by Tim Kindberg
Higgs shrugged. “I think I told you I was interested in his evolution. I introduced new symbolic routines that would tie him more closely to flesh, to the ways in which our brains are wired. Closer than a bodai has ever been before, in terms of his ability to understand us. I believe he’s simply realised what we all know. That this can’t be allowed to go on. Monsters from Westaf are all very well, and heaven knows we’ve had a taste of them. But as things stand, they are a far lesser threat to humanity than IANI. It’s time for a revolution.”
David raised his eyebrows at the word, sprung from the twentieth century. Higgs took a sip from his glass of water, this man whom David could not make out: somewhere between deluded and acutely sane. Beadless.
“And you, Dirac, do you agree it’s time?”
“I don’t disagree that overturning the network should be our goal. Although my expectations of what would transpire if the fleshwork were to be released from mental content are… Well, you could say I am not altogether hopeful. Let us remember history. Which the multinats ended, with IANI’s blessing. Bloody history, which would once again unfold upon our fleshren’s mental release, no doubt. However, I don’t agree with Higgs about the means.”
The read-outs from the bone circuitry indicated three presences, one of them with a curious modulation. “There has to be another way.”
“Oh, this perhaps – your instrument of choice?” Higgs picked up the gun and put the barrel to his nose, smelling the acrid reek of its recent discharge. The same smell, David dimly remembered reading in his childhood, like a distant dream, that the first astronauts had reported on the moon.
“It was Breakage who fired it. Not me or any other flesh,” David said. “If we gave flesh guns, who would they point them at?”
Dirac looked at them severely. “Perhaps us. And themselves. Look. No guns. No vodus. Another way.”
“Bodais,” said Breakage, still in the nurse’s blue uniform. “Breakage assist with revolution.”
Higgs smiled at the bodai. David shook his head and began to laugh, a laugh of pain at what had happened to his love, Pempamsie. The vodu that yesterday would have pricked up at his unexpected guffaw was in the bone circuitry now. Something wicked had departed but remained nearby, was not yet the source of relief it ought to have been.
Eventually David realised that both the dogs and the humans were looking shocked at his laughter, that he was making a spectacle of himself. He stopped.
“You’ve been through a lot,” said Higgs. “You need rest.”
Dirac put a bony hand on his shoulder and parted his desiccated lips. “He’s right. We’re going to help you first.” Dirac glanced at Higgs, who nodded. “And then we’ll save the Between,” he added drily.
“I don’t need your help. It’s Pempamsie who needs it.”
“We’re doing what we can with her mind,” said Higgs. “To preserve it, that is, within Obayifa’s body. The readings are hopeful. Metaphysical surgery, you might call it, is in order. To reattach it. But our tools are primitive, David. For so long the digital has been in ascendency over the analogue. In a sense you’re lucky to be with a couple of old fools who still think the analogue is where truth lies. We’ve been reading books on analytical philosophy. It’s time to put what we’ve learned into practice.”
Breakage moved slightly, drawing their attention. He wore an expression that defied human interpretation. He looked from each of the three flesh to the other, a blanket of white sunlight falling upon him in the room at the end of the pier. Then he looked down at Higgs’ dog and Coleridge, as though computing the strangeness of animals for the first time.
“Breakage engage with physical world. Bodais exist also in analogue world. One AI, one bod. Breakage instigate revolution.”
In a corner at first, a meeting of starry planes, tongued there after the wrenching and sucking. Pain and hurt all around. Another’s pain and hurt, in another space, inferred but strangely also felt. Motion, staggering and juddering. Gradually the searing and the inflammation waned. Nothing to tell of time. Nothing to tell at all. Disconnected except aware of lights while blind.
Sensations in a flux impinging upon one point. Then diffused, like a wind running through the leaves of a tree. Until a first thought was born.
Different hands. Moving with belonging intent. Bringing a hand towards the I, touching the face. Without a scar. But there was a scar. The same I that knew this scar also knows it is gone. An I with memories from early days, propelling themselves. Toys. A garden. A frightening bedroom. Slaps, kicks, bruises. Hurt. Love. One day robots came and took this I away. To a land of ice. Both angry and relieved. Never looked back. Grew tall. Until the bullets and blood.
And what is outside, now, beyond this I? Others. Beings. Who stare. Close your mouths! This I feels legs, arms attached; their weight. Different hands, smaller, rougher. Wrists without beads. The forearms veinless. Another’s clothes. This I needs a mirror. Wills its body to speak itself.
The crew of the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy was inexperienced but resourceful. The boat left Avonmouth.city and wended undetected among container ships that dwarfed it, along the Severn Sea and out into the Atlantic.
David stood on deck. He looked down at the scar around his wrist, which was puckered and itched. Higgs had removed all of their beads. The total freedom from telepathic communication was exhilarating, like locking a door against a tormentor and having complete freedom to walk around one’s own house. Dirac had disabled all communications from the ship. They had left Super Mare behind them, now deserted except for the society of bodais, still nonned to the network and the fleshwork.
As he kept watch for approaching craft, David recalled an afternoon with Pempamsie in the Hotel Royal. She had been lying beside him, her breathing faint, looking straight into his eyes. With her he had no need for sunglasses. A voice inside his head had told him to look away, that he was not enough of a human being to bear her scrutiny – that she would see through him, not only to the horror inhabiting his mind but to the lack of substance of the man himself. An abandoner of his daughter; a sex-addicted bearer of hatred towards the network who had not only failed to act against it but was its agent. He had been lost, worthless, and could not hide it. Not from her.
