Chapter Text
He got off by the side of the road, stepping out onto the edge of the pavement where the cement was crumbling. The auto-rickshaw driver waited for him to pay his fare before disappearing into the mess of red backlights, vehicle spewing black smoke. Water was still pouring from the sky – always cold and never stopping. Yoongi counted the change left in his hand before stuffing it into his pocket and quickly making his way to shelter. Someone’s electric pet sheep ambled past him; the animal’s wool matted to the point he could tell it was going to die of disease soon. He’d always wanted one of those.
Above, only more lights and a voluminous grey sky, underlit with a sickly white glow and the reverberating sound of the wellness voice track from the blimp.
He crossed the junction in the harsh light of hovercraft headlamps, trying to dodge the dripping umbrellas of people. A small shop was ahead, nestled in a corner where the crowd thinned out, the green sign neon-lit and comforting.
Convenience store.
The only other person standing in the rain around here was a thin, haggard man with takeaway coffee. Yoongi tried to avoid looking at him, quickly stepping out of sight.
He went inside for the warmth, those radiator heaters letting steam out, the wet heat comforting. Long shelves of cheap things that he’d been living off for months: bread rolls and packaged ramyun or some onigiri and seaweed-wrapped crunchy orange tobiko.
Yoongi stayed in there for a while, waiting for the cold water in his hair and jacket to dry up, then went to the shelves and bought cheap melon soda, added a ramen cup to the total bill and stirred the noodles in boiling water at the self-cook station.
He went outside to eat and watch the street.
Lights in the distance pulsed from the ebb and flow of the stream of vehicles on the road. He saw their tinted windows and the funny holographic decals pasted on the windshields. A lady came by and shook out her pale silk umbrella before going in.
He'd been at this for two years, content with packaged food and taking hot water from the self-cook stations whenever he could because it tasted better than boiling the mineralised stuff that came out of the tap at home. The rest of it was a diet of food from portable noodle stands and street hawkers, or some pathetic little meal he could whip out of the synthetic ingredients from his refrigerator.
Most of his time was spent living off his savings and waiting until he got the measly unemployment cash bundle, which often came tied with a rubber band, passed to him by some little fellow visiting from the labour department.
The landlord called last week about rent, but he'd had to push it back another month, apologising and trying to come up with another excuse. He hadn’t seen the old man’s face for a long time, and that was only because the guy didn’t even want to look at him now.
In the mornings, he didn't have hot water anymore. They stopped filtering his pipes. The lights went off after a certain time, leaving him to console himself by looking at the thick blue blanket of city lights across the bay that separated him from central urban electric grid. He was slowly getting cut off from the rest of the block.
Yoongi was staring down at the wet sidewalk when someone turned the corner and stopped a short distance in front of him, not moving. He looked up, shoved another lump of noodles into his mouth and scalded his tongue before seeing who it was.
A skinny guy and another officer, both standing there, the officer waving the badge in his face.
“My name Cheon," the skinny guy said in Mandarin. "You are required to accompany me.”
Yoongi stuck his chopsticks inside the cup and took a closer look at his face. “I’m sorry?”
That officer, a roughed-up man with scars on his face, leaned forward politely and tapped on the skinny man's shoulder.
“You are required to come with me,” Cheon repeated, this time in accented Korean, “Mr Min.”
Yoongi stepped out of his spot beside the entrance, walked right to where the dry concrete ended at the edge of the awning and where the rain gathered in puddles. He looked both ways down the street, then turned back to face them.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Not me, is Mr Yeung,” Cheon said, and the officer standing beside them started unravelling restraints from where they were strapped to a belt around his torso. “Now, either you want us to tie you up or you walk with me to the station. We have hovercraft waiting.”
The coffee dude was watching them now, scratching at his chin with a ghost of a smile creeping into his face. Yoongi wondered if he’d heard the scrawny fellow right.
“I am only emissary sent by Mr Yeung. He wants you alive or in pieces. Either way he wants you, and he knows you won’t let us bring you there in body bag.”
