by Tim Kindberg
“To be honest, I don’t exactly know. They’re just stupid bodais, and yet… There’s an emergent algorithm binding them, which I’ve only seen the effects of, never the code. They may have written it themselves. I let it pass – indeed, I encourage it – because we might just be able to benefit from some bodai evolution. So that they act together. As long as it’s in our favour.”
David decided to leave at once, relying on Coleridge to see off Obayifa.
Pempamsie remained slumped in a chair.
“You stay here with them. I’m taking Coleridge and leaving the bones. I’m going to find Breakage. Then I’m coming back.”
“But I—Pempamsie will be strong soon. It is passing.”
“There’s no need to expose you to her. We believe she can’t consume our vodu-inhabited minds, but what if she has new instructions? What if Swirling Suit has lost patience and wants you—”
“Dead.”
“Higgs, the working CCTV shots are all deserted. Where should I find these bodais of yours?”
“Look in the beach huts. It’s where I go for the Beautiful Alone. And they do, too. Not that any of us can or needs to experience what the genpop experiences. It’s a ritual.”
“What exactly is this island you’ve created, this Super Mare?” said David.
“It’s what I’ve needed to survive. But everything has changed now that you’re here.”
To everyone’s profound relief, the banging had ceased.
Higgs shut and locked the inner door behind David. Coleridge pulled him across the small vestibule with the excitement of a dog who had found a scent, and sniffed beneath the door. David stood behind Coleridge and pressed a large button on the wall.
The strip of obsolete pier, the sounds of the estuary with its avian denizens, and the heat all greeted him at once. Obayifa was nowhere to be seen. Coleridge could smell her, though, and pulled on the lead towards land. His heart banging wildly, David peered to either side before exiting.
The salty night air sloughed around flesh and dog as they made for the beach. Brightly lit, the pier was starkly empty of beings in its stretch to land. What was once known as the Severn Sea rolled beneath them. A group of terns took flight from somewhere unseen, flapping like ghosts above. Obayifa could have secreted herself in many places along the pier, but David trusted Coleridge to alert him. The dog tore along.
He did not like leaving Pempamsie with Higgs and Dirac, however much it was the right move for her safety. He wanted her to be cared for, but the two scientists were each in their own way distinctly lacking in any grace. They were an odd couple. Higgs’ superior confidence had been dented by their arrival, perhaps for the better if it meant greater realism on his part. And now Dirac had someone his equal to work with.
David thought of Pempamsie: her serious look, the scar that told of her fracture inside. Because of her, how long it seemed since he had slept with one of the Royal girls. That was over. He had barely needed to think about ceasing his addiction. She had found a way to his heart, however vodu-crushed it remained. But she was diminishing even as he was beginning to know her. If he could safely relieve her of her vodu and her monstrous pursuer, perhaps he could rid himself of his own inhabitant, and see his daughter again.
Super Mare was dimly lit beyond the pier’s brightness. David could just see the fountain and a group of bodais beside it. They were circling something hidden in the centre. Their rotation had a sinister quality, a preamble to setting upon prey, perhaps.
Coleridge had lost Obayifa’s scent, and became interested in the bodais, too. They passed the group and headed, apparently unseen by any of them, to the beach huts. There were about two dozen, set on the promenade. Unlike the stacked huts of grained and knotted wood where the genpop experienced the Beautiful Alone, these were painted in a variety of pastel shades. Higgs had said he came here as a ritual. David wondered whether he had ever sought the Beautiful Alone in a real facility outside, or knew anything of what it was like to be a member of the genpop. How long had he been in Super Mare, this place divorced from the rest of what passed as civilisation?
David could just see waves rolling in the night. Coleridge was calm. A slight breeze had developed, delivering sea air that might have been what was interfering with the dog’s ability to catch Obayifa’s scent. David opened the door of the first hut and let Coleridge in before peering into the darkness. Coleridge left almost at once, uninterested. It was empty. But when David opened the next door there was a bodai inside. Coleridge growled at it.
