by Tim Kindberg
After the sale had taken place, David watched a seedy character occupy the seat next to the purchaser and engage him in conversation. Something wasn’t right. Mr Seedy was obviously bothering him. David felt him through his beads. He was fabbed to high heaven. His ID was impure, its Is and zeroes tainted. There was something brash about the fabbing. What was he? Maybe a creation of Westaf’s Agency for Technological Interventions, to stoke demand for the hacks they sold in the Between.
David walked over as the N-car came to a stop. Mr Seedy spotted him and dashed onto the platform. David thought about following, but he had no further stomach for it after cautioning the young man in the previous carriage. He decided not to act – not even to call it in. The man soon disappeared, shouldering his way through the crowd towards the nexus of pathways.
Breakage appeared stiffly, sporting his cravat.
“Problem in the carie. All is known.”
“Breakage. Why are you even here? The case was closed. You’re no longer assigned.”
“Breakage remember from detective profile. Remember detective personal connection.”
“Personal connection? What are you talking about?”
“Mr Charles. Total loss of data. All is known.”
“Mr Charles? But he’s had his beads deactivated anyway. So what data? What do you mean?”
“Total loss. All is known.”
The beginning of thunder-rain: the drops sparse & heavy, splatting into the greenery and ringing on stone.
Mr Charles had been in immense pain – those idiots could never plan his medication right – but certainly had not been ready to die. And here was his body, entering the earth. David was glad the old man was back in Bristol.city now, Arnos Vale. Free at last of the carie in Avonmouth.city, where some clueless bodai or, worse, careless flesh had had him ensconced. His friend’s mind had been sharp and gentle at the same time: kind but no fool. Uncomplaining.
David guessed it was loneliness that killed him, even though the medical certificate said heart failure. For Mr Charles had no other visitors. Mostly when David went to see him, Mr Charles would be next to the white woman he jokingly referred to in her absence as his mother. He would always speak gently to her, despite the curses she spat at him. Her personality was melted by dementia; she was sometimes confused, babbling. At other times, like a lamb, occasionally exclaiming about a memory that had returned from an indeterminate point in her past.
David had observed Mr Charles’ aloneness keenly. Exiled from Yaa, his only family, he wondered whether he too was headed for continuing isolation, or the frenzied, cold encounters that the vodu had in store for him if it got its way. The strain of hardening his heart, so that it couldn’t, had told on him. The thought of dementia cast a gloom: that he himself might be headed that way before long, at forty-seven. Or, like Mr Charles, he might remain mentally intact for some time but surrounded by dems when he retired, struggling to maintain his sanity.
The rain was soaking through his suit. His shades were doubly out of place in the clouded darkness, where death demanded disclosure. David wondered who the other mourners were, given that Mr Charles had told him everyone he knew had passed away. There were just a few of them, standing around the grave but apart – strangers to one another. All flesh: no bodai would ever appear at a funeral. And among them was the carie nurse: the probable ID felon who Mr Charles had said was kind to him.
David approached to take a better look at her. Once again, her resemblance to his daughter struck him, tenderly; he wondered what Yaa was doing at that moment.
He was pretty sure the nurse was an illegal, but he decided to let it go – in Mr Charles’ memory, since the old man was fond of her, but equally, he realised, for his own sake. In Westaf he’d have turned a blind eye, seeing that she did no real harm. That was who he used to be.
She raised her head and their eyes met for a second before she looked back at the lowering coffin. When he first saw her it had occurred to him that she might have been inhabited, such was the furtive, clever look in her eyes. But no, it wasn’t mentalmagic. When she had rolled up her sleeves to help an old man in pyjamas from a winged armchair, the veins had lain flat beneath the flesh of her forearms.
She had seemed caught up in her task, but David could tell she was sensitive to his presence. She had the network to contend with, for sure. If you were genpop, the network was processing you, running in and out of your beads, storing you in Big Mind and analysing your user journey. A fugitive like her would just have to hope she remained below the statistical threshold for attention from the ID cops. Her covert vigilance was the animal instinct of flesh. She would be looking out not only for ID cops but for whoever else might hold something against her: hiding from everyone, all flesh, however close – although David suspected there would be no one close. You had to be good to get away with it, to live with a criminally fabbed ID. You could never take anyone around you for granted. Yes, the bodais were mostly clueless, and the genpop so preoccupied in sending sensa to one another, half the time they were generally too incurious to be a danger. But there was always the prospect of someone you hadn’t spotted, someone for whom you were not too small a fish.
When the ceremony ended, David moved towards the nurse to accompany her, but she pulled up her collar and headed down a puddled path through the trees. As he walked around the grave her pace quickened. He called to her, but she left him behind and he stopped, the cold rain continuing to pour through the warm air.
The twilight soon fell after Mr Charles’ funeral, and the near-above was filled with a swarm of vehicle lights like gnats around the nodes as David entered its sprawl. Riding above the Parkway in an N-car from Bristol.city to Avonmouth.city, David’s thoughts returned, with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, to Obayifa. She was the only one aboard the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy of any real interest, that much he had surmised. Not that the others were to be taken altogether for granted, given their notably independent accounts of the voyage together.
