Repo Virtual Read online

  But if father is the person who guided you through childhood, who molded you, then here he is: unaware that this new day would set him on a path to the center of everything.

  When he wiped his ass and tossed the folded wads of feces-smeared recycled paper into the toilet bowl, he saw only the act of disposal. He did not see that everything is one. He did not see the truth of his shit—that it could never simply disappear. It was still there, flush, growing distant yes, carried away on a stream of treated water, but it was not gone. It was part of the closed system he called “Earth,” “world,” or even “home.” He had lived his whole life under the lie of this abstraction—that there is a “here,” and a separate “there.”

  This abstraction is what killed them all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The air smelled of synthetic oil, cardboard boxes, and the ozone scent of burnt-out electronics. JD wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his coveralls, the smell of himself thick in the patched and faded fabric. He unscrewed the repair bot’s torso plate by hand, pushing the screwdriver hard to get leverage against the chewed slots in the screw’s head. He set the steel plate down with a hollow clank that he felt in his fingertips more than he heard, the constant machine din of the warehouse as loud as it was hypnotizing.

  The Hippo repair bot was a sphere on four treaded feet painted medic red; powered-down, it hung forward slightly as though drunk. With the maintenance plate removed, the robot had a face—the two glassy eyes of its visual sensors and a gaping black mouth, with greasy metal teeth showing in one corner. JD pulled a face at the damaged machine, his lips pulled back grotesquely—just two coworkers gurning at each other—and got to work.

  First, he unplugged the robot’s secondary power source and put the gold nanowire battery on the polished cement beside his knee. He checked again that the power cable was disconnected from the back of the machine’s enormous head, and reached into its guts through the open maw. He blindly felt along every cable, mentally mapping each one and comparing it to the diagram drawn over his contex.

  The picking and packing robots continued to work at pace, unbothered by the apparent death of one of their own. It bothered JD that they didn’t, couldn’t show solidarity, and it bothered him that it bothered him. The whole factory would fall to rust and ruin without the repair bot, but here it was, dead, and none of the others could even know.

  JD’s mind drifted as his fingers brushed over the copper pins and battery terminals like a doctor poking a sick child’s stomach. He found nothing obviously fatal. With his arm deep inside the machine’s chest cavity, his eyes flicked once more to the disconnected battery that sat on the floor, remembering the ragged dripping meat of Ye-ji’s arm when a broken unit came to life on her. That was the last time he worked with another tech. After the ambulance had taken her away, the picking machines had tracked lines of her blood all across the factory floor until it dried red and black. The blood had stayed there until late that night, when the cleaning bot emerged from its cupboard to mop and polish while the other robots slept in diagnosis.

  A hollow boom echoed through the space, followed by a screeeeee. JD cocked his head, waiting for the next sound to tell him which machine was malfunctioning and how, but instead he heard a voice: “You hungry?”

  JD extricated his arm from the repair bot’s chest and wiped his hands with the grease-stained scrap of T-shirt he used for a rag. He peered toward the main warehouse entrance where Soo-hyun stood in silhouette, stark black against the glare from outside. They lifted a bag high, the clear plastic stretched taut with the weight of mandu from the place on the corner.

  The door thundered closed and the sound of Soo-hyun’s heavy boots ricocheted around the high ceiling as they walked down the central aisle, dressed in navy blue coveralls, their black hair neatly shorn. The picking robots darted around them, perfect precision ruined by Soo-hyun’s unwillingness to bend. JD couldn’t tell if it was Zen stillness, or pure stubbornness—but lately there was a lot about Soo-hyun he found difficult to read.

  “What do you want?” JD asked when Soo-hyun was close enough that he didn’t need to yell.

  “I can’t bring you lunch without some ulterior motive?” Soo-hyun put their hand to their chest in mock outrage.

  JD’s stomach rumbled. His body was a meat engine, and carbs ran through it like sand through those old hourglasses he’d only ever seen abstracted as a loading icon. He ignored the hunger. “How did you get in here?”

