Vampires of Avonmouth

by Tim Kindberg

  “But she will trap us here.”

  Neither slept. The fogged silence, except for Coleridge’s occasional panting, gnawed at them. Even David’s beads were quiet. He thought back to the days before he was disbarred from the force, when he would receive regular updates and assignments from the ID police. However much he hated the network, it had provided structure for his bleak days.

  Pempamsie’s breathing lightly moved the thin bedcover. She reached and took the hand he placed by her side. The night was long.

  Coleridge roused them by placing his snout on the bed. First light filtered into the room, thinned by the fog that shrouded the Best Rooms. There was no word from Breakage. They washed, descended to the lobby and called up to Dirac’s room under the bodai clerk’s straight-ahead gaze, waiting.

  The professor’s face was grey. Evidently he had not slept much either. The gun bulged slightly from a holster beneath his jacket.

  “It’s time to go to Super Mare,” David said.

  Pempamsie, by contrast to the men, had found something of a return to form, to her statuesque bearing. Dirac examined her closely. “You’re still sure this is wise? All we’ve lost so far is your bodai friend.”

  “Come, Professor. I’m sure you’re dying to see Higgs again. To catch up on old times.” David raised the case of bones towards him. “And discuss technological developments.” He decided to follow the silent Pempamsie’s example and put on a brave face, even while he feared that Breakage had met a terrible fate: not merely the destruction of his current bod but corruption or erasure of his AI.

  “Now, which way is it? It’s curious that you instructed Breakage alone on how to reach there.”

  They called a module and entered it hurriedly after scanning the pathways nearby for Obayifa. Dirac beaded coordinates to the craft, which soared above the Best Rooms. “This fog will never go away. It cloaks Super Mare from the inhabitants nearby. And that’s not all that shrouds Super Mare, as you’ll see. You may feel a mild aversion as we approach.”

  “You’ve been there before?” said David.

  Dirac shrugged. “No. My source – albeit indirectly – is Higgs.”

  They soared above a landscape that remained, as far as David could see through the fog, a desultory collection of nodes between which few flesh or bodais shuttled. Above them pure whiteness also blanked the heavens. After a short while, the nodes stopped altogether. The mist slowly cleared and unbroken wild greenery began to show through: woods and scrub beneath swathes of trailing foliage, the nearest David could imagine to a jungle in UK.land. Minutes later the mist had completely disappeared. The module flew over the brow of a hill, crested by pines draped in Spanish moss. Super Mare lay before them, a collection of buildings like a scene from Elizabethan times, with the sea stretching beyond.

  David took the controls, steering the craft through old-fashioned streets of asphalt and pavement, landing in a square by the sea. A fountain played before them as they disembarked. Neither flesh nor bodais were in sight. His beads were utterly blank, an electro-psychic silence so deep it redefined what silence was.

  Pempamsie, who had remained silent during the journey, looked around with concern.

  “Nsoroma did not describe this place, but I imagined lost souls. I imagined lost souls were all that would be here.”

  “I see no souls,” David replied. “Nor a simple way of finding any, unless we are to knock on all these doors. If there are fleshren here then surely they will notice us eventually and want to know what strangers are doing here.”

  “Why don’t the two of you have a look around,” said Dirac. “I’ll stay here and see what I can find out by retuning my beads. Take the dog and leave the case locked in the module. I’ll be all right as long as I have this.” He patted the gun beneath his jacket.

  “Are you sure you know how to use that?” said David.

  “If Obayifa comes, I’ll have a clear view of her approach. Her host is but flesh. This gun will be effective.”

  David and Pempamsie took Coleridge and walked a block inland from the shore, away from the waves they could just hear tumbling against the fortified sea front. Super Mare was frozen in Elizabethan times, yet was well maintained and clean. A bell clattered as they entered a restaurant. Its counter and tables were arranged neatly, in readiness for customers, yet no diners, food, menus or place settings were in sight. David rapped on the counter. No one appeared. Coleridge looked at him as if to ask why he bothered, keen to proceed with their search for life.

