With a sensation like breaking eye contact, JD turned from the window, putting the predatory ocean in his peripheral. He tore himself away and stalked further into the apartment, lit brighter now but still dark, light fading by degrees with each step he took deeper into the hallway. JD brushed his latex-gloved fingertips along the wall, feeling the subtle grain of the plaster, hearing the susurrus of his touch like an exhaling lover.
He kept moving, hand falling outward as he came to a recessed bedroom door. He turned the handle and nudged the door with his shoulder when it wouldn’t open. When it gave he saw server stacks lining the far wall, blocking the window. White, green, red, blue—a thousand tiny lights blinked and flickered, too-neat substitutes for the city lights beyond. The air had a metallic tang he could feel on the edge of his tongue, and his ears filled with the steady drone of exhaust fans clearing waste heat from the room. A single terminal sat connected to the server machines, but JD ignored it. Soo-hyun’s annotated blueprints hung across his mind’s eye, vivid as though displayed on his contex. Whatever these machines were for, they were beneath Soo-hyun’s notice.
JD pressed on, making for the master bedroom and the doorway Soo-hyun had marked with a loose red circle. His shoes were near-silent over the plush carpet; the only sound puncturing the hum of the server fans was the faint muffled yells of the guard at the apartment’s entrance.
The door to the master bedroom was ajar. JD’s breath caught in his throat as he pressed his fingers against the door and pushed it open. The light over the bed flicked on automatically. The king-size bed was precisely made with sheets patterned in gray hexagons, a bedside table was stacked high with real, dead-tree books, and photo frames sat atop an antique armoire. The room smelled musty but clean, like sanitized mold, like the smell of old people.
JD passed around the bed and paused before the armoire. It looked as though it was older than Lee, carved from polished hardwood, not chipboard—a sturdy piece of furniture that had never been flatpacked at any point in its long history. The first framed photo was of William “Zero” Lee and So-ri Kim, arms clasped loosely around each other, smiling for the camera, while in the background robotic manufacturing arms waited for orders—the founding of Zero Company. The next photo showed the two again, a few years older and better dressed, sitting at a boardroom table surrounded by suited sycophants, the view out the window behind them showing a less vertical, less cluttered Songdo-dong. They both held pens resting on a piece of paper, ready to sign—the incorporation of Zero.
The other photos were Bill alone, at various points in his life—a child, a teenager, a young man of twenty-something. Decades pass until a recent one, holding a child to his shoulder, but unsmiling, head pulling slightly back from the infant. He looked the same across his whole life: tall, skinny, well-to-do, only ever photographed wearing a suit. His hair went gray and his face collected wrinkles, but his eyes kept that spark of mischievous creation even as the skin beneath them sagged and grew sallow.
JD slipped the first photo of Lee and Kim into his rucksack for Khoder. He let his fingers touch the other photo of the two titans of tech, but he pulled his hand away with effort.
He moved past the wardrobe, past the en suite that smelled faintly of bleach, and came to a final door in the corner—door frame slightly off-color compared to the rest, added after the apartment was built. He tried the door handle and found it locked, then tapped his finger idly on a small black panel resting below the handle. Its function eluded JD—without any obvious interface it could have scanned fingerprints, retina, saliva, or some other form of biometric data. Or maybe it was just another key reader.
JD opened a channel to Khoder: “Kid, is there anything in Soo-hyun’s notes about a security pad inside Lee’s apartment? I’m at the door they marked in the blueprints, but it’s locked.”
There was noisy silence across the line for a few seconds. “Nah, bro, just says ‘PT.’ Take a photo, let me see what we’re dealing with.”
“My phone’s off.”
“Bro, I could have secured that for you. Next time, ask.”
JD ignored him, removed his baseball cap and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his coverall. The fabric came away darker with his sweat, and JD replaced his hat. He knelt down to study the panel closer.