The rain was falling harder now. Yoongi sighed. “Mr Yeung?”
They hustled him into a beat-up hovercraft which had a paint job that looked like something had thrown up all over it. The doors closed, hissing and creaking, and it was quiet inside. Old fixtures which were all worn-out, faded upholstery and squeaky flooring.
They were taking off, bobbing up and down over the lines of motor vehicles below. The officer was riding in front. Yoongi had been pushed into a corner on the cracked leather-covered benches at the side, swaying slightly in his seat as the spinner cruised from one side to the next, overtaking other vehicles. He was still poking around in the cup of cold noodles and trying to finish the meal.
Cheon opened up a plastic box and took out a tangerine, which he threw in Yoongi’s direction.
“You eat,” he said. “They told me not to waste food on you until we got you in here.”
Yoongi picked it up from the floor, rubbed it against his trousers and absentmindedly held it up against the window to check the texture of the peel.
“Is real orange,” Cheon said, watching him with a shit-eating grin on his face. “Company treat.”
So he took the peel off and started eating, chewing slowly and taking in the sight of the mess outside: all those buildings edged in red and blue, the too-bright roads, broken billboards, holographic ads with people of all sizes traipsing in between the skyscrapers.
Cheon was still talking.
“Mr Yeung said I was right guy for job. I could handle people like you.” He blew on the blade of his pocketknife and rubbed it clean with the edge of his grimy shirt. “But he thinks you gonna be able to do it better. Better than anyone. He say you also know how to kill?” He turned it slowly in the light, watching the metal glisten. He grabbed another tangerine from the plastic box and started cutting into it carefully.
Yoongi watched him for a while, saw the way he worked through the whole thing: a neat, clean circumference, then slowly peeling the skin away. He had never seen anyone cut an orange with such precision before.
“Are you a surgeon?”
“No?” Cheon raised his eyebrows and threw the circle of peel onto the floor of the vehicle. “There’s problem back there. Mr Yeung want to recall you. Why you quit? Scared you be replaced?” He grinned at him, showing teeth. Yoongi stared back uncomprehendingly. Cheon turned around from his hunched squat to look at the officer riding in front. “You thought that was real badge? I getting better at this then, ha!”
“What are you, then?”
“We are not police. We are organ trafficker.”
“Organ trafficker,” Yoongi repeated. He looked at the leftover orange rind in his hand. “They employ people like you?”
“You are no different,” Cheon said, looking out of the window. “Today I do the job, come tomorrow, who knows. Maybe someone will replace me. Someone better. We are all desperate for money.” He pointed the knife at Yoongi. “I know what you used to do. They want you to go back and do it again.”
---
The office was located in a grey vaulted building which he’d grown to hate slowly over the years. Yoongi was ushered down a corridor into the same stuffy office. Mr Yeung hadn’t changed any of the decorations at all. He was a pudgy, middle-aged man, had jowls, a combed ridge of greying hair on his round head and a chubby mouth that hadn’t learned how to shut up.
“He cause any trouble?” he asked.
Cheon shifted his eyes from Yoongi’s to Mr Yeung.
“No, sir.”
Mr Yeung flashed them both a grin.
“Take your money downstairs. First floor, three doors to the right.”
Cheon bounded off. Yoongi stayed in the doorway, not wanting to move into the room.
“Close the door, Yoongi,” Mr Yeung said, rolling a fountain pen between his hands.
There was a rotating metal orb in the corner with its red eye trained on the room. The only light in the office came from a small shuttered window, now walled up with dusty blinds. Everything inside was layered with shades of grey and brown: shelves lined with books and files, boxy computer screens tuned into flickering static, an ancient steam-powered radio. The blinds cast sharp white lines on Mr Yeung's face.
“I knew you wouldn’t have come if I asked you directly.”
Yoongi kept quiet.
“You haven’t changed, eh?” Mr Yeung gestured at the dirty swivel chair in front of his table. “Sit down, please.”
Yoongi closed the door and went over, dragged the chair out with the toe of his shoe and sat down. He eyed the cognac bottle on the desk.
