Repo Virtual

by Corey J. White

  “Morning, Mom,” JD said.

  She grunted in response, not bothering to look at him.

  “What?” he asked. His brain chugged slowly toward a guess, dangerously undercaffeinated. “I didn’t steal it.”

  Gaynor raised her eyebrows and threw one hand up dismissively.

  “I promise, Mom.” He crossed two feet of linoleum flooring and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Where did it come from?” She bit off the words. Still she hadn’t taken her eyes off the meat.

  JD swallowed, his tongue drowning in saliva at the fatty, salty smell. “Soo-hyun gave it to me. Someone at Liber killed the pig and cured the meat.”

  “Probably diseased.”

  “Then don’t eat any,” JD said, and immediately regretted talking back. His stomach lurched, either in anxiety or bacon-induced hunger. He chose to believe it was the latter, forcing back memories of the shouting matches that had punctuated his adolescence. “Do you want coffee?”

  “Tea,” Gaynor said. She pushed the curling meat to one side of the pan and cracked three eggs into the middle. The translucent albumen ran across the oil-slicked pan and quickly turned white, bubbles forming in the hardening substance. JD set the kettle to boil, then took a coffee mug and one of his mom’s chipped china cups from the cupboard. He dropped a green tea bag into the cup and heaped two teaspoons of dirt-colored “coffee” powder into his mug, along with three teaspoons of raw sugar to balance out the bitter taste.

  He switched the kettle off when he heard the first sign of simmering, and poured water into both cups—not so hot it would burn Gaynor’s tea, but warm enough to dissolve his coffee and sugar. He put them down on the small kitchenette table, black liquid slopping out of his cup and running hot down his knuckles. Gaynor carried two breakfast-laden plates over and sat opposite JD. She hadn’t bothered to toast the bread, which was slightly stale but still served to soak up oil, bacon grease, and egg yolk when JD pierced the yellow globes.

  He ate hungrily, unable to slow down even when the hot oil burned his tongue.

  “How is Soo-hyun, then?” Gaynor asked coolly. Her concerned scowl didn’t stop her from eating, the knife and fork held precisely, as though it were a formal meal and not breakfast with her son.

  JD shrugged and chewed. After he swallowed, he said, “They seem happy.”

  Gaynor pointed at JD’s plate with her knife. “Good bacon? Been so long since I cooked it.”

  “It’s great, Mum.” JD flashed her a smile, then stabbed the last piece of meat with his fork and stuck the whole strip in his mouth, chewing slowly.

  “I’d rather you were spending time with Troy. He’s a much better influence. Probably be tenured before Soo-hyun gets another job.”

  JD’s head dropped. He chewed, swallowed. He opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t.

  “You’re happier when you’re with him, Julius. And I want you to be happy.”

  JD sighed. “I know, Mom.” He shifted on the plastic chair and pulled the envelope of cash from his back pocket. He took the bulk of the money from the envelope and slid it across the table. “That’s for your rent.”

  “You don’t have to keep doing this,” Gaynor said quietly.

  “How much did my hospital stay cost you?”

  Gaynor sighed. She looked away from the money as though it were tainted, but she covered it with her hand. A moment later it had disappeared into the pocket of her robe. “Thank you.”

  “Thanks for breakfast.”

  * * *

  JD washed his face and bathed his pits in the bathroom sink, using a chewed fingernail to scrape the remaining sleep from the corner of his eye. The skin hung loose and black under his eyes. He could have shaved, but didn’t bother.

  He always kept fresh boxers and at least one spare T-shirt in his backpack, so he put these on before slipping back into his jeans.

  Gaynor stopped him at the door, holding the rest of the bacon in one hand and two sandwiches sealed in plastic. “I didn’t have any tomatoes, so I couldn’t make you a BLT.”

  “Did you heap the mayo on?”

  Gaynor crossed her arms over her chest and glared, but it was playful this time, with a tiny smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Of course I did.”

  “Then they’ll be amazing,” JD said. He took the sandwiches and placed them carefully into his bag. “The rest of the bacon is yours; if I take it home my roommates will just eat it all.”

