Repo Virtual

by Corey J. White

  The girl rolled her eyes and sneered. “This is a bullshit-free zone. If you want to come inside and find out why Kali picked you to join her inner circle, you’ll need to adjust your tiny clouded mind to some quote-unquote harsh fucking language. Now, do you want to come in, or do you want to fuck the fuck off?”

  Soo-hyun’s heart thumped hard in their chest. The inner circle. They shrugged with the clatter and tink of their many necklaces. “I’m ready. Let’s go.” They pushed inside, past Kali’s personal assistant and mini-doppelganger.

  Andrea slammed the door shut, and it took a few seconds for Soo-hyun’s eyes to adjust to the dark. The building’s first floor had been cleared out during the renovation—an open space but for a small kitchen in the rear corner and the load-bearing columns spaced evenly throughout. The scent of artificial cinnamon hung heavy in the air, a product of the candles that burned and flickered along shelves that lined the walls. The floor was littered with throw pillows and blankets, like a child’s sleepover that had never been tidied up.

  Soo-hyun followed Andrea up a steep staircase, away from the sweet cloying scent and the dim lighting. The smell on the second floor was of harsh antiseptics, and the landing opened onto a small boardroom. Kali and her inner circle sat around a black table, lit brightly from above with humming fluorescent tubes. Kali sat on an ornate, carved wooden throne, cushioned in velvet. The others sat on plastic chairs. Kali stood and motioned for Soo-hyun to take the chair at the far end of the table, while Andrea sat at her right hand.

  “I thought you would never join us,” Kali said, with a smile tugging at her lips. “You wouldn’t have been the first to respond to the call of enlightenment with fear and trepidation.”

  “No, it’s not that at all,” Soo-hyun said, too quickly, as they sat down, “I was just waiting for someone to open the door.”

  “Always waiting, never doing. That is the problem with so many people.” Kali let her eyes drift across the table before landing on Red, seated at her left, cracking his knuckles, unable to sit still. “Did you wait for someone to open the door, Red?”

  “Fuckin’ kicked it in,” he said.

  “You thought I was being attacked, and in a way I was. I was attacking myself.” Kali put a foot on the throne, and lifted her gray dress, revealing more and more of her long, pale legs until, just past her knee, the white skin gave way to stark black ink: a circle on her inner thigh. “I tattooed myself. I was determined to draw a perfect circle on my skin, with no guidelines, no stencil. I started small, and when the circle proved uneven, I would draw it larger and larger. I would have covered my whole leg in that quest for perfection, but Red stopped me. Found me screaming in frustration at my own failings. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was teaching me an important lesson: perfection is not something we attain in this skin or on it.”

  She dropped her foot to the floor and the dress fell with it, covering her flesh once more. She sat on her throne.

  “When I finally stopped myself, I could still feel the tattoo gun buzzing in my hand; a phantom vibration.” She closed her eyes and clenched her fist loosely in front of her face. “I can still feel it. I can still hear the steady buzz of the machine.”

  Kali opened her eyes and stared at Soo-hyun, the pale blue of them reaching down the long table, as though there were only the two of them, everything else fell away.

  “Do you know why people began to tattoo themselves?” Kali asked.

  Soo-hyun tried to speak but found their mouth dry. They licked their lips quickly and shook their head.

  “We needed to dominate our totemic animals,” Kali said. “We could worship them, or we could hunt them; eat their flesh and wear their skins. But these acts were only temporary—the flesh and skin would pass. By burning their bones and making ink from the charcoal, we could trap the animals, the spirits, the totems, beneath our skin. But we didn’t stop there.

  “Our vanquished enemies, our dead lovers, our lost children, all these people could be held forever beneath the skin. We can take their bodies, their power, and insert it into our own selves, one needle prick at a time.”

  Kali held her hand out to Andrea, and the young girl placed a small glass pot onto her palm, the ink inside so dark it seemed to absorb all the light in the room so that the jar was the only thing Soo-hyun could focus on.