“I’m not going to waste your time,” Mr Yeung said, already reaching into a drawer. “You’re a direct person. You want things clear-cut. We like that.” He took out a metal container, the kind used to keep lozenges, and opened it, taking a few pieces of paper out.
“We’ve got four unregistered skinjobs on the loose,” he said, closing the lid of the tin. “Walking the streets in civvies. You know how they operate.”
Yoongi shifted in his seat. “When?”
“It’s been two months. We sent people to find them.” Mr Yeung cleared away the papers on his desk and bent forward to tilt the neck of the desk lamp towards the empty spot on the table. “They came here from an off-world colony. Took spinners, we figured. One of them cleaned out an entire train station. Eviscerated commuters."
That got Yoongi to sit up.
Mr Yeung started placing the things he’d taken out of the tin – passport-sized photographs – down on the worn laminate of the table, turning them around to face Yoongi.
“Look at these very carefully. I want you to commit these faces to memory.”
Yoongi inched forward with reluctance, sliding them across the table with his finger. He surveyed the four faces, slightly bored. No one that he knew.
“Anyone can do this,” he said, leaning back. “You didn’t have to find me.”
“Can you do it?”
“I’d like to know how you got my new address.”
“Cheon over there came along with his sidekick. Wanted a job. I had a job to be done, so I put two and two together. They’re very good at what they do.” Mr Yeung paused, breathing heavily. “We need you back.”
“What if I can't come back?”
“Who else?”
“Give it to Jin-hyung.”
“Perhaps someone should've told you …” Mr Yeung pinched the bridge of his nose. “Poor dude’s in the ICU. Got absolutely butchered during VK, laser punctures to the lung. He’s recovering fine, though.”
Yoongi sat very still.
“I’ll let you see the footage later. It was one of these things –” he tapped his finger on the photo of a dark-haired girl. “The Nexus 9 units, they’re something else. We can’t have them running around in the city like that.”
Later. That meant he’d be coming back.
Yoongi exhaled heavily. “I haven’t got a choice, have I?”
“You don’t. This one –” Mr Yeung looked down at the photographs. “It’s our worst one yet.”
The VK room was a few floors downstairs, hidden away behind a dull green door. There was a large screen inside, the reclining dentist’s chair with the eyeglass device attached to an extended tray, a glass telephone booth that had been repurposed as a control station. No windows, just a ventilating fan installed near the ceiling.
“No weapons,” Mr Yeung explained, pushing Yoongi through a metal detector right in front of the doorway. Yoongi lingered near the wall at the back of the room and scrutinised the thick frames of clear acrylic on the walls. There were words incised into them, safety reminders about operating equipment and the proper way to tie the chair restraints on a person. An anatomical diagram of an old replicant model. A list of contingency questions that he remembered memorising by heart back then.
Mr Yeung switched the lights off and the screen began to whir with a faint stuttering sound. Then it went quiet as the screen slowly came to life, acid-green pixels lighting up.
They could still hear the faint humming sounds of the blimp outside the building.
On screen, a closed-circuit footage of the same room they were standing in. Seokjin was doing the questioning on a suspect. The sound was hollow, the poor quality of it reducing their voices to flat monotones that got to Yoongi’s brain in this very dead and affecting way. A young lady was strapped to the reclined dentist chair.
“– I’ve done an IQ test before,” she was saying. “But I don’t think I’ve ever had one of these.”
“Okay. If you could kindly pay attention to the screen, you’ll notice a word.” This had to be Seokjin. Yoongi squinted at the screen. Their faces on screen were small and so grainy that it began to hurt his eyes.
“Please tell me if you see the word.”
“Yes.”
“You will be presented with a series of re-enactments. You will not need to respond to any of them. However, please refrain from moving excessively as we have to take measurements of your heart rate and pupil dilation in reaction to these images.”
She didn’t say anything. Seokjin went to the console and started the montage sequence. The footage cut to black, skipping forward by a few minutes.
“- Thank you. We will begin with the actual test. Please continue to pay close attention to the screen. Your response time is important for this part.”
