Vampires of Avonmouth

by Tim Kindberg

  “Impossible. Tried.”

  Breakage paused, his expression reminiscent of a farting baby’s. David wished he was capable of laughing.

  “What is common about the dolls?”

  “Pairs, always. Except Mr Charles.”

  “And the man we haven’t found, a singleton. What have we found from their beads – did you run the extra analyses in Big Mind?”

  “Anomaly.”

  “You told me that before. What kind of anomaly?”

  “Unexplained algorithmic output. All is known.”

  “That’s what you said before. You were supposed to investigate further.”

  “All is known.”

  David sighed. “Why weren’t we able to track them? What exactly happened to the IDs we gave them?”

  “Hackery. Unknown. IDs flickered. Like Elizabethan light bulbs.”

  David sighed at the literally mindless repetition of his own words. “And what does Parkin say?” Not that David wanted him involved, but there was little he could do to stop him interfering anyway.

  “No input from ID Forensics.”

  “Re-examine all data.”

  Breakage said, “Breakage analyse the beads of the fourteen dolls. Find commonalities.”

  “Good. Yes.”

  “All is known.”

  “Analysis in Big Mind is not enough. Gather them in one place then call me. And still search for the fifteenth crew member. We have to find him before Obayifa does.”

  Fourteen dolls in one room, a room which David had taken offline. The dolls had been fetched from the caries where they were now kept – alongside the demented but with even less of their sensoria left. Nothing, to be precise. Breakage, a factory worker in scuffed brown coveralls, struggled to manage them, trying to arrange the dolls in a line. As soon as he had positioned a doll, it would head for the table in the centre of the room and climb it. They scrambled together, pushing and climbing over one another.

  David’s vodu, coiled up and caged inside his mind, was poker-faced and keenly observant. David himself was wired. He had visited the Royal in a brief interval before arriving, driven in weakness through the baking air. He hadn’t had time to shower. His skin was slick and still smelling of the girl he had lain with; closing his eyes for an instant, he forced himself to concentrate.

  David ordered Breakage to remove the table from the room and to bring leg shackles while another bodai came to try to manage the dolls. Once their ankles were chained together, the dolls stood still except to test the limits of their bonds, blinking starkly from time to time, wide-eyeing one another as potential scaffolds but no longer able to ascend.

  “What do we have here?” Dirac, for whom they had been waiting, entered at last. Tall, thin and like a knife, David thought. It was strange to see him out of his element: the labnode in which he resided by the crashing, risen sea.

  Breakage said, “Fourteen nons from the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy. Former IDs scanned into Big Mind at arrival.” He brought up a visualisation.

  “We assigned new IDs,” David added, “but those became obfuscated soon after release. Their beads passed all tests, but obviously they had been hacked in a way we didn’t detect and still haven’t got to the bottom of. “

  “I see. And they have been dolled, as you so graphically put it.”

  “Dolled,” repeated Breakage, for no apparent reason, a hiccup in his routines.

  “Explain,” Dirac commanded Breakage, knowing what David had told him but interested to hear what the bodai would say.

  “Mind vacated. Clinically unconscious. Autonomically intact.” To a fleshren eye, Breakage seemed to be denying an urge to look at David as he responded, as though curious about David’s opinion of his explanation. But it was another glitch: no such sensibility was possible in a bodai.

  “As I explained, Professor,” David said, “we can’t get anything out of them. Scans show they’ve had their mental activity reduced to negligible levels.”

  Dirac walked up to one of the dolls, who appeared to consider climbing on top of him as he approached. He took the doll’s hand and pressed it, looking into the eyes that sat in the face like swivelling jellies.

  “And you suspect Obayifa, the female who was on board with them?”

  “You mean, could it have been another like her? I can’t prove that no such other exists, but I’m pretty sure,” said David. “It’s she who’s taken their minds.”

  Dirac walked along the line of dolls, turning their wrists this way and that to examine their beads in their entirety as he did so.

  Curious, and wishing he had thought of it before, David approached and followed Dirac along the line, also taking the dolls’ left hands to see their beads. Each doll became compliant as soon as they were touched. But their eyes continued to rove, searching aimlessly, showing no hint of seeing anyone in front of them.

  “Breakage has found an anomaly in all of their beads but is unable to state what the anomaly is. It’s not the usual hackery – he says there’s something different about them. I had him randomly perturb all of the standard analyses. But the algorithm can’t explain itself.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen the report. Allow me to finish, would you?”

  When Dirac had examined the last doll, he said, “It’s quite simple. Each of them has a bead missing.”

  “There’s a gap? How could we not have seen that! Show me.”

  “Not a physical gap. Nothing is amiss to the naked eye. The beads have reconfigured themselves to avoid detection. But each crew member had one more bead at capture, as I see from the data recorded when they arrived. It’s so simple that it’s fooled your algorithms. Your Obayifa has taken not only their minds but a bead from each wrist of these… unfortunates. It’s as though she’s collecting components for a system of some kind, or an apparatus. It’s a clever ploy: to bring something here under our noses by distributing it amongst the crew – for later reassembly, one supposes.”

