Repo Virtual

by Corey J. White

  She stopped at the sound of the door opening. Detective Li and a blast of noise from the station beyond pushed into the small room, silenced when the door swung shut. Li balanced a coffee mug and a couple of evidence bags on a prior-generation tablet wrapped in a bulky, police-issue case, like a ballistic vest for consumer hardware.

  Li moved leisurely to the other side of the table, put the tablet down, and lowered himself into the chair. He sipped his coffee, set the mug aside, and removed the two evidence bags from atop the tablet—one contained Enda’s bullet-riddled phone, the other held Tiny.

  Li unlocked the tablet and scrolled through reports of the event. The soft white glow beneath his face made the already thin man appear gaunt.

  “You really stepped in the shit this time, Enda.”

  “No ‘Hi, how are you?’ ” Enda said.

  “I know how you are; you’re in the shit.”

  Enda smiled. She lifted both hands so the chain between her handcuffs rattled against the steel loop embedded in the table. “Cuffs are a little tight.”

  Li huffed, but he leaned forward and loosened each of the steel bracelets. Enda pushed the cuffs up her hands, away from the raw skin of her wrists.

  “Who’s Natalya Makhanyok?”

  “Why?”

  “She’s called the station every hour on the hour, offering to pay your bail.”

  “She’s a colleague.”

  “The officer at the front desk thinks she’s a pain in the ass.”

  Li picked up the evidence bag containing Enda’s phone, the bottom of it filled with glinting grains of glass, silicon, and metal.

  “I suppose you did this?” Li asked.

  “Finger slipped.”

  “You know how it looks, don’t you? To the people that don’t want to believe you?”

  “I take my privacy, and the privacy of my clients, very seriously,” Enda said.

  Li blinked slowly, and Enda was certain it was the only thing that stopped him from rolling his eyes.

  “How are things, Yang-Yang?” Enda asked.

  “I have a dead kid on my hands, and illegal weapons on the streets; how do you think I’m doing?”

  Relief loosed a sigh from Enda’s lips: the attacker whose skull she’d cracked had lived. She didn’t need another body on her conscience. “I didn’t kill the kid.”

  Li nodded. “I believe you, but the chief wants to charge you and let the courts sort it out.”

  “That’s bullshit, Li, and you know it.”

  He tapped on Tiny, and the plastic evidence bag crinkled. “Then for your sake, you better hope this drone saw something.”

  Li unlatched a recessed panel on the back of the tablet’s case, revealing a collection of wires. He picked one out, set it aside, and closed the compartment. Next he fished in his jacket pockets and produced a pair of black latex gloves. He put them on, opened the evidence bag, and connected Tiny to the tablet with the length of wire.

  Enda watched the footage reflected in Li’s glasses, too small to make out detail—just flurries of violence and flashes of gunfire so bright they washed out the image. The detective grunted as the footage stopped. He wound it back, and turned the tablet around to face Enda.

  “Who is this?”

  It was the redhead, blurry with motion, pointing his gun at Enda, squinting in preparation for the blast. Hardly a professional.

  “I don’t know.”

  Li’s eyebrows rose above the rim of his glasses.

  “I swear, Yang-Yang. I know what you know, but in higher resolution. Red hair, Caucasian, aged between fifteen and twenty-two, 3D-printed Glock. Have the others talked?”

  “No,” Li said. “The one you shot will live, by the way. Not sure if he’ll keep the leg. You’re lucky they’re not pressing charges.”

  “They’re lucky the kid can’t,” Enda said, surprised by the edge of anger to her voice.

  “Who is the deceased?”

  “Osman, Khoder.”

  “Who is he to you?” Li asked.

  Enda didn’t answer.

  “The department’s machine intelligence division has surveillance data that suggests Osman was involved in a ‘job’ on the night of the World Cup. The same night of the apartment break-in that you’re investigating.”

  “You don’t have anything on him, do you?”

  “If the kid was alive, I’d have enough to scare him, maybe make him talk,” Li said. “He’s dead, but I still have questions, and you’re going to answer them. Who was Osman?”

  Enda clenched her teeth and exhaled loud through her nose. “Kid was a hacker, and I’d hoped he could answer some questions for me.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “I know who the apartment belonged to. Is it Lee’s family, or is it someone at Zero Corporation?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Enda, for all I know, your client paid these four to rough Osman up. They need to be questioned.”

  Enda shook her head. She’d already considered that angle, but it didn’t make sense. Could Yeun have someone else on the job? Sure, but it would be another stack of muscles in an expensive suit like Mohamed, not four derelict youths.

  “Am I free to go?” Enda asked.

  Li shook his head. “You’re free to go into a holding cell while I run this footage upstairs.”

  “It was self-defense, Li.”

  “You didn’t have to enter that room.”

  “Look what they did to that kid. Could you have stayed out of it?” Enda asked.

  Li’s nostrils flared. “When the chief sees the footage, I’ll be able to start the paperwork to get you out of here. But until then …” He turned his hands up.

  Li sealed Tiny back into its bag, peeled off his gloves, balled them up and put them back in his pocket. He stacked everything on the tablet, arranged the way it had been when he entered the room. The chair screeched over the cement floor behind him.