A rapid sequence of fuzzy sentences on the projector. There was no sound, just a robotic voice counting off the seconds for every block of sentences.
Mr Yeung was quiet.
Onscreen, Seokjin was walking around, still waiting. Observing the monitor for changes in the breathing rate, pupil dilation, checking their physical responses.
“This is the third part of the test. I will be verbally describing to you a series of events, similar to the image montage which was shown to you earlier. You will be required to give me a verbal response to these questions, drawing on what you feel is the right reaction in the situation.”
He waited for a few seconds, then took the onion skin copies of standardised questions from a table behind him.
“It’s your birthday and someone gives you a calfskin wallet.”
“I’ll decline it.”
Seokjin leaned forward to check the dials on the VK machine.
The footage skipped forward by another thirty minutes. Yoongi wondered why so much time had been given to that section. Normally, it took about twenty to thirty questions - roughly fifteen minutes - to determine if they’d passed the segment.
But he kept quiet.
Seokjin was fumbling under the desk for the stack of extra questions. He had his back turned when the lady lunged out of the chair and shot him in the back, a direct hit. When he turned around, she hit him again. And again, until the barrel was empty. It was a fluid movement with no recoil or hesitation, ending in six seconds.
Yoongi had been holding his breath throughout.
She dropped the gun and ran to the door, pulling at it until the biometric lock gave way and the catch popped open. A fading sound of sharp footsteps down the hall.
Mr Yeung cut off the footage.
“All of them worked alone. This girl – Jinsoul, Seokjin initially caught her on the street without a tracker.”
“She's the dark-haired one?” Yoongi turned to look at him, their faces poorly-lit in the screen light.
“Yes. Batch 97. Seokjin hauls her in on Tuesday, and she escapes on the same day we find out she’s responsible for that train station wipe-out. She’s a combat model, trained to kill. Travelled here in a hijacked spinner.”
Mr Yeung gestured with the remote at the screen again.
“Your second skinjob, although there’s a chance he might not be alive. They customised him with a four-year lifespan.”
The footage switched to a top view of another room, some kind of gym. There was only one person inside, banging on what looked like metal stocks with his bare fists until they bled. Yoongi could see the marks left behind. The boy took a particularly hard stab and jolted back from the force of it, shaking his hands out like he was drying them, sending flecks everywhere.
“What about this one?”
“Jungkook. Also a Nexus 9, same as Jinsoul. Both part of Batch 97, both unregistered. He’s got some kind of underdeveloped pain receptor system which just …” Mr Yeung gestured at the frozen footage, “- allows him to punch himself raw like that. Must be a goof-up they had with the earlier prototype models. Wallace gave us this footage, and it’s the only one they have of him, strangely.”
“They’re both escapees?”
“Wallace lost track of them after they left the colony, but we picked up on old records of the same two entering the stargate, both by different ways.”
The lights went on. Mr Yeung stared at the blank screen for a few seconds. "You'd think they'd have ID-ed them at checkpoints before allowing them in but there was a breach. Someone's head is gonna roll. The other two, the older ones I was telling you about - they've been here a damn long time." He set the remote down. "Those models are eight-generation, if I'm not wrong. Definitely outlawed. They ran into hiding after the blackout to escape the mass lynching."
The image on the screen changed. Two profiles of Nexus 8 models, their pre-incept photos taken before they were created and accessorised with hair and properly articulated facial features. Citadel, a combat model of unknown division, and Electra, a seamstress.
“Will VK work on them?”
“They’re confirmed targets. Don’t waste time with the tests.” Mr Yeung shook his head. “Just ask them a couple of questions, a simple one that gets straight to the point. Judge their reactions. You’ll know. Nexus 8s are naturally a little suspicious of everyone.”
“I can’t … just base it on a gut feel.”
“You can.”
“Why’d he take so long to do the questioning on her?” Yoongi rubbed at his nose. “Something else happened?”
“Wallace gave the Nexus 9 upgrades to their memories. They’ve got a new designer working the controls and the level of realism in the implants is just … mind blowing. You wouldn’t think that a replicant designer could have made any of that.”
