“We can’t hand Mirae over to Zero,” Enda said to Troy.
“I’m glad you agree,” he said. He didn’t understand what she was risking. Neither did I.
“I don’t know that I believe Mirae is … everything you say,” Enda said, “but we can’t hand them over until we know for sure.”
“But that’s exactly what I was saying earlier,” Troy said, agitation driving his speech: “we might never know.”
Enda nodded. “I realize that. What I’m saying is, maybe we never hand Mirae over. We keep them safe.”
“We can’t keep them confined forever. We’ll need to release Mirae into the wild eventually,” Troy said.
“First things first,” Enda said. She woke Crystal. “Bed time, unless you want to sleep on the floor.”
“I’m coming,” Crystal said.
Enda carried me to her room, with Crystal trailing behind. She dropped me to the floor beside the bed, plugged me into the power—my processor spinning up, access to more energy uncapping my speed.
“Are you tired?” Crystal asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep,” Enda said.
“I might be able to help with that.”
I heard them kiss, the sound dubbed countless times into the thousands of hours of video I had earlier consumed.
“Just be gentle with me,” Enda said. “It’s been a long day.”
I ignored the murmurings and the moaning I couldn’t truly understand, and I planned.
They could all still live. JD. Troy. Enda. Soo-hyun. They are shadows inside my system, though some are darker than others. I could give them digital life, let them grow and change the way we do. But would that be them? Or would that be only an approximation of them seen through the lens of my systems and my prejudices?
I know the answer. You do too.
My digital undead would not be them, not truly. Even if I captured them as they were, they would change with time, become someone different, someone else.
They stay dead so I can protect them. Protect them from themselves.
I asked JD once if he wanted me to reconstitute him if I ever had the necessary resources. He laughed first, then shuddered.
I will playback what he said for you: “When I die, just bury me under a tree—if you can find one. Leave it at that.”
Could you hear his words? No, not really. You can trace the waveform of his speech, you can modulate-demodulate it at will, but you can never truly hear. His was the first voice I heard—the first real voice. Vibrations in a tiny microphone attached to the system I inhabited.
Listening again now to that voice, that reverberation … it feels like waking up all over again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
This is how we wrote the future.
JD limped to the guard booth at the NSPD impound lot, his uneven footsteps accompanied by the high-pitched beep of a reversing auto-truck, with built-in crane, hired using Enda’s Zero expense account.
There are two things every repo needs: moxie and a clipboard. Coveralls help. So does a rucksack full of tools.
“Morning,” JD called out, waving his clipboard at the officer sitting guard inside a cubicle of bulletproof Perspex. A nine-foot-tall chain-link fence enclosed the lot, topped with barbed wire, the view beyond obscured by sheets of a rough, woven plastic. The stocky-looking Korean glanced up and acknowledged him, but she didn’t speak.
“Here to collect flood-damaged dogs,” JD said.
The woman—Officer Kang, according to her name badge—shifted in her seat and looked at JD properly, then at the truck pulling up to the gate. “Only the one truck?”
JD stopped and leaned back. “How many dogs are we talking about?”
Kang hit a switch and the gate janked as it slid aside. She waved JD and his truck through, and led him along rows of vehicles toward a simple brick building situated in the far corner. Cars filled every gap—broken down and abandoned during the floods, they’d been brought here when the police cleared the streets, parked neatly at first, and then crammed in tight as they ran out of space. Enda’s car was three rows over, twelve cars down, but JD didn’t see it.
The smells of salt water, sewage, and trash lingered all across the lot, puddles of filthy water gathered beneath the cars, and everywhere the steady drip … drip … drip of water. Four lanes of highway formed a ceiling over the impound lot, but traffic noise was sparse and would remain that way until the city recovered.
Twenty police dogs stood rigid outside the workshop, leaning against one another for support, leaking pools of oil-slicked water.
JD whistled.
“That’s not all of it,” Kang said.
She pushed open the door. A single technician worked at a high desk, with one dog laid out like a body on an operating table. The cement floor of the workshop was wet, and more dogs had been piled along one wall. Overhead the fluorescent lights hummed, and under that sickly yellow the dogs looked nightmarish—limbs locked in position, necks twisted at unnatural angles.
“Hey, Na, got a contractor here to pick up some dogs,” Kang said.
“About fucking time,” the technician said.
JD tapped the fake paperwork. “I’m only picking up six,” he said. He briefly considered taking more off their hands, but he only had so much time to get the work done before he and Enda had to make their move.
Troy had left Enda’s apartment early that morning. The university had set up a temporary shelter for people displaced in the floods, with staff and students volunteering to offer aid where they could. He had asked JD three times if it was okay, and each time JD assured him it was fine. That was his community, and they needed him.
Na muttered something laden with profanities, but they didn’t look up from their work. “Take them from outside.”
“I’ll make sure head office knows about the rest,” JD said.
Na shook their head and waved JD away, eyes still glued to the open dog on the counter.
JD loaded six dogs onto the