“Report,” David commanded, forgetting his discharge from the ID police.
“Leave,” it said. “This is no place for you.”
David beaded Breakage’s details to it. “Do you know this bodai?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“All is known.” The bodai stretched its mouth open and laughed, like a parody of a Buddha, David thought. He had never heard a bodai laugh before. It was beyond them. Attempts to give them laughter had resulted in horrible, uncanny snorting. The laughter continued; he thought it might never stop. He closed the door on it and tried the next hut. The laughter ceased.
Another bodai. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“Being. Alone. Existing. All is known.”
Looking somewhat less threatening when sitting down, the Super Mare bodais still caused David to wonder whether they were capable of harming flesh. He did not want to find out by pressing them. If they were capable of laughter then they might be capable of anger too. Even Coleridge seemed reluctant to hang around. Nonetheless, David gave it Breakage’s identity.
“Do you know this bodai?”
“Yes.”
And in the next hut was Breakage. At least, there was a bodai who had what appeared to be the same bod: the bureaucrat in a grey suit. His attaché case lay next to him on the bench.
“Breakage?”
The bodai opened his eyes. “All is known.”
David heard the familiar voice. It was him.
“What are you doing?”
“Cannot leave.”
“Says who?”
“Breakage says.”
“No: who or what instructed you to remain here?”
“Local. Influence.”
“Other bodais?”
“Impossible.”
“But true?”
“Yes. All is known.”
“You are to follow only my instructions now.”
“Must dissociate.”
“From me, or them?”
Breakage rose and lurched like a drunk towards David and Coleridge, who were forced to step aside from the door. He made for nearby steps leading over the bulwarks and down to the beach, breaking all protocols for self-protection.
“You can’t go down there. It’s the sea.”
Breakage paused as if to consider David’s words. Streams of integers flowed to and from… Where?
“Breakage is needed. Self-impediment is against your protocols.”
More integers streamed backwards and forwards, in an attempt to match a pattern that would enable the algorithm to proceed. Breakage turned back to face the row of beach huts.
And began to laugh uncannily.
About ten bodais emerged from huts and gathered round Breakage, gyrating in a patch of moonlight which the shifting clouds had released. Their mock laughter caused David to put his hands to his ears. He looked around desperately, hoping Obayifa would not take advantage of the commotion to spring an attack.
Then, with no apparent signal, all the laughter and gyration stopped at once. The bodais approached Breakage in the centre.
“Release him!” David stood and shouted as though he were still with the ID police, flesh against ten machines. Coleridge panted in bemusement. They ignored them.
The bodais had begun to shuffle in a travesty of a dance. Nothing fleshly informed their lumpen swinging. They began to utter sounds like modems from Elizabethan times, speech uttered a hundred tim
es faster than flesh could voice. David felt a chorus of indecipherable transmissions through his beads.
At least they didn’t hold spears, he thought. He tied Coleridge to the handle of a hut and approached the circle, which expanded and contracted as they danced. Great care was needed to avoid their swinging limbs, but he managed to step quickly between a pair of them, guessing correctly that his flesh and blood passing through their shadows in the moonlight was as nothing to these bodais in their tranced state.
Breakage, however, looked at David as he stepped towards him – a sign, perhaps, that he had not been totally conjoined to the gang as yet. The planes of his face, however, were passing through a rapid series of configurations, as though he were cycling swiftly through all the possible simulacra of emotions in his repertoire, unable to assume any one for more than a fraction of a second.
Breakage was otherwise still. David touched his beads to the bodai’s, whose face immediately settled to his default positive expression: the farting baby.
“All is known. We are trapped,” Breakage shouted beneath the crazed laughter, the whirr of mechanical limbs around them.
“Not if we can use whatever happened to you when you arrived to disable them.”
“Breakage does not understand.”