“That’s going to affect the test.”
“Well, Wallace has an ethos that they like to use for their ninth-generation models. More human than human.” Mr Yeung paused to light a cigarette. “If you think about it, that can’t be right. You can’t surpass something that you don’t know the true boundaries of. Sounds pretty bullshit to me.”
They went back to the office.
“We thought the skinjobs were coming back for us.” Mr Yeung pushed a stack of papers towards Yoongi. The case files. “Wouldn’t be surprised if they were, but no. Nothing for two months. They’re definitely hiding from something else or taking their own sweet time. There have been rumours of an underground movement, even an uprising - but it’s all speculation.”
Yoongi ran through the papers. Date, time, everything was recorded down. Specifications of the Nexus 9 model, the coordinates of the train station where they last spotted Jinsoul at, even the details of Seokjin’s injury. A photo of the weapon, which didn't look used.
“Why’d they stay here, though?”
“I don’t know.” Mr Yeung took a long drag on his cigarette. “That’s what you’re here for.”
He turned to a prototype photograph and turned it this way and that to read the technical specifications, none of which made much sense to him. He was beginning to feel the effects of two years of absence from the business weighing down on him.
“They’ll live out there for long?”
“Apparently, their customised lifespans aren’t enough for some.” Mr Yeung was unscrewing the cap of the cognac bottle. Depression cherry, the label read. The stuff swirling around inside was a moody red colour, rotten enough to be mistaken for diluted blood.
“So you think they came back here to extend their lifespans.”
“That’s not possible. They would know. You build something into a skinjob, you can’t remove it without screwing up the biological makeup. That’s what Tyrell said, before he died.” Mr Yeung stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and poured himself a drink, laboriously unscrewing the bottlecap. “Whatever the reason is, it’s more than that. And you’ve got another spanner in the works.”
He drained the glass in a series of long gulps, then looked at Yoongi pointedly.
“You asked me about it just now. Apparently the VK machines can’t pick up on the differences between their emotional responses and that of humans as well as before. You can say it’s because of a few things. One of them has got to do with the jazzed-up implants I told you about.”
Mr Yeung stared at the empty glass as he talked.
“You have replicants getting better memories and better empathy, and on the other hand you’re getting a flattening of affect in humans. You’re getting desensitised regulars. If I took the VK standard and ran it on some of the most jaded human shitheads out there, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
Yoongi went back to reading the sheets, not saying anything.
“Their Nexus 9s are nearly immune to the VK test. They’re developing a new test at the headquarters - the baseline, I think that’s what it’s called - but that’s going to take too much time. It measures their emotional deviance rather than empathic responses, so we’ll have to learn how to administer that once it’s released to us.”
Yoongi closed the file after a few moments. “Okay.”
“Okay, means you’ll do it?”
“I’ll do it.”
Mr Yeung reached into his desk drawer and pushed an odd-looking gun over the desk towards him. Yoongi picked it up, felt the heft and weight of the metal. He looked at Mr Yeung doubtfully and placed it back down.
“We did away with the old ones.” Mr Yeung waved his hand. “That’s a modified PKD. No ammo. You’ll get clean-cut shots that burn right through.”
A nice upgrade for a returning employee, although Yoongi couldn’t say that he missed handling the weapon much. He slid the gun off the desk and waited for what he really wanted to hear.
“I know what you need, and I’ll pay you the first of it by the end of today.” Mr Yeung gestured at the door, sensing his impatience. “Godspeed.”
---
Yoongi was alone on the streets again, a long way from home. But he’d been given directions to possible locations where trails had been left off, last known contacts, and there was a good sum of money heading towards his bank account at last. He had a job now, a dirty one at that. One thing at a time, he used to hear Seokjin say back then, because their kind of work never ended.
A small shower had started outside again, this fine misty thing that umbrellas were useless against. The wind blew long, sparkling streams of it sideways, onto cars and shopfronts, swirling across the road.
