“Don’t sweat it, bro,” Khoder said, sounding as calm as JD wanted to feel. “Just do the thing.”
Long Hair reached clumsily for the walkie-talkie at his belt. JD slapped his hand away, grabbed the radio, and pocketed it. He crouched and hefted Long Hair onto his shoulders. JD hauled the guard down the corridor as he squirmed, praying to every god and none that each apartment door he passed would stay closed. He reached the cleaning cart, molded from gray recycled plastic, and laid the man across it. He rifled through his rucksack on the trolley’s lower shelf, spilling latex gloves onto the floor in his search for zip ties. He fastened the man’s hands and feet, and pushed the cart to Lee’s apartment as fast as its squeaking wheels would let him.
He pressed the key cloner to the security panel just above the handle of Lee’s door. He held his breath and waited.
Blip blip.
JD left the cleaning cart blocking the hallway outside and carried Long Hair into the apartment, kicking the door shut as he went. As soon as it closed he dropped Long Hair to the floor. The guard opened his mouth to call for help, and JD winced in sympathy as he shoved a filthy cleaning rag into the maw. A roll of thousand-mile tape always weighed heavy in JD’s rucksack, so he tore off a strip and sealed the guard’s mouth shut.
“I’m sorry,” JD said. “Don’t let anyone tear that off, alright? You’ll want to use eucalyptus oil first.”
Long Hair tried to focus on JD’s face, but his eyes bugged out and rolled in his sockets like a ship on rough waters.
JD slumped against the doorway and sat on the ground beside Long Hair. His heart, or his lungs, or something inside his chest, ached with every breath. JD put two fingers to his wrist as though checking his pulse were the same as slowing it.
Gradually his eyes adjusted to the gloomy apartment. Thin slices of light seeped in between the window blinds at the far end of the living room, straight ahead from the entrance. The kitchen and laundry sat to the right, gleaming dull with burnished steel appliances. To the left, the rest of the apartment hid down a pitch-black hallway.
JD pushed himself up off the floor. He crossed over to the window, navigating around couches and a coffee table, wary of furniture edges shining ghostly gray in the darkness. In the far corner he flicked a small white switch and the blinds retracted with the quiet whir of hidden motors.
The city spread open before him, drenched in falling rain. Skyscrapers like vertical fields of light, dark streets peppered with pools of orange glowing in nonsense Morse code, and in the distance the ocean. Beyond downtown, beyond the shorefront, beyond the sovereign city of Songdo, the ocean undulated endlessly, older than god, older than death, waiting to reclaim the plastic garbage foundations and consume the city. JD backed away from the window and the expanse of black waters. His mind always went to infinities and ends when he saw the ocean—he could see himself walking into the depths and disappearing under the waves, as though he would need to walk, as though the waters wouldn’t come to him, if only he waited long enough.
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