  “Jules, I can’t.”

  JD ignored her protest. “Just save me some of your famous fried rice.”

  “It has been a while,” she said, looking at the paper-wrapped meat.

  “Ping me if you need anything.” He kissed her on the cheek and rushed out the front door.

  The facial recognition camera by the elevator meant JD had to take the stairs. He kept one hand on the banister to take weight off his bad knee as he descended.

  Gaynor’s apartment was one of hundreds in a tight tower complex. Lights in the corridors shone twenty-four-seven, abandoned rubbish and filthy concrete walls illuminated beneath the flickering, humming fluorescents. Gaynor—like her neighbors—rarely left the apartment. She worked random search-and-admin for cents per task—one of millions behind the algorithms that kept smart assistants and other “automated” systems running at all hours of the day and night. JD guessed half the building subsisted on that same variety of corporate freelance.

  Before falling asleep, JD had quickly scanned the files from Soo-hyun, studying the schematics and timetables as though they were a puzzle to be solved, rather than evidence of a planned crime. Without the official access he would normally receive along with a city repossession order, he’d need help bypassing the target’s security, and there was only one person he could trust with that.

  He took the phone from his pocket and checked the warehouse’s robot uptime app. Everything was green, including the Hippo repairer, but he marked himself as on-call just in case. Next, JD scrolled through his contacts, dodging around a small group of children trudging off to school with cube-shaped backpacks larger than them. He found the name he needed and hit call; the phone rang in his ear like a digital cicada.

  “Khoder, I need to talk to you. In the real.”

  Pain speared up his leg with every step, but JD couldn’t slow down. He felt like bacteria in the body of the apartment building—alien, unwanted. His heart thudded hard and already moisture gathered in his armpits.

  “I’ve got your money,” he said loudly over Khoder’s excuses. “Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll come to you.”

  * * *

  The city shook on digital frequencies as JD made his way to the Varket. Glass facades shuddered with the oscillating purr of bass-heavy beats. The music would spike, then drop, silence like held breath. When the beat returned Songdo exhaled. The sovereign city was home to countless minorities; words from a myriad of languages drifted through the air, mingling to form an indecipherable ur-tongue. Spoken Korean dominated, but in business signage, private conversation, and scattershot insults, everything was being steered toward the entropy of English, the language of globalization.

  JD diagonally crossed the intersection where the Egyptian and Ethiopian quarters met, car horns adding to the Ethiopiyawi electronica emanating from a bustling hookah bar, filled with figures in black and charcoal suits. Spice-thick cuisines battled in the air, and everywhere the flat scent of old fry oil edged with engine exhaust and heavy metal particulates. The saltwater scent, carried in on a breeze, brought small respite from the constant garbage smell of the city—green, trash-free plans abandoned when Songdo hit the first of its financial hurdles. The smell was one thing Zero Corporation couldn’t augment; otherwise they might censor the scent of Korean cooking, emanating from pojangmacha stalls and restaurants all through the city, a mouthwatering reminder that Korean culture had survived longer than any corporation, had survived thousands of years of worse than whatever Zero could do to the city.

  An AR billboard
on one side of the intersection showed the faces of criminals with outstanding warrants—jaywalkers, sexual predators, and violent gangsters, all caught on CCTV but never apprehended. On the building opposite, a video of Kali played: smiling, talking emphatically to a gathered crowd. “Find Truth,” the ad suggested, “Find Happiness,” and a link to her Livideo feed. JD shook his head and kept moving.

  Two blocks further, JD stood across from the Varket, the scarlet glow of its anachronistic neon sign calling to him. He dodged between two cars as the ground flared red beneath his steps. He let the momentum carry him past the bugzapper hum of the sign and in through the first door, into the vantablack foyer. The walls seemed infinitely distant, his steps awkward over a floor that his eyes didn’t want to see. He groped forward until his hand touched the second door; he yanked it open and stepped inside.

