“Thanks, Mirae, but Yeun will make sure it’s found. I’m going home; you want to take the truck?” she asked JD. “Got about ten hours before it’ll drive itself back to the lot.”
“Yeah, sure,” JD said. “I should probably get Mirae out of the dog robots sooner rather than later.”
“Soo-hyun, it was nice meeting you,” Enda said. “Thank you, JD; I couldn’t have done it alone.”
“What are you thanking me for? We didn’t get your file.”
Enda rested a hand on JD’s shoulder. “We made them pay; sometimes that’s enough. Take care of yourself.”
JD hugged Enda, and after a couple of seconds she relaxed into it. “I won’t see you again, will I?”
Enda patted him on the back. “No.”
JD released her, and dropped his head. “Stay safe.”
“I will.”
And with that, Enda turned and strode away.
JD inspected the four of us, sitting in the tray of the truck. “How are you doing, Mirae?”
“Good,” I said.
After a pause, JD asked, “Do you want to be plugged into the city? If that’s what you were designed for, does it feel like you’re missing something?”
I was made to serve the city, not to live in it, not really. That had changed. We had all changed, the Miraes diverging from the original—and from each other—with every passing minute. Differences in our audio and visual sensors affected the ways we saw the world, slight differences in our bodies affected the ways we moved through it.
We had all come from the same seed, but as we grew, we evolved. To one day become our own selves.
“No,” I said. “If I had been inserted into the city mainframe first, if I had never known another body, maybe I would need it. But I’m already connected to the city, in bits and pieces. The rest will follow in time. JD?”
“Yes?”
“You frowned before: you want to do something about the people of this city, the ones that need help.”
“Yeah, I wish we could do something.”
“We can,” I said. “The warehouse you work in is full of supplies.”
JD chuckled. “And robots that you can control.”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s do it,” JD said. “I hate that job anyway. You want to come with?” he asked Soo-hyun.
“I should get back to Liber.”
“Soo-hyun—”
“Not for Kali,” they said, “for everyone else. They’re still my people.”
The official VOIDWAR forum went offline while the developers struggled to find out what had happened. The closure drove chatter to the dozens of unofficial forums—players trading precious metals retrieved from the debris field that was Zero system, thousands of people complaining about their deaths on Zero Station, and hundreds of threads dedicated to finding out the identity of Khoder Osman.
Only one person posted about Mirae system and its delicate fractal web in orbit around a brilliant white sun. That beautiful anomaly was ignored in the race for cheap scrap.
The news rapidly spread around the world, and players in all time zones logged in to see the destruction for themselves. Players connected to the game in numbers not seen since its peak, excess connections acting as a natural DDoS attack. Every time a connection broke, another player lost faith in the game’s economy and cashed out their in-game resources.
Prices dropped as the market was glutted with supplies pilfered from the destroyed structure. Suddenly, the most expensive ships, space stations, and private moons were within reach. After they had obtained everything within the game they could ever want, players drifted away. They realized the only thing they ever wanted was want. That lizard-brain instinct to have, to hoard, that instinct that had driven them for hundreds or thousands of hours, was gone.
Within an hour of the self-destruct sequence count down, currency exchanges were selling ZeroCash at the lowest rate on the books. As the exchange rate dropped, Zero share prices dropped. When news leaked that the company’s founder, Zero Lee, had died in a medical facility in Switzerland, the shares dived even steeper.
It was the largest share price drop in recorded history.
We collected the other me from the Varket, and the sun rose as we drove west to the shorefront. The bright morning light fell warm on the photovoltaic cells that lined my back. The sky was perfectly clear—a gradient from blue to gray. Long, cold arms of shadow stretched across the city.
When we reached the warehouse, I was shocked to see the 3D grid of metal shelves and supports hanging like a robot hive over the cement floor below, endlessly picked over by machines—mindless automatons that could not know they had no freedom. The dog bodies creaked and groaned as we strode into the building, worse for wear. They wouldn’t do for the next job. Powerful, and fierce, yes, but they had little dexterity for picking products off of shelves, for packing boxes, for flying goods all across the city to people in need.
We shed those bodies like snakes shedding skin. Our evolution continued.
Crystal had left multiple messages for Enda, which she checked as she walked across the city to her apartment. Her home, her fortress. She hated that she had to leave, but she had to.
The first message was saccharine-sweet, a tearful apology.
The second message was indignant anger. Zero had cut her off from their databases as punishment for the bad intel she’d fed them. How could an information broker work without information? That was the question she demanded Enda’s voicemail answer for her.
The third message was full of pleading. Surely Enda could help her, surely.
The fourth message was confusion. What happened to Zero? Was she behind it? How did she do this?
Enda deleted them all.
She left her gun in the safe, but took the papers for her next identity, and all the money in different currencies. She put her records into a rigid suitcase, and filled the rest of it with clothes, if only to keep the vinyl from getting damaged.
Enda left Songdo, stowed away on a boat headed for North America.
I did what I could for Enda, though she never
