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  “Uh, sure.” JD blinked the pattern for a full shutdown, and when it was finished he fumbled his phone awkwardly out of his pocket. He slid the battery out of its slot, putting the phone and battery into separate jeans pockets.

  “I’ll bring him to the workshop once we’re done,” Kali told Soo-hyun. “This way.” Kali turned and began to walk, trailed by the dog drone that had escorted JD in from the canal.

  Soo-hyun shoved him forward but stayed behind. He caught up with Kali, and they walked in silence, commune residents staring at Kali wide- and wild-eyed as they passed. JD studied her face surreptitiously, trying to gauge this woman who dressed like a New Age guru and commanded the loyalty of over a hundred million Livideo subscribers. He guessed she was anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, attractive in a plain sort of way. Hers was not a face that many would go to war for, yet she was surrounded by Red and the other zealous teens, armed with cheaply printed guns and excess hormones.

  Nine more hacked dogs joined them one by one until they were completely surrounded. The whine of servomotors made a steady rolling sound, and JD found himself falling into step with the machines. His flat-soled sneakers scraped over the worn cement, but Kali’s feet were bare and silent. She hugged herself and stared into the middle distance. The dogs began to emit a steady hiss of static, different frequencies overlapping to form a wall of sound.

  “What did you think of my talk?” she asked eventually.

  JD considered that for a moment. “I love robots as much as the next guy, but I’m not convinced.” He pitched his voice low, heavy bass traveling beneath the white noise. “It sounds like you want us to give up, as a species. I don’t see that happening.”

  “It’s not about giving up, it’s about choosing to retire before the choice is taken from us. Not just that, but retiring to a relaxed life, a life where all of us are equal, all watched over by machines of loving grace.”

  JD scoffed. “I don’t believe your talk of equality, either.”

  Kali turned to JD and considered him. She nodded. “People think they want equality, but in truth, most of us want someone to tell us what to do. Life is frightening, change is frightening, decision-making is frightening—better to let someone else guide you.”

  “I don’t know that I agree.”

  “Then you must be truly self-actualized.”

  JD smiled but ignored the obvious ploy. He nodded to the families gathered around small fires, cooking rice and noodles in battered aluminum pots. “Shouldn’t all these people have been at your talk?”

  “You’re asking if I’m upset by their absence.”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Everyone here is free to do what they want, as long as they contribute. Some people contribute with money, some till the crops, some spread my message. As long as they’re helping Liber, I don’t care what they do with their time. Some people aren’t ready to listen to my talks anyway, they’re still too blinkered. They need to be reached slowly, introduced to new ideas and new experiences carefully so they are not harmed. If someone doesn’t come to the meetings, then by definition they are not ready to come to the meetings.”

  They continued walking, the dogs holding to their loose circle of noise, hull plates gleaming. They passed other dogs, legs folded beneath them on standby, waiting for the light of morning to charge their batteries.

  “How does Soo-hyun contribute?” JD asked.

  “For one thing, they brought you to me. You’re to be part of my vision, Julius. I said before that money turned us into a virus. Well, I need you to recover another virus, one that could alter the course of history.”

  “You want me to steal a virus?”

  “Steal? Hardly. I’m going to let you in on a secret, Julius. May I call you Jules?”

  “JD.”

  “Alright, JD. You know who Zero Lee is,” she said. It was not a question.

  “Of course.”

  “Like any rich man, like any artist, he would never do the work himself if there was an impressionable young person who could do it for him. Here is my secret, JD: I once worked for Zero Lee.”

  JD stopped dead in his tracks. “What? Really?” he asked. Kali nodded and waited for JD to catch up. “What is he like?”

  “Dying. He was brilliant, and insufferable. But now he’s dying.”

  JD’s hands itched with the urge to check this claim, and he quickly patted the disassembled phone parts resting in his pockets. “They’d be talking about it everywhere if that were true.”

  “The industry rumor mill says he’s in Scandinavia seeking medical treatment, but one of my sources says he’s already dead, and Zero Corp are keeping it under wraps until they can make a deal with his next of kin. They’ll make the announcement when it will have the smallest impact on the market.”

