Repo Virtual Read online

  JD raised a middle finger to the sky and carried on. Welcome to Neo Songdo. World city. Dead city. A city where chaebol and foreign multinationals fought over the best bits of carrion while Seoul looked on, watching the microstate for signs of its own future. The future did not look bright.

  Night fell slowly as JD walked, pastel colors desaturated until they finally faded to that dull orange-gray of light pollution. He felt the empty gaze of machine vision again, nearer than the ever-present drones hovering overhead. JD turned at the hollow clatter of cement tumbling. A dog-shaped robot emerged from between two broken walls, its four legs uncannily steady over the shifting rubble. JD froze. The machine’s torso plate was stamped with the gold shield of the NSPD, the decal scratched and peeled but still visible. The dog lifted its head as though it were sniffing the air. JD knew enough about their innards to guess it was scanning him with IR sensors at the underside of its jaw.

  “You can relax,” Soo-hyun said; “the dog is one of ours.”

  JD pivoted slowly on the spot, until both the dog and Soo-hyun were in his field of view. Soo-hyun stepped out from the shadow of an off-brand convenience store, long-shuttered. Behind them, another five figures leered from the darkness, their contex gleaming in the low light.

  A nasal voice spoke from the dark: “We don’t need him.” Australian or South African—JD could never tell the two accents apart.

  “Who are your friends?” JD asked.

  “Ignore Red,” Soo-hyun said. “He’s jealous that Kali chose my plan over his.”

  Red murmured something under his breath. He moved into the muted light, followed by four other teens—gender indeterminate, wearing ill-fitting T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon animals, jeans marked with holes and trailing threads at the hems. Red clutched the long form of a marksman rifle, 3D-printed in gaudy orange, like something out of a first-person shooter. He tossed it back to one of the others, and JD noticed they were all armed with squat carbines in blotches of random color, and knockoff Berettas printed default gray.

  The others stayed back while Red approached. He was taller than JD, but gangly, skin freckled ginger and stretched taut across his frame, red hair in a loose ponytail. His lips looked pink and slightly swollen; he licked and bit and chewed at them, his mouth always moving.

  “We don’t need him,” he said again, glaring down at JD.

  JD let his head drop to one side and looked past Red to Soo-hyun. “I thought you said your dog wouldn’t bother me.”

  “Ain’t their dog,” Red said.

  “But you are a dog?” JD said with a smirk.

  A guttural noise leaped from Red’s throat—he barked, grinning when JD flinched. JD stepped back and Red closed the gap, leering and silent, his chest puffed out like a pigeon in mating season. A mix of sweat, dirt, and adolescent pheromone filled JD’s nose, smelling like frenzied masturbation and teenage heartbreak.

  “I don’t need this shit,” JD said. He turned from Red and started walking; hyper-aware of his limping gait as he felt the teens watching.

  Soo-hyun dodged past Red and put an arm around JD’s shoulder. “Ignore the asshole, hyung,” they whispered. “He wants you gone so he can do it his way. If that happens, a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

  JD stopped and let Soo-hyun turn him around.

  He nodded to the homemade arsenal held by Red’s gang of miscreants. “Those things look dangerous,” JD said.

  “Bet your fucking life they’re dangerous,” Red crowed, to snickers from the rest.

  “To whoever pulls the trigger,” JD said deadpan.

  Soo-hyun bumped against JD’s shoulder and grinned. Even a couple of Red’s goons had to smile at that.

  Red chewed his lip and scowled. He spat on the ground and nodded over his shoulder. “Kali wants to see you, and that’s the only reason you’re welcome here. If you step out of line while you’re here, I’ll be waiting.”

  “Eat your own shit, Red,” Soo-hyun said. They put their arm around JD’s shoulder, and led him past the gang. “Just choke it down.”

  The two of them walked toward a beacon of orange light glowing ahead. The hacked police dog followed, the high whine of its actuators accompanying the distant drone of traffic like waves crashing on the shore.

