JD paid with the hundred-euro note, and stared blankly at his change. He almost queried the amount, but stopped himself, pocketed the two twenties, and dropped the coins into the tip jar. He paused at the exit while the manager unlocked the door. She stood guard as he left, to ensure no undesirables snuck in.
JD checked the time in the corner of his vision—12:50. Ten minutes until the meeting. The rain was picking up, a screen of analogue distortion streaking through Augmented billboards and signs like flecks of static. Rainbow-slicked puddles spotted the road, and the gutter overflowed with fast-moving currents. Passing auto-cars sent wide arcs of water into the air, splashing down on sidewalk and pedestrian alike. JD guessed the algorithms had never been taught to avoid puddles—or maybe they were taught to hit them and spray pedestrians as punishment for walking when they could be paying for a lift.
He stepped out from under the café’s eaves and joined a growing group of professionals waiting at a crosswalk, talking into headsets, pawing at their phones, unable to stop working even for their lunch break.
JD looked up and blinked against the wet, watching the full parade of surveillance drones drifting between skyscrapers. There were hundreds of them—a few dozen of the large balls like monstrous eyes, and countless smaller quadcopters, hovering over the streets with their unblinking electric vision.
Fear gripped JD’s chest, like a hand around his heart. The city had always been a panopticon, even if its apparatus was usually hidden from sight and easy to ignore. But JD had just pulled the biggest heist of his life, and finally the weight of all those drones above began to press down on him.
The lights changed and the pedestrians jostled JD as they stepped out onto the street, but he stood still, as though the robots would see him if he moved. With his neck still craned, he watched the rain wash advertisements down the sides of towering apartment blocks, animations running in thin streaks until they reached the ground, pixels of color mixing with rainwater in the gutters.
In that moment, as he watched the city melt beneath torrential rain, JD felt that something in his mind had broken. Something was wrong, if not with his mind, then with his contex, or with the city itself. Who do you contact when reality is broken?
Slowly, JD lowered his gaze. A new group of pedestrians surrounded him, indistinguishable from the last—the infinite parts of the city arranged in different formations. The light turned green and JD stepped out onto the street, crossing halfway before he realized no one else had joined him. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the cars, delivery trucks, and pedestrians alike all waiting patiently.
He walked faster, limping across the street. He ducked into an alleyway and stood with his back against the graffitied brickwork. The question rose in JD’s mind unbidden: if someone wrote code on the walls of the city, could the cameras read it? Would the municipal systems at city hall process the code? Graffiti injecting code into the heart of the ubiquitous city. JD shook his head, knowing with bone-deep certainty that he looked mad—clothes dirty, rain-drenched, muttering to himself about a broken city, broken code. He moved on.
Songdo was a city of shortcuts, alleyways forming hidden paths between towering buildings, hidden in plain sight but deep shadow. JD traversed these black veins, creeping the last two blocks to the technopark, pausing in the shadow of an apartment building on Haesong-ro. His knee ached from the wet, from all the walking he’d done the past couple of days, but he ignored it.
He took his phone from his pocket and hit the hard reset. Waiting, he watched people pass by the mouth of the alley and avoid him as though he had the plague. Poverty was the best cover story. Nobody wanted to see the poverty-stricken, the homeless, the beggars.
His phone chimed its welcome sound in his earpiece and JD felt the chemical seep of endorphins. “We’re all Pavlov’s dogs,” he said under his breath.
With the phone rebooted, his vision shifted in layers as the city’s Augmented feed imprinted itself across his eyes, undisturbed by the rain. Billboards and street signs shone bright, and graffiti, flyers, and posters were covered by patches of white and gray—everything unauthorized was hidden from view. JD sighed; it felt like coming home.
Across the street, the technopark stretched the full length of three city blocks. It had once been expertly landscaped and minutely manicured, but the city’s poor had since reclaimed it; hundreds of tents were erected all across the park, sprouting from any flat piece of lawn.
JD emerged from the alleyway and stood at the curb. He let his foot hang over the edge and saw the asphalt flash a red warning. It flickered once, twice, then turned green. Reality broken again, or still. He stepped onto the street, the road shining green while auto-cars and -trucks honked and slammed on their brakes, skidding in the wet. Two cars collided—a kinetic ballet that was meant to be impossible after millions of hours of algorithmic training, testing, and tweaking. Still, none of them came near JD.
Reaching one of the technopark’s concrete footpaths, JD scanned the area for Soo-hyun. Instead he spotted Kali’s young assistant Andrea waiting alone beneath a pagoda at the far corner of the square. JD picked his way between tents, stepping over patches of grass scorched black by cooking fires, apologizing to the residents when he tripped over a taut guy rope. The square was the largest of the technopark’s tented burgs, home to one hundred–plus of the city’s underemployed, living in neat, brightly colored rows on the unkempt lawn. Rain hammered the polyester fabric, hissing like a colossal snake god.
Andrea saw JD. He nodded, and the girl turned away. She
