The city was clean—sidewalks and roads washed by the rain, buildings and infrastructure rendered sterile by her ad-free AR subscription. Only seven external words ever encroached on her psyche, scrolling in the bottom corner of her vision: Clarity, brought to you by Zero Corporation. Even when you paid to silence them, the corporations couldn’t let you forget who owned the city, who owned your view of it.
Further and further, her body carried her while her mind sat quiet—a passenger of thought chained to the meat. Her trance was so deep, Enda didn’t see the car pull up alongside her, only noticed it after it kept pace with her for twenty meters. She cursed herself for that, too; she was getting complacent.
She glanced to the side and the car rolled to a stop. It was a Mercedes painted a gleaming gunmetal gray, with a large matte Z on the front door panel. The rear door opened and a man emerged, so muscular that he didn’t appear to have a neck. A mass of sinew joined his shoulders directly to his jaw. He wore a black suit, tailored to contain his bulk, hair in a neat crew cut.
“Good morning, Ms. Hyldahl,” he said, voice like tires over gravel. “My name is Mohamed Toub; I’m here to deliver you to a meeting with David Yeun at the Zero corporate headquarters.”
Enda took a moment to catch her breath. “I’m not taking any new clients.”
“The job pays one million euro.”
That caused her to skip a beat. “I’m still not taking any new clients.”
Enda turned and continued to run, footsteps feeling clumsy under scrutiny. The security officer—because what else could he be—let her run five meters before he called out: “Ira Lindholme.”
Enda stopped. Slowly she turned. She walked back to the man. He smirked, thinking the leverage had her cowed. She punched him in the throat and his face slackened. Both hands went to his neck and he collapsed to his knees on the sidewalk, choking.
Enda crouched beside him and whispered: “It’s pronounced Ira, not Eye-ra.”
Mohamed coughed and spluttered, but he would live, she was sure of that.
The car waited patiently at the side of the road, door open like a gesturing hand. Part of her wanted to run, but they knew her old name. Not her “real” name, her old one. She climbed into the car and closed the door.
It was an utterly modern automated vehicle, lacking a driver or any visible controls. Two bench seats sat facing one another around a central hollow.
Small cameras were nestled in the corners of the ceiling. Enda fixed her gaze on one of these. “What are we waiting for?”
Within seconds the car came to life with the soft whine of its electric engine. It pulled away from the curb, expertly gliding between two trucks, leaving Mohamed behind, kneeling on the sidewalk in his designer suit, struggling to catch his breath.
Enda watched the city scroll neatly past the window as the car carried her downtown. Slowly the footpaths filled with people—workers in white collar and blue, students, beggars, and every other type of person Songdo saw fit to shelter. Watching the city wake to another chaotic rush hour, Enda again thought it was a city that shouldn’t work. Maybe that was why she liked it. The unsteady balance between enforced multiculturalism and Korean hegemony. Relentless capital in all its horrible glory, embodied in one tiny sovereign city-state, running at double real time, everything accelerated, everything rushing to some bright future or horrendous decline.
If nothing else, it was never boring.
A soft breeze from the car’s AC filled Enda’s nose with the sharp scent of herself. Running shoes, black leggings, and a loose gray singlet over a sports bra, all of them soaked in sweat—hardly suitable attire for whatever this meeting was. Though she wasn’t given much choice.
Zero Corporation. They owned the city, more or less, owned the layers of Augmented Reality that obscured the real, owned eight of the ten most popular immersive games, owned two-thirds of global online infrastructure according to the latest independent analysis.
Too late, Enda realized that perhaps she shouldn’t have throat-punched the messenger.
She contemplated asking the car a question, to see if anyone was listening—to see who might be listening—but she remained silent. She focused instead on her breathing. Her pulse fluttered at her neck, and steadily began to slow.
The car turned on to Central-ro and Zero headquarters sat in the center of the windscreen, in the center of Neo Songdo. The building loomed over the rest of the city, a hundred meters taller than any other tower. It appeared monochromatic; each face the steely gray of reflected cloud cover. It was an unnecessary and ostentatious display of power when, Enda was certain, half the skyscraper stood empty—staff whittled away one by one as machine learning usurped various jobs that were once considered necessary for any corporation.
The auto-car was given green-light priority over the two intersections leading to the building. It quietly drove through the last intersection then dipped beneath the street, plunging into a subterranean car park, lit too-white with fluorescent tubes, tires squealing over polished cement.
The car parked itself beside a row of identical sedans. The door opened automatically, and a cheery electronic voice implored her to “Have a productive day.”
“I hope you crash and burn,” Enda said with a fake smile. She got out of the car and slammed the door.
The light above a nearby elevator flickered to life and caught her eye—as it was designed to do. The elevator doors opened as Enda approached, and she grew impatient with the way her autonomy was systematically being stripped from her. First by the Zero lackey, then by the car, then by a fucking light bulb.
Inside the elevator, the walls were bare—no buttons, no screens, just reflective metal on all sides. Her
