by Tim Kindberg
She was looking at him strangely, with a mixture of desire and fear, but no longer of the dog.
Coleridge sought the shade as soon as they entered the labnode, and lay panting on the floor. David fetched water from Dirac’s small kitchen, which the dog lapped voraciously. A pointed silence hung between Dirac and Pempamsie. David was weary from the heat and from the vodu’s pacing in his mind. The journey back with Pempamsie and Coleridge had provided a little relief, with no sign of Obayifa. But now, in the labnode, the world was weighing on him again. He didn’t like leaving the Royal girls behind.
Dirac was eyeing him. “You don’t seriously have a problem with me giving him water, do you?” said David. “We need this dog in good shape.”
“A word, please, David.”
“We won’t be long,” David assured Pempamsie as they left for the conservatory.
“There’s something you should know about your new friend. I’ve been tracking your emanations, your user journey, now that she’s arrived on the scene. There’s a difference.”
“Do tell,” David said.
“Please, I’m serious. I need to know: is it behaving differently, looking different?”
Yes, it was. It was coming into focus, from its blur of innards-as-skin.
“No.”
Dirac scoffed. “There is a correlation between yours and hers. Perhaps even communication.” Dirac’s bony hand on David’s shoulder made him flinch. “You’re inhabited by something none of us really understands. Quite possibly whoever put it there has no better idea of it than we do.”
“Any more incomprehensible than consciousness itself?”
“All right, but less predictable, I would say.” Dirac looked as though he wanted to touch David again; he was staring at his forehead. “But a vodu isn’t consciousness as we know it. It seems to be, as you have said, not only unnatural but unvirtual. Not to mention un-Turing – at least, it appears not to be algorithmic.”
“That’s a lot of ‘un’.”
Dirac half-smiled. “Would you prefer ‘supernatural’ and ‘supervirtual’?”
“You talk of my vodu and Pempamsie’s communicating. How would you possibly know? You can speak vodu now, can you?”
“No, but I can measure signals, build-ups of energy, correlations.”
“All is known, eh?”
“Look.” Dirac’s tone became more urgent. “I admit I want to dissuade you from going to Super Mare. Have you lost your mind? An allegedly ex-IANI agent appears from nowhere and you believe everything she says?”
“Yes. I believe her. What ulterior designs could she have on me – an ex-ID cop from Avonmouth city?”
“You’ve an inhabitant, David. Don’t be a fool.”
“Look, I’m sick of the world I exist in and I’m sick of what’s inside me. Maybe these bones can help me as well, so that I can do something about the system we’re living in – if you can call it living. But we don’t have the beads – Obayifa does. This Higgs, can he help?”
“I really don’t know much about what he’s been working on, although I suspect he’s no stranger to the supervirtual.”
Breakage entered. He was a driver, smart in his peaked cap, grey suit and leather gloves.
“Presence outside,” he declared. “One flesh. Mentally impaired.”
“Shit,” said David. “That’s all we need. Whatever happened to your Faraday?”
They returned to find Pempamsie looking outside at a man in a dressing gown.
“You know him?” Dirac asked David.
It was the first of the dems to visit him.
“Not exactly.”
Dirac said, “So you do. I take it he followed you here.”
The man started shouting, “Bones! Bo-ones! Bones!”
Dirac turned to his labnode interface. “It seems our bone circuitry is transmitting beyond these walls, without using the tunnel. But the energy remains at the same level. It has transmuted somehow. Or it has found a way to communicate outside.”
The visitor was gesticulating.
“Let Mr Dressing Gown in,” said David.
“I don’t think that would be wise.”
The view through the screen was limited. “Breakage, are there others en route here?”
“One presence only. Mentally impaired.”
“Let him in.”
The man wore not only the same dressing gown but the same diamond-patterned pyjamas underneath. Didn’t they change them in Mary’s carie? Mary, who was conscientious about her “gentlemen and ladies”.
“What is your name?” said David.
The man chewed slowly. How had he found him? It occurred to him, horribly, that Obayifa had got to this man in some way. Or to Mary.
“You’re one of Mary’s. We’ve never been introduced. I’m David.” The man still did not reply.
“Obayifa can’t be far behind,” David said to Dirac. “Either you’re right about the emanations and this gentleman has found us through them – which means she will too – or he’s under her spell, capable of finding me in some other way, with the same corollary.
“Hello, bastard.” Dressing Gown spat in Dirac’s face.
David pulled the man away.
“Do you have a message for me?”
“Bones. Dem bones. Juju.”
“Breakage will take this flesh to where carie can pick him up. Use emergency module dispatch.”
“Thank you, Breakage. You’re thinking like me now. I’ll send rendezvous instructions.”
The man struggled and cried out as Breakage left with him, even though the bodai ushered him gently.
“Dirac, it’s no longer safe for you here. We’re leaving at once. Please, come with us.”
Dirac sighed and went to fetch the case. “I should warn you, before you leave, about some misgivings that are troubling me. First is that the bone circuitry has an unusual construction for Westaf. There are components whose origin – both physically and conceptually – seems to lie outside their provenance. It’s not that they couldn’t in principle have fabricated them by themselves, but I’m not convinced they did so.”