  “But why keep them on the crew? She could’ve just hidden the extra beads on board – like the case of bones.”

  “It was ingenious to hide them in plain sight,” offered Dirac. “And just as ingenious in a different way to have hidden the case on the ship. Who hides anything physically nowadays, in a world where everything is present in Big Mind and only data counts? You were lucky you found the case. It was highly unusual, wasn’t it, to have searched the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy with dogs?”

  “Yes, Breakage ordered it.”

  “Breakage?” Dirac looked questioningly at the bodai.

  “Never mind that. We’re going in circles.” David was growing impatient at the mystery confronting them. “So why not simply hide the beads, too?”

  “It’s possible that the extra beads needed human hosts.”

  “I see. Beads that required direct connection to psychic activity.”

  Dirac gestured at the dolls. “And now she has both their minds and the beads, so in a way those extra beads may remain as connected to the crew’s psyches as they were before, only via her. Are these all of them – the whole crew?”

  “There’s one more, apart from Obayifa, of course. We don’t have a name that’s worth a damn, so let’s call him C15. We need to find him, fast. Just as we need to keep hold of the bone circuitry, which is in your safe hands.”

  “Indeed, the bone circuitry which is part of a fantastic and possibly dangerous construct by Westaf’s Agency for Technological Interventions – you say it was renegades, but I’m not convinced there’s a difference. And you’ve left them with me.”

  “If there’s anyone who can keep them safe, it’s you. I take it they are safe, given that you are not with them?”

  “Of course. I still wonder if you are safe, given that we’ve arranged for the case’s emanations to appear from your desres.”

  “It’s a calculated risk, Professor.”

  “I find it curious, that you would put yourself at risk from this creature. Who has sucked out the psyches from what are now these
dolls and is assembling a construct whose purpose we have yet even to guess at, except that it isn’t to bring light and joy. Is the bone circuitry part of it?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me. Maybe she herself is part of it, too. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. She’s not flesh – not entirely, anyway – and she’s not network. She’s inhabited by a vodu.”

  “A spirit, David?”

  “As you know, it’s not clear. I do know that renegades in Westaf are engineering new entities. Up to Elizabethan times they used to speak of the supernatural, the unnatural. But in Accra city I found evidence they were experimenting with what I’ve heard you call the supervirtual, although you were talking about the bone circuitry. You might also say unvirtual. A ghost in the machine – existing in whatever flesh she used to be but also in the network.”

  “Unless, despite the term I used, the vodu was their find, Detective: plain old supernatural.” Dirac examined the neck and arms of one of the dolls. “Are there any physical signs on any part of them, of interference?”

  “Teeth marks? No. The teeth of the inhabited do grow extra sharp, but they don’t use them. It’s the long tongue that comes to represent their powers. And as for the powers themselves, whatever she does is mentalmagic.”

  Dirac let out a grim guffaw. “Mental ‘magic’?”

  “It’s what they called it in Westaf.” The witch-technologists, the electro-sorcerers he’d encountered in his desperation to find someone to rid him of his vodu. “You’ve devoted your life to closing the gap in our understanding of the relationship between mental and physical phenomena. Well, vodus closed that gap. They’re way ahead of you. They reach out across space to lick and extract minds. Our only question is: are we dealing with actual dark spirits here, or engineering? Or both?”

  David had Breakage fetch a gang of bodais to lead the dolls back to their caries – where their proclivity for heights matched many of their co-residents’ demented wanderings through the horizontal.

  When they were alone, Dirac said, “David, what have you brought to these shores?”

  “Me?”

  “The thing inside you. Is it so different from whatever has dolled these men?”

  “I’m not part of any scheme, just the result of a botched operation, as far as I know. There is someone or something of significance that is Obayifa’s target. We must keep her from the final bead if it’s not too late, and from the bone circuitry.”

  David felt the vodu’s hands shaking the bars of its cage, its face pushed through. There were brush strokes, the expected elements of eyes, nose and mouth, but they were indicated rather than present, and not quite where they should be. Meaty, fleshy.

  “I don’t know what is inside me. It moves around but gives nothing away of its purpose.”

  “You do realise that it could act as a wire, whatever else is behind its implantation. Perhaps they’re listening to your thoughts, however offline you think you are. Do you have any evidence that they know what you are thinking or doing?”

  “No, but then no one who plants a tap would show their hand until the time was right. They can’t have known I’d leave Accra city and come to Avonmouth city, of all places.”

  “Indeed. It’s curious, however, that Obayifa and the rest of the crew have ended up here, where you are. In how many places are there vodus, outside Westaf? Are you part of their system, Detective? Are you needed for whatever it is Obayifa is constructing?”

  “Something tells me there’s someone here in the fleshwork that they are after. I don’t think it’s me. I’m nobody. If all they needed was a vodu, Westaf has plenty of others.”

  “And IANI? Surely they’re interested in all of this. I notice that you put this room offline.”

