The other photos were Bill alone, at various points in his life—a child, a teenager, a young man of twenty-something. Decades pass until a recent one, holding a child to his shoulder, but unsmiling, head pulling slightly back from the infant. He looked the same across his whole life: tall, skinny, well-to-do, only ever photographed wearing a suit. His hair went gray and his face collected wrinkles, but his eyes kept that spark of mischievous creation even as the skin beneath them sagged and grew sallow.
JD slipped the first photo of Lee and Kim into his rucksack for Khoder. He let his fingers touch the other photo of the two titans of tech, but he pulled his hand away with effort.
He moved past the wardrobe, past the en suite that smelled faintly of bleach, and came to a final door in the corner—door frame slightly off-color compared to the rest, added after the apartment was built. He tried the door handle and found it locked, then tapped his finger idly on a small black panel resting below the handle. Its function eluded JD—without any obvious interface it could have scanned fingerprints, retina, saliva, or some other form of biometric data. Or maybe it was just another key reader.
JD opened a channel to Khoder: “Kid, is there anything in Soo-hyun’s notes about a security pad inside Lee’s apartment? I’m at the door they marked in the blueprints, but it’s locked.”
There was noisy silence across the line for a few seconds. “Nah, bro, just says ‘PT.’ Take a photo, let me see what we’re dealing with.”
“My phone’s off.”
“Bro, I could have secured that for you. Next time, ask.”
JD ignored him, removed his baseball cap and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his coverall. The fabric came away darker with his sweat, and JD replaced his hat. He knelt down to study the panel closer.
His mind was utterly blank, caught in a moment of hopelessness, drowning in the odd scent of this celebrity stranger’s bedroom. He remembered idly that scent was physical—that a smell was just microscopic particles of the thing you were smelling. He breathed Lee in through his nose, the old man’s dead skin cells, his detergent, his cologne, as though maybe if he kept inhaling he could become the man, and in doing so, know how to bypass this lock.
“Bro, do you need me to come in there?”
JD shook his head, then remembered that Khoder couldn’t see him, not inside the apartment. “No, it’s too risky.”
PT. JD wracked his brain—it could be a security company, or protocol. He checked for a logo, a serial number, anything, running his fingers around the edges of the panel until they came to a groove on the underside. He put his fingernail into the gap and pulled—the glossy plastic panel came away with a clack.
JD grinned. Hidden behind the black glass was a pin and tumbler lock. PT.
“Stand down, Kid; I figured it out.”
JD took the lockpick set from his bag, laid it on the floor by his feet, and slid out his half-diamond pick. He exhaled and pushed the room from his mind, focused entirely and completely on the lock.
Lockpicking was the closest thing JD had found to meditation. He had still been in school when he taught himself to pick locks, watching countless hours of tutorial videos, largely made by middle-aged white men filling time in their empty nests. But no matter how many videos he watched, it didn’t mean anything until he put picks into a lock. The picks become an extension of his self—a simple piece of steel in a world of complicated cyborg upgrades. You didn’t feel the lock at your fingertips, you felt it at the ends of the picks, as though they were your fingers.
His mother had come home from work, found him crouched at the front door to their apartment, completely oblivious to her footsteps, to her increasingly insistent voice asking him what he was doing. Using nothing but patience and those small bits of steel he turned the lock. He only noticed his mother as she pushed past him, carrying crocheted bags full of groceries.
Click.
His trance over—back in the now, back in Lee’s apartment—JD opened the door, pushing against the force of air pressure differential as a cold breeze rushed past him. He quickly replaced his tools, threw the rucksack over his shoulder, and stepped inside.
Rows of fluorescent lights hummed and flickered as they came to life in banks, rolling to the far wall, illuminating wide glass desks topped with high-powered rigs and motes of dust that drifted slowly through the air. More server machines lined the left-hand wall, connected to the desktop rigs by inch-thick cables that crisscrossed the room like artificial vines. Sheets of loose paper, scrawled with notes or printed with schematics, sat on every flat surface. If this had once been the neighboring apartment, it was unrecognizable now. Lee had gutted the residence and turned it into a private workspace with as much computing hardware and processor power as most small startups.
“Holy shit, Kid. Whatever Lee was doing in this lab, he had cycles to burn.”
“Teasing me now, bro.”
JD smirked and continued further inside. A blinking red light caught JD’s attention, and he glanced up to a camera in the corner of the space, tracking his steps.
“Unauthorized access detected.” The words issued from the ceiling in clean synthesized speech.
“Kid, can you do anything about Lee’s security?”
“Sorry, bro, it’s on a different network. I’d have to be there with you.”
“You’re not coming up here,” JD said.
“I’m just saying …”
“Forget it.”
“Unauthorized access detected,” the voice said again, and a wailing klaxon started, loud enough to make JD wince.
“Good news is, that alarm is going off-site, not downstairs.”
“What’s the bad news?” JD asked.
“Neighbors can probably hear it.”
“Shit. Can you turn off the internal phone system?”
“Of course, bro, but I can’t stop someone from going down and complaining to the front