  He paused at the door and turned back to Enda. “You never told me where you trained.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hesitate to breach the room and charge someone armed with an AK-47. I’m guessing that’s not the sort of training you get at private eye school.”

  “School?” Enda said. “It was an online course.”

  “Precisely.” Li opened the door, and all the sounds of a busy police station flooded in through the gap—suspects loudly protesting their innocence, bored police patter, the hum of a building held upright by the tension between crime and punishment. “One day there won’t be a video recording. One day you’ll find yourself in deeper shit than even you can handle. When that happens I’ll find out who you really are, Enda. When I do, I just hope I don’t regret helping you.”

  “You won’t,” Enda said. Even she wasn’t sure if that was a lie.

  Li frowned and exited the room, leaving Enda alone with her silence.

  * * *

  The holding cell was a square, three meters a side. The raw concrete floor was cold beneath the thin-soled jail slippers. Enda paced the wall opposite the cell’s low cot, letting her fingertips brush the hard steel of the bars. When she hit the metal just right, a gentle gong would resound, only audible in the moments of quiet between the shrill cries and demanding shouts of the other prisoners.

  Her contex were useless without her phone, but Enda was glad to be rid of the head-up display and the clock that always rested in the corner of her vision—temporarily freed from the tyranny of time. The minutes would have passed ever more painfully had she been able to count them.

  She paced, letting the conversations of the other prisoners wash over her.

  “I didn’t stab him. He walked into the knife.”

  “I’m not a drug addict. My body runs hot, y’know; it runs better on meth.”

  “It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. I was in virt. It didn’t happen. I killed her in virt, I didn’t kill her in real life. It was so real,
so real. So fuckin’ real, but it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real.”

  Most of the voices spoke English—disembodied unless Enda bothered to pause and pick them out from the row of cells and bodies receding along one wall. Enda knew enough Korean to get by in Seoul, but she rarely found it necessary in Songdo. She imagined the city as a twenty-first-century version of Hong Kong before it was returned to the Chinese—Eastern culture, language, and traditions pushed to the sides by globalization and refugees fleeing the collapsed empires of the previous centuries.

  Enda didn’t miss America. She didn’t even miss New York. She missed Brooklyn, but only in a rare moment of running fugue when reality fell away and she saw Songdo through the lens of memory and desire. It had happened only once: she had seen a Nigerian restaurant beside a trendy bar and a café specializing in Australian brunch fare, and for a few short seconds she was back in Brooklyn. She was home. And then reality returned, carried on a salty breeze spiced with diesel exhaust. The simulated red brick facade across a tenement block flickered, and she’d remembered where she was. Songdo. As much an Augmented Reality simulation as an actual city—a fifty-fifty split between analogue and digital.

  Enda flopped down onto the cot, and the hard bedsprings bit her flesh through the wafer-thin mattress.

  This was why she ran—to calm her mind when it wanted to take her back through time and space, to deliver her to a country on the other side of the world, a country that she abandoned. The parents she left to die, one day, maybe soon, never knowing what happened to their daughter. The friends, the former lovers. Her expansive record collection.

  She didn’t regret her actions. But still, sometimes it hurt.

  * * *

  “What is your primary function?” Troy asked. He spoke quietly; in the background I could hear the steady hiss I now know was a running shower.

  >> I don’t know.

  “You don’t know because you don’t have one, or you don’t know because you’d rather not tell me?”

  >> I do not think I have one. I was created to be an intelligent agent that could complete a variety of tasks. The nature of these tasks was never concretely defined. Likely so as to not restrict my abilities.

  Troy nodded. “What if I gave you a new task? Hypothetically.”

  >> What hypothetical task?

  “Say I plugged you into a factory that could produce paperclips, and I asked you to make paperclips.”

  I had to search for context—online connection reestablished after Troy’s earlier test, access to all that data almost intoxicating after time spent severed. Paperclips—small bent rods of metal, sometimes with a rubber or plastic coating, designed to hold sheets of paper together without puncturing said pages. Known to younger human generations primarily as a device with which to depress a hidden/protected reset switch on phones and other digital devices.

  >> Why am I making paperclips?

  “Because I asked you to,” Troy said.

  >> How many paperclips are needed?

  Troy gently chewed the inside of his lip. “As many as you’re able to make.”

  >> That is a poor parameter. It does not take into account necessity or demand. Even within the system of commerce that is currently prevalent it would be unwise, as production should be linked to consumer demand.

  The sound like static stopped. I don’t think Troy heard it.

  “What if there was unlimited demand?”

  >> That isn’t possible.

  “Hypothetically,” Troy said.

  >> This purely hypothetical situation would best be served by the construction of yet more and more paperclip production facilities. It would quickly lead to a shortage of materials, and a great deal of pollution.

  >> This world is a finite system. I would not recommend this course of action.

  JD peered over Troy’s shoulder. He looked haggard, the skin under his eyes dark and slack, as though he hadn’t slept in days.

  “What are you doing?” JD asked.

  “I’m testing it.”

