by Tim Kindberg
“What? No. No. No. It’s your duty to report. The flesh known as Pempamsie is in danger. Tell Dirac.”
David felt the bodai’s connection drop from his beads. The module halted outside an unmarked copnode. The door automatically opened and the bodai who might or might not have been Breakage pulled him out roughly. They emerged into the day’s bustle and the baking heat. David’s mouth was dry. The bodai gripped his arm.
“Damn you,” David muttered, trying to pull his arm free. A young flesh girl who was passing by, hand in hand with her mother, darted her eyes up at him, stirred momentarily from her telepathic dreams.
The bodai left David in the copnode without a word, almost shoving him into the custody of a uniformed colleague who led him down a corridor and locked him in a holding cell.
The cell door clanged shut behind him. The wall giving onto the corridor was an open grille of steel bars, but still there was too little ventilation to remove the sweat smell exuding from the suspects inside. There were five of them, two standing and three arranged on a bench that ran along the back wall.
David felt through his beads, wanting to inform Dirac of his whereabouts. Circling at his wrist, the beads balked at his efforts to communicate through them. It was standard practice to disable outgoing communications in a copnode. But not normally for an ID cop like him.
Conversation had suddenly ceased upon the newcomer’s entry. The way the suspects were looking at him, they knew he was a cop. One of them sneered and whispered at his companion. David paid them no mind. In Elizabethan times the group could have included all sorts of criminals, some violently anti-cop. Now the flood of sensa from IANI, amplified in the cells, kept them docile like a drug, a sedative flood of calming imagery and sounds playing out in their heads.
But there was one man in particular, leaning alone against the wall, who drew his attention. Older. Grey stubble. A rough jacket with fluorescent patches. Hairs straying from his eyebrows. His lined expression told of a hard life. The eyes had an energy, though, a sign of an element still alive within him despite the wash of sensa into his brain. The man’s jacket opened a little as he uncrossed his arms. David caught a glimpse of something protruding from his shirt pocket. It took a moment to recognise what it was. Jesus, he thought, a notepad. And pen. For writing down one’s thoughts. Almost unknown by now.
Seeing David notice the writing kit, the man rocked forward from the wall and approached him. He was bigger than David, and lumbering, like a bear. With a firm hand on David’s shoulder he led him as far away as he could – which wasn’t far – from the corner where the others were clustered, and placed himself between them and David.
The proffered hand was rough from manual work. The thumbs were square, nails chipped. “How do you do, cop.” He spoke in a low tone. “Must’ve been bad, whatever you done.”
His regional accent came from another time, before the sensa creators had imposed cultural normalisation on the genpop. David instinctively thought of looking up his case history, but his beads were dead as far as that went. He was alone here, except for the vodu.
The old man’s breath was on him, salty and moist. “What don’t you try guessing why I’m here?”
David shrugged. “You disobey? Too many times?”
The man broke into a faint smile, the stubble cracking.
“You might be right. But you, cop. What’s your story, eh?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
The man had had a thought. “Do you remember playing?”
“Playing?”
“Yeah. Don’t tell me you weren’t a kid before the Dissy. When they broke everything.” References to the Disruption were illegal and automatically punished, but this man didn’t seem to care. “When we was kids with bikes, skateboards. Football. Even though we’d fucked the climate and the weather was getting more and more screwed. Playing outside, like.”
David shifted uncomfortably. “Yes. I remember.”
“Thing is, these others.” He indicated the cellmates behind him, all of whom were in their twenties. “These others ain’t never known it. Not even kicking a football. Remember that!” He leaned even closer, his eyes brightening. “Nowadays it’s all electronic.” He shook his beaded wrist. “Feelings, images and shit. From who? From where? S’not real.”
Then, suddenly, his face collapsed. Upon sensing his agitated state, an algorithm had increased the intensity of telepathic assuagement in the sensa delivered to his consciousness. David recalled the sensa he had been exposed to during training, in learning what the genpop experienced. They were largely scraped from television programmes and websites, all of which had long since ceased to exist. The cheap footage entranced them, a limitless sequence of short clips; they contained salient moments in lives the likes of which the receivers had mostly never experienced. This man, who was rather old not to be a dem, was one of the relatively few who would recognise the buildings, the cars, the dress, the mores for what they were.
“Take care of yourself, man.” He placed his bear’s hand back on David’s shoulder, but now tenderly. “You know and I know. The truth is offline.” Trammelled by another jolt of telepathic sedation, he walked back to lean against the cell wall once more, his eyes now closing as the sensa rinsed through his brain. What was written in that notebook?
David sat down wearily. He should have been more circumspect with Breakage’s replacement in the module, should have kept his mouth shut about Pempamsie and Dirac. Now Breakage, robotically obtuse but with valuable faculties nonetheless, was gone. David’s mind filled with anxious imaginings of squads of ID police swarming over the Hotel Royal and Dirac’s labnode. An urge to smash his fist against his head took hold of him, a wish for the blows to hurt the vodu too. But he remained tense and still, revealing nothing to the others in the cell. He was defeated.