  “This is my mother,” Kali said. “She birthed me, she loved me, she raised me, and she failed me. Our parents always fail us, and we are bound to fail them if we ever wish to become our own people. They have children to continue their line, their name, their genes, and the most important thing we can do is burn their line, lose their name, and mold their genes into something unrecognizable.”

  Kali placed the jar down on the table with a clack that resounded in the silence.

  “Soo-hyun,” she said, “I’ve called you here tonight because we are at the dawn of the next age of life on Earth, the age of machines. I’m not talking about some distant future; I’m talking about now, today. I’m talking about the fruition of these plans that are already in place.

  “You’ve been instrumental in my planning—by getting your brother to join us, and by putting together the data he will need to help us steal our future. But there will be more to come. People will be hurt. People may die. I will take responsibility for the pain we must cause, but I cannot do it all on my own.”

  Kali stood from her seat and walked around the table, all eyes following her as she approached Soo-hyun. She stood behind them, and gently placed a hand on their shoulders.

  “Soo-hyun, your brother is not a believer, but we need him.”

  “Don’t fuckin’ need him,” Red muttered.

  Soo-hyun felt Kali’s breath on their neck as the woman exhaled slowly. “Red,” Kali said eventually, “you would see us start a war without our greatest weapon. There will be no bloodshed unless I order it. Understood?”

  Red lowered his head and mumbled at the table.

  “Answer me clearly.”

  “Yes, Kali,” Red said.

  “Soo-hyun, will you be able to keep your brother on track, keep him focused on the task at hand? Will you make sure he cooperates?”

  “Yes, Kali.”

  “There’s something else I need from you.”

  Soo-hyun cleared their throat. “What is it?”

  “You spend so much of your time tinkering inside your workshop. You take the machines that Zero would use against us, and you make them our eyes, you make them our protectors and our pets.”

  “I do what I can,” Soo-hyun said.

  “It’s not enough.”

  Soo-hyun dropped their head, brow furrowed as they stared at their hands, resting in their lap.

  “I’m not admonishing you,” Kali said. “It’s not your work that’s lacking, it’s your self. You’ve bottled something away and hidden it. I want to change that, Soo-hyun, if you’ll let me.”

  Soo-hyun nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “The rest of you know your parts,” Kali said. “I will speak to you tomorrow.”

  The others all got up from the table, their chairs scraping loudly over the tile floor. Kali pressed her hands together in front of her face, bowing minutely to each of her followers as they bowed to her and left.

  Kali stood in silence, and Soo-hyun listened as the others trudged downstairs and filtered outside. The building door slammed closed, silencing the sounds of the commune that had briefly drifted up to greet them. Kali squeezed Soo-hyun’s shoulder. “I need you to come with me.”

  She walked around the table, pausing to collect the jar of inky void before continuing down a bright hallway, deeper into the converted apartment building.

  Soo-hyun trailed Kali, the woman’s bare feet silent, Soo-hyun’s heavy boots loud and clumsy by comparison. Fear and apprehension slowed their tread. They had never before been alone with Kali, had never felt the full force of the teacher’s attention.

  “Here we are,” Kali said. She stopped at a door p
ainted glossy black, light refracting off its surface in a hundred vertical lines. She opened the door and motioned for Soo-hyun to enter.

  Inside, the smell of antiseptic was stronger. A counter lined the opposite wall, topped with bottles of liquid soap and disinfectant, and a bulky plastic case. A leather office chair sat beside a high, adjustable bed, its black leather covered in plastic wrap.

  “What is this?” Soo-hyun asked.

  Kali crossed over to the plastic case and opened it, revealing a tattoo gun lying on a bed of gray foam. It was a scaffold of machined steel holding two barrels that made up the motor, and other fierce pieces of metal Soo-hyun couldn’t name. A long steel shaft like an industrial pen emerged from one end, with a thick hunk of plastic molded with finger grooves.

  “One cannot join the inner circle, without an inner circle. A tattoo on your inner thigh.”

  Soo-hyun swayed on their feet, chest tight with fear. “The others all have one?”

  “Even Andrea,” Kali said.

  “You tattooed her?”

