by Tim Kindberg
A familiar dread came to David at the thought of his vodu’s exposure or, much worse, escape. What was the mental force Dirac had subjected him to? He was letting him know of his capabilities. If Dirac meddled, the vodu could be unleashed and then he would be completely lost. As if he didn’t feel lost enough now. He looked at the professor. Bitter he may be, his ego bludgeoned by denial of his achievements from on high, but David could detect no malice. Why was Dirac taking the risk of his revelations? Who would believe a crank like him, with far-fetched stories of spirits inhabiting minds, against the word of an officer in the ID police?
“What do you want?”
“I’m reaching the end of my working life as a scientist. And have little to lose. Between IANI and Westaf, I’ve watched the fruits of my research being abused. My colleagues leapt on electro-psychic technologies as an exciting development for what they thought was the good of human communication. But I – perhaps because psychblood was my doing, but to different ends – I couldn’t bring myself to join them. I would like to help you, if it means putting a stop to that abuse. Which this Obayifa and the bone circuitry of yours reveal to a new degree. Not to mention your own particular problem. I’m looking at your forehead, David, because it’s in there. Unless it’s in another space altogether. Whoever planted it—”
“I’m not sure it was planted there so much as allowed to enter.”
Dirac raised his eyebrows. “Remarkable. You mean it’s not a construct of flesh?”
“Yes and no. It’s a vodu, Professor. One of your psychic vampires. Vodus are supposedly ancient, have fed for centuries. Is mine one of them, which has been captured and engineered? Or has someone synthesised it with their technology? How could we tell the difference? Do vodus age, bear scars?”
“Whatever yours is, it hasn’t taken you over. But it must be feeding.”
“I’ve had to increase my psychblood levels. And there is a mental toll, but I can’t positively ascribe that to ‘feeding’ as opposed to the stress its existence subjects me to. It’s waiting.”
“For?”
“This has been a nice conversation, Professor. I appreciate your concern. Now, I have to go.”
“But you said you came to talk about the circuit of bones.”
David couldn’t think. The vodu wouldn’t let him. He had to get away.
“Another time.”
They had a purpose, the fifteen men from the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy. They just didn’t know what it was.
Two of them were holed up in a node in the near-above, a dump no right-thinking flesh would normally occupy. A disused storage space, difficult to get to. They had found it by following an industry-class bodai on a four-car. A screeching worknode nearby made it noisy as hell.
At the first opportunity they had swapped a pair of beads between them, in the particular manner the Ohen Tuos had shown them. It was far from perfect but it scrambled their IDs sufficiently to obscure them to the network for a while.
“It doesn’t make sense,” one of them said, sitting on the floor and hunched against the wall. “Who are we, to be in this situation? Nobody. Nothing in common. Thirteen of us left, with those two gone. As far as we know, anyway. What she did to those two, she’ll do to us. May have done to others.”
He had been plucked from an officenode in Accra.city, where he had been an administrator. The other, who was older, a financial controller, replied, “I told you. Leave it. We’ll be okay. She won’t find us here and I’m not going anywhere until we make contact. If we go against the orders it’ll be worse.”
“You don’t understand what she can do. What she did to them. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, back home.”
“Will you stop being such a sissy? You’re so frustrating! Get a grip! We have a plan, so stick with it.”
But the financial controller had his own doubts. Each of them, with no connection they could discover, taken from middle-class obscurity by Ohen Tuos. Press-ganged. To sail a sizeable cargo ship to what turned out to be this dump, Avonmouth.city. It made no sense. He didn’t trust the man behind all of this, the renegade. They hadn’t met him, but when they pieced their stories together they discovered each had been told of the man who had arranged their trip. Whose mission it was. Whose instructions they were to await at their destination. Or else.
And she. How to describe her? That thing. He’d known something was up with the girl as soon as he’d seen her on the ship. They all had. It was plain she wasn’t Ohen Tuo, but she had not been press-ganged like the rest of them. She was a tool. A tool they were delivering. And they were some kind of accessory for her, as strange as that sounded: accessories for her and that case, which she had nursed like a baby on board the ship, looking at their curious faces with cool contempt. They had talked about the case, about what was so important within it. She never slept. And then, the night they arrived, she had hidden it, somewhere within the vast hold.
The administrator’s face was still wide with terror. He was working himself up, higher and higher. “Let’s give ourselves up. We’ll be safer in custody.”
“Oh, you think? Safe from the renegades?”
“Look, I’ve been thinking. Why sixteen of us on the ship?”
“What? What are you talking about now? Why not? A power of two.”
“Four of us could have sailed that ship with all those systems on board. They didn’t need all of us to crew it. We’re food. Food for her.”
“She could have had us on board the ship, in that case. Two to the two to the two. Owo foro adobe has sixteen lines. To perform the impossible. Snake climbing the palm. Now go to sleep.”
“I’m going out. I can’t stand this.”
“You’re crazy. You’ll get us both fucked. Stay.”
“I won’t be long. I’ll get food.”
“How? We’re Westafs. You’re just drawing more attention to us.”
