In a room with bare steel bulkhead walls, Essien hung suspended a few feet off the ground by some mechanism he couldn’t understand. A blurred figure mostly outside his field of vision jabbed him in the side of the head. An injection, he guessed, because it stung at first and then felt cold.
A man stood in front of him, hands clasped behind his back. There was something wrong with the man’s face. His eyes were too far apart, his wide nose furrowed as if it was made of something that had been soft once and then had congealed while someone was pressing on it. He had a beard that encroached so far onto his cheeks it was as though most of his face was covered in orange fur.
The man spoke to Essien, or at least made noises at him. The noises were short, harsh; barks and growls and yowps expressive of anger and threat and not much else. The man flexed his very mobile lips whenever he fell silent, baring teeth that were long and pointed. Essien had met a man from Congo-Kinshasa once, who had filed his teeth in what he claimed was an ancestral tradition. These teeth were even narrower and sharper. The tongue that flicked out between them from time to time was sharp too, its tip a red V.
Something strange happened to Essien while the man talked. The sounds began to line themselves up in his mind, clustering together like bubbles in a glass of beer. The clusters seemed right somehow, more meaningful. Then he began to see what the meanings might be. How iba might be a sensible word for who, and co could be are, and ne could be… no, had to be you.
“He’s aligned,” a voice said, from off to the side where Essien couldn’t see.
“Good,” said the man with the crumpled nose. “Then please, let’s make a start. The sooner we can be done with this, the better.”
The room lights were dimmed. A hemisphere of milky-white glass about four feet in diameter lowered itself smoothly into place over Essien’s head and shoulders. On its inner face, multicoloured lights flared and flowed and morphed and faded.
The questions started then – and somehow they were made of light as well as sound. Each word blossomed on the white glass screen as a pattern of brilliant hues, so bright that it hurt to look at them. But he couldn’t look away: his head wouldn’t move when he tried to turn it, and his eyelids wouldn’t close.
“Who are you? Give me your name.”
I’m Essien, he said. Essien Nkanika. Did he say it? He could hear the questioner’s voice – very clear and very loud – but not his own.
“And what’s your purpose in all this?”
My purpose? What do you mean? I don’t understand!
“You’ve been using Step technology. Visiting other worlds. Tell me what you were trying to achieve.”
Fear gripped him, so tightly and so suddenly he was afraid he might piss himself. Not me. That wasn’t me. I don’t know anything about it. It’s Hadiz Tambuwal you want. It was Hadiz Tambuwal who made the machine. Ask her and she’ll tell you! There was something wrong with that but for a moment he couldn’t remember what it was. Then the memory rose up in his mind the way vomit comes up in your throat, choking and foul and uncontrollable. Hadiz was dead. The giants in red armour had put a hole in her chest. A sense of grief and shame overwhelmed him, edging out the terror. He gaped his mouth wide and howled, though like the words he was speaking or not-quite-speaking the scream was completely silent.
“What’s that?”
“Non-verbalised emotion, Watchmaster.”
“Jad and Shaster! Can’t we filter it out?”
“Not easily. It’s not being parsed linguistically. I can reduce the volume.”
“Yes! Please! You, Nkanika, control yourself. The sooner you give me answers, the sooner we can be done. Tell me about this woman. Tambuwal. Did you work for her?”
Essien continued to scream for as long as he could, but the absence of sound defeated him in the end. He lay still in the dark, sucking in breath that chilled and pricked his lungs. What was this place? He thought of the meat freezers at Ketu. For all he knew he might be a carcass already hung, his tripes and sweetmeats on a slab underneath him.
“Can you hear me, man? Did you work under Tambuwal, perhaps as an engineer? Or conduct surveying activities for her? Did you act as her bodyguard? What was the nature of your relationship? And who is your principal?”
Essien said nothing. Fuck these people, he decided. If he could get his hands free he would work them harm. Certainly he wouldn’t do anything to help them. They had killed Hadiz, and he was sure they were going to kill him when they were done with him. He would prefer to die knowing he had been able to give them something back for that.
“He’s not answering. Can we intensify?”
“Of course. The CoIL is only on setting three. But there’s a risk of brain damage at higher intensities.”
“I don’t see how that’s pertinent. Proceed.”
The lights flashed brighter, and faded more slowly. They seemed to stack up on top of each other, the older bursts becoming the backdrop against which the newer shapes flared and burned. Essien tried to say no, to say enough, to beg for the bombardment to stop, but it seemed he could only speak when a question was put to him.
Everything poured out of him at once then. Silence wasn’t an option any more, and neither was lying. Each question was like a spile hammered into the core of him, the heartwood. The truth, a distilled essence of him, gushed out without his willing it – so hot it was already subliming away in curls of radiant vapour, vanishing as it was spoken.
He wondered what would be left of him when all these words were gone. Then he wondered who was speaking these things, the tiresome minutiae of someone else’s life. Whoever this Essien Nkanika might be, he sounded like a rogue, a shit and a coward. Definitely someone to avoid.