  “She did her own.” Kali smiled. “Though I admit, I had to clean it up for her.”

  “I don’t have any tattoos,” Soo-hyun said.

  “That will make this one all the more special.”

  “I always wanted one, but it seemed …” Soo-hyun hesitated. “Like one step too far.”

  “You’re holding back, Soo-hyun. What are you afraid of?”

  “Have you ever lost control?” Soo-hyun asked. “Gotten so caught up in your excitement or rage that you disappeared?”

  Kali shook her head only slightly. Her questing blue eyes told Soo-hyun to continue.

  “It’s the greatest feeling in the world,” Soo-hyun said, breathily.

  “Then why are you so afraid?” Kali asked.

  “I don’t trust myself. It’s so easy to lose control, to do something you’ll regret later, to hurt someone you love.”

  “So you toil away in the workshop alone because you’re afraid you might hurt someone.”

  Soo-hyun nodded.

  “I will let you in on a secret, Soo-hyun: life is pain. You will hurt people, and you will be hurt. This isn’t shameful, isn’t something to be avoided at all costs. It is proof that you’re alive. When is the last time you truly felt alive?”

  Soo-hyun thought for a few seconds, then shook their head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve trapped yourself in the workshop because you’re afraid of living. Because you think that who you are is somehow wrong, that you are somehow broken. You are broken, Soo-hyun. We all are.”

  Soo-hyun’s chest jolted with a sob they quickly stifled. They felt seen, understood, for the first time in entirely too long.

  “I appreciate everything you do for Liber, but I no longer need the Soo-hyun that hacks together drones in their workshop. I need someone with rage in their heart, I need bravery, I need soldiers. I need the Soo-hyun that threw homemade bombs at police dogs during the Sinsong riots. Where has that Soo-hyun gone?”

  Before Soo-hyun could answer, Kali spoke louder: “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know. You know because you buried them. You buried them deep down because you’re too afraid to let them live. But I need them. You need them.”

  Soo-hyun nodded and sniffed, their eyes burned with building tears.

  “If you’re not ready for this, if you’re not ready to be close to me, I can’t force it. You have to want this, you have to work for it. You have to be ready to dig deep and find your old reckless self, your true self. The tattoo means you will never be alone, you will always be connected to me, and all the others. You have to accept the tattoo for the gift that it is.”

  Soo-hyun swallowed a hollow pain in the back of their throat. “Okay, I’ll do it,” they said in a breathy whisper, worried that if they spoke normally their voice would break.

  “I knew you would,” Kali said. “Welcome.” She sat on the leather chair, opened a cupboard beneath the counter, and retrieved a pair of black latex gloves, a tiny plastic cup, and an eyedropper stained black with use. She carefully unscrewed the lid on the ink pot, and using the eyedropper, decanted a couple of drops into the plastic cup. “You’re going to need to strip.”

  “Strip?” Soo-hyun said.

  “Sorry, I should have warned you not to wear coveralls.” Kali connected the tattoo gun to a small box that sat inside the cupboard, cables joining it to a power point and a flat round pedal on the floor. She looked up, and Soo-hyun still hadn’t undressed. Kali sighed. “I don’t expect you to do anything that I wouldn’t,” she said.

  Kali stood and, without hesitation, lifted her dress over her head, before dropping it in the corner of the room. She was naked but for a pair of gray briefs, her skin white enough for Soo-hyun to see the red, blue, and purple of her veins meandering beneath the surface.

  Soo-hyun stared, eyes shocked wide.

  Kali made no effort to cover her breasts, or conceal the different tattoos that marked her flesh like ancient hieroglyphs or the forgotten sigils of some dead god. She sat back down, and continued working at the tattoo machine. “I’m not even looking, Soo-hyun; take your time.”

  Soo-hyun exhaled. Without thinking, before they could change their mind, they pulled down the zip on the front of their coveralls, listening to the plastic sound of the teeth being pulled apart. They took their arms from the sleeves and pushed the rough canvas fabric down past their hips, letting it pool on the floor at their feet. They kept on their underpants and a T-shirt, embarrassed by the stains that marred the armpits.