He ran through the mental images of the Nexus 9 models in his head as he walked, thinking about the sweet face of that kid, Jungkook, and his bloodied knuckles.
“Nexus 8s have been out there for a pretty long time,” Mr Yeung had warned him. “They’ll most likely be able to brush your standard questions off. They’ll recognise you before you realise it.”
And Jinsoul. Mr Yeung had allowed him to keep a photograph of a subway station, the platform strewn with bloodied clothes. They said it was taken some time after she’d escaped.
The goddamned rain never stopped. He went to a public vidphone and called a cab, wondering where Cheon and his burly knuckleheaded sidekick were now. Organ traffickers. They were like unicorns. He’d heard of them but never seen them until now.
The cab was a sleek, black car that looked like a cheap limousine knockoff; windows dark, headlights tinted green and yellow. It made no sound at all, pulling up next to the sidewalk.
Coming in five minutes my ass, Yoongi thought. You’re late.
But he got in, trying not to let the rain get onto the pleather seats. The driver took off before he could even slam the door shut.
“Where are you going?” the driver asked, turning the radio volume down.
“Fifth Avenue,” Yoongi said, fiddling with the seatbelt. “I’ll tell you where to drop me off when we get there.”
He settled back, running his hand over his crossbody bag for the outline of the gun, just to make sure it was there.
“I could’ve fallen out just now.”
The driver switched his radio off. “Sorry,” he said, nonchalantly. “In a rush.”
His fingers that had crazy-looking rings on them – rainbow-coloured flowers, painted glass, some silver filigree things. Yoongi watched the way they blinked under the streetlights as he moved his hand to turn the wheel.
They stopped at a traffic junction, the car interior dark and drowsy, rain pouring over the windows. Deep silence punctuated with the ticking sound of the winker.
Yoongi stared out distractedly at the smaller blimps hovering above the road, washed-out in pink and blue through the glass.
The driver shifted slightly in his seat. Then he took his glasses off, met Yoongi’s eye in the rear-view mirror.
“Do I … know you?”
Silence. Only the sound of the wipers moving up and down in front.
“There are millions of people in this city.” Yoongi couldn’t help a quiet chuckle. “I’ve never been asked that before.”
The driver shook his head. “Sorry. You remind me of an old friend.”
“A classmate?” Yoongi smiled to himself. “From where?”
The driver turned around and flicked a switch near the ceiling. Above, overhead lights came on, bright and stinging. Yoongi winced. The driver turned them off.
“… Hyung?”
He squinted. “What?”
“Yoongi-hyung,” the driver said, looking ecstatic. “Yoongi-hyung, is that you?”
He couldn’t quite believe it either, but Yoongi could see it clearly now, the shape of that smile, the excited eyes.
“What luck,” he mumbled, but he allowed himself to smile too. He didn't know what else to do.
“I’d recognise your voice anywhere,” Hoseok said, still grinning. “How are you?”
Murdering for money, Yoongi thought, but he shook his head slightly. “Nothing too serious.”
“Do you still play?”
“Play?” Yoongi echoed, amused that he remembered. “No.”
The light turned green and they moved off.
“I’ll say you’re doing pretty well, though,” Hoseok said politely. The car rounded a turn, the omnipresent drone of the blimps fading away behind them as they left the main street behind. “You look good.”
“In what way?”
“Just … good, overall.” He gestured with one hand at the road in front. From behind Yoongi could see him grinning, the outline of his cheeks rising. “Like all the rain here hasn’t dampened your spirits.”
They were quiet for the rest of the ride until they turned into Fifth Avenue. Hoseok brought the car to a crawl and pulled up next to a sheltered spot under someone’s fire escape. Yoongi pushed the money over to him.
“Nice clothes,” Hoseok said, watching Yoongi unbuckle his seatbelt. He looked down and slowly unrolled the cash. “Wanna meet up for a drink or something? … It’s been awhile.”
Yoongi had one hand on the door handle. The wipers were still moving. Something about the whole thing had this unreal quality to it. He didn’t miss the way Hoseok was suddenly staring at him, all too intensely in the darkness.