“What instructions were issued to you when you arrived in Super Mare? Reverse them.”
“Separation. Told to separate. And join.”
“Go up to them. Touch them.”
The bureaucrat approached one of the dancers, who stared through him in its robotic trance. Breakage began to wave his left arm in time with it, and touched beads. David wondered at that point in which direction control would flow: it might reinforce rather than break the other bodai’s spell on Breakage.
The bodais fell still.
“Steer it out of the circle,” said David.
“Cannot leave David.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
Breakage laid hands on the bodai whose beads he had touched, manoeuvring it around and to the side to make way for their exit. David clung nervously to Breakage’s back as they left the circle.
“Keep going!” They walked over to where Coleridge sat on his haunches, awaiting his master.
The group began to disband. Some returned to the huts. Others walked off along the seafront in twos and threes, for all the world like so many promenaders of old, out for a midnight stroll.
“Breakage, Dirac directed you to record the brain signatures of everyone you came across, and you were with Obayifa.”
“David ask question?”
“Did you record her signature?”
“Data from ID criminal. Recorded.”
“But your bod has been substituted since then. Did you transfer the recording?”
“Erasure.”
“Damn.”
“But recording now.”
“What?”
“Recording unknown flesh now. ID crime. Suspect.”
“How? Where is she?” David held more tightly on to Coleridge’s lead.
“Unknown. Proximate.” David could feel nothing through his beads, which was her trademark. Could the bodai sense her through whatever instrumentation Dirac had installed? Coleridge, who remained calm, showed no signs of a scent. David took in the heavy, moist, salt-laden air through his nostrils. Perhaps it was too strong even for a canine.
“Are you sure?”
Breakage, for all the affinity David had begun to feel for the bodai, adopted a travesty of a quizzical expression, as of old.
With Coleridge on a very short leash, David asked Breakage to open the hut doors one by one. Each time a pastel door was swung open a chill shot through him.
Empty. Empty. Bodai. Empty. When the door of the last hut was opened, David again could see an empty bench.
But Obayifa suddenly swung into view from the side, glistening and sharp-edged in the light of the moon, powerful with mentalmagic. She had bested Breakage in their last encounter. But now he had Coleridge, who bared his teeth and growled fiercely.
She stepped towards David, flashing her incisors, her tongue protruding horribly. A million thoughts, a million adrenal raindrops splashing throughout his body. He straightened his spine. Coleridge was between them. The dog pulled up at her. She looked down at the animal. David thought for a second that she was going to reach down and strangle him – with her tongue? But the tongue merely quivered in the air. She backed slightly. Despite the mad stare, the arms and claws suspended above him, the lizard mouth, the hard, leaning body, Coleridge did not show signs of fear. He locked eyes with her. A mental struggle occurred between Obayifa and what the dog represented to her, for surely she could have reached down and killed it.
“I’m going to let him go,” said David. “We’ll see what’s in those veins of yours.” David started to release the lead from his fingers. But he could not. For a muscular appendage entered his mind, hard and tentacular like a tongue. He felt its ingress from the base, through his id. And it began to probe, searching and vampiric. He felt himself grow hard.
This cannot happen; the vodu-inhabited cannot fuck with the vodu-inhabited. He clung to the thought even as it was refuted, trying desperately to release the lead but finding himself holding tighter and tighter on to it, his legs planted where he stood. Obayifa was but a metre beyond the dog’s reach.
The tongue was flexing for purchase but staying away from the cage. The cage. His vodu was in a cage, the tongue apparently safe beyond it, free to roam in his mind. The tongue was forming a scoop, beginning to dig.
Then Breakage reached and unclipped the lead from Coleridge’s collar. The dog bounded furiously after Obayifa, who sprang like a cat up to the hut’s roof and flew along the row from ridge to ridge, with Coleridge barking and snapping at her. When she was in the middle, she jumped down behind the row and disappeared while Coleridge tried to throw himself after her, through a gap that was too narrow.
