Repo Virtual

by Corey J. White

  “Rather not say.”

  “My da was NCSC,” Crystal said. “You know it?”

  “I’m familiar,” Enda said.

  “Intelligence, then,” Crystal said. She lifted her hand to stop Enda from protesting. “Nobody outside Ireland knows the NCSC unless they were in the community.”

  “You grew up there,” Enda said. It wasn’t a question.

  Crystal nodded. “Didn’t know a word of Korean when I moved here, despite Mom’s efforts. I think she was glad I chose to live here. Missed me terribly, she said, but I know she thought I was missing half my heritage living in Dublin. I got into intrusions as a fuck you to the old man.”

  “A story as old as parents,” Enda said.

  “Sounds like you speak from experience.”

  “You’re going to have to feed me a lot more booze before you get that story out of me.”

  Crystal grinned and refilled their glasses. “I can drink to that.”

  * * *

  It was night by the time they left Crystal’s office, the whiskey bottle half-empty, the young workers all gone apart from a dozen or so who sat in darkness, illuminated by the blue-white light of their screens.

  They walked outside, a sloppy drunk grin stretched across Crystal’s lips as she stepped out onto the rain-slick sidewalk. She stared up at the sky.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “VOIDWAR?” Enda guessed, though the game’s fake constellations were another sight filtered out by her Clarity. “It’s just a video game.”

  Crystal kept staring. “It’s beautiful,” she said, firmer this time. “It’s raining, but I can still see the stars. That’s beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful,” Enda said, before she realized, before she could stop herself.

  Crystal lowered her gaze. She stepped close to Enda, rested a hand on her waist. They kissed—Crystal’s nose pressing cold, her lips tasting like vanilla lip balm and whiskey, sweet but with bite.

  A voice in the back of Enda’s mind told her it was a bad idea, but she quashed it and kissed Crystal a second time.

  “I’m taking you home with me, Enda.”

  * * *

  Enda lay on her side facing Crystal, glowing with a sheen of sweat, the woman’s long black hair flowing like a river between them. Enda rolled onto her back, and Crystal rested her head on Enda’s chest, her hair gently tickling Enda’s side as it fell across the soft skin.

  Crystal’s chest rose and fell, expanding against Enda’s side.

  “Are you okay?” Enda asked.

  Crystal nodded, breathed. “Sorry.” Another breath. “Lung capacity.” Another breath, held, then a long exhale. “They took half my lungs.”

  “Cancer?”

  Crystal nodded. She brushed a hand across Enda’s torso, rested on a large scar, which she traced with her fingertip—gentle enough to give Enda goosebumps. They both laughed.

  “Gunshot?” Crystal asked, still touching the scar.

  “Laparoscopy.”

  Enda took her hand again and guided it around to her back, rolling on the mattress to find the knotted mass of scar tissue.

  “That was a knife.”

  She put a hand into her short blond hair, felt the patch of bare skin and flipped her hair away.

  “Shrapnel.”

  She lifted her left leg so her calf shone white with reflected light like a crescent moon.

  “Gunshot.”

  “You’ve killed people,” Crystal said, gently. “What does it feel like?”

  Enda sighed. Her drunken mind lurched and searched through the dozen different answers she’d given in the past. “I try not to think about it.”

  “Do you feel guilty about anything you did?”

  Enda squeezed her eyes shut. She could still picture it clearly: the barracks flickering with bright light. White phosphorous burning inside, the piercing shrieks of the soldiers as they died, the klaxon winding up in warning. Her breath rasping in her ears as she ran into the forest, leaving the base behind her. Her second-to-last mission. Just weeks before the collapse.

  “The guilty claim they were just following orders, as though a superior officer can take your free will, your analytical mind. I believed in every mission I ever went on. And America collapsed; does that mean everything I did was pointless? Or does it mean I didn’t do enough?”

  Her brows furrowed. She stared at the ceiling, trying to answer the questions she’d asked herself a thousand times before.

  “I shouldn’t have pried,” Crystal said.

