blank, but he had them. Or something that looked very like them.”

  There was a pause as David and Dirac absorbed this information. The four young women could be heard whispering to one another, paying no attention to what was unfolding beside them. Breakage stood aside and watched.

  Pempamsie was impatient with David. “Do you know what they are?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Why would you even think of destroying them when you don’t know what they are?”

  “Only because if Obayifa wants them, then we don’t want her to have them.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Among Strangers

  This Dirac was his own man. “Let me examine the bones one more time. If they were instrumental in nonning her, an operation involving a vodu, that casts a new and specific light on them.”

  And so we waited. Dirac had thrown a dark look at me before leaving. Did he hate me because he loved David? And suspected that I was competition? Yet he seemed too dried up to be capable of love. I, Pempamsie, tried to be patient. I needed to hear what Dirac had to say and then find a way to Super Mare.

  I was amongst strangers. Since the days in the icestation, I lived knowing many but estranged from all. I chose a path alone. Whatever I felt with David, even he was distant now, caught up in his clash of wills with the professor. That left Pempamsie with the Royal girls, as David called them. These strange fleshren in UK.land. So different from the rivers of flesh in Accra.city. Pale. Crushed by the network almost as soon as we had left the Beautiful Alone; they were sapped, too, by the baking sun which burned through the white sheet of cloud.

  And I. I was weakening further. I could feel my vodu redacting me, deep underground, trashing my memories.

  The women had fallen silent. I sat next to one of them. One who had asked a question of me.

  “What do you call yourself?” I said.

  “Lana.” I fancied I saw the sensa flickering there behind her eyes. “What is it like, the content playing inside your head?”

  “You—How could you not know? You’re not from here, I suppose. Westaf. They say you’re peculiar there.”

  “Let’s just say I’ve tried it, but a long time ago and I don’t know whether it’s stayed the same.” In the icestation they filled us with sensa briefly, so that we would have an idea of what the genpop experienced.

  “My gran told me they used to have things called radios, boxes which played music or people speaking or… any sounds, really. And you could choose what you listened to, by turning a dial. People would have them on in the background. Well, it’s a bit like that: like the radio’s on, only there is no radio. It’s your friend who’s on, or someone you don’t know. A man telling you how white your blouse could be, or how bodais should be respected because they are there to help you. Or how there are new desreses for assignment, and they are exactly what you wanted, where you want to live.”

  “And these are voices?”

  “They’re more feelings, dreams. Little dreams.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” If I became unnonned the sensa would flow to me too.

  “I don’t know, I suppose so. There’s only one at a time, sometimes none. And it doesn’t happen when you sleep. At least, I don’t think so. And then there’s always the Beautiful Alone.”

  “The only time you’re offline.”

  “The only place where the sensa go away. I love being surrounded by the wood and the silence. You can stay in there as long as you want. But no one’s there more than an hour or two. You always want to go back online, get on with your life.”

  “They want you to experience offline because then you appreciate how powerful they are: to be able to occupy your head or not as they choose. It’s godlike.”

  “It’s what? I can’t really imagine not wanting to get the latest on what this lot’re feeling.” She indicated one of the other women. “That Bebe. The stuff she sends while the men’re fucking her. Hilarious!”

  “And how are you now, Lana?”

  “I need to get back to the Royal, to be honest. I need bytecoins. What about you? Will you be safe? What about the others? The ones still there?”

  I had no answer. David had told the other sex workers to keep away from the Royal, but they had livings to make. And by bringing these four with us – with me, Obayifa’s prey – David had perhaps endangered them more than the ones left behind. He paid these women little attention. What exactly did he want with them? To make me a little safer, like a sheep in a flock, since she had to determine which of us was her target? Perhaps he was trying to atone, on the other hand, but didn’t know how.

  “David? These young women, your fleshren,” I said.

  “Mine?”

  “They have not charged their beads for some time.”

  David looked around in the labnode, opening cupboards and searching on shelves. Eventually he found a box of charging units and handed them to the four.

