Repo Virtual

by Corey J. White

  Enda slotted Yeun’s datacube into her rig. It required authentication—the cube linked to her new Zero account with layers of corporate safeware. She placed her phone on the rig’s NFC reader, and waited a few seconds while the data on the cube was decrypted. It was a few terabytes all told, witness statements, police reports, and a virtual re-creation of the theft from every available angle throughout the rampartment complex.

  According to police reports, entry to the enclave had been gained with the cleaning contractor’s credentials. Diversion in the form of arson and looting at the compound’s grocery store. Police dogs tagged a number of juvenile suspects on-site, but none were held, and none had been arrested. Have to find them first, and that’s harder with minors. Especially with so many kids out of school, so many with no permanent residence.

  Enda couldn’t be sure if the bare-minimum policing was due to laziness or a sort of extortion attempt—pay us and we’ll do our jobs properly. Since moving to the city, she’d had enough run-ins with the Songdo Police Department to know it could go either way. Not every local cop was lazy or corrupt … some were both.

  With her head moving unconsciously to the music, Enda opened the virtual re-creation of the burglary. Her rig hummed as the twin GPUs powered up, and a small circle spun on-screen. Enda blew on her coffee and sipped it. Finally the rig pinged.

  The ghost of a hallway was drawn over her apartment. With her sight blurred by overlapping visions, Enda put her coffee down and fumbled across her desk until she found her eyemask and virt controls. She put the mask on and the real world disappeared. Dull, overcast daylight had been replaced by night, her decor removed as if by invisible stagehands, without even the need for a curtain to hide their work.

  She hit play on the re-creation, and every flat surface surged with masses of flesh—thrusting, sucking, gagging, fucking flesh. She paused the playback and the walls of pornography stopped with it.

  “Fuck me.”

  She zoomed out at speed, vertigo like free fall in reverse. She was outside, looking down at the complex—every surface was painted the flesh-colored tones of sex. The compound looked like a living thing, a massive structure of undulating skin.

  The compound’s security system had been compromised, and whilst the Digital Intrusions Expert hadn’t been able to disable the cameras, they had tampered in another way. In dimly lit corners of the enclave, the pornography was also steeped in darkness. This wasn’t a simple overlay, it was precisely what the cameras “thought” they had seen. It was bizarre, but it was inspired. Perhaps the DIE had intended a simple trolling, but it also meant that Enda couldn’t trust the virtual playback, and it could never stand as evidence if the thieves wound up in court.

  Enda sipped more of her coffee, and looked over the fleshy compound one more time. She pulled the eyemask from her face, and closed the virt re-creation, feeling the first pang of a VR headache. She was going to have to see the building in person.

  * * *

  The rain fell heavy, and water flowed over the windscreen with the movement of the auto-car—pushed to the sides when the vehicle accelerated, and drifting down when it stopped. The city was distorted through that shifting lens. Enda focused out the side window, and urged her brain to silence as the auto-car took her across the city. She had her own car, but the morning’s events left her feeling too irritated to drive.

  “The Korea Meteorological Administration forecasts rain for the next five days,” the car said in an upbeat voice. “Flood warnings may soon be in effect. Would you like to know more?”

  “No.”

  Crowds filled the sidewalk like a funeral procession, black umbrellas bobbing over the throng. Enda felt disconnected from it all, shielded behind thick glass and rubber-sealed doors. Auto-cars were ostensibly a means of mass transportation, but they were priced beyond most city-dwellers. They offered protection, and distance. A way to move through the bleeding heart of Songdo-dong without getting dirty.

  “VOIDWAR servers—”

  “No.”

  “Police are ur—”

  “No,” Enda said, louder. “Disable conversation for this account.”

  The car went quiet. Enda knew it was taking her command literally, but the silence seemed petulant. Could you hurt a car’s feelings?

  The sidewalks passed by like a film set. Songdo looked oddly bare through her eyes—everywhere were the flat planes of cement and glass, the censorious gray panels of her ad-free AR subscription. She’d found Songdo too much when she first arrived, like New York’s Times Square, but for block after endless block. It had looked too loud—there was no other way to describe it—as though every surface were screaming at her to buy something, even surfaces that didn’t exist in the real.

  Still, at times the layer of artificial cleanliness was jarring—unreal, unnatural. She had tried to alter the settings of her Clarity to let through street art and noncorporate shop fronts, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition. For the sake of her inner peace, Enda had chosen nothing.

  The car braked sharply outside Lee’s enclave, and Enda’s head was jolted off the window. She took a moment to select the expense account on her phone, paid the fare, and opened the car door. The city rushed to meet her—the steady drone of traffic, the hiss of rain, the chatter of conversation, and the disparate sounds of music coming from two busy noodle shops on the opposite side of the street.

  Enda slammed the car door and turned the high collar of her coat up against the rain. She quickly adjusted the bag that was slung over one shoulder and across her chest, the dotted neoprene pressing into her skin like tiny fingers. It was weighed down with her eye-drone and her small but effective less-lethal arsenal: a telescoping baton and collapsible riot shield rated to withstand up to three hundred pounds of protester bodyweight.