  The row of shops along the street was similarly deserted. It was not until they reached a hotel that life of a sort proved to be present. Coleridge started to growl as they neared it. The name emblazoned across its front was Hotel Royal. With the slightest of nods, Pempamsie signalled her readiness to enter. From the outside, the hotel bore little resemblance to its nominal cousin in Avonmouth.city; it was evidently aimed at what the owners would consider a better class of guest. The lobby, too, was in a much better condition than the one they both had passed through many times, with brass light fittings, ornate wallpaper and a floor and desk of polished wood.

  Coleridge’s growl increased and the dog strained towards the space beside the empty desk, pulling David.

  “What is it, boy?”

  As if in answer, a bodai crept from the office and stood with its arms spread on the desk.

  “What do you want?” it said.

  “We’re here to see Higgs,” said Pempamsie.

  “And a bodai called Breakage.” David tried to bead his assistant’s details, as though he were still an ID cop. The bodai felt him back as if with cold fingers. It cast its black eyes over them and said nothing.

  Coleridge barked at it.

  “Quiet!” said David, and the animal obeyed, appearing to swallow its concern. It was hard to understand how a bodai could cause a reaction in a trained dog. David told himself not to yield to the same unease.

  “We want to go to room 71,” Pempamsie said to the bodai.

  “Yes, room 71,” David demanded.

  “No guests in room 71,” the bodai responded after a discomforting pause.

  “What about Higgs?” said David. “And the bodai Breakage. What do you know about them?”

  Again a pause, as though it had listened to a hidden party before responding. It wiped its hand along the counter. “Not in room 71.”

  “Do you know where they are?” David said with frustration.

  “Higgs, yes. I know.”

  “Where?”

  “Forbidden.”

  “Then take us to any flesh around here. Who else is there?”

  “You are the only flesh apart from Higgs.”

  “It’s no use,” said Pempamsie, “talking to this thing.”

  They departed, and returned to find Dirac where they had left him. He displayed no reaction when they told him about the strange bodai in the hotel.

  “You obviously have access to information about this place,” David said to the professor, who was looking around as if for inspiration. “Do you have no clue about where to look for Higgs?”

  “None. We must keep knocking on doors. I’d better join you.”

  They trawled the streets around the square for an hour without success. Super Mare exuded a well-groomed vacancy that was proving soporific to all of them.

  Around noon, as they peered into the buildings, seeking shade whenever they could from the blazing white sky, bodais began to appear in Super Mare. They left the shops, cafes, restaurants and hotels, crossed the streets and gathered. This congregation was something that bodais were never known to do.

  But these were not ordinary bodais. Their bearing and movements were louche and faintly menacing, like the bodai in the Hotel Royal. They stepped near to one another, some facing a common direction, others randomly oriented as though dropped by a hand through a crack in the sky. All of them leaned slightly, jutted out their hips.

  “They are like the Chinese robots in Accra city,” said Pem
pamsie.

  “And what, exactly,” sneered Dirac, “is a Chinese robot?”

  “Are you a racist, Professor?”

  Dirac straightened himself. “But you used the word ‘Chinese’. I was simply asking what that signified.”

  “I meant towards me. You do not respect me.”

  David’s vodu stirred at the sparring between his companions; its hooves were pinpricks inside his consciousness. He wanted this to be over, wanted to hold Pempamsie, untrammelled by their vodus.

  “Please, can we keep focussed on where we are and what we’ve come for?”

  “As I was saying,” Pempamsie continued, “and as you must know, David, in Accra city the former colonists from China land left robots behind when we expelled them. They cut them off from any fleshly control. These robots developed certain disorders, a mild sociopathy, hanging around in the streets, charging one another like apes grooming. They seem menacing, but as far as I know none has harmed flesh in any way.”

  “Yes, I came across them all the time in my work,” said David. “We ignored them. They gave me the creeps and I hated passing them, with the looks they threw me. But none of them committed any crimes.”