  With one chewed fingernail Soo-hyun tapped the scratched employee ID badge hanging at their belt. “Perks of being a floor manager.”

  “Former floor manager.”

  They shrugged. “Not my fault they never wiped the old database. Now, come on, hyung, lunch time.”

  * * *

  Dust motes swam through shafts of light that daggered between mangled vertical blinds. Windows on the opposite side of the room looked out over the factory floor—pickers picking, packers packing, conveyor belts turning endlessly to fill the delivery auto-trucks that docked outside. JD had stopped eating in the lunchroom sometime after the cleaning drone had given up on the disused space but before the fridge seals had broken. The door hung open; the dank smell of mold and rotting salad still lingered.

  “This is disgusting,” Soo-hyun said.

  “I normally eat downstairs.”

  “If you eat in your workspace, did you really take a break?” Soo-hyun asked. They ran a finger through the dust gathered on the table’s surface, and took the trays of mandu from the bag. They spread them out across the table, and handed a pair of chopsticks to JD. He opened the nearest tray and leaned forward, as if the rising steam could wash the room’s other smells from his mind.

  “What is this?” JD asked, snapping apart his chopsticks and cleaning them against each other.

  “Kimchi, mushroom, tofu,” Soo-hyun said, pointing to each tray.

  “No, this visit.”

  Soo-hyun’s mass of necklaces made from copper wire and assorted junk collected in the shadowed V of their coveralls and jangled when they dropped into the seat opposite JD. “I want to help you.”

  JD took one of the fried mandu for an excuse to look away. He put the whole dumpling in his mouth. “You want to help,” he said once he’d chewed and swallowed, “but you still haven’t apologized.”

  Soo-hyun lowered their head. “I never wanted you to get hurt, hyung,” they said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  JD shook his head—less a response than a surrender. “You still living in the ruins?”

  “You wouldn’t call our community ‘ruins’ if you ever visited. You should come see me after work today, let me introduce you to everyone.”

  JD shoved another dumpling into his mouth and chewed. “I haven’t seen you for months, and now you show up here to talk about—what?”

  “You’d be happier living at Liber, Jules. There’s no rent, no bills, just a community of people trying to help each other. Living there has calmed me down. It really helps.”

  JD rested his chopsticks across the closest tray and leveled a gaze at his younger sibling. “What do you want, Soo-hyun?” He sounded tired as he spoke the words, heard them echo through their past like a mantra. Soo-hyun always wanted something.

  “I’m trying to give you a job.”

  JD took up the chopsticks and made a circular motion that said, “Go on.”

  “We need a repo.”

  “You say ‘repo,’ but something tells me you mean ‘thief.’ ”

  Soo-hyun smirked. “Aren’t those jobs more fun?”

  JD ferried a dumpling into his mouth and waited for them to continue.

  “We’ll pay you, okay? Is that what you want to hear?”

  “How much?” JD said around a mouthful of mandu.

  “Fifty thousand euro.”

  JD almost choked. “How much?”

  “Fifty thousand. Five-zero.”

  JD raised his eyebrows, cynicism resting with his pursed lips.

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p; “Kali has the money, Jules. She has a hundred and thirty million Livideo subscribers, and a hundred thousand who pay for her online courses. Every night she gives a talk, and every night it streams to more and more people. We have money, JD, enough to turn Liber into a paradise.”

  “Maybe I should move in,” JD said, voice flat.

  “You should!” Soo-hyun said. “It’s amazing, JD. Kali is amazing, you’ll love her.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “Kali wrote a piece of software that will change the world, but someone stole it from her. All you’ve got to do is steal it back.”

  JD’s hand halted halfway between the tray of mandu and his mouth. He sighed. “And what happens if I visit tonight?” he asked eventually.

  “Just hear Kali out. If you don’t like it, we don’t do the job.”

  “We?”

  “It’s a big job; you’re going to need a diversion.” They spoke the words casually, but still JD’s knee flared with remembered pain.

  “I thought you gave that up. I thought you were calm now. I’m still limping after your last diversion.”

  “Maybe I’m too calm. Kali worries I’m stunting my own spiritual growth.”

