JD considered it. The money alone was tempting, but a chance to see Zero Lee’s home, his workspace? When he was a teen he’d dreamed of working for Lee, but he was better with his hands than he was with code.
“Alright, I’m in,” JD said.
“Excellent, JD. Truly, truly excellent. When Soo-hyun told me they had a brother who could help, I was hesitant, but now I see how the two of you could work well together. The job was Soo-hyun’s idea, and they’ll give you everything you need.”
Kali motioned to a large brick building down the hill. It was separated from the rest of the school by a moat of darkness, while lights shone brightly from within.
“Have you visited Liber before?” Kali asked as they walked toward it.
JD shook his head. “I never go anywhere with fewer than three bars of signal.”
Kali smiled. “You should visit again. It’s important work we’re doing here, planning and growing a new civilization. But that’s enough for now.”
The ring of dogs broke apart and sat alert on the cracked cement outside the detached building. Kali led JD up a short set of stairs and stood outside twin rusted doors. JD rested a hand on the knob and Kali nodded, then she turned and walked away, escorted back to the school by nine of the dogs, while the one from the canal stayed at JD’s side.
“Are you visiting Soo-hyun, or checking up on me?” he asked. The dog didn’t respond.
JD pushed into the building and was struck by the noise—soundproofed doors giving way to the deafening hiss of an arc welder, and Kali’s voice blaring from a cheap digital radio. The building had been the school’s maintenance shed. Tools hung across the front wall, traced by neat outlines, and desks had been brought in from the classrooms, now laden with different models of police dog in various states of disassembly, and quadcopter drones with bright green electrical tape stuck over their camera lenses. A thin mattress sat in one corner of the room, the sheets unmade, with dust and bits of wire caught within the linen canyons. The tang of solder hung in the air, accompanied by the meaty scent of old sweat.
Soo-hyun stood at a workbench at the rear of the room, wearing a welder’s visor. They worked on a dog drone laid across the bench, its torso open, wires spread out like winter branches, nuts, bolts, screws, and solder slag littered all around it.
When Soo-hyun noticed JD, they cut off the gas to their arc welder, placed the heavy tool down with a chank, and switched off the radio. They lifted their visor and beamed.
“Are you in?” they asked.
JD nodded. “Yeah, I’m in.”
Soo-hyun dropped the visor onto the table and gave JD a hug. “I knew you’d say yes.”
They looked down at the dog standing patiently at JD’s heel like a well-trained pet, and patted it once on the head.
“You didn’t have to check up on me, Plato,” Soo-hyun said. “Go on back to Kali.”
The robot bowed its cylindrical metal head slightly in response. It stood and turned before bounding out the door, leg actuators whirring sharply in the quiet space.
“Natural language processing in a police drone?” JD said, impressed. “You told me you were tinkering out here, but this is …” He motioned around the workshop to all the disassembled dogs. “It’s a lot.”
“It’s how I keep myself occupied. Some of the teens have made drone hunting into a vocation, so there’s always work. It keeps me centered.”
“Do you mind?” JD asked, pointing to the dog open on Soo-hyun’s workbench. They stepped back and JD leaned in for a better look. “You didn’t tell me you worked on police dogs.”
“You didn’t ask,” Soo-hyun said.
JD nodded. He’d been angry with Soo-hyun for the longest time. Eventually it got to be easier not to ask what they were doing with their life, easier to just pretend there was no anger there, no connection.
“Tektech put in for the tender to repair the police dogs, but nothing ever came of it. I always wanted to get a look inside one.”
“All you had to do was visit,” Soo-hyun said. “They’re nasty machines until you teach them some manners.” They pulled a screwdriver from a drawer in the workbench and held it by the head, tapping the rubber handle on the robot’s hip flexor. “Basic movement and motor functions are the same as we had in the warehouse, more or less. Where dogs get interesting is here,” they said, dropping the tool onto the bench and pulling away half of the dog’s skull, their fingers tipped with grime-blacked nails.
They parted two lots of power cabling and their fingers disappeared inside the cranial cavity. They reached around blindly and continued: “Before you can reprogram them, you want to remove the storage and start from scratch.” They grunted with this last word and pulled their hand free.
Soo-hyun held a standard storage cube—burnished steel casing twelve millimeters a side. One of the faces was dotted with small holes like the six of a die. They dropped it into JD’s hand.
“Got every police rule and procedure in there, plus records of every day it spent on the job.”
JD tried to give the datacube back, but Soo-hyun closed his hand around it.
“Keep it. Stick it inside a quadcopter drone and watch it try and pull over speeding auto-trucks.” Soo-hyun grinned. They took the screwdriver from the bench and handed that to JD too.
“What’s this for?” JD asked.
“Happy birthday.”
“My birthday was months ago.”
“And I didn’t get you anything. It’s a LOX-Recess screwdriver. If you ever get a chance to open up a dog, you’re going to need one of those.”
“Don’t you need it?”
“I’ve got a dozen of them littered around here.” Soo-hyun squeezed JD’s shoulder. “Come on, take a seat.”
They motioned to two stools, and JD groaned as he dropped onto the low seat, struggling to ignore the ache in his knee. Soo-hyun reached into a cooler beside the chair and produced two bottles of unlabeled beer. They tossed one to JD and he caught it.
JD twisted the lid off his beer and took a sip; it wasn’t good beer, but it was cold, and it was free.
“What do you think of the place?”
JD raised his eyebrows. “It’s, uh, cozy.”
“It’s a shithole,” Soo-hyun said.
JD nodded, and they both smiled. “At least you don’t have to share the workshop with anyone else. Do you?”
“No.”
“There you go then, that’s something,” JD said. “You really like it out here?”
“It’s quieter. I’m quieter. I fucked up, y’know,” they said, pointing to JD’s knee with their beer. “Liber is good for me.”
“You can’t hide here forever.”
Soo-hyun shrugged. “Songdo will always be waiting for me, but for now I’m happy.”
“Alright,” JD said. “Kali said you’d give me the details of this job?”
“I’ve already put the file together. I’ll make you a copy.” Soo-hyun walked to an old rig asleep in the corner, and whacked the mechanical keyboard to life. They pointed to a yellow envelope on a workbench by the door. “That’s your down payment; two thousand for expenses. Don’t give Red an excuse to come looking for it, hyung.”