"You got a pen or something?"
Hoseok turned to the glovebox compartment and fished out a notepad, took a pen from the breast pocket of his coat. Yoongi carefully wrote his house phone number down.
“Call me,” he said, groping for the handle again. He opened the door and started out, the din of the rain overwhelming, pounding inside his head.
---
Yoongi visited Seokjin the next morning.
The place was a sad, quiet building that had a temperature-screening robot standing out in front. He was given a surgical mask at the front desk and scanned in. The elevator was dim, tucked away in a separate wing.
Seokjin was watching something – a foreign soap opera – on the tiny bubble television hanging opposite him, blinking hard every few minutes. The entire bed was encased in a sarcophagi-like respirator with pulsing lights along the side, a monitor for the heart rate. He was up to his chest in blankets and bandages covered his broad exposed shoulders.
No damage had been done to his face. Yoongi supposed he was happy about that.
He waited outside, watching through the glass window until the commercial break. Then he went straight up to the doorway and tapped on the frame gently.
It took Seokjin a while to realise his silhouette in the dimly-lit doorway. The rest of the room was dark, save for the thin glow strip of light from below his bed. He startled, and then relaxed when he realised who it was.
“How are you feeling?” Yoongi said, keeping his voice low. He approached the bed, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets.
“I’m fine,” Seokjin said, a little weariness to his voice. He looked relieved. “Never thought I’d see you again.”
“Well –” Yoongi shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I.”
Seokjin tried to laugh, but it came out like a short wheeze. The monitor above his head emitted a small beep.
“So Mr Yeung told you.”
“Yes. I heard you punctured a lung.”
“Punctured two lungs.” Seokjin met his eye for a brief moment. “You shouldn’t be seeing me like this, though. Not good for staff morale.”
Yoongi moved closer to the bed, pulling his mask down slightly.
“It’s pretty bad.”
“Yeah, sure. I look amazing,” Seokjin huffed, his chest visibly rising and falling with the effort.
“Anybody came around?”
“No.” His expression darkened. “No one thought this would happen. I checked them … I really did.”
“It’s not you. It’s the machine.” Yoongi ran his eyes across the beeping statistics along the headboard. Seokjin was watching him, suddenly blinking very hard. “She got you pretty bad, huh?”
“Look at me, you won’t believe one of those things did this.” His voice quavered, just a little. “Doc says I’m alright, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to go back.”
Yoongi looked around for a chair to sit on, but found none. He leaned over the bed slightly, just took in the sight of all those tubes running up and down to the drip, to the machines, the one that went straight up into Seokjin’s nose.
“How’d you find her?”
“On the streets.” He spoke with long pauses between each sentence. “They got hold of the trail pretty early, I guess. I was lucky in that aspect. Once they pinned down the tracker, it was easy to see how they entered the city. Same for the other one that I didn’t catch yet.”
“What about the others?”
“That’s where you come in. It’s not gonna be so easy for you, though.” He stopped to breathe in deep. “Once they entered the city, they figured out that Wallace could still track them, so they ripped the trackers out of their necks.”
“Do they know they’re being pursued by us, then?”
“The one who nearly killed me, of course.” Seokjin tilted his head slightly, as far as the intubation would allow it to go. “I haven’t gotten any leads on the rest.”
They heard approaching footsteps. Yoongi turned to look back at the doorway, saw the silhouette of the ward nurse.
“Visiting hours are over, sir,” she whispered.
“You get back there and find out what happened, you hear?” Seokjin said, suddenly fervent. His voice faltered in a way that only Yoongi could still tell, and he didn’t like it at all. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again, anyway.”
The nurse was wheeling a cart in, piled with medicine and liquid food. Yoongi placed one hand on the side of the bed, waiting, out of some duty to reassure Seokjin. She turned the lights on, brightening up the room. Fussing over the monitors with silicon gloves, the starched white uniform and tissues.
Everything was so clean. All of it. Yoongi tapped on the metal before leaving, to get his attention. Just two taps, the code they used in the past to communicate before going in for the kill.
