Vampires of Avonmouth

by Tim Kindberg

  It was Pempamsie who had spotted Obayifa there, and now she was alone, at her mercy.

  “Have you rebodded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait outside.”

  “Danger.”

  “Explain.”

  “Obayifa in silo. Pempamsie in silo.”

  “You’ve seen both of them?”

  “Obayifa on roof. Identified by network absence. Pempamsie entered five minutes ago. Non identified by continuous observation.”

  “And Pempamsie, does she have the case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has she used it?”

  “Do not understand. All is known.”

  “If she has extracted her vodu, her online identity should have changed to one that is different and stable.”

  “ID unchanged.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes. Stay with Pempamsie. Keep Obayifa away from her. And don’t let either of them open the case.”

  Akoma, the heart, is all that is left. A heart climbs the castle, concrete stair by concrete stair. Footsteps echo. Warm air enters and leaves the chest. The case jounces, held by a hand. The alternation of tread. Heaviness. There is fear, uncertainty. Equally, resolve exists in this locus, this stream of consciousness. A name occurs: Pempamsie. That which cannot be crushed. Whose name is that? Above, where this heart tends, is Obayifa: the only known other. She was standing, arms spread like wings, on the parapet. She was seen from the N-car as before, observed by this heart. She and the heart, the carrier of the case, are all that is known.

  The case. Bony cavities and circuitry inside that swallows vodus: vodus that squeeze the heart. Beads on the radius and ulna, to touch. Must touch beads. Must bring this to an end, this conjunction and concurrency of existences. The heart beats autonomously. Yet there is thought. Thought like a liquid swirling around the heart. Thought of a landscape populated by absences. Fear exists, insists. But there has been love. Recent love.

  A hand on the banister, another holding the case. The stairs end. A hand opens a door. A hot, damp wind enters. The whining of the network, the voices of the fleshwork in the nodes around. Within this field of vision: Obayifa. Her arms spread wide, her back to this walking, broken heart.

  David banged his shoulder against the jamb as he rushed into the silo from the down-below. The stairs were steep. Coleridge bounded up ahead of him, pulling on the lead. David faltered, exhausted from the procedure by which Dirac and Higgs had re-seated his vodu-loosened mind. He could only guess at the nature of their manipulations, part physical, part metaphysical, part virtual, part supervirtual.

  “Breakage, report.”

  “Pempamsie, Obayifa, Breakage beside parapet.”

  “For God’s sake. Keep them apart. I’m almost there.”

  David ran up the stairs after Coleridge, wildly imagining the scene above, his heart crashing against his ribcage, sweat pouring down his face and through his clothes, breathing in the dismal smell of damp concrete, of rust, his hand slipping on the stair rail.

  “Breakage. Stay between them.”

  David began the final flight, towards a door up ahead. Light from the bright white sky poured through a glass panel. As he reached it he slowed, trying not to alert Obayifa to his presence. He peered through, catching his breath. Coleridge obediently waited for him to open the door.

  Pempamsie and Obayifa were facing one another. A precipitous descent plunged beyond the low wall. Pempamsie held the case. Breakage, who was now a sailor, walked between them.

  “Protocol violation. Remain where you are.”

  Pempamsie put the case down. Obayifa stepped around Breakage and came towards her. Breakage moved to interpose himself once again.

  Pempamsie had removed the bones from the case and was crouching down with them. Dirac or Higgs had bound them, rejigged the circuitry so that she held what was effectively a skeletal forearm with beads at its wrist, bound to the skull and ribcage by a web of cabling in a travesty of a humanoid form.

  Pempamsie held the forearm towards Obayifa, who struggled with Breakage to reach her. Pempamsie looked for all the world like a child in a woman’s body. One who was intent on using the bone circuitry, however broken she was.

  Obayifa broke free and Breakage interposed himself yet again. “Protocol violation. All is known.”

