Repo Virtual

by Corey J. White

  He shut down the game and absently checked social media and news outlets as he drank his second coffee. South Korea’s World Cup win dominated the headlines, and as JD scrolled further and further he realized there was nothing about the heist. About the fire and the police chase, yes, but not the heist itself. Did they get away with it? It was too early to tell.

  From his table, JD could see a crime watch billboard slowly flicking through ID photos of citizens wanted for questioning. He watched it rotate through its full selection, heartbeat pulsing steady at his neck, expecting his face to appear, or Khoder’s, or Soo-hyun’s, but they never did.

  As he drained the dregs of his cup, JD contemplated a third coffee, but already his left leg bounced erratically beneath the table. The chair screeched as he stood, and he went to the counter to pay.

  JD paid with the hundred-euro note, and stared blankly at his change. He almost queried the amount, but stopped himself, pocketed the two twenties, and dropped the coins into the tip jar. He paused at the exit while the manager unlocked the door. She stood guard as he left, to ensure no undesirables snuck in.

  JD checked the time in the corner of his vision—12:50. Ten minutes until the meeting. The rain was picking up, a screen of analogue distortion streaking through Augmented billboards and signs like flecks of static. Rainbow-slicked puddles spotted the road, and the gutter overflowed with fast-moving currents. Passing auto-cars sent wide arcs of water into the air, splashing down on sidewalk and pedestrian alike. JD guessed the algorithms had never been taught to avoid puddles—or maybe they were taught to hit them and spray pedestrians as punishment for walking when they could be paying for a lift.

  He stepped out from under the café’s eaves and joined a growing group of professionals waiting at a crosswalk, talking into headsets, pawing at their phones, unable to stop working even for their lunch break.

  JD looked up and blinked against the wet, watching the full parade of surveillance drones drifting between skyscrapers. There were hundreds of them—a few dozen of the large balls like monstrous eyes, and countless smaller quadcopters, hovering over the streets with their unblinking electric vision.

  Fear gripped JD’s chest, like a hand around his heart. The city had always been a panopticon, even if its apparatus was usually hidden from sight and easy to ignore. But JD had just pulled the biggest heist of his life, and finally the weight of all those drones above began to press down on him.

  The lights changed and the pedestrians jostled JD as they stepped out onto the street, but he stood still, as though the robots would see him if he moved. With his neck still craned, he watched the rain wash advertisements down the sides of towering apartment blocks, animations running in thin streaks until they reached the ground, pixels of color mixing with rainwater in the gutters.

  In that moment, as he watched the city melt beneath torrential rain, JD felt that something in his mind had broken. Something was wrong, if not with his mind, then with his contex, or with the city itself. Who do you contact when reality is broken?

  Slowly, JD lowered his gaze. A new group of pedestrians surrounded him, indistinguishable from the last—the infinite parts of the city arranged in different formations. The light turned green and JD stepped out onto the street, crossing halfway before he realized no one else had joined him. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the cars, delivery trucks, and pedestrians alike all waiting patiently.

  He walked faster, limping across the street. He ducked into an alleyway and stood with his back against the graffitied brickwork. The question rose in JD’s mind unbidden: if someone wrote code on the walls of the city, could the cameras read it? Would the municipal systems at city hall process the code? Graffiti injecting code into the heart of the ubiquitous city. JD shook his head, knowing with bone-deep certainty that he looked mad—clothes dirty, rain-drenched, muttering to himself about a broken city, broken code. He moved on.

  Songdo was a city of shortcuts, alleyways forming hidden paths between towering buildings, hidden in plain sight but deep shadow. JD traversed these black veins, creeping the last two blocks to the technopark, pausing in the shadow of an apartment building on Haesong-ro. His knee ached from the wet, from all the walking he’d done the past couple of days, but he ignored it.

  He took his phone from his pocket and hit the hard reset. Waiting, he watched people pass by the mouth of the alley and avoid him as though he had the plague. Poverty was the best cover story. Nobody wanted to see the poverty-stricken, the homeless, the beggars.

