by Axie Oh
“If she’s only part of the program, why hasn’t she shot both of us already?”
This truth grabs Alex’s sense of logic. We face the girl, seeing that she’s lowered her gun.
“Kill me,” she says.
I blink, thinking I’ve misheard her. “What?”
Alex picks up the gun from the floor. “If I kill you, will you die?”
“Alex . . . ,” I warn.
“I’m already dead,” she answers.
I pause, not understanding. I can’t detect a lie in the blunt tone of her voice.
Alex’s eyes narrow. “Are you taking a test somewhere else?”
“I am not.”
“Do you want me to kill you? If you respond in the affirmative, I will shoot you.”
“Yes.”
He lifts the gun.
“Alex!” I shout, rushing him in the side. I hear the deafening sound of a gunshot.
Alex stumbles into the holographic cage. I whip around, scramble to the body of the girl, who is falling. Before I can reach her, she flickers with static, suspended centimeters above the ground.
I stop and look down at the erratic, pulsating image of her, the slow process of a simulated person canceling out of the program.
“You’re not real,” I say slowly. “You haven’t died.”
Alex crouches beside me. He has a regulation knife in one hand. He reaches for her chest, takes the red cord, and cuts it.
Immediately I feel myself being sucked out of the simulation, back to reality. Soon the shadows will creep close enough to pull me into unconsciousness.
Whether the girl’s simulation feels pity for me (a strange thought) or whether I make up her response as my conscious dims, a few last words brighten my mind before I black out completely.
A person who doesn’t exist can’t die.
09
Rain
I wake to the sound of shouting. Jessica slaps Alex hard across the face. He doesn’t try to dodge it. He takes the bite of the slap with his eyes open.
“How could you?” she screams. “You lied about the test, and you lied about the percentages, and now Seungpyo’s dead.”
I look across the room. Seungpyo’s body now rests on the hard floor of the simulation room. Seungri is on his knees beside him, his back turned from us.
His shoulders are shaking.
Tsuko has followed through with the rules. He sits at the regulators’ table, calm, dictating some last notes to his mobile tablet.
I climb out of the pod. One of the cameramen corners me, talking into my ear. I ignore him and make my way to the door.
“Alex Kim and Lee Jaewon,” Tsuko says, not looking up from his notes. “Report to the Tower in Gangnam for your official placement, Monday, February eleventh, 2199 at 12:30:00 KTC.”
I don’t wait to hear Jessica’s or Seungri’s assignments. I exit the room.
Sela waits outside in the circular common area, alone. Our test got out an hour later than the others, and the rest of the students have gone home.
“I thought you were very brave,” Sela says. She bends at the stomach, bowing. “Thank you for taking care of me in the simulation. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be alive.”
I shake my head, not sure what to say. An anguished cry issues from inside the room. Seungri.
I turn away from Sela’s gaze. “I have to go,” I say. I can’t be here right now. Everything’s so messed up. This school. This world.
Me, too, I think.
* * *
■ ■ ■
It’s dark when I exit the gates of the academy. Storm clouds loom over the horizon, and the harsh winter winds sweep through the city. I stuff my hands deep into the pockets of my slacks. I just spent hours in an unreality, only to wake up to this one — a far cry from welcome. If there are stars out, I can’t see them through the black clouds.
When the rain finally decides to drop, I want to be out of this city and in my own. I’m tired of being in places where I don’t belong.
“Lee Jaewon?”
A thickset man leans against the outer wall of the academy, his sunglasses already wet with the first droplets of rain.
When I don’t answer, the man pulls his phone out of his pocket, holding the screen up in front of his face. He must have a photo of me, because he looks from the screen to me several times before placing it back in his pocket. “I have something for you.”
“I don’t want it,” I say, brushing past him.
He reaches inside his coat and pulls out an envelope. “Come on, kid.” The man holds the envelope out in the air between us. There’s a scent to the envelope’s paper — pomegranate blossoms. “You don’t even know what’s in it.”
“Have you looked?” I ask.
He nods slowly, giving nothing away. I can’t read his eyes behind his dark lenses.
I think briefly of leaving, but there’s a betrayal of hope that creeps into my heart. I reach for the flap of the envelope, tipping it open slightly. Maybe it’s a letter. Maybe it’s an address. Maybe it’s anything but what’s actually there.
A wad of cold cash.
I swallow my disappointment, put my hand back in its pocket. “Tell her I don’t need it.”
“She’ll worry,” the man says.
It takes me awhile to respond. What he’s said, it’s just not true. “You’re more persistent than others she’s hired.”
He shrugs. “Your mother pays well.”
I nod, understanding. “You pocket the money and say you gave it to me.”
“What if she — ”
“She won’t ask.”
The man sighs, and then slides the envelope back inside his coat. “Is there anything you’d like me to say to her?”
I grimace. He must be feeling generous. Rich in money. Rich in thoughts.
“There’s nothing.”
I cross the street, trying to put distance between us. A traitorous thought gnaws at the back of my mind — if my mother gave him the money from her own hands, then he’d have seen her. He could describe her to me. Does she still have the small mole beneath her right eye? Or did she get it removed, like she said she always wanted? Does her smile still take up her whole face, like the moon at its brightest? Or does she never smile anymore?
