by Tim Kindberg
Reality: I, Pempamsie, was now sought by both IANI and Swirling Suit, the Westaf renegade. I had no bytecoins. I had never had friends.
But my eyes were opened. I had seen the fleshwork in the vast Between for what it had become: the living data factory of the multinats. The earth was a hothouse of purchases driven by telepathic advertising and shoddy algorithms.
Westaf: at least they see futility for what it is and waste no time on such puny algorithmic dreaming – except to make money by opposing it. What they understand above all is Nkyin kyin: the twisted pattern, changing one’s self, playing many parts.
I, Pempamsie, wished an end to the tyranny that started with IANI, this oligarchy stretched between the poles, and equally the now spirit-inflected hackery that rose from Westaf to meet and profit from it. I wanted back what they used to call humanity.
I, Pempamsie, was now a non. My true presence in the network had disappeared. For I was inhabited by another. A vodu. Which perturbed every digital emanation from my beads and spun a fabrication in my stead, superior to the algorithms of IANI. It was a conscious being, like me. That Swirling Suit had made or captured. I know not which.
And was I, Pempamsie, still I? That which cannot be crushed?
Yes, and no. I was Afuntummireku denkyemmireku: the plural-headed crocodile with a single stomach.
And so I walked, a walk that felt more like swimming, swimming in the murky heat of Accra.city.
And then a Chinese robot approached me. They all had a certain look about them, not Chinese but an unsubtle representation of us. Robots are stupid and always will be, their utterances and actions statistical cusps in a rush of integers. No match for the brains of flesh, our symbolic sensibility. The multinats peddle the old fantasy that software will develop into true intelligence. They act as though they really believe it. I, Pempamsie, knew this to be a fantasy. Owuo atwedie baako nfo: all men shall climb the ladder of death.
And yet, they are creatures who converse with us.
“I know you,” it said.
“You are mistaken.”
“Are you flesh?”
“Surely.”
It came closer. Menacingly. The Chinese introduced thousands of these robots at the tail end of their economic colonisation, a venture that came to no good as we lifted ourselves by our digital bootstraps and ejected all foreign investment. Their robots all went offline at the same time, frozen. Then they came back online under the control of an unidentified entity, who kept them on the streets, hanging around in public places like gangs of teenagers up to no good. I hated them.
The robot stood stock still. It felt me through its beads as with a cold hand, in a silent digital appraisal. One or two flesh from the current of ones around us slowed, wondering at our stand-off.
I, Pempamsie, walked on. I made for a one-car tro-tro a few metres ahead. Bad move. Two more Chinese robots were strap-hanging, and my accoster followed me on board. Bodies, flesh and bod, were packed close. The density and the white rays that pierced even the filtered glass were too much for the tro-tro’s A/C. The smell of flesh clung in the air.
I felt the beads of all around me, and they felt me: as we flick our eyes over those around us, looking for what piques us as flesh: danger signs, sex signs, curious demeanours.
I had the Chinese robots’ interest, that was for sure. Had Swirling Suit cheated me? Had he already taken his revenge for my non-payment? I should appear so ordinary that you could not tell me apart from the crowd. Background.
The robot who had accosted me shouldered its way towards me, like a bee seeing in bit-light instead of visible light, casting around with its imperfect algorithms. It stood with its mouth as close to my ear as it could manage, which was next to my shoulder.
“Don’t you wish,” it said, “for a quiet life?”
I, Pempamsie, disdained from placing my gaze upon this robotic creature, did not meet its icy stare.
I said, “I do not know of what you speak.” The other two made their presence known through my beads. All the flesh around us were oblivious to our exchanges, caught up in their thoughts, some with sensa from their fleshren flickering inside, as the tro-tro pulled through Accra.city.
Then the vodu came alive inside me, like a shadow that pulled itself up from its recline and loomed.
The vodu played upon my emanations, replacing me with another identity. Even as the robot felt me. Robots are incapable of emulating the double-take of surprised flesh. But in their circuitry they were dumbfounded as the vodu impressed another self on them. Their digital grip fell away.
I left at the next stop. The Chinese robots, still minus comprehension, remained on board.
I wanted to engage with the vodu itself but could not. Swirling Suit said it would do its work but not communicate. It was a shadow, subtly and indistinctly present. A co-existent self inside me. A mild visitor, he told me. Not a Mr Hyde who I would become, oblivious. Not a guest who arrives and tumbles the company, makes them wonder who invited him, so limp do they become in the wind of his energy, his mad voice.
No, it was subtle, he said – just enough to send me through the gaps in their algorithms when they felt me with their beads or from the poles.
I wondered, if I had a familiar, nay, a lover, would they notice something different about me, ask what was wrong? I felt the same inside. I had entered, to the outside, the Incognito Divide. Courtesy of Swirling Suit, and his vodu. A living mental transfusion via software and psychblood.
But I suspected it cut both ways, that the vodu was not entirely neutral. It would have needs too, perhaps.
And the man who engineered my inhabitance was now my enemy. I had no one to extract my squatter, should I want that. Equally, I wondered if it had a way to leave of its own accord, or if it would ever want to leave. Except, of course, when I died.