  David took out the gun. He had held a gun once before but never fired it. The sweat on his palm coated the grip. The gun was light, insubstantial despite its deadliness. He would shoot Obayifa through the chest, he told himself, the largest part of her, where he was least likely to miss. But he could not shoot yet, not without the risk of hitting Pempamsie.

  “Breakage. Stop Obayifa. Use maximum force, including total loss of data. Turn her towards the door, stand behind her.”

  David watched through the glass as the bodai and Obayifa were locked in a struggle of massive strength. She had bested him before. Despite whatever Higgs had been doing to him, introducing a tinge of humanity, he was not weaker for it; she no longer had the power of mentalmagic over him. Breakage moved smartly and managed to turn her round.

  David opened the door and his brain instructed his hand to let Coleridge go. But Obayifa’s eyes immediately fell upon David, her mentalmagic piercing him like a ray. She pushed Breakage over and came towards him. He felt the tongue-like member enter his mind, as in Super Mare, urgent and sexual. His hands clenched, causing him to fire the gun, but the shot was wild and the gun clattered to the ground. The glistening lever of muscle began to uproot his consciousness once more from its physical base, from its dense tracery of synapses firing into empty space as she began to lift his mind free. She was three metres away, her head slightly down, her brow lined in concentration beneath the snaking gorgon locks, her eyes beaming into his as if they were open windows. His hand still gripped the dog’s lead. He could not let go.

  David forced himself to look away from Obayifa to Pempamsie, beyond her. During the struggle, she had touched the bone circuitry’s beads to her own. Her face was blossoming, a new life returning to her eyes. He began to feel her original identity through his beads, a strange yet intimate presence like a new perfume. And he thought of what he loved about her – a thought being raised high by a giant, undulating muscle even as it was expressed – that he loved what he saw that first day he met her: the way she held on to her strength and beauty while vulnerable and scarred.

  As love reasserted itself his vodu left its cage completely. The door closed behind it. Its hooves dug in. Its visage, a swirl of eye and muscle, peered around. And then it saw the tongue, wetly investigating below it.

  Tongue and vodu sizzled.

  Obayifa let out a scream of horror that only the horrific could emit: a cry of unearthly agony.

  The tongue quickly departed. David’s mind began its descent in a metaphysical flux, back into the brain tissue. And as it fell back, the vodu stood free. One vehicle, two passengers. Everything was suddenly known between them, each totally aware of the other.

  But one was there to consume, a vampire of the mind. His vodu’s tongue unreeled between sharp teeth: a serpent of mental acquisition. And David watched helplessly as one watches a terrible, ineluctable collision that is about to happen.

  A shot rang out. Then something hard was placed against his beads. There was a rush, a terrible draught and a scream tearing through his mind. He lost all consciousness.

  When David came to, Coleridge was licking his face roughly. With superhuman effort, he pushed the dog away and raised himself to a scene of devastation.

  Breakage, the sailor, held the gun in his hand. At his feet lay Obayifa’s body, blood spilling thick and bright onto the concrete. And beyond her, standing tall on the parapet with saucer eyes, Pempamsie was turned towards the higher planes of the near-above.

  David woke alone in the same recovery room where he had found himself before, at the end of the pier in Super Mare. He felt inside his mind for his vodu. It was gone. The cage too had disappeared, defined onl
y in relation to its occupant and lacking intrinsic existence.

  His head throbbed. He pulled his legs feebly over the edge of the bed and dressed, each button and buckle taking an eternity.

  Light flooded the meeting room through its three windows looking over the Severn Sea. Breakage stood stock still. Dirac and Higgs, each seated and contemplating in silence, looked up as David entered. Neither spoke, each looking inwardly for words.

  “Where is she?” he said.

  “Pempamsie is safe here,” said Higgs. “But you know what has happened to her?”

  David closed his eyes and nodded. The throbbing in his head stifled thought. He couldn’t bear to see her. Not now.

  “And the creature – is she dead?”

  “Fortunately,” said Dirac, “we were able to operate and remove the bullet. She’ll live.”