I stop halfway down the opposite sidewalk. My hands are fists by my sides. Maybe I should ask him. It wouldn’t hurt to ask him. It’ll help make clear the image I have of her — an old image, a memory of her. I look, but the hired man is gone. He’s called over a cab and fled.
At least he didn’t stay long enough to see me turn around.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I’m not surprised when I step off the bridge and see Young standing beneath the bridge cart ajumma’s tarp roof. He’s downing odeng and making the ajumma giggle like a schoolgirl.
“You’ve been cheating on me,” I say to her as I approach, taking a place next to Young beneath the tarp. She holds out a stick of odeng over the vats of steaming broth, and I accept it with both hands.
“He says he’s a friend of yours. You didn’t tell me you had such a handsome friend. You’ve been stingy with me.”
She’s too taken with Young to see the marks on my face, the evidence of my earlier fight with Kim Jobi. I’m grateful for this. I don’t want her to worry.
Young laughs at the ajumma’s words. “Ajumeoni,” he says, pouting, “Jaewon’s a bad kid, isn’t he? He’s been selfish. If I’d known there was such a beautiful ajumeoni here, who cooks like an angel, I’d have visited every chance I could get.”
I choke on the odeng, coughing into my fist. “You leave a bad taste in my mouth with lines like that. No wonder you don’t have a girl.”
“You don’t know that I don’t have a girl,” Young says, turning his cap backward and cr
ossing his arms.
“Do you?” the ajumma asks, chuckling at his exaggerated frown.
Young drops his shoulders with a dramatic sigh. “Girls just don’t understand me.” He pauses. I can see the moment a new thought comes to him, his mock-frown turning into a wicked grin. “Then again,” he says, his teeth glinting, “you’re not a girl. You’re a woman.”
“Ya!” the ajumma shouts, swatting a hand at his head. He ducks to avoid it.
I shake my head. “Stop fooling around.” We bow to the ajumma. I left my motorbike at my apartment, so I head home on foot. Young follows me out.
Neither of us speaks as we walk away from the food cart, our hands in our pockets, our eyes on the broken ground. As we pass beneath a lit lamp, I hear Young suck in a breath. “Shit, Jaewon. Did you get in a fight?”
I don’t say anything. I didn’t actually do any fighting.
“Please tell me the other guy got it worse.”
“I didn’t touch him.”
Young shakes his head. “I don’t believe it. There’s no way you let some punk get the best of you. That’s not the Lee Jaewon I know.”
I flinch.
“I mean,” he says quickly, “that’s not like you. You’ve too much pride.”
“People change.”
Young quiets, and I let out a breath, the warmth of it visible in the air. I’m being an asshole, I know. Why am I like this? Who am I trying to hurt? I look at Young.
His eyes are on the deserted street stretching ahead of us, most of the buildings lightless but for one or two doorways seeping out warmth. He looks tired. There are dark shadows under his eyes, a fresh wound on the side of his cheek. Has he been fighting? Who has he been fighting? How could Ro Jinwoon and Jeon Daeho let someone close enough to hurt him?
I turn away.
“Lee Jaewon?”
“I’m listening.”
“The assassination attempt on the Director, it’s all over the Net. NSK soldiers have already interrogated the other dancers in the assassin’s troupe. They were all UKL agents and sympathizers.”
The UKL. The United Korean League.
So it got out, the news. The Director must be furious. A rash independence group gaining attention in Neo Seoul won’t look good for the NSK. It’ll look like the government doesn’t have full control.
“The girl herself was a new recruit. She’d found out last week that two of her sisters had been killed in combat overseas. Her attempt on the Director’s life was more reactive than anything.”
I remember how the girl had looked on the floor of the courtyard — young and afraid.
I force away the image. “What about Sela from C’est La Vie? She could be implicated for hiring her.”
Young shakes his head. “I doubt it. The Director was seen tonight having dinner with the CEO of her entertainment company. It pays to be rich.”
I grimace at Young’s turn of phrase. It pays both figuratively and literally.
“Are you sure it’s okay for you to go to that school?” Young asks. “Won’t they recheck your papers? With the UKL making trouble in the city, there are bound to be more crackdowns in Neo Seoul. If you need new papers, I know a guy.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I had a good forger the first time around.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Young trails off. He takes his cap off, punching the inside of it. He puts it back on his head. “What about your mother? With the news of the UKL — ”
“Worry about your own family,” I say, my voice thick, the run-in with the man my mother hired still a fresh wound. She’d said she was leaving to help give me a new life. But I didn’t want a new life, not at eight years old. I wanted her.
Young shakes his head. “I don’t have a family.”
I open my mouth to contradict him — only yesterday, I’d seen the last member of his family — but he speaks before I can get a word out. “My father died when your father died. My mother left when your mother left.”
I hold his gaze. “You’ve experienced a lot of loss in your life.”
“I have.”
A drizzle of rain hits my shoulder.
“Stop this.” My voice comes out tired, ragged. I begin to walk away, but he grabs my arm.
