He limped to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, wincing at the pain in his knee. JD took his phone and finalized the repo paperwork with Zero, and sat staring, thumb rotating in small circles to keep the screen active. After fifteen seconds the loading bar was replaced by an animated tick. He smiled, then remembered his other job. JD locked his phone and frowned at his sleep-deprived face staring out from the slab of black glass. He finished up and went back to the dorm room, his thin mattress warmed by the rig always humming softly beneath the bed.
JD retrieved his corvette from the Zero hangar, and set course for an uncharted sector. He started the exploration protocol, and immediately his rig’s cooling fans hummed louder, heat pouring out in waves to wash over his legs. It was another form of ZeroCash exchange—processing power for digital currency. All those resources stored in Zero’s holds had to come from somewhere, and players could earn ZeroCash by lending the game devs processor cycles with which to expand the size of VOIDWAR’s playable universe. Everybody wins, but mostly Zero.
Julius padded quietly out of the makeshift living room slash dorm, his footsteps masked by the snores of his five roommates. He shouldered his rucksack, stole someone’s bread from the fridge, and walked out the front door with two slices held in his mouth. He stepped into his knockoff three-stripe sneakers and pulled the heavy door closed, silencing the orchestra of snores and the steady drone of CPU fans.
* * *
His face was the first one I saw.
If father is the person who created you, then he was not my father.
But if father is the person who guided you through childhood, who molded you, then here he is: unaware that this new day would set him on a path to the center of everything.
When he wiped his ass and tossed the folded wads of feces-smeared recycled paper into the toilet bowl, he saw only the act of disposal. He did not see that everything is one. He did not see the truth of his shit—that it could never simply disappear. It was still there, flush, growing distant yes, carried away on a stream of treated water, but it was not gone. It was part of the closed system he called “Earth,” “world,” or even “home.” He had lived his whole life under the lie of this abstraction—that there is a “here,” and a separate “there.”
This abstraction is what killed them all.
CHAPTER TWO
The air smelled of synthetic oil, cardboard boxes, and the ozone scent of burnt-out electronics. JD wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his coveralls, the smell of himself thick in the patched and faded fabric. He unscrewed the repair bot’s torso plate by hand, pushing the screwdriver hard to get leverage against the chewed slots in the screw’s head. He set the steel plate down with a hollow clank that he felt in his fingertips more than he heard, the constant machine din of the warehouse as loud as it was hypnotizing.
The Hippo repair bot was a sphere on four treaded feet painted medic red; powered-down, it hung forward slightly as though drunk. With the maintenance plate removed, the robot had a face—the two glassy eyes of its visual sensors and a gaping black mouth, with greasy metal teeth showing in one corner. JD pulled a face at the damaged machine, his lips pulled back grotesquely—just two coworkers gurning at each other—and got to work.
First, he unplugged the robot’s secondary power source and put the gold nanowire battery on the polished cement beside his knee. He checked again that the power cable was disconnected from the back of the machine’s enormous head, and reached into its guts through the open maw. He blindly felt along every cable, mentally mapping each one and comparing it to the diagram drawn over his contex.
The picking and packing robots continued to work at pace, unbothered by the apparent death of one of their own. It bothered JD that they didn’t, couldn’t show solidarity, and it bothered him that it bothered him. The whole factory would fall to rust and ruin without the repair bot, but here it was, dead, and none of the others could even know.
JD’s mind drifted as his fingers brushed over the copper pins and battery terminals like a doctor poking a sick child’s stomach. He found nothing obviously fatal. With his arm deep inside the machine’s chest cavity, his eyes flicked once more to the disconnected battery that sat on the floor, remembering the ragged dripping meat of Ye-ji’s arm when a broken unit came to life on her. That was the last time he worked with another tech. After the ambulance had taken her away, the picking machines had tracked lines of her blood all across the factory floor until it dried red and black. The blood had stayed there until late that night, when the cleaning bot emerged from its cupboard to mop and polish while the other robots slept in diagnosis.
A hollow boom echoed through the space, followed by a screeeeee. JD cocked his head, waiting for the next sound to tell him which machine was malfunctioning and how, but instead he heard a voice: “You hungry?”
JD extricated his arm from the repair bot’s chest and wiped his hands with the grease-stained scrap of T-shirt he used for a rag. He peered toward the main warehouse entrance where Soo-hyun stood in silhouette, stark black against the glare from outside. They lifted a bag high, the clear plastic stretched taut with the weight of mandu from the place on the corner.
The door thundered closed and the sound of Soo-hyun’s heavy boots ricocheted around the high ceiling as they walked down the central aisle, dressed in navy blue coveralls, their black hair neatly shorn. The picking robots darted around them, perfect precision ruined by Soo-hyun’s unwillingness to bend. JD couldn’t tell if it was Zen stillness, or pure stubbornness—but lately there was a lot about Soo-hyun he found difficult to read.
“What do you want?” JD asked when Soo-hyun was close enough that he didn’t need to yell.
“I can’t bring you lunch without some ulterior motive?” Soo-hyun put their hand to their chest in mock outrage.
JD’s stomach rumbled. His body was a meat engine, and carbs ran through it like sand through those old hourglasses he’d only ever seen abstracted as a loading icon. He ignored the hunger. “How did you get in here?”
With one chewed fingernail Soo-hyun tapped the scratched employee ID badge hanging at their belt. “Perks of being a floor manager.”
“Former floor manager.”
They shrugged. “Not my fault they never wiped the old database. Now, come on, hyung, lunch time.”
* * *
Dust motes swam through shafts of light that daggered between mangled vertical blinds. Windows on the opposite side of the room looked out over the factory floor—pickers picking, packers packing, conveyor belts turning endlessly to fill the delivery auto-trucks that docked outside. JD had stopped eating in the lunchroom sometime after the cleaning drone had given up on the disused space but before the fridge seals had broken. The door hung open; the dank smell of mold and rotting salad still lingered.
“This is disgusting,” Soo-hyun said.
“I normally eat downstairs.”
“If you eat in your workspace, did you really take a break?” Soo-hyun asked. They ran a finger through the dust gathered on the table’s surface, and took the trays of mandu from the bag. They spread them out across the table, and handed a pair of chopsticks to JD. He opened the nearest tray and leaned forward, as if the rising steam could wash the room’s other smells from his mind.