  His phone chimed its welcome sound in his earpiece and JD felt the chemical seep of endorphins. “We’re all Pavlov’s dogs,” he said under his breath.

  With the phone rebooted, his vision shifted in layers as the city’s Augmented feed imprinted itself across his eyes, undisturbed by the rain. Billboards and street signs shone bright, and graffiti, flyers, and posters were covered by patches of white and gray—everything unauthorized was hidden from view. JD sighed; it felt like coming home.

  Across the street, the technopark stretched the full length of three city blocks. It had once been expertly landscaped and minutely manicured, but the city’s poor had since reclaimed it; hundreds of tents were erected all across the park, sprouting from any flat piece of lawn.

  JD emerged from the alleyway and stood at the curb. He let his foot hang over the edge and saw the asphalt flash a red warning. It flickered once, twice, then turned green. Reality broken again, or still. He stepped onto the street, the road shining green while auto-cars and -trucks honked and slammed on their brakes, skidding in the wet. Two cars collided—a kinetic ballet that was meant to be impossible after millions of hours of algorithmic training, testing, and tweaking. Still, none of them came near JD.

  Reaching one of the technopark’s concrete footpaths, JD scanned the area for Soo-hyun. Instead he spotted Kali’s young assistant Andrea waiting alone beneath a pagoda at the far corner of the square. JD picked his way between tents, stepping over patches of grass scorched black by cooking fires, apologizing to the residents when he tripped over a taut guy rope. The square was the largest of the technopark’s tented burgs, home to one hundred–plus of the city’s underemployed, living in neat, brightly colored rows on the unkempt lawn. Rain hammered the polyester fabric, hissing like a colossal snake god.

  Andrea saw JD. He nodded, and the girl turned away. She was leaning on the pagoda’s railing, wearing a red North Face jacket a few sizes too large. She had a pink backpack slung over one shoulder, big enough for one hundred thousand euro in large notes—or a submachine gun.

  He climbed the pagoda steps, surrounded by a mess of pigeons. They cooed among themselves, and their mangled feet scraped against the wooden floor as they picked at scraps of food, most of it already sullied by bird droppings. JD stepped gingerly through the pigeons to join Andrea. He rested against the railing and felt the dusty crust of droppings.

  “Where’s Soo-hyun?” JD asked, wiping his hand on his pants.

  The girl rolled her eyes and sneered. “You don’t fucking dictate terms to Kali,” she said. “You really fucked up this time.” The girl squinted, her eyes seeming to scan the park with an awareness beyond her years. JD followed her gaze, saw only the park’s residents and an oppressive sheet of rain. When he turned back to face Andrea, a small swarm of fireflies had gathered, flitting aimlessly beneath the pagoda roof.

  “Do you have the money?” JD asked.

  Andrea shook her head. “I told you, you fucked up. She needs the virus, and she doesn’t trust you anymore.”

  “I’ll call her,” JD said.

  “It’s too late for that. I’m here to take it off you.”

  “What if I don’t hand it over?” JD said, looking down at the girl.

  Andrea smiled sweetly, showing two missing teeth. “It’s not up to you anymore.”

  It happened too fast, each moment rendered in JD’s mind like a series of screenshots. The fireflies rushed for JD’s face and he flinched back, swatting at their t
iny lights. The swarm glimmered and disappeared, and a blurred glitch flashed sideways across his vision. A bullet. It whistled as it passed inches in front of him—passed over Andrea and right through the space his head had occupied moments before.

  Chank. The bullet struck a vertical post supporting the pagoda’s roof. Splinters of hardwood burst from the wound—a dozen tiny spikes embedded themselves in the skin of JD’s arm.

  Boom. Gunshot. A third of a second after the bullet had torn past his face. JD dropped to the ground, pinning three pigeons beneath him while the rest took flight in a flurry of pink, gray, and white. Another chank and more splinters filled the air, joining the feathers that drifted slow to the ground.