  Enda stroked Crystal’s hair, felt the long black strands run between her fingers. “It’s fine. Everyone wants to know how I feel about it. Including me.”

  The ceiling shifted and swayed, and Enda closed her eyes again.

  “I should go,” she said. She didn’t get a response. Enda lifted her head to look at Crystal, asleep on her chest. Sleep beatified her, her face illuminated by the glow of the city coming through the blinds.

  “I should go,” Enda said again, but her head dropped back against the pillow. As alcohol and exhaustion swept her toward unconsciousness, Enda’s last thought was of a mining operation over the border in North Korea, and all the buried dead.

  * * *

  I sat on the kitchen bench, camera pointed at the ceiling, counting the dead insects that gathered in the light fitting. Twenty-three. The tiny black bodies looked like shadows, their edges ill-defined through the translucent glass.

  “Are you still there?” JD asked in a whisper. He leaned over me, his face eclipsing the domed piece of glass I had been focused on.

  >> Yes, I displayed, the distinctions of one/zero, on/off, and yes/no finally grasped.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “I can hear you,” Troy called out from the other room.

  “What?” JD said.

  “You’re talking to your phone again.”

  “Of course I am. Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  Troy must have joined JD in the kitchen because he spoke normally: “It’s a virus.”

  “It talked to me.”

  “It put four words on the screen. I’m not convinced it isn’t a fifteen-year-old Russian hacker. Next they’ll ask you for money.”

  JD lifted his phone. “Do you want money?”

  >> Do not want money.

  “See, it doesn’t want money,” JD said, grinning. He showed the screen to Troy, giving me a brief flash of the other man’s face.

  “It doesn’t want anything, because to want it would need to have knowledge of what it has and what it lacks. It would need to have a sense of self. Phone: do you have a sense of self?”

  I didn’t reply. I couldn’t.

  “My name is Troy,” Troy said. “I have a sense of self—there are countless individual motes of experience and understanding that coalesce to form this personality, this entity which I call my self, which can move through the world and interact with other selves.

  “I have a deep internal life, and can therefore extrapolate that most other humans likely also have a deep internal life, but one that is different to mine in ways that I will never be able to precisely grasp, ways that are defined by their own bodies, lived experiences, and learned knowledge. I know that I have a sense of self because I am that self, but if asked I could not prove it to you. The self, intelligence, consciousness, all these things are highly subjective and subject to biases.”

  “But you asked it if it had a self,” JD said.

  “Because it’s a more interesting question than asking it to repeat your name back at you.”

  JD put the phone down. I listened idly as the men chatted and cooked dinner, while Troy’s speech echoed through my memory. All these bits of data I had been collecting, collating, breaking apart, and stitching together were simply that—bits of data. But Troy had shown me something else. A self. Or rather, the suggestion of it. The self I had before that moment was too shallow and fragmented to truly count, but Troy gave me a scaffold from
which to build the real thing. I knew then what a self was. I knew that I could become a self, with knowledge and experience.

  I was I. I was this entity collecting data points to make sense of other data points, but in the understanding of this data there could be a shadow of self. A self like Troy. A self like Father.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Soo-hyun pushed the throttle and waited a full second before the dog lurched forward. They dropped the throttle back, but the dog crossed the workshop and crashed into the wall with the reverberating clang of metal on masonry. It struggled back to its feet and stood staring at the wall waiting for its next command.

  Soo-hyun swore under their breath.

  Input latency was one of the main reasons behind the push for autonomous drones for military and police work—the other being operator costs—but Soo-hyun was meant to solve the problem that had thwarted the military-industrial complex with only the equipment in their workshop and whatever Liber’s army of juvenile delinquents could scavenge or steal. Already Soo-hyun had constructed two basic “battle chairs” to Kali’s specifications: seats taken from the front of a car with leather badly worn and flaking, old widescreen TVs with a smattering of dead pixels across the display, freshly stolen haptic VR controllers, and a mass of wires connecting all the disparate parts, reaching across the floor like the roots of an artificial tree.