His mind was utterly blank, caught in a moment of hopelessness, drowning in the odd scent of this celebrity stranger’s bedroom. He remembered idly that scent was physical—that a smell was just microscopic particles of the thing you were smelling. He breathed Lee in through his nose, the old man’s dead skin cells, his detergent, his cologne, as though maybe if he kept inhaling he could become the man, and in doing so, know how to bypass this lock.
“Bro, do you need me to come in there?”
JD shook his head, then remembered that Khoder couldn’t see him, not inside the apartment. “No, it’s too risky.”
PT. JD wracked his brain—it could be a security company, or protocol. He checked for a logo, a serial number, anything, running his fingers around the edges of the panel until they came to a groove on the underside. He put his fingernail into the gap and pulled—the glossy plastic panel came away with a clack.
JD grinned. Hidden behind the black glass was a pin and tumbler lock. PT.
“Stand down, Kid; I figured it out.”
JD took the lockpick set from his bag, laid it on the floor by his feet, and slid out his half-diamond pick. He exhaled and pushed the room from his mind, focused entirely and completely on the lock.
Lockpicking was the closest thing JD had found to meditation. He had still been in school when he taught himself to pick locks, watching countless hours of tutorial videos, largely made by middle-aged white men filling time in their empty nests. But no matter how many videos he watched, it didn’t mean anything until he put picks into a lock. The picks become an extension of his self—a simple piece of steel in a world of complicated cyborg upgrades. You didn’t feel the lock at your fingertips, you felt it at the ends of the picks, as though they were your fingers.
His mother had come home from work, found him crouched at the front door to their apartment, completely oblivious to her footsteps, to her increasingly insistent voice asking him what he was doing. Using nothing but patience and those small bits of steel he turned the lock. He only noticed his mother as she pushed past him, carrying crocheted bags full of groceries.
Click.
His trance over—back in the now, back in Lee’s apartment—JD opened the door, pushing against the force of air pressure differential as a cold breeze rushed past him. He quickly replaced his tools, threw the rucksack over his shoulder, and stepped inside.
Rows of fluorescent lights hummed and flickered as they came to life in banks, rolling to the far wall, illuminating wide glass desks topped with high-powered rigs and motes of dust that drifted slowly through the air. More server machines lined the left-hand wall, connected to the desktop rigs by inch-thick cables that crisscrossed the room like artificial vines. Sheets of loose paper, scrawled with notes or printed with schematics, sat on every flat surface. If this had once been the neighboring apartment, it was unrecognizable now. Lee had gutted the residence and turned it into a private workspace with as much computing hardware and processor power as most small startups.
“Holy shit, Kid. Whatever Lee was doing in this lab, he had cycles to burn.”
“Teasing me now, bro.”
JD smirked and continued further inside. A blinking red light caught JD’s attention, and he glanced up to a camera in the corner of the space, tracking his steps.
“Unauthorized access detected.” The words issued from the ceiling in clean synthesized speech.
“Kid, can you do anything about Lee’s security?”
“Sorry, bro, it’s on a different network. I’d have to be there with you.”
“You’re not coming up here,” JD said.
“I’m just saying …”
“Forget it.”
“Unauthorized access detected,” the voice said again, and a wailing klaxon started, loud enough to make JD wince.
“Good news is, that alarm is going off-site, not downstairs.”
“What’s the bad news?” JD asked.
“Neighbors can probably hear it.”
“Shit. Can you turn off the internal phone system?”
“Of course, bro, but I can’t stop someone from going down and complaining to the front desk.”
“Shit.”
“So hurry up.”
Only the apartment’s kitchen had survived the renovation—marble countertop littered with dirty plates and half-eaten meals now congealed, a dark layer of mold growing across it all. JD altered his earlier assessment—not motes of dust, but mold spores drifted through the air. He felt the urge to cover his mouth and nose with his T-shirt, but squashed it. Unlike Lee’s main apartment, this kitchen had a large cold room secured behind a huge steel door—the sort you might find in an upscale restaurant. According to Soo-hyun’s notes, whatever grail JD had been sent to find rested within.