  “You’ll soon be just fine,” he said grimly.

  Dirac returned with the case. He immediately asked me, “Why are you here in Avonmouth city?”

  Dirac and Pempamsie had been so cold to one another – and David didn’t know why – that he expected her not to tell the professor about her mission in Avonmouth.city. But she did.

  “I consulted a young man I trust, Nsoroma, in Accra city. He told me to seek out one in Super Mare who can rid me of my inhabitant. And in order to find him, he said, I should first talk to one who knows of vodus and who can lead me to him. Well…” She looked at David. “I have found one who knows of vodus, but he tells me that he cannot help.”

  “Fascinating,” Dirac replied. “I’m beginning to have an idea about the bone circuitry, based on what you have just told me, but there remain more questions than answers.”

  He placed the case on a counter, opened it and immediately set to work as though he had just had a revelation, alternately squinting at a screen and manipulating the bone circuitry.

  “What is it?” said David.

  “There’s an asymmetry in this circuitry.” Dirac wielded the skeleton’s forearm, looked at the display again.

  “Explanation, please.”

  “You will appreciate that someone like me, who assists ID Forensics, has encountered many a Westaf construct – although far more often in software than hardware. Always they modulate the flow of electro-psychic information in both directions.”

  “Network to mind and mind to network.”

  “Exactly. But this.” Dirac put down the forearm and traced his finger over the skull. “This circuitry has an asymmetry. It has a mode in which it is diodic: data can flow in but not out.”

  “A kind of valve.”

  “Indeed. It’s also capacitative.”

  “For storage.”

  “Yes, ingress and storage.
It’s a receptacle for something beyond the strictly digital: something supervirtual.”

  “Such as a vodu,” said Pempamsie. Dirac turned to her, hesitated, addressed David again.

  “Such as a vodu. You know Scheherazade’s tale of the fisherman and the Jinni?”

  “Instead of a Jinni in a jar,” David replied, “a vodu in confinement. In the bones themselves?”

  “In the electronics plus, perhaps, in the space of the skull or the ribcage. Or both. The bones may also be a kind of lure to persuade, shall we say, the vodu to leave its host.”

  “I see,” said Pempamsie.

  “Perhaps you do.”

  Dirac stood aside for them to look inside the case again.

  “Are you actually sure about any of this?” David said.

  Dirac shrugged. “It’s my belief, based on the evidence available. If I am right, then given the circumstances in which they were found, it would seem they are for Obayifa to take Pempamsie’s vodu back to its owner. Except that the circuitry would not serve her purpose in its current state; it is missing vital components.”

  “You mean the beads Obayifa removed from the crew,” David said.

  “There are sixteen gaps among the arrangement of beads at the wrist of the radius and ulna. You can’t see gaps – any more than we could see the gaps in the beads of the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy’s crew. But mathematically the gaps are there. I’m guessing that they have to be filled with beads for the apparatus to work – those particular beads, not just any.”

  “Allow me to understand,” said Pempamsie. “With these bones, if she were able to complete them, she could extract the vodu from me and contain it – in the ribcage or the skull? In any case, she could take it back to the man who inserted it in me. And she could do to me what she wants.”

  “A fair summary. I’m assuming that whoever used a vodu to non you wants it back. Obayifa cannot extract the vodu without a tool of some description. She is a vodu, and according to my analysis two vodus cannot encounter one another inside the same mental substrate. They are the macro equivalent of fermions, quantum electrodynamically speaking, and so cannot occupy the same state. If she tried to enter your mind to remove your vodu, she’d be destroyed herself. In fact, mutual annihilation would take place. Not to mention – and not that she would care – what could happen to collateral minds in the vicinity. Therefore she needs to draw your vodu into a separate container. However full of holes and gaps are the skull and ribcage, I believe they will, when configured correctly, exert a force field around it. Everything has to be in place. It’s like a chemical experiment: if your preparations are not just right, you blow yourself up.”