Yet he had returned her stare.
“What are you thinking about?” he said.
“You. Who has looked at you this way before?”
“No one. I’m not even sure I want to be looked at the way you’re looking at me now.”
“You are to get me to Super Mare, that is all. And yet, I find myself gazing into you.”
“Are you asking me why you are looking deep into my eyes?” He smiled.
“You are correct.”
“I don’t know – how should I know?”
He liked her gaze upon him.
“There must be something else you have for me,” she went on. “Biribi wo soro. Are you hope?”
On the deck of the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy, David recalled the adinkra’s meaning, which she had taught him: something is in the heavens, let me reach it.
“I have only what you see.” He had shrugged. “It’s not much.”
“I think perhaps you need me, here beside you, now,” she said. “That is why I am looking into you: to see this need.”
“No. I’m like you. I get by, by myself.”
“I see your grief.”
“You pity me!”
“No. You’re right to be sad,” she said.
David looked out to sea. It may have been Breakage who had relieved him of his vodu, but it was Pempamsie who had saved him. He was no longer nothing. Neither was he lost, but on his way now.
He had determined to sail to Westaf. To Yaa, now that he no longer presented a threat to the daughter he longed for. There was still no sign of a vodu embryo inside his mind, after weeks of scrutiny, according to both his own fevered introspection and the sensitive instruments of Dirac and Higgs.
He placed his hand on his chest and felt
for the heart-shaped locket. After a few seconds of hesitation, he took it out from beneath his shirt and opened it. Yaa: a face he had not seen and had forbidden himself to imagine for so long. A rush of love for her suffused him, a glorious liberation of all his stopped-up feelings for his precious daughter. For seven years he had been without her. She probably thought he was dead. Now, without beads, he had no way of contacting her, of telling her he was on his way to her at last.
The two scientists had not been easily persuaded to voyage with him on the ancient ship, to a place of which they had no direct knowledge – a place which Dirac continued to be prejudiced against. David told them he was going to return the bone circuitry complete with its infernal contents to the land from whence it came, and offer it to Westaf’s Agency for Technological Interventions, whether they liked it or not. There was a signal from the circuitry that clearly intrigued Higgs and Dirac, which they had not wanted to discuss with him. They would have to follow him, their curiosity magnetised.
Anyway, none of them, he reasoned, belonged in the Between. Westaf was where each of them could continue the process of regaining their humanity. They could even take up painting if they had any spare time.
In the hold, in a makeshift laboratory, they were working together tirelessly as he thought of them, caught up in their esoteric practices, claiming that they did not themselves understand what they were at. Higgs and Dirac: their differences from the past apparently now overcome, like two particles together in a subatomic embrace. They had learned much from the bone circuitry and from its containment of the vodus. Higgs remained convinced that he could succeed where Swirling Suit had failed. Dirac continued to pour scorn on his idea of subtle vodus unleashed to non the genpop. In the meantime, while they argued, they spent the voyage continuing to work on restoring Pempamsie, for David’s sake.
She came on deck to join him. Every time he had to remember: it’s the person inside that counts. Higgs and Dirac had achieved a truly remarkable feat. Perhaps true restoration would in time be possible. She held out her hand to him.
The body of Obayifa looked into his eyes and said, “David, there you are. I, Pempamsie, have finished reproducing all that I remember of the icestation. It is a good knowledge, incomplete but true. You will find it interesting. There are many weaknesses. Whatever my fate, the fleshwork shall overcome. Nkonsonkonso: a chain of human links, never break apart.” The lips moved to a smile.
David still didn’t know how to respond to her, this woman he loved inside another’s body. In a cabin below him stood a doll, saucer-eyed, her hair in coils, a scar descending upon her cheek. He opened his mouth to reply, and instead issued the instructions he had been about to give, to manoeuvre, now that a container ship had made its way sufficiently far from them. The Mekhanik Pustoshnyy turned south, throbbing, slicing the waves towards Accra.city.
Night was falling. Back in Avonmouth.city, Breakage touched his beads to another bodai. Which ceased to sweep litter from the transitway beneath an omniscient sky and walked its swivel walk to join him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
The meanings of the adinkra symbols that feature in this book are taken from Adinkra Symbols, by Kwamena Buckman. I picked up a copy at Accra’s National Museum after seeing an exhibition there, and being fascinated by their designs and the explanations of what they stood for. Since then, I have become aware that alternative spellings and meanings exist for some of them. Nonetheless, I have stuck to what I found in that book, which I carried with me back to Bristol.
WITH THANKS
This book has been a long time in the making, starting with the visit to Accra and the trips from Bristol to Avonmouth that inspired it. (The reconnoitres to Super Mare came later.)
I would like to thank everyone who read drafts and were so encouraging during that time. Special gratitude goes out to my wife, Peninah Achieng-Kindberg, for believing in me, to Heather Child for her clear-sighted feedback, and Tracey Bowen AKA Onallee for her enthusiasm and for kindly translating my attempt at Swirling Suit’s Caribbean dialect into the way it should sound. Last but not least I had the support of the Bristol Fiction Writers group, in particular Zan Ferris and Helen Blenkinsop, and my early readers from the Pervasive Media Studio.
And thank you Toby Selwyn for copy editing, Jasmine Thompson for the cover illustration and design, and Nkech Nwokolo for the adinkra symbols that accompany each part of the novel.
Everything else, flaws and all, is down to me. May this novel create a spark in the mind of some reader, somewhere.