Police surrounded the van, but no one paid them much mind. By the time they realized the fans weren’t the thieves, he’d be long gone.
As the army of soccer fans marched across the city, restaurants, bars, and cafés opened their doors, ready to feed the crowds with food and booze. The people were the lifeblood of the city, causing it to wake and breathe as they passed down the veins of asphalt and cement. The rain pattered loud against the polyester shell of JD’s windbreaker, but he could barely hear it over the fans’ chatter and songs, unperturbed by the wet.
The crowd broke like a wave at the corner of Central-ro and Convensia-daero. Bars on all sides of the intersection glowed bright with neon, siren song of various dance beats competing to see who could call in the most lost souls. Three bars shone a little brighter, and JD watched as the crowd split, tracking people with his eyes as if he knew before they did which bar they would choose. Half the throng split away, filing into the three brightest bars; the other half boarded auto-buses and climbed into share cars.
JD took his phone from the sandwich bag, the thin rectangle of glass and silicon warm in his hand. At his touch it displayed the lock screen—a VOIDWAR wallpaper of ships exploding against a backdrop of stars. He swiped across the screen, unlocking it, and was greeted by a message:
>> Overheating Risk. Processor usage restricted to 0.3%
JD flipped the phone over in his hand and for a moment, the noise and bustle of Songdo fell away. He stared in shock—he had never reconnected the battery.
The datacube sat snugly in its port, but it wasn’t a datacube at all. He’d been told he was stealing a virus, but this was something else, something that shouldn’t be possible—storage, power supply, and shit only knew what else, miniaturized beyond anything he’d seen before. JD slotted his battery back into place, unsure of how long the phone would last on the power from the cube. He shook his head, incredulous.
Picking a direction at random, JD walked fast. He ignored the throbbing ache in the gristle of his knee, paranoiac fear pushing him forward, as though everyone on the street knew what it was that he carried.
He didn’t even know what he carried, but he knew immediately that it was worth a lot more than fifty thousand euro.
He plunged the phone back into his pocket, clutched tight in his left hand. He brought the contex interface up at fifty percent opacity and found eleven messages waiting for him, each from Troy. JD smiled and checked the map. Troy’s place wasn’t far, and he didn’t want to go home—he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he did.
Decision made, JD took the next left, putting his clogged dorm room somewhere behind him. After hours of disconnection, he soaked up the Augmented advertising plastered over every surface. World Cup merchandise—licensed and un—and other soccer paraphernalia were a constant, hovering in the air across billboards and buildings, shimmering on buses that sped past loaded to capacity with post-game revelers.
JD slowed his pace. The ubiquitous ads always came packaged with pervasive surveillance on the street and in the skies above. The further he got from the post-game crowds, the easier he would be to distinguish. JD stepped into an apartment building’s alcove, removed his hat, put his jacket on over his rucksack, and counted to thirty before he stepped back onto the busy sidewalk. JD focused on keeping his gait steady, and clenched his jaw to tamp down on the pain from his knee.
As he reached a corner and stood waiting for the light, JD looked up and closed his eyes against the steady rainfall. Rain had a way of scaring people off the streets—at least, the ones who had elsewhere to go—but nothing less than a torrential downpour could dampen the city’s spirits tonight. He noticed the camera sitting just above the traffic light—the long, squared head stared up, as if mimicking him, as if it too were content beneath the clouds, at home in the rain.
The signal turned green and JD crossed. He glanced up to the camera at the corner opposite; it turned away from him by degrees, pointing further and further up until it was vertical, more telescope than security. What stars could it see in the polluted sky?
JD flicked his collar up against the rain and returned to watching his feet—finding something perplexing and uncomfortable in the way the cameras avoided his gaze. He quickened his pace, ignoring crosswalks and lights, ducking across streets when he shouldn’t, watching the ground light up red in warning signs that glitched, flickered, and died beneath his feet.
This far from the stadium he finally found quiet, apartment blocks on both sides of the street half in darkness, the sidewalk populated only sparsely with other people on their own mysterious errands. Ahead, a group of fireflies hovered and danced above the sidewalk, unperturbed by the rain. JD stopped, and approached the flitting lights slowly. More fireflies joined the small swarm and they began to fly faster, drawing small circles of light in the air. JD drew near and reached both hands out. Quickly he cupped his hands around one of the insects, and pulled his thumbs apart to see the glow of its yellowish light. He opened his hands all the way, expecting the insect to fly away. It didn’t. It hung static in the air above his palms. He lifted his eyes and saw that all the fireflies had stopped. The small still lights had formed a