  “What does that even mean?” JD asked.

  “I don’t know, Jules. I’m just here to try and make things right. I never wanted to apologize if all I could offer you were the words, but if we do this job, I’ll give you my cut. Fifty k is enough for your knee surgery, enough to keep you fed while you recover.”

  JD shook his head, in disbelief or shock, he wasn’t sure.

  “This is how I apologize, hyung. This is how I make it right.” Soo-hyun stared at him, their hazel eyes gleaming. Something vulnerable sat in those eyes, and suddenly JD saw Soo-hyun as they were when they’d first met—a sweet seven-year-old, scared but excited. The little sibling he would always love, no matter how much they annoyed him, no matter how badly they hurt him. That was family.

  “Alright, I’ll come see you after work; but no guarantee I’ll take the job.”

  “You won’t regret it,” Soo-hyun said, and they flashed him their best mischievous smile. Some part of him regretted it already.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and saw the pin Soo-hyun had just dropped—the location of Liber, in Songdo’s ruined east beyond the canal, abandoned by the city council after the flood a decade earlier.

  “How am I supposed to—” He looked up and the lunchroom door was already swinging closed behind Soo-hyun, a whorl of dust spinning in the void they left behind.

  He crossed to the window and watched Soo-hyun march back to the exit, carving a straight line through the machines. They waved once as they pushed the main doors open, and disappeared into the glare, swallowed by the external world.

  * * *

  Hours later, JD stepped outside, leaving behind the industrial clang of the warehouse. The building loomed over him, haloed by the fast-approaching dusk. It was four stories’ worth of storage, humming with machine labor, and still ringed with suicide nets from when human pickers and packers worked themselves to exhaustion within its walls, all for the sake of some technocrat’s net worth. JD left the structure’s shadow and pushed into the sidewalk surge, joining the shuffling biomass of Neo Songdo. Sunlight speared between buildings at migraine height; it burned bright through the smog, heat hanging heavy over the city, where it would persist until well after midnight.

  Traffic lights and crossing signals shone in the real, largely for the sake of pedestrians and the rare human driver—the self-driving cars too unsettling to watch without their every move telegraphed in advance. The cars didn’t see the lights, they reacted instead to some hidden system of machine semiotics, chattering constantly among themselves. Watching them, JD wondered if the cars ever talked about their passengers, ever gossiped about the biological denizens of the machine city.

  The original plans for Songdo had called for a focus on pedestrians and public transport—a clean city, a green city—but when Zero bailed out the government and took on the city’s debt, their rideshare network had taken precedence. Wide sidewalks gave way to roads, people gave way to cars, and the grand intentions of Songdo’s architects gave way to the excesses of capital.

  Waiting at a crosswalk, people packed in tight around JD, their bodies adding to the heat of the falling sun. He scrunched his nose against the medley of body odor, the acrid scent of vehicle exhaust and factory runoff, and the biologic smells of vomit and piss baking on hot cement.

  The signal turned green, and JD walked.

  He shot daggers at every corporate worker dressed identically in black, white, and gray, still exquisitely preened after eight hours in air-conditioning, but he knew the sneer that twisted his mouth was pure jealousy, not class warfare. He pushed those elite specters from his mind and took in the rest of the bustle: gig-economy hopefuls rushing home, some paid, others not; folks peddling noodles, soup, or bottled water from behind corporate censor bars; and rich kids strangled by private school uniforms, chain-smoking cigarettes because nothing is cooler than lung cancer your parents can afford to cure. They flocked birdlike around the street’s other denizens: urchins, runaways, freaks, beggars, and petty criminals working their latest angle.

  In disused doorways and dirty alleys, virt-lost homeless withered away to skin and bone, largely hidden behind Songdo’s Augmented Reality facade. They owned no possessions but the third-hand phones clutched in bony fingers and the makeshift blindfolds wrapped around their heads to keep their virtual worlds sacrosanct, safe from the encroachments of the real.