  The Varket was a favored hangout of hackers and hopefuls, freelance share traders, and voidwarriors; lowest ping you could find outside a corporate compound. The soundtrack droned its oppressive, beatless ambient mantras with the scratch and hiss of analogue tape, heavy enough to shroud discussion.

  JD went straight for the counter. The bartender slash barista had an asymmetrical fringe over eyes darkened by makeup or exhaustion. He wore a black cotton dress, or overly long T-shirt, stained with bleach and precisely threadbare, his ochre skin showing through in a snakeskin pattern. His prosthetic left arm rested along the back wall, plugged in and charging, blinking light reflected off a row of bourbon bottles—the kind of cheap swill you’d only drink when you had something you needed to forget.

  “What’s your poison?” he asked.

  “Coffee, black. Thanks,” JD said.

  “Not dexy? It’s cheaper.”

  “Nah, I like my teeth how they are.”

  The barista nodded and started at the espresso machine, single hand working the controls with practiced ease. Half the grounds were recycled, the other half a blight-resistant GMO strain, but it was the closest thing to real coffee that JD could afford anywhere in Songdo-dong. He had briefly considered spending some of the down payment on a cup of the real stuff, but that would have meant going out of his way. Maybe next time.

  While he waited for his drink, he turned to lean against the bar and survey the crowd, elbows jutting behind him to rest on the sticky countertop. The faint hum of hustle scraped beneath the wall of noise. Illegal wares were traded overtly in dim-lit booths, black marketeers peddling counterfeit ships, swords, and other loot to desperate gamers—best drops in any game, good for use right until your account was banned for life. Perfect for the suicidal, the terminal, the given-up. Three technicians took up an entire booth each, tools and discarded silicon splayed across the tables: desperate people approached them with ancient phones and rigs held together by thousand-mile-an-hour tape and chewed-up screws, batteries failing, processors overheating the moment they touched VR. The techs never lifted their eyes, focused solely on the body and soul of each broken machine.

  There was the dull clatter of ceramic as the barista deposited JD’s coffee. He swiped his hand over the cashpass and it beeped in acceptance.

  The barista raised an eyebrow. “Implant?”

  JD nodded.

  “Careful it doesn’t rot your arm off.”

  JD’s eyes flicked to the prosthetic along the back wall. “Is that—” The rest of the question died on his tongue as JD hesitated, unsure if it was rude to ask.

  The barista guessed anyway. “Nah,” he said; “I’m just fucking with you.”

  JD nodded toward the basement door. “Khoder in?”

  “Does the kid ever leave?”

  “Thanks.”

  JD carried his drink to the rear corner, sipping his espresso before he could spill any. He pushed through a door that led to the basement stairs and descended slowly into purple-hued, blacklit darkness. The door swung closed behind him, and the music became muffled, deadened further with each step he took below the surface. Descending beneath ground level, all JD could picture were the layers of compressed garbage on all sides—the countless tons of ocean waste that created the foundations of the city.

  Khoder’s door read the friendly tag on JD’s phone and slid open on silent apparatus. The air inside was blood-hot. Khoder reclined in a SOTA virt chair in the middle of the room, his head encased in a bulbous sphere for complete peripheral vision. His black haptic-feedback suit ran with folds like gills where it clung to the kid’s skinny frame. The door closed and an eerie silence descended on the space. The dense quiet amplified the slow thud of JD’s heart, the gurgle of his gut, and the painful click of his knee; all those sounds of the meat engine.

  Fragmented grabs from in-game fell slow across the walls—among the black of space rare spots of color drifted like machine snow. Explosions bloomed, scattered to form a leering deathmask drawn in abstract. JD shuddered despite the heat.

  “Hey, Khoder.”

  No response.

  JD counted out two hundred euro from the envelope and dropped the notes on Khoder’s chest.

  “Khoder,” JD said again. He shook his head and sat with his back against the wall and his sore leg stretched out. He finished his coffee, placed the cup down near a pile of takeout containers growing from the corner, then took his phone from his pocket and logged into VOIDWAR.