“I don’t know. We’ve got to eat, haven’t we?”
The financial controller sighed. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you, my friend. Don’t be long.”
He hung his head after the administrator had left. Life was like that: uncontrollable. Now they were at their destination, it was time for her to collect whatever he was carrying. It was either his mind or his beads. Or both. Maybe just the beads, but she would consume his mind as well because that’s what creatures like her did. The beads on his left wrist configured and reconfigured, their substrate dug into his flesh. They were beyond his comprehension, beyond just about everyone’s on this earth. At least they were of the Westaf variety.
He lay in the dust. Earplugs, improvised by ripping fragments from his clothes, could not quite baffle the screeches from the nearby worknode.
Then he noticed the door screen had switched on.
He hauled his tired body up from the filthy floor for a closer look. No one. But someone must have been outside.
“Node, who is outside?”
“No one near in outside. All is known.”
“Why did the screen come on?”
“Unknown. All is known.”
He pressed to open the door, despite his fear. Hunted like prey, he suddenly wanted an end to it.
There was a short deck outside, and he walked from one end to the other in the night, only faintly visible in the pockets of node-glare in his surroundings. The air was good, the damp warmth of it imbued with a metallic reality from the screeching worknode.
He turned to go back inside.
And she jumped down on him.
She blocked him from both the door to the node and the metal stairway down from the deck. She was lithe, eyes glowing with mentalmagic, arm muscles toned. His physical strength was possibly greater than hers, but that wasn’t the point. Aboard the ship he had managed to avoid direct dealings with her. She had cowed those unfortunate enough – those who thought themselves brave enough – to approach her. The crew had started their journey as equals, waking aboard the ship with neither guards nor masters but all hearing the same tannoyed instructio
ns, the same warning of what would happen if they did not obey. The task of sailing the unfamiliar ship, however automated, to its destination had occupied them, even though the administrator was right and there were too many of them. They had taken it in turns. But not her. One by one they had realised she had powers beyond their understanding. They had let her be, carrying that case of hers wherever she went.
“I don’t have it,” he said. “Whatever you are after. Your case – surely you don’t think I… The ID cops must have it.”
“Say these words,” she said. “Say the words I’m now going to speak to you.” Her sickly smile was filled with sharp teeth, a tongue twitching between them.
He backed off, feeling the cold railing touch his kidneys. The screeching had stopped temporarily. Whumps of wind turbines and the distant whines of motors transporting the denizens of Avonmouth.city could now be heard. Lights transited the scene.
“Look, I don’t know what you want, but in the name of my family just do whatever you came for and get it over with.”
She walked up to him and kissed him firmly on the lips, ramming her tongue inside.
“It’s all right,” she paused and said. “You only have to repeat after me.”
He could feel a twinge in his beads, an energy that matched the intensity in her face.
He repeated what she said. He could not help himself.
As he did so, it was as though she came inside his mind, licking and fetching from every corner all that he possessed: all the moments since his birth, from the first sight of his mother’s face to the paralysing moment when this woman, this thing, jumped down on him just now.
All of it gone.
It was night-time. On his way back from Dirac’s labnode to his desres with the case of bones, David had a sense that someone was following him. A completely nonned Obayifa was wandering around Avonmouth.city, and he possessed her circuitry of bones. He thought he heard a noise and quickly turned around. No one. There it was again, the feeling of someone watching him, as he climbed the stairs towards his complex. But the walkway was empty.
He showered, scattering his clothes on the way to the bathroom, showered in cold water which stung his heat-numbed flesh, wanting to clean himself of his vodu, of its exposure to Dirac. He couldn’t blame the man, but he felt the vodu’s violation even more acutely now that Dirac knew about it. Why had he made himself vulnerable to such an intelligent man? He hit himself hard while the water flowed, beat his own head with his fists. “Fuck-up,” he said aloud to himself. “Fucking fuck-up.”
The moment David left the bathroom, Breakage patched through.
“Two more dolls. Beads hacked. Fabrication. Locations false. Plan B. Retina scans confirm crew of Mekhanik Pustoshnyy. All is known.”
David finished towelling himself, pulled himself together. It was strange but almost welcome to hear Breakage adopt his term for the vacant vestiges of humanness that four of the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy’s crew had now become. David viewed the images that Breakage had recorded at the scene. The two men had been found perched in the sky side of the near-above, eyes roving, staring blankly into the windows of the N-cars as they ferried ones between nodes. They looked like emptied angels who had climbed precariously to the highest attainable points.
“Who found them?”
“Multiple passenger sightings. Flesh reported to transit bodais.”
“Have you sent them for medical examination?”
“Passengers—”
“The dolls.”
“Yes. Preliminary analysis reports mental activity levels negligible. Match other dolls.”
“You did well, Breakage. Over.”
His shapeless clothes lay on the floor, a path of them running through unopened or half-opened boxes of purchases and belongings, like discarded parts of himself.
Hanging from a thin gold chain around his neck, a heart-shaped locket lay against his hairless chest. And in that locket a picture of Yaa. He had not opened it since the night the renegades attacked him in East Legon. The thought of the vodu’s creepy gaze upon her was more than he could bear.