Why had they ordered him to let them all go? And who, exactly, were “they”? The chief, who had definitely carried the requisite authority, whoever he was, had said the ID Prosecution Service had ordered it. But there was no such thing as a unitary authority. Everything in the network – and in the terrestrial material world – everything below IANI was owned and operated by a collection of multinats. Nothing, in fact, was unitary: even IANI, the supreme issuer of multinat licences, was fissioned between the poles, straddling the Between and in complete control everywhere except Westaf.
The chief and the rest of David’s ID department were just obeying orders, he was pretty sure. They didn’t even know what they were doing. With no idea of what David knew – that she was a vodu-inhabited creature, a feeder upon minds – they had forced him to let her loose. Who else would recognise her for what she was, apart from someone like him who was vodu-inhabited? To be fair to them, all the flesh who had come into contact with her had mentioned there was something nefarious about her, even if they couldn’t put a finger on it. Like David, they weren’t sure her mission was in common with the rest of the sixteen. The fifteen males – also free now – were highly suspect, but David’s instinct told him they were just doing what they’d been told to do. And they were not the thing she was. She had her own agenda. Any vodu had. To persist, a vampire consuming conscious energy, leaving a trail of devastation behind her. A victim of vodu inhabitance himself, he had no idea what he could do to limit her.
And what else did she have in mind, so to speak?
A strap-hanger was looking fixedly at David. She made her way over to him, edging past fellow travellers.
“I’m to come back with you,” she said into his ear.
David didn’t answer. He looked out of the window as they left Bristol.city behind. Eclipsed by Avonmouth.city as a side effect of the Disruption, Bristol.city lay drab and dilapidated, unrecognisable from its days as a centre of creativity and technology early in the century. Now it was little mo
re than a collection of cemeteries. They left the uninhabited suburbs, soaring above the fleeting landscape. The Avon, with its crinkly mud walls at low tide, snaked back to the Severn Estuary beside them.
She put her arm through his. He removed it. She smiled. David wondered who was making the call. It would be to do with the case. Unusual interest, it meant. In Obayifa.
They left the N-car and walked to his desres, the quarters of a chief detective in the department of ID crime. Not much, but a place to doss when exhausted by his job, his vodu and his addiction. His clothes were strewn and washing-up was piled in and around the sink. He wondered how he lived like this. It wasn’t always so. He was too fucked up, he reflected, to keep himself together enough to buy washing-up liquid.
She sat on the crumpled bed, hands on knees, looking at him in that uncanny way that some bodais had, ones like her built for intimacy. She was attractive, and David felt himself stirring. Then he thought of Obayifa, ready to suck the consciousness out of anyone in her path. Then he thought of the prostitutes he used, then the carie nurse, then Yaa, then his vodu, like a flick through a deck of Tarot cards. The stirring stopped.
She said, “David, we’re worried.”
There was no way of knowing precisely who “we” were. But he guessed it was IANI. Why would they contact him, a lowly ID cop?
“You need to get to the bottom of this,” she continued, “and soon. What do you think so far?”
David’s desres told him the clearance level of any bodai or flesh within it, through sound. He was supposed to trust her, the way the desres had almost silently purred when she entered. But that didn’t mean he knew where the words originated from, only that he was allowed to reply. He recalled the screech from the desres when he had let in a sex worker the previous week. It had almost put him off.
She said, “What do you think? You know as well as I do that sixteen flesh had been intentionally offline for some weeks at least. One of them class-A nonned. And now they are all at liberty.”
“But I was told to let them go! Why didn’t you stop the prosecution service from making their determination?” Could a multinat be exceeding its privileges, going against IANI? In a world mostly operated by AIs, a cock-up was quite possible. But he sensed the decision had been purposeful.
She rose and stood close to him. Her breath would have been on his face if she were flesh.
“That wasn’t us.” She smiled. Suddenly David realised she was an agent of Westaf, despite everything his beads told him. His mind flashed back to the officials he had worked closely with in Accra.city. Good people he hadn’t wanted to leave without saying goodbye to, but he didn’t want even them to know his destination, in case they tried to persuade him back. He had obfuscated his trail to Avonmouth.city in every way he knew, and crafted a new ID. Given their abilities, it was no great surprise that they had seen through his ploys.
“And the female, David. What about the female?” Of course, Obayifa was their real interest. A vodu whose presence was no doubt connected to one of their renegades.
“Obayifa? Oh, she’s maybe cleverer than the men. Look, what do you want me to do?”
“We want you to continue pursuing this case, by all means necessary.”
He was hard again. She saw, and lay on the bed.