  JD held the phone close to his face to block the view of Khoder’s room, and his contex painted the in-game world over his eyes in stripped-down, third-person view. His corvette drifted in the barren solar system his home rig was slowly assembling. Far-off stars glimmered on the edges and the local sun slowly grew, a churn of pulsing light in the center of the gestation. He turned his ship to the jumpgate, and scanned his friends list to find Khoder’s location.

  He took three jumps through the galaxy’s transit system and arrived in Ertl—his mobile processor struggling to render the wide belt of asteroids and massively eroded planets of the quarry system. Just off-center, near the sun, two fleets circled one another, streaks of light filling the void between them.

  “Khoder,” JD said, stern over voice chat.

  “You sound pissed, bro,” was the kid’s curt response.

  “I’m in the room.”

  “Room?” Khoder said, sounding vague.

  JD reached an arm out and found a sticky ecoboard takeout container. He lobbed the box at Khoder; it bounced off the kid’s helmet and clattered to the floor.

  “Oh, the fucking room. Why are you here?” Khoder said, his voice betraying the very teenage resentment of meeting in the real.

  “I told you I was coming. I wanted to give you your cut from that repo job.”

  “Money transfer, bro,” Khoder said, muffled murmur coming from inside his helmet while his voice came clear through the game.

  JD hesitated, surveillance vigilance telling him to keep his mouth shut. “I’ve got another job, in the real this time.”

  “Good for you, bro.”

  JD almost swore. Instead he clenched his free hand and his jaw. “I need a hacker, and you’re the best I know.”

  “Best there is, but I’m busy.”

  JD winced as he stood. He walked over to Khoder and slapped the side of his helmet three times. “Get out here and talk to me, you little shit.”

  “Okay, bro, fuck. One minute.”

  JD went back and leaned against the wall. “Kids these days,” he mumbled to himself.

  In-game he let his corvette loiter by the jumpgate, keeping clear of the battle engulfing more and more of Ertl. A blur of light pulled away from the melee, rushed at JD, and stopped dead mere kilometers away. JD took his eyes from the screen at the sound of creaking leather. The whole room seemed to vibrate as Khoder sat up—the money slipped from his chest onto his lap. He removed the helmet; his black hair was glossy with grease and a shadow of a moustache crept across his upper lip.

  “Fucking rude, bro.”

  “Money,” JD said, pointing at Khoder’s lap.

  Khoder snatched up
the notes and held them under his nose. “If this happened every time I came out, maybe I’d visit the real more often.”

  “Thanks again for the assist,” JD said.

  “Money is its own reward,” Khoder said with a sly grin. He stood and held the helmet against his side like one of those old astronauts back from space. “Bro, one day you’re going to walk in here while I’m balls-deep in some VR fucking. Teach you to come uninvited.”

  “We both know you’d never soil that haptic suit.”

  Khoder looked down at his outfit, matte black material edged with silver accents. He shrugged and nodded—JD was right.

  “What’s this job that’s so fucking important?”

  “Can you secure the room?” JD asked.

  “Already done.” As Khoder spoke the drifting snatches of VOIDWAR surrounding them fell to the floor and disappeared, quickly replaced by padlock icons tiled over every surface.

  JD found a slot at the base of Khoder’s virt chair and plugged in Soo-hyun’s datacube. The room’s OS automatically sifted through the information, grouping pieces of data together and neatly arranging it across each of the room’s four walls.

  Building blueprints and security camera stills took up the north and east wall, street surveillance footage and neighborhood maps covered the south, and documents tiled the west wall, text too pixelated to read. Handwritten addenda were highlighted, scanned, and translated into text—a brief rundown of security protocols, potential issues, and dire warnings, all scrawled in Soo-hyun’s tight script.

  Khoder whistled, crossed his arms over his thin chest, and took it all in, turning slowly to inspect each data cluster.

  “This is some high-level heist you’re planning, bro,” Khoder said. “Four levels of security: complex, building, apartment, room.”

  JD nodded.

  “What is this place?”

  “Zero Lee’s apartment building.”

  Khoder blinked slowly. “No shit?”

  “No shit.”