The tongue was gone. David collapsed to the ground, his mind frozen, and lay crumpled in a pool of moonlight. The bureaucrat picked him up and slung him across his shoulder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Biribi Wo Soro
As soon as we had witnessed the incident on CCTV we headed directly to the scene, Dirac pointing his gun at every shadow, Higgs with his straining dog. I, Pempamsie, fell upon David’s limp body, extracting him from the arms of the bodai. We returned with all haste to Higgs’ headquarters, the dogs on either side of us.
David still had not regained consciousness the next day. I waited beside him with the dog. The room Higgs found for us within his compound at the end of the pier was dismal. We were cocooned. The one window let in light up high, too high to look out to the sea. There was but a bed and a chair. One of Higgs’ outlaw robots brought food and water, even for the dog. I was not hungry, but I forced myself to eat. The dog, Coleridge, looked at me, at David, at me again.
My subtle vodu cast its shadows. I felt: molten, undone. From time to time I looked over the unconscious body beside me. I saw the sad man David. I knew who he was. I knew the dog, with its brown eyes and brindled fur. Yet I was not sure who it was who knew them. Why, for a moment the question arose, was this “I” waiting with them? Then I forced myself to think of Obayifa, the creature in the painting who had now attacked David, not me. And I wrote. I wrote down everything I know to write. I wrote: This is the man who listens to you. He does not know you any more than you know yourself. But he listens to you. He is kind. And there is a sweetness in your stomach when you look at him.
I left David for a break. The dog, who seemed not to reciprocate my antipathy, followed. Higgs and Dirac were not around. There had to be quarters where Higgs lived. Surely he had a laboratory. Was Higgs not a scientist, like Dirac?
Since Obayifa was prowling outside, I guessed they had not left. They were even more vulnerable to her than David or I. We were trapped. I was weary. What could I do? I knew no medicine, so I could do little for David except sit by h
im. Where was his robot, Breakage? Could it help him? Would it obey me?
My vodu rippled inside me, like a school of fish swimming through me, as though I were nothing but their shape in water. I needed a symbol of hope: Biribi wo soro: something is in the heavens, let me reach it.
Instead, one of Higgs’ robots came in from outside. I watched, afraid lest Obayifa followed it in, then relieved when the door sealed behind it.
“Where is Higgs?” I demanded. The black-eyed robot swivelled its way past me.
“And Dirac? Tell them to come to me.”
It walked on, past the door that led to David’s room, and turned to look at me – turned its head only, beyond the compass of a fleshly head, placing its beady eyes upon me for a second before disappearing through a sliding section of the wall.
I, Pempamsie, followed.
Dirac and Higgs were bent over the bone circuitry. Seemingly united after David’s imperilment.
“How is he?” asked Dirac.
“Unconscious still. But you know how he is. You are monitoring his vital signs.”
“Indeed,” said Higgs. “He has undergone a mental trauma, to put it mildly. His bodily data is within acceptable parameters but his mind seems to have been… upended.”
“David believed he was impervious to her,” I said.
“There is a vodu inside him,” said Dirac, “but it is contained. It seems she was able to enter his mind as long as his vodu remained confined.”
“And what did she do to him while she was in there?”
“She neither consumed nor impregnated him. His mind is still in there. I have monitored for any sign of vodu spawn. There remains but the one occult mental presence. His mind is like a house that’s been burgled – there’s an archaic crime for you – turned over. But I believe she left empty-handed.”
“What would she be looking for?” I said.
“How should I know?” said Dirac. “Perhaps a suitable hatching place for her progeny. I don’t know for a fact that she was looking for anything. I may be misreading the data; perhaps she was simply trying to feed. Or to stop David from helping you. We don’t actually know how she achieves mind consumption. She would have to loosen the mind from its anchor before she could extract it, while avoiding his vodu.”