  Enda approached the rampartment’s entrance, and a woman dressed in a black windbreaker emerged from a small booth beside the gate. She wore bulky facial recognition glasses—less about functionality than signaling: If you speak to me, you will be tagged.

  “Please, state your business, ma’am,” the woman said.

  “I’ve been hired to look into the burglary,” Enda said. She took her wallet from her bag and showed the guard her private investigator license.

  The woman took it, and held it up to inspect Enda’s face and photo. The license was authentic—the forms of identification she’d used to get it were fakes. Expensive fakes too—though the real cost was always the database manipulation rather than the forged paperwork.

  After a few seconds the guard handed the license back to Enda and said: “You’re clear.” Must have gotten permission via the glasses. She took a step closer and lowered her voice. “Please do not speak with any of the residents. It is best if they do not concern themselves with an isolated incident.”

  Enda nodded. “I understand.”

  “Good.” The woman returned to her booth and raised the boom gate. She silently watched as Enda walked beneath it and into the compound.

  Enda had clients living in similar situations, but she always thought the lifestyle seemed too much like doomsday preparation, an admission that the poor would enact violence on you if they realized the truth about your wealth, about the reasons for the disparity.

  She followed the road as it veered right, past the underground car park, leading to the maintenance access behind Building One. Three overflowing dumpsters sat against the building, and the scent of rot permeated the air.

  Enda took the phone from her pocket. The first thing she did was put on Bitches Brew again. The sound quality was awful after listening to the vinyl, but she could listen to sixty-eight minutes of music without turning or changing discs. Next, she opened the virtual re-creation of the burglary and switched it to Augmented mode to strip the permanent features from the playback—the ground, the walls, the ceiling, and the porn that had been injected into the feed.

  Her phone grew hot as it spent processor cycles to match her location to the re
cording. As soon as it found her, playback began.

  Enda turned and watched a large white van drive toward her, disconcertingly real. She stepped back, moving out of the way, and the van parked beside the dumpsters.

  Miles’s trumpet dominated the soundscape, then fell away. There was no audio on the recording, just Enda’s soundtrack of jazz over a man walking around to the rear of the van and unloading four round robots and a cleaning cart. He wore a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, but he looked familiar, with a distinctive black tribal tattoo around one eye. She stepped around him, hoping for a better look, but the face resisted—it rested awkwardly on the man’s head, out of place.

  She paused the feed, and was confused for a half second when the music kept playing. The whole band crescendoed, beautiful, cacophonous. Enda held her hands out, made a frame around the man’s face, and took a snapshot. She flicked it to her phone, and called Natalya.

  “Good to hear from you, Enda,” Natalya said. “I am sorry about earlier.”

  “Forget about it. I just sent you a still image—could you run it through the facial recognition databases and tell me if there are any hits?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll send more through as I get them.”

  “Of course, Enda. I have a match,” Natalya said.

  “Already?”

  “Your snapshot has a ninety-eight-point-three percent likeness to Mike Tyson.”

  Enda squeezed her eyes shut in embarrassment. She opened them and looked at the man again, paused awkwardly in AR view. It was clear now—Mike Tyson, tattoo and all. “I thought he looked familiar.”

  “It’s an AR projection,” Natalya continued, ever helpful.

  “Yes, I didn’t think it was actually him.” Though he did have a similarly broad build. “Any chance of seeing through the mask?”

  “Unlikely. Any digital recording will have captured the same faked face. To see past it you’d need to find analogue film.”

  “Sorry for wasting your time, Natalya.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’ll send you more momentarily.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  Enda brought up the police report on her phone. Cleaning services were contracted to an Omar Garang, who had been found at his home, beaten and restrained. Enda didn’t rule out the possibility of his involvement, but one guard was absolutely certain that it had not been the usual cleaner that night.

  Enda leaned in to inspect the back of the van. There the re-creation lost fidelity. Untextured blocks of impossible geometry hung in abstract. Past these, a sea of darkness stretched beyond the walls, diffuse patches glowing with light from seams in the joints of reality. Tyson stood at the doors, and Enda wondered if an accomplice hid within those shadows, obscured by missing visual data.

  She unpaused the playback and followed Tyson into the building.

  Inside, the man in the coveralls was lit brighter, but he still wore Mike Tyson’s face like a mask. The reports from the other guards hadn’t been much help—none had noticed it was a different black man, except in retrospect. The usual guy was skinnier, one had said. The thief might have had a beard, or he might not have. They each claimed he had a limp, but Enda was waiting to see proof of that for herself.

  Tyson trailed the four cylindrical robots’ slow path along the corridors, but Enda left them. She walked into the building’s foyer, where four security guards stood behind the desk. One of them made eye contact and Enda started. He was real, surrounded by three AR colleagues. He stood at his approximation of attention and nodded at Enda as she approached. She lowered the opacity on her playback and the other guards turned ghostly.

  “The woman at the gate warn you I was coming?” Enda asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the guard said.

  Otherwise you’d still be playing on your phone.

  “Were you working that night?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Anybody from that night still work here?”

  “In light of our failures, the company has had to aggressively restructure.”