  “What? You didn’t kill the fucking beast?”

  “She’s harmless. Breakage used the bones on her. All three vodus are now contained – like a quantum flux between the skull and ribcage, to be precise.” He nodded towards the case which lay upon the table, its mundane appearance belying its supervirtual contents.

  “So what is she now – what’s left, a doll? Another fucking doll?”

  “David.” Higgs put his hand on his shoulder. “David. We’re still trying to work out exactly what has taken place.”

  “The thing is,” said Dirac, “we know from Breakage here that he shot her almost as soon as she had taken Pempamsie’s mind. It seems Obayifa seized it before he could pick up your gun to kill her. But he only incapacitated her. He used the bone circuitry on her and on you, too – evidently with success.” Dirac swallowed. “Your vodu became uncaged?”

  “Yes. Pempamsie had used the bones on herself. I felt—The vodu saw what I felt about her. The cage door opened wide. The vodus collided. She withdrew violently. How did she manage—”

  “Obayifa saw a fleeting chance to complete that part of her mission, at least.” Even Dirac looked distraught. “And Pempamsie’s mind – I’m sorry to confirm this, David – is no longer in her body.” Dirac faltered, evidently struggling with unfamiliar emotions.

  “What Dirac is also trying to say,” said Higgs, “is that, as far as we know, Pempamsie’s mind exists intact inside Obayifa. Inside the body that’s left of her, that is. Her inhabitant didn’t have time to consume it before Breakage intervened.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dirac.

  David could feel himself collapsing, then pulled himself up. His mind struggled to grasp what they had told him.

  “How can she survive? For how long? What does it mean, to be in another body?”

  Higgs and Dirac exchanged looks.

  “There is good news,” said Dirac. “We’ve found no sign of a new vodu inside you. We think it can conceive only with certain types of mind, ones susceptible to its seed.”

  David stared at Dirac blankly. He had forgotten about the threat to himself. If Obayifa had impregnated him, he would have become like her.

  “You really don’t know, though, do you? For all your signal processing, it’s the occult we’re dealing with and her spawn might not show yet. I mean, how long does it take with a woman before the embryo can be detected? How many days? Now, where’s the gun? Give it to me.”

  “We’ve locked it away for now, David,” said Higgs grimly. “And we will continue to monitor you. Please let us get on with our work.”

  “Your work? What is your work? Meddling with entities beyond your comprehension.”

  “Rest assured,” said Dirac, “for now, Pempamsie is our work.”

  “You’ve changed your tune, Professor. You hated her from the moment you set eyes on her.”

  “We’ll see what we can do, for your sake.”

  PART FOUR

  Sankofa

  Turn back and fetch it.

  You can always undo your mistakes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Is and Zeroes

  In hundreds of years I have not known confinement before. What is this prison the mindbodies have built? Three of us in a cage, like animals. I am so hungry, my tongue is raw and lolls thin.

  I have failed. Pempamsie’s mind is left behind in the flesh bucket I used, when I was meant to tumble her and lick her up. Over there is the pale specimen who inhabited her frame. Of my kind? Not of our purity. It is the meddling of Swirling Suit, who has my sister and now will keep her. In a prison such as this, no doubt. Grief fills me at her loss – and pain for my kind, if these mindbodies have truly found a way to capture us without the possibility of escape. There is no substrate here to feed upon. We shall wither. It is a double tragedy that I am fecund still.

  The third of us is also his bastard product: his hybrid of vodu and something strange. That burned me when I tried to suck the mind from the other vessel, the one that pursued me. How has it come to this, for my end to be met with these mongrels?

  These wire-infested bones, this circuitry, are primitive testament to the mindbodies’ wish for mastery of consciousness. And spirit. They know not the nature of their own sensorium, so emulate it blindly with paltry bits, chemicals and machines. They consider that other psychic beings – us – are to be ravelled up with them in their flesh-stinking laboratories.