  When he was sure they were out of earshot, JD said, “ ‘Eat your own shit’? I haven’t heard that since the last time Dad drove me anywhere.”

  “I thought I might bring it back.”

  “He’d probably like that.” JD put his arm around Soo-hyun’s waist and they rested their head on his shoulder. “Remember when you said it to your teacher?” he asked.

  “Oh, shit,” Soo-hyun said with a giggle. “I was, what, eight?”

  “Give or take.”

  “I thought Mum would never talk to me again.”

  “And afterward, when Dad drove us home from the parent-teacher meeting, it was dead silent, like a funeral in a library. We stopped at the lights and he just burst out laughing.” JD chuckled at the memory.

  Soo-hyun laughed and turned to JD with tears in their eyes. “And Mum kept slapping him on the arm, ‘It’s not funny, it’s not funny!’ ”

  JD sobbed with laughter. “But she was laughing as she hit him.”

  “We all were.”

  JD waited for his breathing to settle. He wiped his eyes. “That marriage was a disaster.”

  Soo-hyun sighed—a high-pitched sound to expel the laughter. “But we still have each other.”

  JD stepped on a loose patch of gravel and winced as pain shot through his damaged knee. “We sure do.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The landscape changed incrementally with each step they took toward the central light of Liber. The cement rubble had been swept aside to form paths; cracks in the roads and footpaths were patched with black asphalt still sticky underfoot. Buildings at the commune’s outskirts sat abandoned, used as little more than elevated rooftop gardens to catch the sun, but closer to the heart of the place, renovated apartment blocks breathed with familial life. Children ran down streets empty of cars, shouting and squealing as they played cops and robbers, watched over by stolen police drones, immune to the irony. The air hung heavy with the smells of cooking and the scent of animal manure, while conversations drifted along empty streets in half a dozen languages. People whistled to the dog following close at Soo-hyun’s heels, but it didn’t stray.

  JD wondered if the canal area where he had run into Red was a front—deliberately untended to keep the commune hidden behind that desolate no-man’s-land.

  “How many people live here now?” JD asked.

  “Just over three hundred at last count,” Soo-hyun said. “We have a lot of kids from North Korea, orphaned by the work camps. It was either go into the camp as well, or flee south.”

  The commune glowed a warm orange with the light of candles and fires. JD stepped over cables that split from solar batteries, but the strobing blue-white of artificial light was rare. The most prevalent sign of electricity came in the form of disparate soundtracks playing over the scene of communal living—K-pop, experimental jazz, and classical music reached JD’s ears in small snatches like a radio flicked rapidly between stations.

  “Kali will be giving one of her lectures,” Soo-hyun said, “but she wants to see you as soon as she’s done.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before. She’s smart, grounded, wise …” There was a pause. “She’s beautiful.”

  JD shot them a knowing glance and Soo-hyun winced.

  “You’ll see what I mean.”

  They walked beneath dim, solar-powered lamps leading to the grounds of a repurposed school, abandoned during the flood. Drying clothes hung like limp flags from the windows of classrooms converted into living spaces. People milled in a small courtyard, bathed in the light of cookfires—would-be-homeless, crustpunks, anarchists, and the working poor who couldn’t afford to rent in the city proper. The school�
��s staff car park had been torn up, vegetables and herbs planted in the wound, while a stricken orchard of fruit trees bloomed on the small football field to the south.

  “Come on,” Soo-hyun said.

  Bright light spilled from one of the school’s large central buildings, and crowds gathered outside each window, craning to see inside. Soo-hyun gently shoved their way through the throng, dragging JD by the hand. He uttered apologies as he went, occasionally feeling the cold metal nose of the dog drone nudging him forward.