  “ ‘Aggressively restructure,’ huh? That’s a new one.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No, I’ve already read the reports,” Enda said.

  She walked out the building’s front door and into the courtyard that filled the space between buildings. The rain streaked cold down Enda’s face as she crossed to the grocer. The ceiling was burnt black in patches, and broken windows had been boarded up with plywood. Remnants of police tape littered the support struts, rustling gently in the breeze.

  Enda watched Tyson and the robots proceed through the building as though she had X-ray vision. On the fourth floor skybridge Tyson stopped and looked down, as if he could see Enda standing there.

  Enda took a few paces out from beneath the awning, trying to see what Tyson could see. A patch of the outer wall had been recently repaired but not yet painted. A car burst through the wall, front end already crumpled by the time it appeared inside the compound. Text labels hung from the car—make, model, year, VIN, registration, but none of it was important. It was a stolen car, too old to have any intelligent security systems onboard.

  A small flood of people rushed around the car and into the complex. Some ran into the grocer, then fled, their arms laden with stolen goods. When they were clear, others flung Molotov cocktails at the business. Enda paced the scene for a better view of the pyromaniacs, but as she reached the far side of the figures they turned two-dimensional, flattened by the lack of cameras on the opposite side of the street. No doubt police could access those feeds, but Enda would have to do without.

  She unpaused the playback and put it up to triple-speed as she walked back inside. She crossed the foyer and nodded at the overly alert guard, then hit the elevator call button. Before the car could arrive, Tyson dropped through the building to ground level, and approached the security guards at the main operations desk.

  “Could you step aside?” Enda asked the real guard. Puzzlement crossed his face, but he didn’t ask any questions.

  The same three AR guards stood at the desk, but now they were joined by a woman. She was a well-dressed, upper-management type, brought on scene by the arson.

  Tyson spoke to the woman and the guards, and left. It was a strange gamble, talking to security in the middle of a burglary. Braggadocio, or something else? Enda dropped the playback speed to real-time, and followed Tyson as he walked calmly away from the desk, rounded the corner, and began to run.

  She could see it clearly, the limp the guards had mentioned—right leg, possible knee injury or lower-leg prosthetic. Enda recorded the man’s stride and flicked that to Natalya as well, unsure of what resources she might have for gait detection.

  She followed Tyson up the elevator and watched him incapacitate a guard. He ferried the man into Lee’s apartment, which he accessed with a small round device. Enda stood outside Lee’s apartment, also tagged with police tape, and watched Tyson vanish as he reached the threshold. There were no cameras inside the apartment, nothing for the virt recording to re-create.

  She skipped ahead until Tyson emerged through the closed door, and trailed him downstairs and outside to the maintenance access.

  He loaded the cleaning cart back into the van, and drove slowly past police dog drones scouring the premises. Two of the arsonists joined Tyson at the van, and that was where the playback stopped—the figures static, human statues.

  Enda took stills of the arsonists, and closed the re-creation, the van disappearing from view in a disconcerting instant.

  Enda ordered a car, and nodded to the guard who raised the boom gate and let her back out to the street. Sparse traffic passed, tires hissed over the wet road.

  Enda’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She retrieved the phone and answered: “Natalya? You’ve got answers for me already?”

  “Sadly not on the facial recognition front, but I got a hit on the devic
e. It is a Hon Hai Precision Industries RFID cloner.”

  “Could it clone the sorts of keycards used for residential access?”

  “Quite easily. They are a restricted product, sold only to police, military, and intelligence organizations. One could safely assume an effective range of between three and five meters.”

  “Thank you,” Enda said, the new piece of data slotting into place.

  “I will be in touch again later.” The Mechanic hung up.

  Enda’s hunch had been right. The arson and looting had been designed to get the head of security on-site so that Tyson could clone her all-access key.

  She knew she hadn’t made a great agent because she was particularly intelligent—though she had a more analytical mode of thought than most. Intellect alone was worthless until combined with spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and a desire to find the meaning and method that lay beneath a person’s actions.

  The thieves were amateurs, that much was obvious. If the security company’s protocols weren’t so predictable, or if the head of security had been less conscientious, the whole heist would have fallen apart. The only part of the heist that showed real finesse was the digital intrusion. Talented DIEs—talented hackers—were rare. That gave her somewhere to start.

  A dark blue car pulled up to the curb and Enda stepped forward to grab the handle, then stopped. Not an auto-car. Not a civilian car at all.

  The window came down with an electric whir, revealing Detective Yang-Yang Li. He wore a suit cut in royal blue, a black pocket square, a skinny black tie, and overly large, thin-rimmed glasses. His hair stuck up in thick black tufts, and a pencil moustache adorned his upper lip, but otherwise he was cleanly shaved. After all their run-ins, Enda still couldn’t tell if his style was some retro hipster pastiche, or Yang-Yang’s idea of how a detective should look.

  “Get in,” Li said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder.

  Enda sighed, and did as she was told.

  * * *

  I drifted through a star system of my own devising. A nonentity, surrounded by the precise mathematical shape of a glittering superstructure, its spiraling arms reaching from the burning corona of the sun to the very edge of the system, where a million stars shone impossibly distant.