  “Shit,” was all JD could manage.

  Kali wrapped a hand around JD’s arm, and walked in step with him. “I used to work for Lee, creating various pieces of software for one of his start-ups. He would provide a design document, but the implementation came down to us. He claimed authorship over these programs but he had no idea how they actually worked. He was a fraud, and that is one of the reasons why I left his employ. But he owned everything I wrote, even the things he didn’t understand.”

  She paused, and turned to JD, releasing his arm. She fixed him with a look, her eyes glinting bright, translucent skin otherworldly, lips held slightly apart as though to speak, whistle, or kiss. In that second JD thought he could see her the way Red must—she was beatific.

  “I created a virus, a piece of living software unlike anything the world has ever seen, and I had to leave it behind. The loss still hurts, JD. I feel like a mother who lost her child. Lee didn’t even know what he had, but I would be damned before I told him.”

  “So you want me to break into his office and take it back?”

  “Not his office, his home. But yes.”

  JD exhaled through pursed lips. “And if I do that, you’ll pay me fifty thousand euro?”

  Kali winced, but nodded. “This software will help me take Songdo from the corporations, so it’s a small price to pay.” She looked at JD and smiled, her pale eyes ice-cold. “If everything works out, you won’t need the money; none of us will.” The words seemed well rehearsed—just like her smile.

  JD considered it. The money alone was tempting, but a chance to see Zero Lee’s home, his workspace? When he was a teen he’d dreamed of working for Lee, but he was better with his hands than he was with code.

  “Alright, I’m in,” JD said.

  “Excellent, JD. Truly, truly excellent. When Soo-hyun told me they had a brother who could help, I was hesitant, but now I see how the two of you could work well together. The job was Soo-hyun’s idea, and they’ll give you everything you need.”

  Kali motioned to a large brick building down the hill. It was separated from the rest of the school by a moat of darkness, while lights shone brightly from within.

  “Have you visited Liber before?” Kali asked as they walked toward it.

  JD shook his head. “I never go anywhere with fewer than three bars of signal.”

  Kali smiled. “You should visit again. It’s important work we’re doing here, planning and growing a new civilization. But that’s enough for now.”

  The ring of dogs broke apart and sat alert on the cracked cement outside the detached building. Kali led JD up a short set of stairs and stood outside twin rusted doors. JD rested a hand on the knob and Kali nodded, then she turned and walked away, escorted back to the school by nine of the dogs, while the one from the canal stayed at JD’s side.

  “Are you visiting Soo-hyun, or checking up on me?” he asked. The dog didn’t respond.

  JD pushed into the building and was struck by the noise—soundproofed doors giving way to the deafening hiss of an arc welder, and Kali’s voice blaring from a cheap digital radio. The building had been the school’s maintenance shed. Tools hung across the front wall, tr
aced by neat outlines, and desks had been brought in from the classrooms, now laden with different models of police dog in various states of disassembly, and quadcopter drones with bright green electrical tape stuck over their camera lenses. A thin mattress sat in one corner of the room, the sheets unmade, with dust and bits of wire caught within the linen canyons. The tang of solder hung in the air, accompanied by the meaty scent of old sweat.

  Soo-hyun stood at a workbench at the rear of the room, wearing a welder’s visor. They worked on a dog drone laid across the bench, its torso open, wires spread out like winter branches, nuts, bolts, screws, and solder slag littered all around it.

  When Soo-hyun noticed JD, they cut off the gas to their arc welder, placed the heavy tool down with a chank, and switched off the radio. They lifted their visor and beamed.

  “Are you in?” they asked.

  JD nodded. “Yeah, I’m in.”

  Soo-hyun dropped the visor onto the table and gave JD a hug. “I knew you’d say yes.”

  They looked down at the dog standing patiently at JD’s heel like a well-trained pet, and patted it once on the head.

  “You didn’t have to check up on me, Plato,” Soo-hyun said. “Go on back to Kali.”