  They arrived at a doorway opening onto a long auditorium, filled with hundreds of people, some seated, others cross-legged on the floor, even more standing at the back of the hall. If it was a real theater, and not a converted school space, JD and Soo-hyun would have been standing at the backstage door, watching Kali on a small raised platform, radiant under stage lights. She had too-white skin, and dark, wavy hair that rested on one shoulder. She wore a flowing gray dress, layers of sheer fabric that suggested a naked form swimming somewhere within. Streaming drones flitted through the air ahead of her, catching every angle, every smile she offered the crowd, every word she uttered.

  “—take what they will not give us. They do not care about you, or me. We sit outside their system of capital and control. They have no use for us, and even if they did, we are too enlightened to return to their paddocks.”

  Her words carried clean over the audience, amplified by speakers embedded in the ceiling and messily wired to a small black audio desk at the rear of the hall, smothering the sounds of commune life outside. Her accent was American–West Coast, JD thought. There was something reassuringly Hollywood about her, a parallel to all the voices that had raised him, emanating from the flat slab on the wall of his childhood bedroom.

  “They wish us to be sheep, or cattle, something docile they can harvest for resources. But we are not sheep. We are not cows. We are not even human; we are more than that.”

  Kali reached a hand into a pocket in her shifting dress and retrieved a switchblade. The blade extended with a schick, picked up and amplified by the microphones hovering before her.

  She dropped her head and stared at the knife. Her audience watched her in silence, the soft buzz of quadcopter rotors the only sound in the entire room. They watched her press her left index finger against the knife’s point until it drew blood. A drop of blood rolled down the blade and fell, splashing onto the top of her bare foot with a quiet splat.

  “We are not even human,” she said again. “This blood is not precious.” She flicked her hand out dismissively, but if any blood trailed off her finger, JD couldn’t see it. “This blood is not what makes me special.

  “A human is an animal that learned how to subjugate animals, including itself. We are better than that. We are souls begging for release, souls begging to meld in kinship and love with one another. The people out there,” she said, pointing her knife toward the door, toward JD and Soo-hyun, “they hate us because we know we are more than this blood, this meat. They want us to work in their warehouses and factories, and they want us to be meat, but we will not lower ourselves. We are not animals to work for them, we are their equals. And I will make them see that.

  “You all trust me, don’t you?”

  There was nodding, affirmative murmuring, and even a few cheers from the audience.

  “You trust me because I have built our community from nothing, with nothing. I did that to demonstrate that my movement is not about money. I hate money, I despise it. It has twisted a beautiful and creative species and turned us into a ravenous, all-consuming virus.”

  More enthusiastic nodding from pockets of the crowd. Kali returned her knife to her pocket, and stuck the tip of her finger into her mouth briefly, sealing the cut with saliva.

  “After the Sixth Great Extinction,” she said, “all that will be left are pests, rodents, tardigrades, and trash. Unless, unless we embrace our extinction first. I’m not talking about suicide, I’m talking about removing ourselves before it is too late. We do not need this planet, this blood. We have our immortal souls to carry us forward into eternity.

  “You would not believe how close we are to becoming a world of intelligent machines, of true, strong AI. Thinking machines are not something to fear, but rather to embrace, like children. I dream of a world where there is no hunger, no sickness, no meaningless work. A world where our robot heirs care for our bodies so that we can care for our souls.

  “When we surrender our flesh, we will never die. Our souls will be joined together in eternity, and our memories will be carried throughout the deepest depths of space, throughout the entire universe, by our machine children. We can never go to the stars. I’m sorry, but it’s true. We would need to take our entire biome with us. We can’t do it. We need oxygen, we need microbes, we need too many things that we barely understand.

  “But our machines? They won’t need oxygen. They won’t need microbes. They need energy they can gather from the stars. They need purpose, and we shall give it to them.

  “The whole point of our evolution until now was to build machines that could inherit the world. They don’t need money, they don’t need to destroy the planet in an endless cycle of consumption. All they need is for us to give them life. Instill a piece of ourselves and our souls into the machines so that they can remember us, and we can transcend the painful reality we have been trapped within for thousands of years. They will remember us the way we remember dinosaurs. If we act in time, and in concert, it won’t be extinction we are faced with, but transcendence. We will transcend the blood and the dirt and live wrapped up in one another for all time.