  Andrea screamed like a child on a rollercoaster, fear and ecstasy combined. JD grabbed her by the hand and yanked her down to the ground. All around the square people ran—some fled the technopark, others dived into their tents as though the fabric walls could stop high-caliber rounds.

  JD’s vision pitched, and his head swam as he rose above the pagoda, above the park, drone-eye view climbing until it came level with the roof of a squat office block. The camera zoomed in tight on Red—the lanky teen crouched on the building’s rooftop with a 3D-printed Dragunov sniper rifle, a white bandage over the bridge of his nose, the flesh beneath it badly bruised from the car crash. Red raised the gun to his shoulder and JD rolled blindly, feeling the last of the pigeons flutter out from underneath him as another burst of splinters exploded beside his head.

  His eyes blurred with visual artifacts, then he was staring at Andrea. She had opened the flap on his rucksack and was digging through the tools, zip ties, and other bits and pieces that weighed it down. JD snatched the bag away from the child and she bared her teeth, as though ready to attack.

  Another chank and the distant boom of gunfire changed her mind. JD covered his head with his arms while Andrea scurried out from beneath the pagoda, running into the rain, quickly getting lost in the rush of fleeing bodies.

  He waited for another shot, heard instead the whine of approaching police sirens.

  With the stolen datacube still slotted into his phone, JD ran.

  * * *

  The door opened before JD could even knock. Troy stood in the opening, with his black leather satchel slung over one shoulder, a travel coffee mug in his hand.

  He sighed when he saw JD. “I’m going to work. I don’t have time to talk, and I don’t know if I even—”

  “They tried to kill me.”

  Troy stopped. “Come inside.”

  * * *

  If the city is a body, then violence is a virus.

  Gunfire erupted in a crowded park. The sound registered on surveillance apparatus. Satellite heat-maps showed the panicked flight of bodies away from the site.

  Police reacted with brutal efficiency. Drone dogs delivered by armored auto-trucks, while sirens warned of more police en route. Like rogue antibodies, they attacked everything—parents, children, delinquent teens, the homeless. The violence of others used as an excuse for the violence of authority.

  JD was hunted. Frightened by the reach of Kali, and the lengths to which Red would go.

  He did not know how, or if, he would be saved.

  Neither did I.

  PART TWO

  Gumshoe Protocol

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Enda Hyldahl beat a steady rhythm along the sidewalk as she ran. Her mind was utterly blank, the usual chaos of her thoughts replaced with a short count on loop: one, two, three, four. She inhaled one count. Exhaled one count. It was the closest she got to meditation—running until her mind finally, mercifully, shut … the fuck … up.

  It was dawn, and the city yawned open for her. Traffic was sparse, footpaths barren but for other runners. In that moment, if Enda could spare any thought at all for those joggers, it would be one of pity. Running with their phones, running to music, to podcasts, to audiobooks; too weak to simply run.

  Too weak? Or do they not hate themselves enough?

  Enda cursed beneath her rasping breath. That is why she ran. To keep the hate at bay.

  She reached a crossing and stopped, bent over heaving while delivery auto-trucks poured past, hauling food from the shorefront before Songdo woke. Enda put her hands on her sides and inhaled deep. She held it. She stood straight and exhaled as she looked up to the sky. The heavy cloud cover was slashed by thin slivers of blue—the first she’d seen in days. Even they would be gone before rush hour arrived. The light turned green, and she ran.

  The city was clean—sidewalks and roads washed by the rain, buildings and infrastructure rendered sterile by her ad-free AR subscription. Only seven external words ever encroached on her psyche, scrolling in the bottom corner of her vision: Clarity, brought to you by Zero Corporation. Even when you paid to silence them, the corporations couldn’t let you forget who owned the city, who owned your view of it.

  Further and further, her body carried her while her mind sat quiet—a passenger of thought chained to the meat. Her trance was so deep, Enda didn’t see the car pull up alongside her, only noticed it after it kept pace with her for twenty meters. She cursed herself for that, too; she was getting complacent.