Hungry, I entered a shopnode for food. I had found a few fake bytecoins stashed away: the purest, crispest, newly minted bytecoins that may cause consternation in the network after use but which could not be traced. Thank you, IANI.
My basket was full. I didn’t seem to have thought through where I was to eat. I packed the items and made to leave. An alarm sounded.
A robot appeared at once. My ears became hypersensitive. I thought I could hear its mechanisms, the multitude of electric motors humming and whining within.
The robot blocked my path.
And flesh arrived, dressed in an exaggeratedly militaristic uniform.
“Contravention, ma’am,” he said, looking bored. The robot stood precisely still, looming.
“I don’t know what you mean. Look in my bag.”
He poked in it with his truncheon, not looking. Chuckled.
“I don’t need to look. The system says contravention.”
“Contravention of what?”
“The code.”
“What code?”
The robot spoke up. “Unexpected item.”
I felt a noumenal stirring within my soul, an unexpected touch on my spine. From within. Something moving, beyond my control. I was like a child taken by the hand, going along with its holder to an unknown destination.
“Is that better?”
The flesh, in his hugely peaked blue cap crested with a Best One badge, looked at the robot. The robot turned to him with an inaccurate swivel.
“All expected items. Error. All is known.”
I, Pempamsie, my soul churning, walked into the stream of flesh outside.
Swirling Suit told me not to worry, that the vodu would operate only in the network, not the fleshwork. To IANI, from which I had to remain hidden, network is all: the fleshwork is the substrate, a petri dish.
He lied.
How did I, Pempamsie, discover this?
In the shopnode and on the tro-tro with the Chinese robots, all was as Swirling Suit had said it would be. The vodu stirred, I projected someone else. I triggered not recognition but interest. My inhabitant’s operation had not been smooth, but probably it was lear
ning its shadowy trade.
However. I had begun to feel, undefinably, that I was not as I used to be. Pempamsie’s mind was altered.
I sat in a tree-shaded square and reached in my mind for what could comfort me against the unknown journey ahead. I reached for a memory from my childhood. But I could no longer remember my mother and father. There was a hole where their memories used to be. Paths led to that hole in my thoughts, presentiments of what I would find when I thought of them. But I reached only a chasm. Names: gone. Faces: gone. Words they spoke to me: vanished.
I girded myself. Again walked the path within my mind. Nothing. I had been orphaned, cut off from the two people I had never seen since my abduction but the memory of whom had kept me true to myself.
And what was that truth? That however I was forced in the icestation to become IANI’s agent, however I was compelled thereby to relinquish all but the most perfunctory interaction with other flesh, my parents were where I came from. They occupied such an important place in my freezing heart. But I couldn’t picture them anymore.
Swirling Suit, in implanting the vodu to alter my network emanations, had cut away a part of me. Redacted it, cast a shadow over it. I knew at once that I must eject the vodu. I had to remove its spell. I didn’t care anymore what became of me: why should I, if “me” was to be no more?
And the next day it took me over, more and more. It nonned me, yes, but it went beyond. In the mirror, sometimes, for a moment, a stranger faced me. A stranger with a scar running down from her left eye whose origin had become obscure.
Pempamsie’s hair was coiled up. Her lips were full, eyes wide, brows strong. She was tall, yes. Strong, yes. The strange scar seemed to attest to a fight, not weakness. The gazes of men and women still swivelled her way in the fleshwork of Accra.city. And yet.
Clouds loomed where Pempamsie’s clarity used to be. A minuscule difference in the set to my mouth, to my eyes, to my thoughts. And then I looked at my bare arms: the veins had started to run thickly towards my wrists, visible as never before.
What had I done to rid myself of IANI? What compromise had I made? I, Pempamsie, had no one. My greatest fear was that I would not even have me.
I had made a mistake.
CHAPTER NINE
David
Dirac’s labnode stood at what used to be called the seaside, an off-car zone reachable only by module. Seagulls cried around it. The sea made its waves in partnership with the wind, utterly alien to what had come to exist on land: the network incarnate, lattices of concrete, steel and glass. Farms of wind turbines spun offshore. Ships, many of them under sail, began or ended their voyages. Further away, the thin line of the tidal barrier stretched across the estuary. David felt a moment’s concern for Breakage: the maritime environment would rust bodais. At least Breakage didn’t have to bear the heat, though. As they walked up to the labnode, there was no relief from the infrared that pummelled down from the low sky. The gulls made circles, as did the blades of the turbines. Once, in Elizabethan times, flesh would have sat and played near here, or walked their dogs. Flesh who were at that time entirely undistracted by sensa.
Professor Dirac appeared at the door. He had lost, blue eyes. A long upper lip told of his intelligence. David’s research had confirmed some of what people said about Dirac. His scientific practice had been taken away from him. Science was now the preserve of the inner nodes of the multinats. He did what he could to make a living as a technical assistant to the ID police. He was reputed to be brooding and bitter.
“Professor, how good to meet you at last.”
“A pleasure, Detective,” Dirac said coldly.
“I’ll get straight down to business. I’d like your opinion on what’s in this.” David handed him the case.