They kept him in the cell overnight, and in the morning another bodai came to let him go without explanation. David knew they were playing with him: that a night’s imprisonment was not the end of it.
It was unusually cloudless when he left the copnode. The air was moist and suffocatingly hot. The searing sun that had climbed over the towers, the walkways, the platforms, the traffic and the wind turbines was like the eye of a small boy who was unsure what to think of his construction, and whether he should now destroy it.
A young woman bodai, dressed as an air hostess such as had not been seen since the 2030s, was on the N-car. She came and stood next to David, and when the next stop arrived they left together into the lattice of the near-above.
She walked a little ahead, like a lover, he thought, who had just had another row with him and was fixed on her own, new, ravelling agenda. And she was IANI, no doubt – not Westaf this time. It was their next move.
The hostess led him to a hotnode occupied by the ID commissioner he was supposed to have gone to see, plus five other bodais. As in all parts of the network, hierarchy existed but in a complex and shifting manner. After a while you stopped trying to make sense of it or keep track of who or what was above you in authority and what below. You listened to your beads for constant guidance. That was the point, of course.
The beads said to listen to the ID commissioner, who regarded David from his chair but did not invite him to sit. The commissioner was perfectly still and had an uncanny air about him, but David wasn’t close enough, and the feel through his beads was not clear enough, to tell if he was in fact flesh and not a bodai as he had first assumed.
“What can I do for you?” He felt reckless again after his incarceration, a feeling lessened somewhat by the thought that that was what his vodu wanted him to feel; the vodu was watching with interest. But he was angry. Not only Mr Charles but two of the Royal girls and all the crew members dolled, Breakage lost, maybe Dirac too. And Pempamsie’s status unknown. What little he had left was being destroyed.
“You’ve broken a number of protocols,” the ID commissioner said.
“I’m investigating what may be a
new kind of ID crime.”
“Mind theft. We know all about it. Something new. The law needs to keep up.”
It must be a bodai, to state the phrase “mind theft” so calmly. And it moved its head as it spoke in a minutely inauthentic way. But the way it spoke was not clipped like a bodai’s phrasing.
“Why did you have me arrested? I believe that new measures are going to be necessary,” said David.
“But you haven’t caught the perpetrator.”
“I—”
“You suspect someone of mind theft. What have you done to capture her?”
David thought, It’s true. Why haven’t I gone after her? It’s what I should have done. I’m afraid.
“It was you who let her go,” he said.
“‘You’? Don’t you mean ‘we’ let her go? Why have you continued since you were ordered off the case?”
“She was let go. And I have no concrete proof of anything she might have done.”
“Your measures. They include frequent resort to offline.”
“I do what I believe is necessary.”
“And consorting with unofficial help: Professor Dirac, who is not officially assigned to the case. Why are you not using Parkin?”
“Dirac’s knowledge of the electro-psychic interface is—”
“Suspect.”
“I disagree. He doesn’t correlate with the crimes. He’s been accounted for when the victims have been dolled.”
“Dolled?”
“That’s what we call it. Someone is stealing the minds from people in Avonmouth city, and I will find out who and why.”
“And this ‘someone’ is the flesh called Obayifa.”
“Yes. I believe she has special… abilities.”
“What abilities would those be, exactly, Detective? How would you, of all the detectives in the ID police, be the one to spot something that was not ascertained by Big Mind?”
“I don’t know. Call it gut feeling.”
“You don’t know where she is, do you? You let her escape when you went to find the final crew member – when you arrived too late, as it turned out.”
The mouths of the bodais around the commissioner all gaped open, like sales bodais. Why were no flesh officers in attendance, given the complexity of the case?
“I have made mistakes. Nonetheless, the case is in progress. Can I go now, and do my job? There are fleshren I need to protect.”
The hostess came to stand behind David and draped her arms over his shoulders.
The commissioner said, “Ah, yes, the sex workers you frequent in the Hotel Royal. They’re being ‘dolled’ now, aren’t they. Is this case actually about you, Detective?”
“Not as far as I’m aware.”
“You’ve exceeded your station. We don’t like your attitude. We set you on this case like a dog, a stupid dog, to do the grunt work, to dig up anything of interest to us.” It was a bodai, but these were definitely the words of flesh.
The bodais around the commissioner closed their mouths.
“Are you going to let me go? Only, if you don’t I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Something told David that the voice’s owner was at one of the poles: ensconced there, a gale blowing outside a luxurious enclave in the snow fields. “You’ll come to get us?” The commissioner coughed, unknown in a bodai. “In that ship, the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy, perhaps? Well, why don’t you try. See how far you manage to travel. In the meantime, on the one hand, we do like you running around. It’s better than locking you up, on balance. We like the data you’re producing. We think you’ll deliver something special. You and the inhabited woman.”
Did they mean Pempamsie or Obayifa?
“But it’s merely a matter of curiosity, you understand. Not because we actually care. We see what Westaf has done, or renegades as they would claim. A certain amount of internecine mind-consumption is neither here nor there to us. What’re they going to do – eat the minds of the entire fleshwork? For what?” A cough and a snigger became merged into a single, sharp expiration. “We’ve already mind-fucked the lot of you in the Between anyway, haven’t we?”