  The robot bowed its cylindrical metal head slightly in response. It stood and turned before bounding out the door, leg actuators whirring sharply in the quiet space.

  “Natural language processing in a police drone?” JD said, impressed. “You told me you were tinkering out here, but this is …” He motioned around the workshop to all the disassembled dogs. “It’s a lot.”

  “It’s how I keep myself occupied. Some of the teens have made drone hunting into a vocation, so there’s always work. It keeps me centered.”

  “Do you mind?” JD asked, pointing to the dog open on Soo-hyun’s workbench. They stepped back and JD leaned in for a better look. “You didn’t tell me you worked on police dogs.”

  “You didn’t ask,” Soo-hyun said.

  JD nodded. He’d been angry with Soo-hyun for the longest time. Eventually it got to be easier not to ask what they were doing with their life, easier to just pretend there was no anger there, no connection.

  “Tektech put in for the tender to repair the police dogs, but nothing ever came of it. I always wanted to get a look inside one.”

  “All you had to do was visit,” Soo-hyun said. “They’re nasty machines until you teach them some manners.” They pulled a screwdriver from a drawer in the workbench and held it by the head, tapping the rubber handle on the robot’s hip flexor. “Basic movement and motor functions are the same as we had in the warehouse, more or less. Where dogs get interesting is here,” they said, dropping the tool onto the bench and pulling away half of the dog’s skull, their fingers tipped with grime-blacked nails.

  They parted two lots of power cabling and their fingers disappeared inside the cranial cavity. They reached around blindly and continued: “Before you can reprogram them, you want to remove the storage and start from scratch.” They grunted with this last word and pulled their hand free.

  Soo-hyun held a standard storage cube—burnished steel casing twelve millimeters a side. One of the faces was dotted with small holes like the six of a die. They dropped it into JD’s hand.

  “Got every police rule and procedure in there, plus records of every day it spent on the job.”

  JD tried to give the datacube back, but Soo-hyun closed his hand around it.

  “Keep it. Stick it inside a quadcopter drone and watch it try and pull over speeding auto-trucks.” Soo-hyun grinned. They took the screwdriver from the bench and handed that to JD too.

  “What’s this for?” JD asked.

  “Happy birthday.”

  “My birthday was months ago.”

  “And I didn’t get you anything. It’s a LOX-Recess screwdriver. If you ever get a chance to open up a dog, you’re going to need one of those.”

  “Don’t you need it?”

  “I’ve got a dozen of them littered around here.” Soo-hyun squeezed JD’s shoulder. “Come on, take a seat.”

  They motioned to two stools, and JD groaned as he dropped onto the low seat, struggling to ignore the ache in his knee. Soo-hyun reached into a cooler beside the chair and produced two bottles of unlabeled beer. They tossed one to JD and he caught it.

  JD twisted the lid off his beer and took a sip; it wasn’t good beer, but it was cold, and it was free.

  “What do you think of the place?”

  JD raised his eyebrows. “It’s, uh, cozy.”

  “It’s a shithole,” Soo-hyun said.

  JD nodded, and they both smiled. “At least you don’t have to share the workshop with anyone else. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “There you go then, that’s something,” JD said. “You really like it out here?”

  “It’s quieter. I’m quieter. I fucked up, y’know,” they said, pointing to JD’s knee with their beer. “Liber is good for me.”

  “You can’t hide here forever.”

  Soo-hyun shrugged. “Songdo will always be waiting for me, but for now I’m happy.”

  “Alright,” JD said. “Kali said you’d give me the details of this job?”

  “I’ve already put the file together. I’ll make you a copy.” Soo-hyun walked to an old rig asleep in the corner, and whacked the mechanical keyboard to life. They pointed to a yellow envelope on a workbench by the door. “That’s your down payment; two thousand for expenses. Don’t give Red an excuse to come looking for it, hyung.”

  “I wouldn’t give him the pleasure,” JD said as he wandered over to the bench. He swept up the cash-laden envelope and slipped it into his back pocket in one smooth movement.