  “Which raises the question,” said Dirac, “of whose sociopathy is at play here, and whether it is algorithmic or flesh-driven.” He walked up to the nearest group of bodais, six of them.

  “Explain yourselves.”

  They turned to him.

  “Whose authority do you operate under?” he said. “Which multinat?”

  “Be careful,” called David. “This isn’t Accra city.”

  The bodais had eyes like crows. Dirac backed away. Two of them sloped after him, loosely swinging their limbs; their faces were locked in contemptuous expressions. Normally bodais were constrained by Big Mind. But if they had been cut off here then their behaviour would be unpredictable.

  Dirac touched his beads. His pursuers halted.

  “Fascinating,” he said as he walked back to David and Pempamsie. “Never mind savages in the nineteenth-century Congo – we appear to be faced with delinquent machines in late-twenty-first-century Super Mare, which looks like the Elizabethan seaside.”

  “And is there a Kurtz here,” said Pempamsie, “who heads them?”

  David shook his head. “Great. We all remember that story. But it doesn’t get us very far.”

  “I managed to block their interest in me without too much trouble,” said Dirac. “Just a trick of the trade. But it’s best if we don’t draw their attention further.”

  “I’m worried about Breakage,” said David. “He might have become one of them.” He might have lost his friend.

  “Let us not speculate,” said Dirac. “And let us not remain here any longer than we have to. There are intrinsic dangers here as well as from Obayifa – who might already have joined us. These bodais could crush us and clear our remains away as though we were never here. Which may have been the fate of visitors before us.”

  “We’ve looked everywhere except the obvious place: over there, the pier,” said Pempamsie.

  “Then let us search there.” Dirac set off without waiting.

  They crossed the empty road to the pier. The tide was high and the sea sloshed against the bulwarks. A few gulls were sitting atop the words Grand Pier, spelled in an arc across its entrance. The group passed beneath and along the boardwalk, enlivened somewhat by the strengthening smell of the sea in the stillness, the salt air entering their lungs.

  Dirac turned suddenly, as though alerted by a sound that David had not heard. The rest of the group stopped as he walked backwards a few steps, scanning for signs of a pursuer. Then he faced forwards again, took the gun from his holster and released the safety catch.

  “You’re quite handy with that, aren’t you,” said David.

  “I’ve had occasion to use one before, and something tells me that soon I’m going to have to again. And you,” Dirac said to Pempamsie, “how are you with guns?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No special reason. Except that you were an agent for IANI.”

  “And you think IANI deals in such crude ways of managing Betweeners.”

  “So it’s true that you would never have employed such a primitive tool? Total loss of data being anathema, and all that.”

  “Its primitiveness seems apposite here,” said David. “A means to kill a vodu-inhabited creature probably not far behind us.” He and Dirac both turned to look once more for sight of her.

  They set off again. Pempamsie gazed out to sea, which was clear except for distant ships. “We’re walking to a place from which there is no escape except by going back the narrow way we came.”

  “Coleridge will tell us when there is danger.” David bent to pat the panting dog’s head as they walked, feeling its soft fur. The sun had broken through the thin cloud bank. The briny air filled his lungs.

  Coleridge suddenly picked up his pace. Ahead of them, a figure had appeared, blocking their path. A figure with a dog.

  The man’s arms were bare. No beads were on his wrist. His dog’s lead was wrapped where the beads should have been. He was in his early sixties, lithe with a goatee beard.

  “Higgs, I presume?” David whispered.

  Dirac stared at the man with a sour expression. “I’m not so sure it’s Higgs,” he said loudly before raising the gun and pointing it at him.

  “You always were one for drama. That pistol really isn’t necessary. I’ve been wondering when you would come. When all of you would pay a visit.”

  Higgs pulled gently on the lead and turned, heading for a gate of steel bars at the end of the pier, with stairs beyond. They followed in silence. The gate opened automatically. The air was motionless. More rays of sun found their way through the blanket of cloud. The crested sea stretched around them.