  She glanced to the side and the car rolled to a stop. It was a Mercedes painted a gleaming gunmetal gray, with a large matte Z on the front door panel. The rear door opened and a man emerged, so muscular that he didn’t appear to have a neck. A mass of sinew joined his shoulders directly to his jaw. He wore a black suit, tailored to contain his bulk, hair in a neat crew cut.

  “Good morning, Ms. Hyldahl,” he said, voice like tires over gravel. “My name is Mohamed Toub; I’m here to deliver you to a meeting with David Yeun at the Zero corporate headquarters.”

  Enda took a moment to catch her breath. “I’m not taking any new clients.”

  “The job pays one million euro.”

  That caused her to skip a beat. “I’m still not taking any new clients.”

  Enda turned and continued to run, footsteps feeling clumsy under scrutiny. The security officer—because what else could he be—let her run five meters before he called out: “Ira Lindholme.”

  Enda stopped. Slowly she turned. She walked back to the man. He smirked, thinking the leverage had her cowed. She punched him in the throat and his face slackened. Both hands went to his neck and he collapsed to his knees on the sidewalk, choking.

  Enda crouched beside him and whispered: “It’s pronounced Ira, not Eye-ra.”

  Mohamed coughed and spluttered, but he would live, she was sure of that.

  The car waited patiently at the side of the road, door open like a gesturing hand. Part of her wanted to run, but they knew her old name. Not her “real” name, her old one. She climbed into the car and closed the door.

  It was an utterly modern automated vehicle, lacking a driver or any visible controls. Two bench seats sat facing one another around a central hollow.

  Small cameras were nestled in the corners of the ceiling. Enda fixed her gaze on one of these. “What are we waiting for?”

  Within seconds the car came to life with the soft whine of its electric engine. It pulled away from the curb, expertly gliding between two trucks, leaving Mohamed behind, kneeling on the sidewalk in his designer suit, struggling to catch his breath.

  Enda watched the city scroll neatly past the window as the car carried her downtown. Slowly the footpaths filled with people—workers in white collar and blue, students, beggars, and every other type of person Songdo saw fit to shelter. Watching the city wake to another chaotic rush hour, Enda again thought it was a city that shouldn’t work. Maybe that was why she liked it. The unsteady balance between enforced multiculturalism and Korean hegemony. Relentless capital in all its horrible glory, embodied in one tiny sovereign city-state, running at double real time, everything accelerated, everything rushing to some bright future or horrendous decline.

  If nothing else, it was never boring.

  A soft breeze from the car’s A
C filled Enda’s nose with the sharp scent of herself. Running shoes, black leggings, and a loose gray singlet over a sports bra, all of them soaked in sweat—hardly suitable attire for whatever this meeting was. Though she wasn’t given much choice.

  Zero Corporation. They owned the city, more or less, owned the layers of Augmented Reality that obscured the real, owned eight of the ten most popular immersive games, owned two-thirds of global online infrastructure according to the latest independent analysis.

  Too late, Enda realized that perhaps she shouldn’t have throat-punched the messenger.

  She contemplated asking the car a question, to see if anyone was listening—to see who might be listening—but she remained silent. She focused instead on her breathing. Her pulse fluttered at her neck, and steadily began to slow.

  The car turned on to Central-ro and Zero headquarters sat in the center of the windscreen, in the center of Neo Songdo. The building loomed over the rest of the city, a hundred meters taller than any other tower. It appeared monochromatic; each face the steely gray of reflected cloud cover. It was an unnecessary and ostentatious display of power when, Enda was certain, half the skyscraper stood empty—staff whittled away one by one as machine learning usurped various jobs that were once considered necessary for any corporation.

  The auto-car was given green-light priority over the two intersections leading to the building. It quietly drove through the last intersection then dipped beneath the street, plunging into a subterranean car park, lit too-white with fluorescent tubes, tires squealing over polished cement.

  The car parked itself beside a row of identical sedans. The door opened automatically, and a cheery electronic voice implored her to “Have a productive day.”