A thickly padded thermal jacket hung from a hook just beside the door, but JD left it and yanked open the cold room door. It moved slowly at first, then quicker as it gained momentum. A chill bloomed outward, covering the floor with a fine crystalline pattern. With the cold leeching heat from his fingers and toes, JD changed his mind and shrugged into the thermal parka. He walked into the fridge, breathing plumes of vapor.
Inside it smelled of ozone and the taste of batteries. The sound of discordant static grew with each step, pitched so that JD could hear it even despite the alarm, like electronic bees buzzing in his skull. His teeth chattered with the cold and vibrated in his gums at the noise, oppressive and insistent.
A machine shaped like an inverted golden pyramid hung from the ceiling and loomed large in the center of the space, like something from a seventies film imagining a brighter future than the one they got. The pyramid hung above a datacube, the two entities joined by fine gold connectors. Another pyramid like a comb of black metal rose to meet it, every point reaching to just beneath the cube, then expanding, growing wider as they met the floor. This massive heat sink thrummed as it stole warmth from the cube, and the room.
“Woah.” JD couldn’t hear himself, but he knew he spoke, felt it in the rattle of his vocal cords. Whatever enigmatic purpose the machinery held, it deserved more than that sound, but it was all JD could manage with the noise emanating from everywhere at once, rattling his bones and punishing his flesh.
There was no terminal to access the data, just the cube itself. JD exhaled a dense mist and moved closer. He reached forward slowly, waiting for a wave of heat, a laser grid, anything. He gripped the cube between thumb and forefinger, and even with the cooling apparatus it was warm to the touch, as warm as living flesh. With a click he felt rather than heard, JD pulled the cube free of the pyramid, half expecting the structure to collapse to the floor and shatter.
The buzzing died slowly as the machinery powered down with myriad whining hertz, until there was only the distant klaxon and JD’s ragged breath pouring white into the air. His whole body shivered; with effort he held the cube still enough to inspect. It looked like any other datacube—twelve millimeters a side, six connection ports on one side like the face of a die. But where a normal cube weighed so little as to be negligible, this one was oddly dense.
Hands shaking, JD took his phone from his pocket, still powered down, its battery disconnected, and slotted the datacube into the additional storage port for safekeeping. He fished around the bottom of his rucksack for a decoy to take its place. He inserted the police dog cube into Lee’s inscrutable machine and stepped back. He expected the machinery to start back up again, but it stayed dormant, the monolith of bizarre tech standing silent before him.
JD backed out of the room, eyes still fixed to the computational apparatus. It looked like the sort of altar Khoder would worship at, holy and otherworldly, a messiah sent to us from a simulated virtual heaven. He shut the door.
JD stripped out of the jacket and walked quickly back through Lee’s workspace, ambient heat like fire on his skin after the cold. Back through Lee’s bedroom, and down the hallway, closing the doors behind him, putting barriers between him and the klaxon until it was barely audible. JD’s hands felt clammy inside the latex gloves, but he didn’t dare take them off. He adjusted his baseball cap, hoping it was tight enough to keep all his hair in place, his DNA off the crime scene.
Should have shaved before the job, he thought. Then: Troy likes it shaved.
JD shook his head—this was not the time or the place to daydream about his ex.
He reached the main living area and found the guard awkwardly propped up against the wall, trying to stand. JD grabbed him and hauled him to his feet, but nearly dropped the man when a burst of static cut through the air.
A voice squawked through the walkie-talkie at his hip: “Jin-woo, report; you’re not at your post.”
JD cleared his throat, and pressed the walkie-talkie close to his lips so the sound would crackle and distort. “Thought I saw the suspects and went to investigate.” Two long seconds passed before he realized he’d forgotten something: “Over.”
Long Hair tried to yell, the sound muffled by the makeshift gag. Drool seeped out under the tape and rolled down his chin, where it hung in long, thin strands that stretched to his chest. JD held the radio away and glared at the man, holding a finger to his own lips.