  Soo-hyun worked at their rig in silence for a minute or two, while JD drank his beer. Another dog drone walked in through the open door and bumped into Soo-hyun’s leg, shaking its rear half though it had no tail to wag. They patted it on the head and glanced at JD.

  “Might have gone overboard on the canine subroutines with this one.”

  JD smiled. “Nah, it’s cute.”

  “I’ve got another present for you,” Soo-hyun said. “Check the fridge. Parcel wrapped in white paper. It’s all yours.”

  The fridge was tucked away in the back corner of the room, half-hidden behind a mound of scrap metal and drone parts. JD opened the fridge door to a noisy hum, and the faint smell of mold. It was empty but for a single package in waxed paper on the middle tray. He took it and held it up to his nose. Salty.

  “It’s bacon,” Soo-hyun said.

  “What?” JD said. He almost dropped it in shock.

  “One of the residents here used to be a butcher. Killed Quincy last week, and cured her. I put some aside for your mom’s famous fried rice.”

  “I can’t take this—”

  “You already did, now keep it.”

  JD stashed it in his backpack, and downed the rest of his beer.

  “Here you go,” Soo-hyun announced. They tossed a datacube across the room, and JD snatched it out of the air. “Everything you need for the job. Just—just don’t open it on a public network.”

  “It’s not my first illegal rodeo.”

  Soo-hyun smiled. “Take a look and we’ll compare notes tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?” JD asked, putting the cube into his pocket.

  “Planning dinner.” Soo-hyun left the workbench and crossed over to join JD, trailed by their pet drone. “Thank you for doing this. I’ll talk to you later.” They hugged briefly, and Soo-hyun ducked out through the doorway and disappeared from sight.

  JD slammed the fridge door and limped after Soo-hyun, but when he stepped outside, they were gone. A dog drone sat guard beside the entrance, visual sensors whirring as it looked up at JD’s face.

  “Where’d they go?” he asked. The dog’s only response was the quiet whir of actuators as it scanned the school grounds, tracking a group of kids playing a chaotic soccer match on a too-small stretch of flat groun
d.

  JD limped away, leaving behind the commune and all of Kali’s followers. He exhaled sharp through his nose to dislodge the clinging scent of solder, but when he breathed in he almost choked on the smell of pig shit, seeing for the first time the pen of sleeping animals beyond the commune’s vegetable patch.

  JD slotted the battery into his phone, and blinked the start-up sequence. He waited impatiently for that surge of connection—informational and physiological, feedback loops of connectivity threaded deep through his psyche.

  Once he was back online, JD made a call. “Hey, Mom. I’ve got a present for you; is it okay if I come around?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Soo-hyun waited on the cracked footpath outside Kali’s residence. It was the first building Kali had cleaned up and renovated with the earnings from her teachings—a three-story apartment block that housed the woman and held meeting rooms for her inner circle: Andrea, Yoo Jong-seo, Oh A-sung, Brandon “Red” Jones, Jin Sang-yeop, and Park Do-cheol.

  A cool breeze rolled in, and Soo-hyun shivered and rubbed their arms through the thick fabric of their coveralls.

  A message from Kali had brought them to the apartment block, but nothing in the text told them what to expect from the meeting. A childlike voice somewhere in the back of their head warned that they were in trouble. Sent to the head teacher for disciplinary action. It had been too long since their school days for the fear to emerge so vividly from their subconscious, and yet it had.

  They’d been so good lately.

  Soo-hyun let their head fall back, and they took in the night sky. Soo-hyun had always lived under that light-stained sky, despite false memories of vivid starlight implanted into their mind by film, TV, and social media. Still, Soo-hyun found a particular sort of beauty in the image—human civilization so bright it blotted the sky itself.

  The front door to Kali’s building opened with a quiet squeal, and Andrea stood in the gap, her cherubic face lit from beneath by the tablet she always carried flat across her arm.

  “What the fuck are you doing out here? She’s waiting for you.”

  “The fuck did you just say?” Soo-hyun asked.