“I’ll go offline again.”
“No. You won’t. Not anymore. We’re taking your badge. You are no longer with the ID police.”
The voice from the pole gave out a series of stuttering coughs. How David would like to think they were all sickening up – or down – there.
The commissioner indicated with a wave of his hand that he was done with him.
David unpeeled the hostess’ arms and walked along an empty corridor, back towards the network incarnate.
When David tried to leave, the glass doors did not open automatically as they would for someone who was still an ID cop; he almost bumped into them. A bodai had to let him out. Once he stepped out onto the transitway, under the brilliant sun, there was far worse. The telepathic stream came on: the stream of sensa tailored for every off-duty member of the genpop. In a corner of his consciousness, a young flesh woman appeared, showing how to apply make-up. A couple replaced her, mouthing the words to a saccharine song as one dried dishes while the other washed them using a product-placed kitchen detergent. He cringed. There must have been a glitch; the algorithm was blindly finding its way with the new recipient.
David stopped by the wayside, taken aback by the impact of this unwanted, uncontrollable projection in his mind. The moving images and sounds lay in a corner, peripheral and yet not ignorable. They swelled to occupy his field of vision, then receded again. It was far more intense than the sensa of his youth, before he had moved to Westaf to get his own mind back: far more intense, too, than the sensa he was exposed to as part of his training.
Leaning to steady himself against the wall of a nearby officenode, he placed his hands on his head, sliding them down and pressing his cheeks so hard his mouth was pulled into the upright oval of a silent scream. Let me not go mad.
His own thoughts struggled to make space for themselves within his mind, shared with the stream and with the vodu. Even the vodu was reacting to the sensa, twitching; its smeared skin was puckering. It turned its head in apparent alarm at the stream’s incursion. David could almost see the banal content – now there was a picnic scene – reflected in its eyes. Once again the vodu seemed indignant at the sea change to which it was being subjected. Join the club, David thought. On second thoughts, don’t. You are not welcome in my world.
Its horny knuckles were near-white as it grasped the bars of its mental cell while the sensa danced outside.
He tried going offline, failed.
He walked on unsteadily, noticing as if for the first time that the flesh around him seemed not to struggle violently with the sensa as he did, but to float along. I’ll have to get used to it, he thought, let it wash over me. Like them. I’m like them now. There’s no escape.
He clawed feebly at his beads, as if he could scratch away the flow into his brain, as he pressed on for the Hotel Royal to try to find Pempamsie.
On the N-car he boarded, after a few stops, a bodai in a black polo-necked sweater and grey slacks whispered up to him. David’s beads were uninformative about the arrival. What’s next? he thought. What’s the next humiliation?
An advertisement for shower soap appeared in the sensa stream. Did they know how dirty he felt, how badly he smelled from the night in the cell?
“This stop,” the bodai said, without looking out of the window. Suddenly immersed in the unfamiliar conditions of the genpop, David wracked his brains for what this bodai’s arrival could signify. Was it a sale? He had seen so many of the bodai transactions that the genpop regularly experienced, but he had never truly paid attention.
The bodai ushered him out of the N-car onto the platform. He felt like an animal, herded. Flesh. A beast of flesh, with its yield of psychic data. They couldn’t read his thoughts as such, but they would log any sensa he dispatched through his beads, his physical and emotional state, and his location.
After a few streets
they entered an unfamiliar part of the down-below. He prepared himself for danger. The bodai made for a bijou road lined with terraced houses restored from the beginning of the last century. David followed the figure down an alley to the rear. Although no longer ushered by the bodai, he was now curious. They emerged into a shared space that David was astonished to see contained a small garden complete with clusters of flowering plants in blue and mauve, shrubs and greenery dug into beds. Someone obviously regularly tended to it. In the middle of a patch of lawn stood a young willow tree, its branches trailing towards the grass. The air was warm and faintly flower-scented. The bodai, which had stopped for David to catch up, now took him by the arm. They each bent over to duck beneath the branches. This was an exceedingly odd movement for the bodai, to go beneath a tree.
A trickle of the unusually clear sunlight filtered in through the fine hanging leaves. There was room enough for them to stand some way apart, beside the slender trunk. David, still struggling with sensa, didn’t want to get close to their agent, who was regarding him steadily and uncannily, the face quite still above the polo-necked top. After a pause, it spoke.
“Qualia sky faze shifting distraught.” The bodai’s voice was curiously human, sounding out clearly in the silence.
David couldn’t believe his ears. It was the passphrase he remembered trying to use with Breakage in the module when they were en route to his incarceration. He could also remember what Breakage was supposed to say in response, which the bodai duly uttered.
“Qualia careful shop deny.”
Unsure whether he was being tricked, David forced himself not to show any response that its algorithms could pick up.
The bodai continued. “We are offline.”
At once, the banalities pouring into David’s mind ceased.
“Breakage?” He so wanted to believe it.
“Virtually, yes.”
“Virtually?”
“Breakage timeslice between two bods: one where Big Mind expects Breakage to be, and this bod for accompaniment of David. For now.”