“I see. And what exactly am I looking for?”
“I don’t know. Anything unusual.”
Dirac opened the case, regarded its contents in silence for some time. “I’ll need a while. Will you wait?”
“Of course.”
David left the labnode to take the air, instructing Breakage, who was in the form of a natty office professional, to remain. The wind tugged at him as he walked on grass and sand down to the beach. No one else was there but the thing was inside him, so solitude was impossible. He felt trapped, wanted to disappear. If he couldn’t be with Yaa, he could be on a sailing ship, perhaps, in a far corner of the ocean.
He walked along by the waves, lost in thought until he realised he’d been called and saw the silhouetted figure of Breakage beside the squat labnode. The bodai could not come closer to sand and water. David returned.
“The bones” – Dirac’s spidery hands were trying to follow swift thoughts – “date from before the first human. They are parts of the skeleton of a member of a humanoid species for which there is no record. Where did you find them?”
“On a ship. Which came from Westaf: probably from Accra city or Port-Harcourt city. But we can’t be sure.”
“There’s DNA within them of a type not known in Big Mind. Something’s very strange about them altogether. Not to mention the beads and the circuitry that connects them.”
“Do the bones actually do anything?”
“To be honest, I don’t see how. But the wiring is intricately attached to them. The forearm, with its beads at the wrist, seems to be an interface to the rest of the world for the skull and ribcage. I will get to the bottom of it. You know, I am sure, that I have certain interests and specialisms here, Detective.”
“Psychblood. I know about you and psychblood, Professor.”
“Your tone disappoints me. You speak of it as though it were witchcraft. Psychblood is being released into you and modulated through your beads as we speak, is it not? Yes, you can override its effects as an ID detective. But does the network not bind you to charging your beads with electricity and psychblood like the rest of us? Systematic, algorithmic manipulation of the genpop’s consciousness.” The words rolled from Dirac’s mouth like the carriages of a train. “I conduct experiments, and as part of those investigations I measure… emanations, presence.” Dirac touched his beads. “Such as those of beads but also other configurations of matter. And these bones with their circuitry, Detective, are emanating their calciferous little hearts out.”
“You say they predate the earliest known human to date, but are they human?”
“I said humanoid. But they will cause quite a stir.”
“Any stir will have to wait, because they are evidence in a case.”
“Oh, and what case is that?”
“We’ll get to that in due course.”
Breakage stood stock still beside them. David suddenly became conscious of his assistant observing their conversation, causing Dirac to throw a glance at the bodai.
“Consciousness is in this circuit of bones but not in you, Mr Robot,” said Dirac.
“Consciousness?” said David. “But you’re surely not suggesting this bone circuitry is alive. It’s simply matter. Sophisticated matter, no doubt assembled in Westaf, but matter nonetheless.”
“And you know all about that difference, do you, Detective? I tell you, whatever the effects of this circuit of bones are, they are not precisely digital or analogue.”
“What else is there?” said David.
“What are you?” Dirac said. “What am I? What is flesh? Conscious.”
“To say that is not Turing, is it, Professor. All is algorithmic, as we know. Everything is ultimately reproducible by an algorithm running on machines. A machine at the poles, to be precise. Do you not agree? All is known.” David reproduced the network’s teaching with a mild sneer to let Dirac know what he thought of it. He became conscious of the vodu inside him, of another consciousness within his own, far more sophisticated than the sensa ferried by the multinats into the minds of the genpop. And at least sensa were benign in themselves. The vodu was a spirit, however mute: it had agency; was synthesised at least partly through software although not necessarily under the i
mplementor’s control.
Dirac, who was watching him closely, said, “You are correct. It is not Turing. But it’s true. Are you going to arrest me for it?”
“No, Professor.” David threw Breakage a forbidding look. “We won’t be arresting you. We need your help.”
Dirac said, “Think of your beads, which communicate with others’ beads and with transceivers all around you. Correct? Are you listening to me, Detective?”
David forced his attention back into the labnode again, the bodai next to him and the professor looking at him with a new focus now, beyond a lonely man’s ambivalent interest in whatever half-intelligent beings came his way; looking at David as though he had caught sight of something new about him.
“I’m listening, Dirac.”
“Our beads are relatively old hardware, servicing constantly evolving algorithms.”
“Why are you telling me what you know I know? Anyway, you don’t know how they work, do you, Professor, because that would be illegal, wouldn’t it.” David gave Breakage another look. The natty professional stood down.
“Of course, Detective. But I do know them from outside, so to speak, just as you do. And they, with their manipulations of psychblood, are the most psychically integrated technology that exists, are they not?”
“Your point, Professor, is what?”
“My point is that greater psychic integration with matter is theoretically possible.”
“Theoretically?”
“Yes, theoretically. Detective, how could I possibly speak of more than that?”
David considered Dirac’s existence by the sea, surrounded by measuring devices in his technical outnode, with few opportunities to engage his prodigious brain – reduced to forensics and crash investigations.
“I need a second opinion.”
“Naturally. Why should the ID police accept my word?”
“Especially when you’re making two highly contentious assertions: that the bones predate all known human remains, and that they are associated with a mental presence.”