  Kali glanced up, and patted the leather bed. “Take a seat.”

  Soo-hyun did as they were told, stretching out across the plastic wrap that clung to their skin, scritching as they peeled their limbs away, repositioning their legs until they could sit comfortably. With their right leg bent at the knee, and their inner thigh pointed up toward the ceiling, Soo-hyun tried not to focus on the stretch marks and blemishes, the fine dark hair they had never bothered to shave.

  “There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” Kali said, her attention fixed on the needles blurring at the tip of the gun as she hit the pedal and the gun buzzed. “Your police dogs—can they be piloted?”

  “Piloted?”

  “They patrol our community, and they help to keep us safe from outsiders, but I need more from them. They’re marked like police units, they could go out into the city and work with impunity. We just need to be able to control them.”

  “The first generation of dog drones were strictly user-operated. It was only after a couple of years of in-the-field training that the machine learning algorithms could grasp the necessary duties and responsibilities,” Soo-hyun said, nerves speeding the words from their mouth.

  “So that’s a yes?”

  “I don’t know exactly how I’d do it, but it must be possible.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “I have no idea,” Soo-hyun said. “A few days? A week?”

  “Alright. I’ll get you whatever you need to make it work.” Kali dipped the needles into the ink and hit the pedal, coating them in black. “I would tell you this isn’t going to hurt, but I hate lying.”

  Soo-hyun lay back, focused their attention on the bank of lights overhead, fluorescents cycling at fifty hertz, their flicker barely perceptible. Something cold touched their leg and Soo-hyun’s body lurched. They looked down to find Kali wiping a spot on their inner leg, disinfectant cool against their skin.

  “Just calm down,” Kali said. “Breathe slowly. In for four seconds, out for four seconds, nice and steady.”

  Soo-hyun inhaled, and closed their eyes. They squeezed them shut tight when the gun buzzed again, steady this time, sound like a huge mechanical wasp hovering over their skin. The wasp touched down, and a pain like burning spread across the soft skin of their thigh.

  * * *

  When her people gathered in throngs, Kali spoke slowly, wi
th authority gathered from every higher power she cared to mention. Given enough time she mentioned them all.

  Her detractors claimed her pilgrimage was made of lies rather than steps, but the woman born to the name Madelyn Danekas truly traveled across the Indian subcontinent. See the QR codes of her boarding passes, verify each pixel of the photos she uploaded to the cloud. They are all still here.

  She was there. That much cannot be denied.

  She traveled through India reading books on Hubbard, Asahara, Jones, Osho. She learned ways to lead. She learned the lies people wanted most desperately to believe. She learned the careful manipulations needed to keep herself separate from her followers, above them.

  Madelyn Danekas traveled to India with a suitcase full of books, but Kali Magdalene returned. A self-made woman, the product of immaculate conception.

  Madelyn Danekas’s mother was alive and well, in Burbank, California. Her bones had not been reduced to ash, the ash made into ink. She was always among the first to like Kali’s posts and videos, and she remained a recurring monthly donor to her daughter’s organization, no matter how often Kali claimed she was dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The fry pan slammed down on the steel stovetop. JD twitched awake at the noise, eyes wide to the alien surrounds, brain struggling to catch up to his sensorium. He rolled over and felt the threading of a throw pillow rub against the side of his head. He sat upright on his mom’s couch, face to face with his reflection desaturated in the black glass of the TV hanging on the opposite wall—two days’ growth casting a dark shadow across his cheeks, faded old T-shirt loose around his neck. He pulled his jeans on as he stood. A sharp sizzle from the kitchen called to him like a siren song. He shuffled through, yawning.

  It was a tiny kitchen by Hollywood suburban standards, but large for a single-bedroom apartment. A toaster and microwave were shoved into one corner, collecting dust behind a battered rice cooker. The cupboards were finished in a grainy white laminate, stained with old finger smudges that wouldn’t come off, no matter how many times Gaynor scrubbed at them. Gaynor stood at the stove in an old satin robe, staring intently at the bacon curling in the pan.