In disused doorways and dirty alleys, virt-lost homeless withered away to skin and bone, largely hidden behind Songdo’s Augmented Reality facade. They owned no possessions but the third-hand phones clutched in bony fingers and the makeshift blindfolds wrapped around their heads to keep their virtual worlds sacrosanct, safe from the encroachments of the real.
JD shouldered through the crowd with his limping gait, his broad frame an unintentional battering ram. Eyes followed him as he moved through the sea of mostly Korean bodies, their gaze marking him as an outsider—the city’s multicultural push hindered by thousands of years of Korean ethnic homogeneity. JD stepped into the street to pass a knot of execs tied around a pop-up cocktail bar and ignored the flashing red warning underfoot. He slapped the door of a passing auto-car and the driving algorithm slammed to a halt with a honk of its horn. JD just laughed.
At the next corner a man stood at a little stall, dressed in a jacket patterned with bright rectangles of global currency. He sold US hundred-dollar bills enshrined in plastic frames for ten euro apiece—souvenirs from a fallen empire.
Everywhere slabs of color stood out too-crisp against the dreary real, hiding graffiti, pirate ads, and occasional spatters of blood. Early in Neo Songdo’s life, the Augmented layer had been writable. Excited city planners invited citizens to write their own lives onto the street: advice for new arrivals, reviews of local restaurants, warnings of criminal elements or overzealous police. In practice, the city became a bathroom wall writ large. Now, only city council and advertisers could write into the Augmented feed, giving every street a uniform commercial banality that scraped at JD’s psyche.
Walls on either side of the road thrummed with high-resolution adverts tailored for his eyes: VOIDWAR promotions beside Olavon beauty treatments hawked by affectless celebrities he’d never seen before, sex-baited cola ads next to commercials for daytime soap operas, omnipresent algorithms confused by all the money he spent on his mother. JD watched his feet, pushing the layer of compulsory AR from his mind as he navigated the city, following fiber-optic ley lines, the veins running through the failed ubiquitous city.
JD logged into VOIDWAR as he walked, the sign-in screen opaque across the visual noise of the city. His phone grew hot in his pocket as it connected to the game’s systems. Spend enough time logged in and you’d feel your phone cooking the meat of your thigh. He checked his inbox first, saw confirmation of payment on his in-game repo job, then searched the forums for after-action reports from the battle around Grzyb Station. Seal Team Dix crowed over their victory, while furious Russians cursed JD, “the repo fuck,” in janky machine translation.
He passed through downtown from the west, until the tide of foot traffic slowly turned against him: night workers ferrying themselves into the heart of the city while he trudged toward the broken, gangrenous foot. Soon the current turned to a trickle. Skyscrapers and low-rises gave way to overpasses, bypasses, highways, and byways. The diesel smoke was thick enough to taste, because nothing moves a loaded truck like burning dinosaurs.
Past some invisible border between the city proper and the ruined outskirts, the Augmented street signs and road markings began to fall from JD’s vision, pixels blinking out of existence to reveal the true grime of the city beneath. JD had never come out this far, despite Soo-hyun’s insistence, but he knew it was the residents of Liber who had scraped away the bokodes that controlled all the Augmented signifiers of city life. It was their retaliation for the council’s neglect. Graffiti peeked out from behind the final fading stretches of digital wall—basic tags, indecipherable sigils in splashes of garish paint, and the words north korea best korea in bold black letters a meter tall across the length of a broken glass factory.
JD paused at the bridge over the canal to catch his breath and stretch out his leg, wincing at the ache in his knee. He could have—should have—ordered a car, but none would drive this far out without a heavy surcharge that JD couldn’t pay.
Fifty thousand euro. Enough for the surgery, enough to pay off the debt he held in his mother’s name. He didn’t trust Soo-hyun’s judgment, but he wanted to. He wanted the job to pan out.
Beyond the canal, crumbled ruins gave way to reconstruction. Rusted rebar jutted from cement like compound fractures, but the buildings that still stood were painted haphazardly in bright colors and topped with green. Vines of unknown origin crept along rusting gutters, and carefully cultivated vegetables, fruits, herbs, and medicinal plants sat on rooftops and burst over balcony railings. These colors stood vivid against the pale cement and smog-smeared sky. Beneath that dirty fog, birds circled with mathematical precision, and puffy, too-white clouds hung static, undisturbed by any wind; the badly disguised tools of surveillance-state capitalism.
JD raised a middle finger to the sky and carried on. Welcome to Neo Songdo. World city. Dead city. A city where chaebol and foreign multinationals fought over the best bits of carrion while Seoul looked on, watching the microstate for signs of its own future. The future did not look bright.
Night fell slowly as JD walked, pastel colors desaturated until they finally faded to that dull orange-gray of light pollution. He felt the empty gaze of machine vision again, nearer than the ever-present drones hovering overhead. JD turned at the hollow clatter of cement tumbling. A dog-shaped robot emerged from between two broken walls, its four legs uncannily steady over the shifting rubble. JD froze. The machine’s torso plate was stamped with the gold shield of the NSPD, the decal scratched and peeled but still visible. The dog lifted its head as though it were sniffing the air. JD knew enough about their innards to guess it was scanning him with IR sensors at the underside of its jaw.
“You can relax,” Soo-hyun said; “the dog is one of ours.”
JD pivoted slowly on the spot, until both the dog and Soo-hyun were in his field of view. Soo-hyun stepped out from the shadow of an off-brand convenience store, long-shuttered. Behind them, another five figures leered from the darkness, their contex gleaming in the low light.
A nasal voice spoke from the dark: “We don’t need him.” Australian or South African—JD could never tell the two accents apart.
“Who are your friends?” JD asked.
“Ignore Red,” Soo-hyun said. “He’s jealous that Kali chose my plan over his.”
Red murmured something under his breath. He moved into the muted light, followed by four other teens—gender indeterminate, wearing ill-fitting T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon animals, jeans marked with holes and trailing threads at the hems. Red clutched the long form of a marksman rifle, 3D-printed in gaudy orange, like something out of a first-person shooter. He tossed it back to one of the others, and JD noticed they were all armed with squat carbines in blotches of random color, and knockoff Berettas printed default gray.
The others stayed back while Red approached. He was taller than JD, but gangly, skin freckled ginger and stretched taut across his frame, red hair in a loose ponytail. His lips looked pink and slightly swollen; he licked and bit and chewed at them, his mouth always moving.
“We don’t need him,” he said again, glaring down at JD.
JD let his head drop to one side and looked past Red to Soo-hyun. “I thought you said your dog wouldn’t bother me.”
“Ain’t their dog,” Red said.