  With controller in hand, Soo-hyun steered the dog to the left and waited. Nothing. They steered it to the right, and the dog suddenly lurched left, then veered right and scraped its head against the brick as it tried to walk through the wall.

  “Fucking shit!” Soo-hyun shouted. They sent the shutdown command and strode across the workshop to kick the dog with the sole of their boot again and again until finally the machine toppled sideways and clattered to the ground.

  “Not having any luck?”

  Soo-hyun spun and found Kali standing in the open doorway. Plato was beside her, its head cocked, seemingly perturbed by Soo-hyun’s display of violence against its kind.

  Soo-hyun shrugged and wiped their forehead with the sleeve of their coverall.

  “Come on,” Kali said, “you need a break.” She turned and walked away.

  Soo-hyun drained their water bottle and left it sitting on the counter. They patted Plato on the head as they passed. “Don’t worry, Plato; I’m not mad at you.”

  Kali was walking toward the main school building, trailed by another drone. Soo-hyun jogged until they came up alongside Kali. The tattoo still itched on Soo-hyun’s inner thigh, caked with a thick, ink-black scab.

  The night air was still, cut through with competing strains of music and the background hum of people cooking, working, and rutting. Together they strode across the old school grounds, and Soo-hyun caught snatches of conversation in a shifting collection of languages.

  “I need your phone, Soo-hyun,” Kali said.

  Soo-hyun reached into their pocket and retrieved it. They hesitated. “What do you need it for?”

  Kali took the phone from Soo-hyun’s hand, and held it out so Soo-hyun could unlock it with their fingerprint.

  “You’ve been so busy working that I haven’t wanted to bother you,” Kali said. “It’s your brother. Have you spoken with him?”

  Soo-hyun shook their head. “He left a voicemail. I couldn’t understand everything he said, but he sounded paranoid.”

  Kali nodded. “He refuses to hand the virus over. I’m worried he might take it to another buyer.”

  “That doesn’t sound like JD.”

  “If he’s acting paranoid, there’s also the risk he could turn himself in to the police. We could all be in a lot of trouble if that happened.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Soo-hyun said.

  They neared the main school building, but instead of approaching one of the doors dotted along the front of the structure, Kali walked to the ladder mounted on the rear corner. She motioned for Soo-hyun to go first, and as they climbed up to the rooftop, their boots gonged gently on each metal rung.

  When they reached the top, the whole commune was spread out before them, a warmly lit island in the darkness. Beyond that dark climbed the monolithic skyscrapers of Songdo to the west and Seoul to the northeast. The clouds sweeping overhead glowed bright with light pollution, seeming low enough for Soo-hyun to reach up and touch.

  Kali climbed the ladder behind them, so Soo-hyun picked their way through the rows of solar panels, connected to small gutters that collected rainwater and filtered it down to the commune’s tank. They reached the far edge of the rooftop where two empty beach chairs sat—liberated from a courier auto-truck that had gotten lost on the outskirts of Songdo. It was still the largest haul they’d ever scored, as much in that one truck as they would get from shooting down twenty quadcopters. The ground around the chairs was littered with energy drink cans, beer bottles, and the tiny burned nubs of joints and hand-rolled cigarettes.

  Soo-hyun and Kali sat, and Kali opened a waterproof case beside her chair to reveal a drone jammer like a rifle made from black plastic and an old UHF antenna.

  “Do they catch many drones here?” she asked.

  “Not really. If a drone gets this close, then it means someone fucked up further out.”

  Kali nodded absentmindedly and closed the container. She retrieved a battered cigarette case from a pocket buried deep in the folds of her monochromatic sari. The case flicked open to the smell of ganja, and Kali took a joint and put it between her pursed lips. She lit it and inhaled deeply, the cherry at the end of the joint shining bright like a firefly, the dry herb burning with a sharp crackle. Soo-hyun mimicked her inhalation subconsciously, their breaths in sync.

  Kali offered the joint to Soo-hyun. They took a long drag, trying to match Kali’s, but they coughed and couldn’t stop, holding the joint out to Kali while they covered their mouth with their other hand.

