“What is this?” JD asked, snapping apart his chopsticks and cleaning them against each other.
“Kimchi, mushroom, tofu,” Soo-hyun said, pointing to each tray.
“No, this visit.”
Soo-hyun’s mass of necklaces made from copper wire and assorted junk collected in the shadowed V of their coveralls and jangled when they dropped into the seat opposite JD. “I want to help you.”
JD took one of the fried mandu for an excuse to look away. He put the whole dumpling in his mouth. “You want to help,” he said once he’d chewed and swallowed, “but you still haven’t apologized.”
Soo-hyun lowered their head. “I never wanted you to get hurt, hyung,” they said. “Isn’t that enough?”
JD shook his head—less a response than a surrender. “You still living in the ruins?”
“You wouldn’t call our community ‘ruins’ if you ever visited. You should come see me after work today, let me introduce you to everyone.”
JD shoved another dumpling into his mouth and chewed. “I haven’t seen you for months, and now you show up here to talk about—what?”
“You’d be happier living at Liber, Jules. There’s no rent, no bills, just a community of people trying to help each other. Living there has calmed me down. It really helps.”
JD rested his chopsticks across the closest tray and leveled a gaze at his younger sibling. “What do you want, Soo-hyun?” He sounded tired as he spoke the words, heard them echo through their past like a mantra. Soo-hyun always wanted something.
“I’m trying to give you a job.”
JD took up the chopsticks and made a circular motion that said, “Go on.”
“We need a repo.”
“You say ‘repo,’ but something tells me you mean ‘thief.’ ”
Soo-hyun smirked. “Aren’t those jobs more fun?”
JD ferried a dumpling into his mouth and waited for them to continue.
“We’ll pay you, okay? Is that what you want to hear?”
“How much?” JD said around a mouthful of mandu.
“Fifty thousand euro.”
JD almost choked. “How much?”
“Fifty thousand. Five-zero.”
JD raised his eyebrows, cynicism resting with his pursed lips.
“Kali has the money, Jules. She has a hundred and thirty million Livideo subscribers, and a hundred thousand who pay for her online courses. Every night she gives a talk, and every night it streams to more and more people. We have money, JD, enough to turn Liber into a paradise.”
“Maybe I should move in,” JD said, voice flat.
“You should!” Soo-hyun said. “It’s amazing, JD. Kali is amazing, you’ll love her.”
“What’s the job?”
“Kali wrote a piece of software that will change the world, but someone stole it from her. All you’ve got to do is steal it back.”
JD’s hand halted halfway between the tray of mandu and his mouth. He sighed. “And what happens if I visit tonight?” he asked eventually.
“Just hear Kali out. If you don’t like it, we don’t do the job.”
“We?”
“It’s a big job; you’re going to need a diversion.” They spoke the words casually, but still JD’s knee flared with remembered pain.
“I thought you gave that up. I thought you were calm now. I’m still limping after your last diversion.”
“Maybe I’m too calm. Kali worries I’m stunting my own spiritual growth.”
“What does that even mean?” JD asked.
“I don’t know, Jules. I’m just here to try and make things right. I never wanted to apologize if all I could offer you were the words, but if we do this job, I’ll give you my cut. Fifty k is enough for your knee surgery, enough to keep you fed while you recover.”
JD shook his head, in disbelief or shock, he wasn’t sure.
“This is how I apologize, hyung. This is how I make it right.” Soo-hyun stared at him, their hazel eyes gleaming. Something vulnerable sat in those eyes, and suddenly JD saw Soo-hyun as they were when they’d first met—a sweet seven-year-old, scared but excited. The little sibling he would always love, no matter how much they annoyed him, no matter how badly they hurt him. That was family.
“Alright, I’ll come see you after work; but no guarantee I’ll take the job.”
“You won’t regret it,” Soo-hyun said, and they flashed him their best mischievous smile. Some part of him regretted it already.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and saw the pin Soo-hyun had just dropped—the location of Liber, in Songdo’s ruined east beyond the canal, abandoned by the city council after the flood a decade earlier.
“How am I supposed to—” He looked up and the lunchroom door was already swinging closed behind Soo-hyun, a whorl of dust spinning in the void they left behind.
He crossed to the window and watched Soo-hyun march back to the exit, carving a straight line through the machines. They waved once as they pushed the main doors open, and disappeared into the glare, swallowed by the external world.
* * *
Hours later, JD stepped outside, leaving behind the industrial clang of the warehouse. The building loomed over him, haloed by the fast-approaching dusk. It was four stories’ worth of storage, humming with machine labor, and still ringed with suicide nets from when human pickers and packers worked themselves to exhaustion within its walls, all for the sake of some technocrat’s net worth. JD left the structure’s shadow and pushed into the sidewalk surge, joining the shuffling biomass of Neo Songdo. Sunlight speared between buildings at migraine height; it burned bright through the smog, heat hanging heavy over the city, where it would persist until well after midnight.
Traffic lights and crossing signals shone in the real, largely for the sake of pedestrians and the rare human driver—the self-driving cars too unsettling to watch without their every move telegraphed in advance. The cars didn’t see the lights, they reacted instead to some hidden system of machine semiotics, chattering constantly among themselves. Watching them, JD wondered if the cars ever talked about their passengers, ever gossiped about the biological denizens of the machine city.
The original plans for Songdo had called for a focus on pedestrians and public transport—a clean city, a green city—but when Zero bailed out the government and took on the city’s debt, their rideshare network had taken precedence. Wide sidewalks gave way to roads, people gave way to cars, and the grand intentions of Songdo’s architects gave way to the excesses of capital.
Waiting at a crosswalk, people packed in tight around JD, their bodies adding to the heat of the falling sun. He scrunched his nose against the medley of body odor, the acrid scent of vehicle exhaust and factory runoff, and the biologic smells of vomit and piss baking on hot cement.
The signal turned green, and JD walked.
He shot daggers at every corporate worker dressed identically in black, white, and gray, still exquisitely preened after eight hours in air-conditioning, but he knew the sneer that twisted his mouth was pure jealousy, not class warfare. He pushed those elite specters from his mind and took in the rest of the bustle: gig-economy hopefuls rushing home, some paid, others not; folks peddling noodles, soup, or bottled water from behind corporate censor bars; and rich kids strangled by private school uniforms, chain-smoking cigarettes because nothing is cooler than lung cancer your parents can afford to cure. They flocked birdlike around the street’s other denizens: urchins, runaways, freaks, beggars, and petty criminals working their latest angle.