  Higgs bade them to sit at a table in a large meeting room with a view out to the water on three sides. The two dogs lay and eyed one another; two tongues stretched into the conditioned air. Dirac, who remained standing while the others sat, was still pointing his gun at Higgs, now half-heartedly, as if too embarrassed to draw attention by holstering it. Higgs stared across the table at Pempamsie. David experienced a pang of jealousy; Higgs was an irritatingly handsome man.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your colleagues, Dirac? I doubt they’re your friends.”

  “I am Pempamsie. And this is David. Can we start at the beginning, and how you two know one another?”

  “It’s been a long time.” Higgs placed the palms of his hands on the table. “I haven’t seen this gun-toting stranger” – he smiled with a hint of mockery – “since the late forties. Aren’t you going to put that down, for heaven’s sake? You’re being tiresome.”

  “Professor?” said David.

  “It’s Higgs all right, but he’s not so much a man as a construction. Before he came here and nonned the place he used fake beads, changed his identity more times than I could keep track of. He even looks different.”

  “Charmed to hear you’ve been taking an interest.”

  “Are you the one Nsoroma sent me to? Do you know him?” said Pempamsie.

  “I know about your vodu,” Higgs said. “And his.” He gestured towards David.

  “How could you,” Dirac said scornfully, “when she’s nonned and he’s—”

  “He’s carrying a vodu within a constraint of some sort. This place is equally as well equipped to detect supervirtual phenomena as your labnode. Now, I believe you’ve brought something for me to look at.”

  “We’ve no reason to trust him,” said Dirac, still pointing the gun vaguely in Higgs’ direction.

  “And yet you’ve come in need of help, I believe. I’ll gladly give it. And David and Pempamsie might just help me, given what they are inhabited by. The contents of the case you’ve brought might be even more useful. To all of us.”

  Higgs held out his hand. Pempamsie picked up the case from David’s side – David put out a hand to st
op her but then thought better of it – and passed it across the table. Dirac raised the muzzle of his gun to point at Higgs’ head.

  Higgs received the case in his outstretched hand. It was shocking to see flesh without beads.

  “What’s it like,” asked David, “being absolutely and forever offline?”

  “My aim is to take all flesh offline. To render us as men and women again. Humans again.” He looked like a human, David thought. Not trammelled flesh. David knew what humanity was, and yet it was so distant in his past. Like a star, he thought. He was lost because of his vodu and his exile from Yaa, but they – flesh – were all lost in the Between. And humanity, the idea of it, could be a star to guide them.

  His vodu opened its obscene mouth.

  Dirac sneered at Higgs. “What do you know of humanity? You’re holed up with a bunch of delinquent bodais. When did you last have a conversation with your fleshren?”

  “I have done whatever was necessary to achieve the objectives I have just stated. And I’ve made whatever personal sacrifices were necessary. Now do shut up, there’s a good man, while I examine these.”

  Higgs opened the case and absorbed himself in the bone circuitry, revealing no surprise at its construction from skull, ribcage, forearm and wires.

  Pempamsie watched him examine the means of her salvation.

  “We know nothing of this man apart from the fact that he and the professor go way back.”

  “And that Nsoroma wanted you to see him in order to retrieve your clarity,” David said. If Higgs was perturbed by being the subject of their discussion, he showed no evidence of it.

  “Nsoroma said I was to see someone in Super Mare. He did not say who.”

  “He’s the only flesh we’ve found here. Who else could it be?”

  “What does he do all day? Walk his dog? I see no laboratory. No assistants. Why has he surrounded himself with those thuggish robots outside? I, Pempamsie, do not understand how this can be someone who will be able to help.”

  “Higgs wants for very little,” Dirac interjected, joining the conversation heard clearly by its subject. “He’s a thinker – aren’t you. A philosopher. Mathematician. That’s what he always was. And a dreamer.”