  “Someone’s been in touch.” The messenger girl bodai. He remained convinced she was Westaf, in fact, but didn’t reveal that to Dirac, who seemed prejudiced where they were concerned. They’d used her to let him know they were watching the exploits of their renegades. And he’d used her for sex. Why couldn’t he stop? “To let me know they know about Obayifa. They’ll be carrying out their own analysis.”

  “And offline is online, David. All this Faradaying…”

  “You know what? I don’t really care anymore. Now, what do you suggest we do, Professor?”

  “Perhaps there’s a pattern to the evanescence of your crew members’ user journeys after you released them. Can you let me see that within Big Mind?”

  “You mean, give you full access – override your restrictions? I hope I’m right to trust you, Dirac, since I’d be proxying you through. Effectively you’ll be acting as me when you analyse it.”

  “You suspect my agenda.”

  “I know that it goes beyond this case. I think you want to explore the supervirtual.”

  “Detective, you of all people should not knock my endeavours. What, exactly, is inhabiting you?”

  The vodu was naked, as far as he could tell, slunk in its cage. Its body was a travesty of flesh.

  “What do you think they did to me, exactly?”

  “Frankly, it’s beyond anything I’ve come across, although I know of someone not a million miles away, someone I ceased to work with many years ago, with similar interests. I can only imagine that it is the mental equivalent of an organ transplant. With bodies there’s the risk of organ rejection. But the mind? It’s a pronounced ability of ours to compartmentalise. Your mind has rejected your inhabitant, has built a cage around it.”

  “I have to go. I’d like to hear more about this ex-colleague of yours.”

  “There’s something odd about C15,” Dirac patched through later. “Literally. The others paired up, probably to fuse their identities on the network. You have two of them arrive in data, then just one, a new type of fab. The algorithms can’t tell the individuals anymore. Clever. Digitally they became Siamese twins. And this also occurred at the level of pairs: it looks as though they’d meet, two pairs together, but it’s not possible to tell which pair is which afterwards. Even more clever.”

  “But the vampire found them all, nonetheless,” said David.

  “Your girl with ‘mentalmagic’. If she’d been looking in data she would have been just as fooled. She was looking in the fleshwork.”

  “Always supposing that she was tracking them down, that she didn’t know where they were – hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing.”

  “Yes, you might be right. To maintain access to the beads, she had only to tell them where to meet her, beyond our knowledge or suspicion. Anyway, now she’s dolled them, so we’ll never know their stories.”

  “And C15?”

  “I’m afraid I have no clue about him. He’s not in the data, but that absence must have been achieved through a different mode of fabrication. Has anyone else been dolled?”

  “Not recently – that we know of. Before all of this, there was my friend. He was the first we found.”

  “And is there a connection?”

  “None that I can think of. She was sending me a message, to back off.”

  “Is she telling you she could do this to you?”

  “In Westaf I seemed to be safe from them precisely because I’m inhabited myself. I don’t know whether that’s through disinclination – some kind of honour amongst thieves – or because if one tried, it would engender an infinite loop of mind-fuckery.”

  Dirac paused. David could hear him breathing. “Any word from that bodai of yours?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He’s not just any bodai, is he, David?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s something different about him. You’re at ease with him. Does Breakage have a glitch – perhaps an inhabitant – of his own?”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  “Am I? As you wish.”

  “To speak more mundanely, do you think he’s been hacked?”

  “Not that I am able to detect.”

  “Who would have hacked him? Someone with
an interest in me.”

  Dirac paused again. More breathing. A thought had clearly crossed his mind. “Is that all for now?”

  PART TWO

  Owo Foro Adobe

  Snake climbing the palm.

  Performing the impossible or unusual.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Obayifa

  I am a vodu who sails a human ship. And in the hold of that ship: the bound psyches of wretches whose minds I have sucked. Food. Pure spirit, that fuels me on my voyage through this world. As I lick and swish my mind’s tongue, as I lap at them they dissolve, grow watery and pale. Are they aware? It’s no matter to me. They are consciousness itself. Good and bad, clever and stupid, and all the shades between. They all look like energy in my sight. I pay no heed to their memories and thoughts as I consume them.

  I have lived in this body for so long now, hunting in Accra. They know me when it’s too late. As a vampire has no reflection in a mirror, I am nowhere to be seen in the network when they encounter me. Mindbodies see her, the one I inhabit; they drool over her and draw close – and why shouldn’t they, with her fine limbs, her face carved from deliciousness? When they realise she is nowhere to be found through their beads – when they feel the silence – it is too late. I waste no time. I do them there and then.

  This mindbody who has recruited me and sent me over to this foreign place: he knows something of the art of my kind. I wanted but could not have the contents of that head of his. By way of compensation, he threw me morsels caught by his Ohen Tuos now and then. But most of all about him: he has something of mine. My sister. Yes, she. The she I love and have always loved alone. She who was torn from me long ago. He says he can bring her to me. He says what she says: “Sister, I am thisness, I am yourness, usness, haecceity in hungry flux.” Who else would use such words, would speak of vodu essence thus? And each time he utters a fresh cocktail of her language. He has her, or has access to her.

  I’ll have her back to love and hold, he says. But first I must do his bidding. To capture and return what he was deceived of and by.