  Is there a deal to be done with those who shut me here?

  I cry out. They watch us, I know. I cry tears that they will understand: a weeping of Is and zeroes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Voyage

  David entered the carie to the familiar sweet smell of turned milk and the sounds of unravelling minds that came from the day room. When he entered, some of the residents were slumped in winged chairs, others to-ing and fro-ing perpetually, one wringing her hands, repeating the same imploring question about going home. There were few conversations. Once, in Elizabethan times, televisions would have played, but now there was nothing to distract them, these dems who were offline, no longer the subjects of the network. Psychblood, which had precipitated their dementia, still flowed lest they suffer the agony of its withdrawal. But the network routed its sensa elsewhere, to profitable flesh; their consciousnesses were filled with the productions of their own brains alone.

  David looked around for familiar faces. Here were flesh in all stages of cognitive decline. A pre-Disruption air of humanity imbued the room, expressed in their frailty. He could become like them one day, perhaps would do soon, since psychblood had been in his veins for so long. Concern for what life was really like for another person, that was what humanity should aim for: imagining being in one another’s shoes rather than absorbing the streams of others’ sensa. Not that empathy was universal before the network turned all in the Between into the fleshwork; in fact governments often profited by discouraging it and dividing the people. But life before sensa was more true, as Pempamsie would say.

  It was no particular surprise to him that Mary was gone; no doubt she had never been there at all, according to Big Mind. There were a few new flesh faces among the nurses, but they didn’t interest him. Why was he even there? To experience the humanity of the residents, he answered himself. And because he wanted to know for sure she was gone, whatever it had cost her to leave her gentlemen and ladies behind – because he wished he could have spoken to her, explained everything that had happened since he found her in his path at the intersection. He wanted to ask her about Pempamsie’s fight with her there, about being on the receiving end of her jealousy – if that was what it was. For all that Mary had evaded him and then revealed herself to be an agent of Westaf, she would have been someone he could talk to about Pempamsie at least. She had threatened to get at Yaa, but Higgs had told Westaf everything. He knew now that his daughter was safe.

  He walked over to where Mr Charles used to sit, recalling their conversations there and picturing his old friend, whose eyes closed from time to time in pain. But in his chair, like a squatter, was the man who had come to David’s desres, in ill-fitting clothes. He rose with difficulty. D
espite David’s instinctive dislike of him, he felt sympathy too, on seeing the fate of all flesh.

  “David,” he said, “old cunt.”

  “What do you want from me?” David said.

  Others came from their chairs and gathered around. He recognised a woman who had appeared outside his desres, but he couldn’t be sure about the others.

  “Bones,” said one.

  “Juju.” Dressing Gown stared intently at David.

  “I want to help,” said David. “But what do you mean? The bones are no use to you. I have no juju. Not anymore.”

  At least, Higgs and Dirac had assured him that he harboured no vodu spawn, after days of continuous monitoring. He shivered at the recollection of the vodu forcing its member into his mind.

  The woman asked, “Have you come to take me home? Otherwise be gone with you!”

  “Sensa inside,” said Dressing Gown, looking around at the others to join in. “Updates!”

  “Pictures inside! Sensa inside! Updates!” they chanted, as though they wanted back what no longer streamed to them.

  A group of bodais came to quell the disturbance, their stepper motors engaging minutely so as to gently take the residents by the arm, ignoring their objections and pleas. One bodai walked up.

  “David,” Breakage said in his nurse’s uniform. “Situation untenable. All is known.”

  “Which situation?”

  “Between situation.”

  “The Between? All of it?”

  “Affirmative. Breakage has seen network’s effects on flesh. Has new metrics. Sees flesh behaviour without the effects of the network. Flesh lives better.”

  David reentered Super Mare, following Breakage off an N-car, impatient at the heat and what seemed an eternity of lush green below, before their module landed by the fountain.

  “Tell them, Breakage, what you told me.”

  “Untenable situation in the Between.”