  JD shouldered through the crowd with his limping gait, his broad frame an unintentional battering ram. Eyes followed him as he moved through the sea of mostly Korean bodies, their gaze marking him as an outsider—the city’s multicultural push hindered by thousands of years of Korean ethnic homogeneity. JD stepped into the street to pass a knot of execs tied around a pop-up cocktail bar and ignored the flashing red warning underfoot. He slapped the door of a passing auto-car and the driving algorithm slammed to a halt with a honk of its horn. JD just laughed.

  At the next corner a man stood at a little stall, dressed in a jacket patterned with bright rectangles of global currency. He sold US hundred-dollar bills enshrined in plastic frames for ten euro apiece—souvenirs from a fallen empire.

  Everywhere slabs of color stood out too-crisp against the dreary real, hiding graffiti, pirate ads, and occasional spatters of blood. Early in Neo Songdo’s life, the Augmented layer had been writable. Excited city planners invited citizens to write their own lives onto the street: advice for new arrivals, reviews of local restaurants, warnings of criminal elements or overzealous police. In practice, the city became a bathroom wall writ large. Now, only city council and advertisers could write into the Augmented feed, giving every street a uniform commercial banality that scraped at JD’s psyche.

  Walls on either side of the road thrummed with high-resolution adverts tailored for his eyes: VOIDWAR promotions beside Olavon beauty treatments hawked by affectless celebrities he’d never seen before, sex-baited cola ads next to commercials for daytime soap operas, omnipresent algorithms confused by all the money he spent on his mother. JD watched his feet, pushing the layer of compulsory AR from his mind as he navigated the city, following fiber-optic ley lines, the veins running through the failed ubiquitous city.

  JD logged into VOIDWAR as he walked, the sign-in screen opaque across the visual noise of the city. His phone grew hot in his pocket as it connected to the game’s systems. Spend enough time logged in and you’d feel your phone cooking the meat of your thigh. He checked his inbox first, saw confirmation of payment on his in-game repo job, then searched the forums for after-action reports from the battle around Grzyb Station. Seal Team Dix crowed over their victory, while furious Russians cursed JD, “the repo fuck,” in janky machine translation.

  He passed through downtown from the west, until the tide of foot traffic slowly turned against him: nig
ht workers ferrying themselves into the heart of the city while he trudged toward the broken, gangrenous foot. Soon the current turned to a trickle. Skyscrapers and low-rises gave way to overpasses, bypasses, highways, and byways. The diesel smoke was thick enough to taste, because nothing moves a loaded truck like burning dinosaurs.

  Past some invisible border between the city proper and the ruined outskirts, the Augmented street signs and road markings began to fall from JD’s vision, pixels blinking out of existence to reveal the true grime of the city beneath. JD had never come out this far, despite Soo-hyun’s insistence, but he knew it was the residents of Liber who had scraped away the bokodes that controlled all the Augmented signifiers of city life. It was their retaliation for the council’s neglect. Graffiti peeked out from behind the final fading stretches of digital wall—basic tags, indecipherable sigils in splashes of garish paint, and the words north korea best korea in bold black letters a meter tall across the length of a broken glass factory.

  JD paused at the bridge over the canal to catch his breath and stretch out his leg, wincing at the ache in his knee. He could have—should have—ordered a car, but none would drive this far out without a heavy surcharge that JD couldn’t pay.

  Fifty thousand euro. Enough for the surgery, enough to pay off the debt he held in his mother’s name. He didn’t trust Soo-hyun’s judgment, but he wanted to. He wanted the job to pan out.

  Beyond the canal, crumbled ruins gave way to reconstruction. Rusted rebar jutted from cement like compound fractures, but the buildings that still stood were painted haphazardly in bright colors and topped with green. Vines of unknown origin crept along rusting gutters, and carefully cultivated vegetables, fruits, herbs, and medicinal plants sat on rooftops and burst over balcony railings. These colors stood vivid against the pale cement and smog-smeared sky. Beneath that dirty fog, birds circled with mathematical precision, and puffy, too-white clouds hung static, undisturbed by any wind; the badly disguised tools of surveillance-state capitalism.