“Jaewon-ah . . .”
“Let me go.”
He doesn’t.
Let me go, Young.
I’ll never tell him this, but today, when Seungpyo died, what upset me most wasn’t that he died. It’s that he’d died in front of his brother. And I’d thought, in the moment of his death, how it’d be hard to go on if Park Young had died in front of me. And then I thought of how Park Taesung could have killed me that night, two years ago. And how Young was the one who would have let it happen.
Young lets go.
He stays on the street corner, his gaze turned east toward Hongdae, the low glow of the neon signs lighting his face in eerie fluorescence.
I walk most of the way to my apartment, only running the last few minutes when the rain begins to pour from the sky.
10
The Tower
Our assignments don’t start for another week. There’s a funeral service for Seungpyo in Jamsil that I don’t attend. Neither does Alex. Seungri’s father pulls him from school and sends him abroad to study at a military academy in Neo Tokyo.
I continue my normal school and part-time job schedule that week. As I go through the motions, I think of Seungri, wondering if I’ll ever meet him on the battlefield. The Neo States of Japan and Korea are allied in the war, but I wouldn’t blame Seungri if he should look upon my face one day and see an enemy, someone who won a placement on a test while he lost his brother.
Jessica passes Alex and me in the hall. We don’t speak.
Later I find out she’s received a placement in the NSK’s defense cabinet, one of the more lucrative positions available. I’m glad for her. Even if she’s lost a boyfriend in Alex, at least she’s gained something more permanent.
Bora gets a placement working in supply inventory for the navy fleet, which satisfies her mother because Minwoo also gets placed in the adjoining navy training corps as a junior officer.
After school on Friday, Bora pulls me into one of the physical education supply storage rooms that she’s converted into a private design studio. After she’s completed her military service, she hopes to pursue fashion design. She bribed one of the janitors with cash to overlook her use of the storage room. And she’s bribed me with food to be her fitting model.
I take a bite of a ham-and-cheese sandwich, standing shirtless on a pile of gym mats with half a jacket dangling from my shoulder. She waves a large pin in the air, and I eye it nervously.
“My mother keeps on goading me to ‘secure’ Minwoo, whatever that means. Does she want me to get pregnant or something?”
I refrain from commenting.
“I mean,” Bora continues, “I get that he’s, like, super rich or whatever, and that if I married him I’d be set for life, but God, let me count the ways my life would suck. I’d have to schmooze with the elites of society, all those stuck-up, judgmental old men and women, and I’d have to be nice about it. I couldn’t have a career that his family didn’t approve of, and I couldn’t do anything to besmirch his family name.”
“You couldn’t,” I say loyally. “You could only increase their status.”
Bora lights up, and in her excitement, jabs me with the pin. “What if Minwoo finds a mistress?” she groans. “The new pop star after Sela, or maybe even Sela herself. I’d feel so pathetic.”
“He wouldn’t. And we’re talking about Minwoo.” I don’t think Minwoo has ever spoken to a girl besides Bora.
“I know,” Bora agrees. “All of what I’ve been saying is conjecture, and it doesn’t even really matter in the long run. I couldn’t marry him because I’d destroy him. I just fee
l like I’d walk all over him, you know?”
“Well,” I say, “at least you’re aware.”
I get another jab, this time on purpose.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Monday is the start of our senior assignments. After class, I meet up with Alex outside the school gates. One of the incentives to join his team was his promise that he’d cover any assignment or transportation fees that might arise, and Alex, for all his many faults, never goes back on his word.
The courtyard buzzes with seniors waiting to move off to their assignments. The majority of them are taking cabs or the Skyway, a network of bullet trains in the sky.
I wave to Bora and Minwoo as they hop into a cab outside school. They’ll head out to Incheon, where a naval port sits on the Yellow Sea.
Behind me, there’s a chorus of oohs and aahs as a sleek imported car swerves up the streets outside the academy. Its doors lift open to reveal an empty leather-cushioned seating area. Alex walks over, signaling me to follow. I slide behind him into a car worth more than I could make in several lifetimes. The doors shut, and Alex plugs his phone into the jack.
“Athena, wake up,” he says aloud in English. I raise an eyebrow. Sometimes I forget that Alex was born in the American Neo States. English is his first language.
“Good afternoon, Alex,” says a distinctly female computerized voice from the speakers.
“Take us to the Tower.”
“Confirming destination: the Neo State of Korea’s Tower of Operations in Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Neo Seoul. Arrival time is 12:24:47 KST.”
The car moves smoothly onto the main streets of the Grid, picking up speed as we head deeper into the city.
In Old Seoul, roads are paved with prewar cement, and a driver determines the speed and direction of a vehicle.
In Neo Seoul, vehicles on the Grid are electro-magnetized, allowing for self-driving vehicles. Cars are programmed with a destination and given an optimal speed in which there is a less-than-.001-percent chance of collision or accident. The only cases of accidents occur when a foreign object disrupts the Grid — a drunk accidentally wandering off the sidewalk — but even then, the Grid corrects itself, compensating for unforeseen incidents.