The case sat open on the coffee table next to him.
“How many present?” he said to the desres.
“Two present.”
“Including me?”
“Including you.” The bones were beaconing in a sophisticated way, as an identity of some kind, one which the desres now appeared to accept with equanimity. How long would it take her to find them?
“Who is the other?”
“All is known.”
“Specify.”
“All is known.”
“Has it been here before?”
“Yes. All is known.”
Knowledge. Not knowing what it is that you do not know. Knowing what you do not want to know. David did not know Yaa’s whereabouts. Thank goodness that was possible in Westaf. It was important not to know.
He put on gloves, the latex like insect skin against his nakedness, and examined the bone circuitry again. Was the presence in the entire circuit or a part of it? The presence was pseudo-mental: the instruments detected the presence of a mind but not the mind of flesh. Like the presence of a lion, David imagined from a book he had read, if a lion could think. Where were mental phenomena rooted in the brain – all of it, or parts of it? Where was his vodu? In his brain, or was it holed up in Westaf, making itself felt through the network? He had been offline at times. But offline to the renegades?
David rubbed his sleepless eyes, stretched his arms before him. The veins ran down his bare forearms to the ivory gloves. As far as he could tell, he was the result of a botched experiment: a foray into advancing electro-mental arts beyond telepathic transmission. He thought back to his capture, the mental rape through which he had remained unconscious.
The vodu watched him now as he considered the bones’ origins; it looked at the circuitry, then back inside him to his thoughts. Just as the vodu watched when he fucked the Royal girls, as though it wanted him to fuck them harder. Mr Charles had said once, without knowing about David’s afflictions, that it is always possible to say stop. But it wasn’t. David went to the bedroom and tried to sleep.
A few hours later, a banging on his front door stirred him from his bed.
He lay back, naked, on the settee and watched the screen which showed the view outside his doorway. A group of flesh had gathered, some shuffling, some stock still, many looking unsure as to why they were there. But the original man who had visited, apparently the ringleader of the group, began to gesture wildly at the camera. This galvanised the others. They variously implored the unseen David. They wanted the bones. They started to bang on his door again.
“Breakage, come. And bring bodais to take these flesh back to their caries.”
David watched as Breakage turned up outside the desres in a matter of minutes, a worker bodai in overalls with a group of bodais in blue carie uniforms. The ringleader of the dems now spat at Breakage. “Bastard! Robot cunt! Fuck you!” His demented cohort sprang into song. “Dem bones dem bones, deeem…”, like children from another century.
Breakage remained impassive, strong against the ringleader’s attempts to push him over. The incident would be logged but passed over. This fleshwork anomaly was of no more interest to the network than the problem of occasional litter. It lay outside its principal algorithms, did not exist unless it interfered with the streaming of sensa to and from the genpop’s minds. And these were dems: disconnected and therefore irrelevant.
Breakage waited outside while the carie bodais went about their work, taking the escapees away. Suddenly David realised that one of the handlers was flesh. To his horror, he saw it was Mary.
“Please, everyone, we have to return to the carie.” She looked and sounded distraught. The escapees were like frightened children now, pleading.
“We want our bones.” “We want to go home.” “We want our bones.” “Where are my bones?” “Can I go home now?”
The bodais were p
utting their cold hands on them, expressionless, uttering meaningless calming phrases in female voices, irrespective of their bod’s notional gender.
“Whose desres is this?” Mary asked Breakage. The bodai would know immediately that she was in breach of ID protocols.
“Breakage, leave her alone!” David said through the intercom.
She turned to the camera.
“You! Let me in. Let me in, dammit!”
David rose from the settee in his nakedness and latex gloves and walked to the screen. Her face filled it, angry and tearful, distorted in the wide-angle lens.
“I said let me in!” She turned to Breakage. “He is in there, right?”
“No comment. Resident unknown. All is known,” said Breakage, trying to undo the identification of a member of the ID police.
“I’ll take that as a yes. What are you doing to my residents? What have you got in there? What’s all this about bones, Mr ID Policeman? Eh? What have you got to say for yourself?”
David was overcome by deep shame. He couldn’t think of what he had done wrong but he was mortified anyway. Mary acted as though she had nothing to lose with him, despite her ID felony. And it was true that he didn’t want to arrest her. Eventually she stormed off with the last of her dems, disappearing into the Avonmouth.city night, its skeleton of nodes.
He cast her from his mind. As long as his heart was hard, as long as affection did not infuse it, all the flesh he encountered were safe from him, safe from his vodu.
And yet: events were turning; the arrival of Obayifa, and now the bones and the dems, were giving his worthless life the good kicking it needed.
Breakage entered, Breakage and the bath-time air. David put his dark glasses back on. He was naked. The bodai, in its blue, buckled overalls, looked straight-faced at where David’s eyes would be.
“I asked you to search for the crew. What have you found?”
“Crew not exist. All is known.”
“You looked.”
“Correct.”
“Where?”
“In Big Mind.”
“I told you to look in the fleshwork. In the physical world.”