“You mean they contain outer-Westaf technology. As I’ve tried to tell you, they were made by a renegade,” said David.
“So you say. Advised by Pempamsie, no doubt. But something tells me these components derive at least in part from Super Mare.”
“Higgs?”
“He’s had a lot of time on his hands. Dabbling in the supervirtual would be right up his street. My other doubt is this. I’m simply being thorough, you understand. We assume the bone circuitry is for Obayifa’s use, and yet you acquired it rather easily and you have no evidence of it ever having been in her possession.”
“Some of the crew of the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy reported seeing her with the case.”
“This case, or a case? What if we were meant to find this circuitry – what if it’s intended for us?”
They looked at Pempamsie.
“For me?” she exclaimed. “But how could Swirling Suit know this construction would ever find its way to me? In any event, I feel no effects from it. And don’t we know it can’t work without the beads that she possesses?”
“It’s always bugged me, though,” said David, “that we came across the bones as though we were meant to.”
“Anyway,” said Dirac, “we face unknown dangers. You have your dog to accompany us. An unusual but reasonable choice, given the circumstances. I have something too.”
Dirac opened a drawer and took out an old wooden box, which he unlocked. In it, smelling of burnt oil, lying in folds of black cloth, was a handgun, Elizabethan.
PART THREE
Nkonsonkonso
Link in a chain. Symbol of human links.
Never break apart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Higgs
Higgs had short silver hair, a silver goatee beard. His long face was like a sharp implement. Behind it lay a knowledge of fundamental physics second to none, and a rare, intense c
uriosity – curiosity which the network had driven out of the genpop with sensa. He wore tight clothes, too tight for a man in his sixties although there was barely a sag in his flesh. On his left wrist were scars where his beads had been. The most nonned man on the planet. Nonned by a mechanism of his own devising.
Higgs was pissed off. It was like living in a tank, at the end of the pier in Super Mare, the sea always sloshing or crashing itself against the legs and girders like an insane cat. Sleep was elusive.
He would saunter out when he couldn’t bear it anymore, this existence on the edge; he would stroll with glazed sea and steambath sky his backdrop, past the disused entertainments and the loitering gangs of bodais he kept.
The wooden sheds, laid along the esplanade, smelled of heated timber inside. This was where he meditated about the genpop, imagined their lives by simulating the Beautiful Alone. Higgs enjoyed every second of it, laying his forearms on his thighs and holding his back straight, feeling the smooth wooden solidity of the bench and the wall behind. He relished the superfluity of his being there, he who was always offline.
The world of the network was fractal, recursive. Higgs was going to bring it down recursively. So that flesh could be human, and curious again.
Engineering this isolation, necessary to conduct his experiments, had been no mean feat. No gang of ID police had swept in to claim him. Luck had played a part, perhaps. It could not last forever.
But he did not need to wait much longer. For now Dirac and the ID cop were working together. And there was the woman from Accra.city and the vampire: veritable gifts from Westaf. All he had to do was ensure they came to him.
Dirac explained that Super Mare lay south-west along the coast from his labnode, although not on any map. Flesh travelled to nodes all around it – points arbitrarily close to its outskirts – but never reached Super Mare itself. It was as though something exerted a repulsive force upon their psyches, strengthening its subconscious deterrence as they drew near.
The group set off without knowing how they would enter Super Mare, or what they would find there. At first they were silent in the N-car as it swept along Route 5, occupying a pair of facing double seats. David gave Coleridge’s lead to Breakage, positioning the dog between them and any possible approach by Obayifa. Coleridge exuded an air of self-possession, as though he were headed to where he always knew one day he would travel.
“What is it?” David asked Pempamsie, who was staring into the fleeting landscape, her expression distant. He took her hand. “Look at me.”
The set of her gaze betrayed not so much an absence as a departure, an inchoate voyage from which she must be called back to shore.
“Hey, it’s me. David.”
For a second there was no recognition.
“My parents – I was trying to recollect them again. And they are not there, nowhere in my memories.”
David looked at her scar. Which of them had inflicted the wound upon her? Mary – an agent of Westaf – had no reason to lie to him about the beatings. And the parents had sold Pempamsie, too. Their only daughter had existed for their abuse and profit.
“What about your other family – aunts, uncles, cousins?”
“I have none.”
“Friends?” He knew the answer.
“No. Pempamsie had no friends.”
“Then colleagues?”
She shook her head, as though in regret of the choices she had made. “I kept myself to myself in the icestation. We attended classes together, that was all.”
“Just you and your parents then. That was all there ever was.”
“Yes. I feel… I was going to say sure, that we were alone together.”
“And you are trying to reach them in your mind now.”
“The paths to their memories grow fewer and more eroded. This thing that inhabits me is eating me.”
“And what about their friends and acquaintances – surely your parents knew other flesh?”
“I remember some facts about them. Only trivial fragments. Not them, not they themselves, what they were like, what they looked like. There’s only a blank…” She faltered.