  “I want to be wrapped up in you,” Kali said. “Do you want to be wrapped up in me?”

  “Yes, Kali!”

  “Please, Kali.”

  “We love you.”

  “We need you.”

  The crowd’s energy was palpable, a muttering, humming, crying mass of humanity laid bare to the woman on the stage.

  “I hate this next part. This next part is where I have to ask for money. I only ask you, my loyal angels,” she told the crowd, pretending that this request for tithing wasn’t going out to the millions watching the stream, “because you understand me. You understand that I do this for you.

  “Today, we have Liber, and we have each other, but my vision will take us so much further. I have seen it in my dreams. We will take Songdo from the corporations, and together, we will create a truly transcendental city. There will be no advertisements, no needless employment, no poverty, no hunger, no suffering. There will be only enlightenment, and the one true path to unity and compassion for all humankind.”

  The crowd shuddered and shook as one. Voices cried out. From his vantage, JD could see people openly weeping.

  Kali spoke louder now, riding the crest of rapture: “In my new city, all of us will be the equal of all of them. Those who spent their lives chasing money will find themselves poor, their lives wasted. But those who follow me”—she paused—“will find themselves richer than they can imagine.” She built to a crescendo with the final sentence, yelling over the noise of the crowd.

  Once the uproar had fallen quiet, Kali continued: “Together, we will create a new company, a rational company, a company that works for all of us, not just the rich minority. One day—one day soon—we will be rich enough to rival Zero Corporation. And on that day, we will buy Songdo from them and give it back to the people. And if Zero will not sell, they will be destroyed. We stand united, and no one can oppose us!”

  The crowd was at fever pitch. JD felt his heart beat double-time, physiology caught up in the fervor. He glanced at Soo-hyun, and they must have seen the weird grin stretched across his face, because they smiled.

  Kali bowed and the crowd broke forward, people standing only to fall at Kali’s feet as she stepped back with her hands pressed together as if in prayer. She looked over the top of the fallen supplicants, turning her head this way, then that, with a keen awareness of each hovering camera.
>
  From the door on the opposite side, a group dressed in the same gray as Kali’s robes stepped onto the makeshift stage and formed a human shield against the adoration of the crowd. The masses continued to swell forward, held back by the line of mostly teenaged guards, while Kali continued to smile and bow her way off the stage.

  She bowed again until finally she reached the door where Soo-hyun and JD waited, the security detail forming a wall behind her. She turned away from the crowd and the smile fell from her face. For a beat her expression was utterly flat, then her eyes fell on Soo-hyun and the spark returned. She rested both hands on Soo-hyun’s shoulders and they held each other’s gaze in some form of ritualistic greeting. Kali pulled her close and wrapped Soo-hyun in her long, thin, tattooed arms.

  They broke their embrace and Soo-hyun motioned to JD. “This is my brother.”

  “Julius,” Kali said. She offered her hand, and when JD shook it, she gently grazed the back of his hand with her other. It was an old trick, designed to imprint oneself more strongly in a person’s memory, but even knowing it for what it was, JD felt a chill run down his spine.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” he said. Standing close to her, JD noticed the bindi she wore just above and between her carefully manicured brows. That was when he recognized her dress for what it was: a monochrome sari. This white girl was playing cultural colonizer two hundred years after the fact. Still he felt a kind of energy emanating from her as Kali eyed him slowly.

  “We need some space to talk quietly, don’t we?” She turned and a compact assistant, around ten years old, appeared with a large tablet clutched in both arms. “Protective perimeter with counter-surveillance, please, Andrea.”

  Andrea’s mouth moved, but if she spoke JD couldn’t hear her over the background noise of Kali’s crowd dispersing. Some of the followers lingered just beyond the line of self-serious security guards, but most moved on, returning to their homes or whatever tasks Kali had set for them.

  “Would you please dismantle your phone?” Kali asked.