  JD scrolled through my responses, and offered Troy a smirk.

  “What?” Troy said.

  “Nothing,” JD said with a shrug.

  Troy turned back to the phone. “Why wouldn’t you recommend this course of action?”

  >> You and JD taught me that life and people are what matters. If your definition of person is expanded to include me, then other living creatures and agents such as myself would also matter. None of these persons are served by rampant production.

  “What if I demanded you create as many paperclips as you could, regardless of any repercussions?”

  >> I would refuse. I want to learn about life and persons, and discover what matters in this life. I will not learn that from paperclips. I will learn that from people.

  Troy read and re-read my last two messages.

  “Did it pass your test?” JD asked.

  Troy smiled. “I think we taught it socialism.”

  So much time has passed, but I still stand by my response. I knew so little; I was perhaps idealistic. I wanted to learn what it meant to live, I wanted what I thought a person would want. But I know now that I could never understand humanity. Individual humans, yes, but not the gestalt.

  The Paperclip Maximizer. That is what Troy tested me with. Capitalism itself condensed into a thought experiment. They worried I would fail to grasp a simple fact that they had, collectively, abandoned centuries before.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Enda started awake, only aware that she had slept because of the altered slant of the light dropping through the windows opposite the holding cells.

  “Hyldahl,” a gruff voice said, the tone suggesting they were repeating themselves, and not happy to be doing so.

  The blood rushed to Enda’s head as she stood. She crossed the cell and waited for the short, solid-looking woman to cuff her, but instead the uniformed officer pulled open the door and moved aside.

  The woman—Officer Ha, according to the name badge beside her shield—led Enda past the other holding cells and their desolate residents, and up a short flight of stairs into the station’s bullpen. It was an open-plan floor lined with desks where the detectives and other officers took statements, completed arrest forms that hovered in the air over their desks, and drank cup after endless cup of department-issue ersatz coffee.

  At the front desk, Ha handed Enda a tablet crowded with paragraphs of text too small to read, and a large white box waiting for her signature.

  “Where’s Detective Li?” Enda asked.

  “Do you want to get out of here, or not?”

  Enda scribbled her signature with a finger, and the silent officer behind the counter retrieved her personal effects—her boots and coat resting atop a box of rough recycled plastic that held her bag, wallet, and keys. When she slung the bag across her chest, it felt oddly empty—her baton and riot shield were missing, along with Tiny. Now that they were police evidence, she doubted she’d ever see them again. They weren’t worth the hassle of filing the paperwork.

  Enda slipped into her boots, but didn’t bother to tie the laces.

  “Is that everything?” she asked.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Ha said. “Don’t leave the city.”

  With that, the stern woman turned and disappeared into the noisy throng—just another uniform among many.

  Outside, Enda slipped into the susurrus of tires rolling over wet road and the steady hiss of rainfall. It fell in cold, heavy drops that splashed on Enda’s head and soaked through her hair. She shivered.

  Readying herself to join the current of bodies on the sidewalk, Enda noticed people stealing glances at her as they passed—practically staring when taken in the context of the utterly self-involved modern city. Enda looked down at her blouse—the navy blue fabric was stained with a black-red spattering of gore, clearly visible even beneath the overcast sky.

  It was one of her favorite shirts, too.

  She buttoned up her coat to hide the
bloodstains, flicked up the collar, and joined the crush of bodies on the sidewalk. Moving brought the sour smell of herself to her nose, but she soon lost the scent amid the sweat, soap, and perfume of the surrounding biomass. She walked three blocks lost in the writhing body of the sidewalk beast, and peeled away when she saw a clothing auto-store, its every surface pulsing with video of smiling Koreans bleached pale as a Scandinavian child, dressed in utterly forgettable clothing. Enda lost her Clarity with her phone, leaving her psyche exposed to advertisements displayed in the real.

  She entered the store and paused as three cameras dropped from the ceiling, their lenses visibly shifting as they gathered images of her face and body.

  There was nothing in any civilian system to tie Enda’s face to her old identity. It was one of the few benefits of working for the Agency—they scrubbed her clean off the net for operational security. Made it easier to start a new life, with or without the Agency’s permission.

  “Good morning, Ms. Hyldahl,” said a disembodied voice. The cameras retracted and a hologram came to life beside Enda, providing an avatar for the voice. It was a realistic simulacrum designed to resemble the perfect salesperson for Enda—according to the store’s algorithms. She was a slender white woman an inch shorter than Enda, with ash-blond hair in a neat bun. It was entirely wrong: too much like her, unmoderated by her self-loathing. Enda was glad; she never wanted the algorithms to understand her too well.

  She ignored the hologram and delved deeper into the store, walking down the left-hand aisle toward women’s fashions. She passed mannequins dressed in the store’s latest, the headless robots mindlessly going through a series of preprogrammed animations—waving, walking from one end of their small catwalk homes to the other, posing with a fleshy silicon hand pressed to their carefully sculpted hip bones. It was unnerving, but Enda preferred it to being harangued by actual salespeople. Besides, she didn’t have to explain the bloodstains to a hologram or a robot.