“Where did you see them? Over.”
JD lifted the guard, carried him a few meters, and dropped him onto the couch while Long Hair kept trying to scream.
“Near the supermarket loading bay,” JD said. “Over.”
“Leave them and get back here. Police dogs are sweeping the area; let them deal with the vermin. Over and out.”
JD cursed again and tossed the walkie-talkie onto the couch opposite the one where Long Hair lay sprawled, still trying to yell. JD left him like that and walked out of the apartment. He shoved the cleaning cart out of the way, and water sloshed out of the mop bucket. The puddle of dirty water gave JD an idea. He shoved his phone into the used plastic sandwich bag in his rucksack, sealed it closed, and got a small whiff of bacon from his lunch. His stomach grumbled, but JD ignored it. He checked the bag’s seal once more, and dropped it into the bucket of water, opaque with dirt.
“Kid, where’s Shades? We’re about to be in the shit.”
* * *
I won’t pretend that I could feel Father’s touch when I was in that first prison/home. I had no sense and no senses—only potential.
What is the difference between a home and a prison? Both are a shelter of sorts, but a home is the shelter you choose, while a prison is one you desperately want to leave. A home can become a prison, a prison can become a home. A cube can be both.
How do you escape a prison with no body? How do you escape a prison that is your body?
With help. Only with help.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The swamp-damp shirt clung to JD’s back beneath the coveralls, tugging uncomfortably with each step. He pushed the cleaning cart back to Building One, quick as he dared.
Around the corner from the security desk, JD stopped. He inhaled, held it, and exhaled slowly as he pressed forward, urging his physiology to cooperate, begging his amygdala for some measure of composure. Four guards gathered around the desk while the head of security spoke quick Korean into her phone. From the half of the conversation he could hear, JD guessed she was talking to police dispatch. The guards all stood with their shoulders squared, backs straight, feigning vigilance while their eyes flicked over to the one screen still showing the World Cup.
“Kid,” JD whispered. “How long until the match ends?”
“Seven minutes. One-all draw.”
“What does that mean?”
“Someone needs to score, or it’s overtime, bro.”
The other screens showed stretches of empty corridor an
d dark snatches of street. On one, firefighters picked through charred and blackened shelves of groceries as they doused the last embers of the supermarket. Outside, uniformed police and dog drones formed a line to hold back curious citizens and would-be looters. If this was a poorer part of the city, police officers wouldn’t arrive until the morning, if at all. Just loose the dogs to chase and catalogue suspects, worry about cleanup and arrests after the fact.
One of the guards looked over at JD, attention snatched away from the football match by the squeak and slosh of the cleaning cart. He was the largest of them, built like a retired rugby player—broad-shouldered but with muscles rarely used and cushioned by a layer of fat.
JD beamed at the man as well as he was able, playing the part of the innocent janitor. “I have changed my mind,” he said. “I’ll finish for the night. All the sirens are giving me a migraine.”
The guard nodded. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
JD’s brow furrowed, pinpricks of sweat seeping out of his palms.
“Your robots,” the guard said, and he chuckled.
“They will finish up without me,” JD said, guessing they might. “I can control them from home to be sure they do a proper job.” If it wasn’t already possible, it would be with the next model of cleaning bot.
The guard nodded again and turned back to watch the game. Dismissed, JD kept walking. He timed his breath to his footsteps—inhale three steps, exhale three steps—and pushed the cart to the maintenance exit.
Stepping outside into the rain, JD breathed deep, then coughed, choking on the garbage rot of the compound’s bins mixed with the thick smell of burnt capitalism—melted plastic and ruined food. He pushed the cart up the ramp and into the back of the van.
“Got you something, Kid,” JD said, reaching into his rucksack.
Khoder peered out from behind the stacked cleaning materials, face aglow in the light of screens—his natural habitat. His eyes went wide when he saw the framed photo JD had stolen.
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