“There’s no one else, no data, to tell you what your parents were like?”
“None.”
“And you miss them.”
“Yes. What do you want me to say? As I would miss a limb.” She looked at him as though his questions were absurd. David fumbled for what else he could say to this woman who was turning his heart upside down. The former IANI agent – trained to overcome all emotion – now bore a bereft cast which captivated him all the more as it contrasted with what was plainly her inner strength, or had been, before the vodu had begun its work. This woman had committed murders for IANI, however unwittingly, then taken such a drastic step to flee. He felt her for a second through his beads. Her chimerical, nondescript identity in Big Mind made an impossible contrast to her physical reality. It was all he could do to hold her gaze, the trace of her scar tempting him off-centre. If this mission were to be successful he could perhaps show her Westaf’s data about her parents. But what good would that do? Was an absence of memories better or worse than knowledge that they beat her? The story behind her scar lent her a vulnerability, heightened his attraction to her. She had declined perceptibly in the short time he had known her: a slip in her bearing. If they did not find a way to remove her vodu, how far would her decline continue? How much more of her being would the vodu consume?
David’s own inhabitant impressed itself at the thought, flexing its sinuous paws through the door of its cage, which was stuck slightly ajar in Pempamsie’s presence. The vodu seethed in response to his feelings for her, its mouth puckering.
The near-above stopped. Node by node, transitway by transitway, route by route, the network incarnate lowered itself to the down-below. The sky took the opportunity to scorch this nondescript patch of UK.land, hammering down its thermal radiation through the drenched air. Flesh, too, largely fell away.
“Where are we?” said Pempamsie.
“Close,” Dirac said, rocking gently with the car, slyly observing the couple. “To the outskirts, anyway.”
“She will be following us,” she said.
“We should assume she’s following the case,” said David.
“She might try to stop us entering,” she said.
David looked at the professor. “I’m not even sure we can enter.”
“Explain,” she said.
“According to the memes,” said David, “flesh simply do not enter Super Mare. They send in bodais.”
They all looked at Breakage, standing with Coleridge beside Dirac. He was a middle-grade creative professional, fussily bearded and dressed in a polo-neck top, not holding on as the N-car swayed, speeding through the down-below.
“And what supposedly would happen,” Pempamsie said, “were flesh to enter?”
“They don’t come back,” said David.
“That’s what they say,” snorted Dirac. “This is all part of an engineered taboo.”
“Nonetheless, you know no one who has been into this place we are actually about to visit. Apart from Higgs. Am I correct?”
Dirac turned his gaze disdainfully through the opposite window.
David saw concern cloud Pempamsie’s face, and said to her, “It’s thought of as a highly desirable place, but one which no one would think of entering unless they wanted to be lost for ever – a taboo, as Dirac says. It’s… just an idea of a place.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No one does. Except, apparently, Professor Dirac here.”
“But tell me. Will we be in danger if we go there?”
“Perhaps. But not much compared to the clear and present danger of Obayifa. In any case, it’s where Nsoroma told you your salvation exists. We’ll send Breakage in to begin with.”
They came to a smooth halt. No one else was on board. An announcement came thorough the tannoy: “Please take all your belongings. This N-car terminates here
.”
David and Dirac sat in the lobby of a Best Rooms, just off Route 5. The fog that had met them soon after leaving the N-car station had persisted, clouding the buildings and the few signs of life outside. The quiet was unsettling. Pempamsie had watched with David as Dirac beaded instructions to Breakage on how to reach Super Mare. The bodai had disappeared into the mist, rebodded as a middle-aged bureaucrat in a grey suit. Pempamsie had excused herself with fatigue. Her slow mental decline continued. David saw her into the lift alone, the doors closing on a figure cast in on herself.
It was nightfall. Breakage had not returned.
The bodai clerk stood at attention behind the desk, oblivious to the worry that infused his only guests. Coleridge lay beside the entrance, the dog’s ears turning and stiffening at the occasional fog-baffled sounds from outside. The humping whirr and electric whine of Avonmouth.city was absent, although it persisted in David’s imagination. Obayifa was somewhere on a vector from there to this anonymous node, sniffing for the case of bones. And for Pempamsie.
David fidgeted: pacing then sitting down again. Dirac was still and self-contained, his hands pressed together in concentration.
“Dirac, don’t just sit there. What do you think?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Do you want to follow him in?”
“At night? We can’t leave Pempamsie. We’ll give him until morning.” David looked down at the case of bones, which, beyond their control, were signalling their location to Obayifa. He glanced once again to check that Coleridge was still beside the open door, then at Dirac who appeared, David realised, to be waiting for him to take the case and keep it overnight. Dirac, with no vodu inhabiting him, was in the most danger. David picked up the case and Coleridge followed him to the lift.
Pempamsie lay on the bed with her eyes open. David placed the case beside the bed and checked the window was locked.
“What if she comes?” she said as he looked out. “What if she takes an N-car as we did and finds us here? She can climb. Like a reptile: owo foro adobe.”
“Coleridge will let us know if she comes near.” He climbed into the bed beside her. “And we’re not going to invite her in.”