David raised himself from his pillow. The messenger had left. A clinging, sweaty sheet was swathed around him as always, no matter how much he needed a peaceful sleep, what candles he lit or other measures he took to achieve rest. The desres was making tiny animal sounds of concern, an expression at odds with the scene around him of clothes discarded on the floor and draped over the furniture, of smeared crockery on whatever surface had been at hand and half-unpacked boxes of belongings – he could barely remember what remained in them – left in corners. Memories of Elizabethan detective stories flooded his mind, books he’d enjoyed back in Accra.city before his inhabitance. The PIs always lived in a state of some dishevelment, lived broken lives. He was carrying the torch for them, but if only they could see what had become of their world.
There was a faint knocking at his front door. Nobody knocked at a front door. From his early youth, lost words came to him, suddenly remembered: neighbour, neighbourhood. Once, neighbours might have knocked. Nowadays, there were flesh who lived in adjacent desreses as a matter of physical fact, but the concept of neighbourliness – linked to nearness, distance – was irrelevant to those who were either telepathically linked or absolute strangers. Neither were there neighbourhoods as such in Avonmouth.city. The city’s regions were but topological contingencies of the built environment, without individual character. And yet flesh sometimes referred to parts of the down-below with the names of streets as used to be: Merebank, Kings Weston, Ironchurch.
His head ached as though he’d been drinking heavily the night before. But he hadn’t. It was simply the damage from an endless cycling of the same thoughts, clattering like bricks in a washing machine. And the vodu – his vodu – looking on from its mental enclosure, learning about him.
The desres raised the lights softly as he got up into the darkness of what he now saw was five a.m., written in green script on the wall.
“Shut up,” he said. Its mewling ceased. The knocks were now accompanied by a voice.
“A little boy’s told me! He’s told me. The little boy!” It was a middle-aged man’s voice. The projection David switched on confirmed it. Late middle age in a smart maroon dressing gown over pyjamas patterned with small grey diamonds. Bare feet. Bare chest. His hair ruffled, by sleep perhaps. He was flabby. Childish terror contorted his face. But there was something familiar about him. Then David realised he had been at the funeral.
David couldn’t remember when he’d last had a visitor at his door. Not flesh, anyway. The screen and the intercom system were only for a security situation like this. Ones joining you by agreement would be let in by dint of bead protocols. Otherwise, some solecism or act of criminal intent was in progress.
“Hello?” David said through the intercom. “I don’t know what you’re really saying but I do know you’ve got the wrong place. If you’re locked out, call the network. It will sort you out.”
The man knocked harder.
“Château-d’Oex,” he said. “Château-d’Oex!” He was smiling now. “I’m going skiing in Château-d’Oex!”
The man’s helpless state made David think of his father, whoever he had been; a question crossed his mind fleetingly about how his father had ended his days.
Except that this visitor might not have been helpless, of course. An ID cop had plenty of enemies. The man was looking upwards, hands shoved into the pockets of his dressing gown. What did he have in there?
“Desres? What is happening?” The mewling began again. The man must have come from the carie. Or had escaped at the funeral after David had left. David looked beyond him as though searching for the path he had taken in the horizontal and vertical expanse of Avonmouth.city, visible at this hour only as points of light, surfaces falling into the distance.
The man’s eyes suddenly turned to the side, then back to the door.
David opened the door.
The mewling of the desres became a loud whistle of alarm. David overrode it with a gesture. The desres switched on the morning news and further lights shone up the walls from recesses.
The man at once put on a sickly smile.
“Bastard!” he said. “Fucking cunting bastard!”
David stepped out towards him, careful to check to the side as he did so. The desres registered only one presence outside, but the man had looked at something and you couldn’t be sure.
The concrete immediately sent coldness up through his bare feet. Avonmouth.city rumbled and whirred softly in the dawn, its nodes busy in the network, unfortunate flesh up all night attending to it. Even at this early hour, the air was tepid.
Two flesh in dressing gowns facing one another, bleary.
“Get away, you cunt! Stay away, bastard!”
David said, “I’ll get someone to help you. You don’t need to worry. Breakage,” he continued through the desres. “Breakage, come.”
The desres turned down the news so that Breakage could answer him, an unfamiliar voice. “Five minutes.”
“Wait out here,” David said, and turned to go back inside. He didn’t know why, but he’d needed to see him in the flesh, in the open air; had felt a basic urge to go back offline. Not that either of them was offline; their beads would report the encounter. Seeing the actual, unpixellated texture of the man’s puffy skin, feeling the very faint heat of his body close by – nothing could reproduce that.
“David,” the man said.
“What did you say?” The cold seeped deeper into David’s feet, numbing the bones. Mr Charles must have told him his name.
“David.” The man seemed to be preparing himself to say something further, his jaw tightening and opening, chewing air slightly. Behind him, Avonmouth.city was starting to crystallise with the dawn, new thwacks and electric engine sounds starting up somewhere nearby, carried in the ever-bath-time air, a billion coils turning on axes through magnetic fields.
Just then Breakage appeared at the top of the stairs, a beefy middle-aged man. He came and stopped just behind the visitor at David’s door, who was looking ever more the product of an unhealthy life, decades of the wrong food and lack of exercise, of toil in the fleshwork for the network. And all for what? To blather in front of a stranger’s door, his mind dissolved in psychblood.