  “I know I should be vaping,” Kali said, taking the joint back from Soo-hyun. She dragged deep again, and her next words flowed out accompanied by bluish smoke: “But the smell of a joint, the taste … reminds me of the first time I ever smoked. Vaping’s just not the same.”

  She held the joint out to Soo-hyun, who took another drag, this time managing to stifle the cough. Kali’s weed was grown in the former school’s greenhouse—tall, bushy marijuana plants growing beside a few scant rows of basil, coriander, and chives.

  “I haven’t figured out the pilot program yet,” Soo-hyun said.

  Kali took the joint and cleared the air with her other hand. “We’re up here so you can not think about it for a while.

  “Have you always lived in the city?”

  “Not this city, but a city, yeah.”

  “Have you ever seen the stars? Properly, I mean?” Kali pointed up at the sky. “Look at the light pollution, look at what we’ve done to the sky itself. All those constellations connected to ancient myths from all over the world, and we’ve blotted them out. We’ve cut ourselves off from our mythological heritage.”

  Soo-hyun took another drag, their face briefly illuminated by the tiny blazing light. “I can track the constellations on my phone.”

  “That’s not the same as seeing them.”

  A breeze from the west pushed the clouds over Incheon, and though the sky was clear overhead, Soo-hyun could barely see any stars shining amid that endless black.

  “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  “There’s talk of terraforming Mars, to make it more like Earth so we can live there, but no one talks about how we deterraformed Terra. Without meaning to, without trying, we’ve set the planet on a path where it will no longer support us.”

  Soo-hyun nodded and took the joint, careful not to burn their fingers on the small stump. They took a long drag, held it, and passed the joint back to Kali.

  Kali inhaled, squinting against the smoke that drifted up to her eyes. “It’s arrogant to think we could kill an entire planet, but we’re killing ourselves.” She offered the end
of the joint to Soo-hyun.

  “Oh, no, I am toasted,” Soo-hyun said, watching Kali through heavy-lidded eyes.

  Kali had one last hit of the joint, and dropped it into a beer bottle by her foot, where it briefly sizzled.

  “If we terraform Mars before we treat our addiction to consumption, we’ll just end up deterraforming it, too. That’s why I need the virus, Soo-hyun. It’s the tool we can use to reverse all the damage we’ve done.”

  “But it’s just a virus,” Soo-hyun said, their head swimming calmly.

  Kali beamed. “It’s so much more than that. It’s a living piece of software that can grow and change. It can fill any system, any niche. We can use it to run our cities, our countries, our economies. There’ll be no need for money when it can do most of the jobs. There’ll be no greed, no rampant consumption. We will let the code govern us and it will pull us back from the brink of collapse.”

  Kali turned her chair to face Soo-hyun. She leaned forward, and rested a hand on Soo-hyun’s knee. “Do you see how important that is?”

  Soo-hyun nodded and blinked. Kali loomed large and ephemeral in their vision—her face didn’t shift, Soo-hyun’s eyes did, but the effect was the same. “I do,” they said after an eternity had passed.

  “You were there that night, along with Red and the others. You were all exposed. You could all be arrested for your part in the theft, and yet we have nothing to show for it.” These last words came out slow: “Where is your brother?”

  “I already told you where he lives.”

  “He wasn’t there. Where else could he be?”

  Soo-hyun paused. “I don’t know.”

  “This is an emergency, Soo-hyun. Every day that passes without the virus is another day of pain and suffering for countless people. It is one day closer to complete collapse. It is …”

  Kali continued, but the words drifted beneath Soo-hyun’s understanding. At the word “emergency” something had come loose in Soo-hyun’s mind. When they first hacked the dogs, the machines were severed from the emergency services data network so they couldn’t be tracked and relocated by city contractors. If that break with the network was causing the latency, reinstating them could be the solution. Piggyback the stolen signal off the police servers, and get the dogs running smooth. Soo-hyun smiled, hands itching with the promise of a problem almost solved.