“You will. I’m sure you will.”
That afternoon, he made another trip down to the office. The clip had been stored permanently in the hard drive memory of the VK room computer unit. Yoongi let it wind slowly, while he stood in the middle of the room and watched the clip play over and over again.
The last question Seokjin had asked was a very simple one.
[For recalibration] the screen read, and then the transcribed sentences and descriptions of what was happening onscreen.
- Tell me, in one sentence, only the good things you remember about your childhood.
She seemed confused at first, confirming what he meant.
What childhood, she asked.
- The time from when you were a kid.
- There are no good things. Nothing that I remember at least.
[Seokjin leans down to grab the VK kit, still talking] and then, [Jinsoul, sitting up with the weapon]
Seokjin falling to the floor, over and over again. The shots went through the chair as well, leaving a scatterplot of black holes in the pleather backrest.
He counted the seconds it took for her to break through the restraints, the time she took to wrench the catch apart and run away. The circuit footage always glitched slightly near the last three seconds.
Wallace never said anything about distinguishing between good and bad memory implants. For realism, they needed everything. What she saw wasn’t real, couldn’t be real enough to warrant such a reaction.
He remembered what Mr Yeung had said about the new memory designer. More human than human. Making memories so detailed that replicants would be fooled into believing that they were real.
Yoongi rubbed at his temple and switched the screen off, plunging the room into darkness.
The archival storage room was a dank grey place filled with dust and bad lighting. He dug through files, digitised copies of last wills, evidence photographs. It was strange, being inside there without anyone else. The whole place was awash in shades of dark blue, blinds still drawn.
Yoongi stood in front of the examination table, contemplating the piles of papers on the desk still waiting to be digitised. He went straight for the stack of brown binders piled on one side, riffling through the layers until he found a familiar-looking messy stack. He pulled it out and laid it open, flicking through, finding Nexus 8 and 9 prototype documentations, which he slipped into an empty envelope.
He came to the documents which contained their particulars - health statistics, last known sightings, individual vocations. Jungkook's particulars. Jinsoul's photo, that hard stare under the dim office light. He stared at it, waiting until he could hear, in the silence, his ears ringing with gunshots. He tossed those aside to take along.
The newspapers and reports were kept in a separate aisle of the room. He moved down the row of shelves, which were mounted on straight movable tracks that allowed them to be pushed apart.
He tugged one down the rolling tracks and stood in the middle of the dark aisle under sensor-operated lights, scanning the rows of dusty white boxes. Each had a date written in marker on the side, separated by chronological year.
He picked a random box to check the contents, heaving it down and thumping it on the floor. Stacks of printouts jammed into wrapped paper envelopes, some laminated pieces of newspaper.
Placing that back on the shelf, he went to study the catalogue at the archivist table. There was a computer there, this ancient fat white thing that had Hivemind access. A standard-issue neurocable connected to a modem had been neatly coiled up at the side.
Yoongi powered up the monitor and did a quick search for Jinsoul’s name. The results were too broad and vague for him to find anything. He tried the date on the CCTV footage, and found a recent forum discussing unsolved mysteries. Just a few curious commenters who were following the topic. One of them had compiled a list of recently abandoned train stations which they suspected the murderer was hiding at, based on crowdsourced information. Any historical records from before 2033 had been completely destroyed in the blackout, meaning there was no easy way for him to fact-check it, even on the Hivemind.
The forum wasn’t the most reliable source, but this was the only lead he had and it seemed to make sense.
He got a printout of that page and sat there, studying it. Many stations had been left for dead in the 2010s, the tracks re-routed past them as various parts of the city urbanised and deindustrialised. He’d eventually given up trying to form a mental map. There were sixty-five names on the list, all decommissioned and closed for good since 2015. No coordinates, though.
Jinsoul knew she was being hunted. There would be a lot of moving around involved, a cat and mouse game.
He went back to the catalogue. The date was matched to shelf number 21. Leaving the monitor on, Yoongi went to that shelf and dragged it aside slowly, finding another wall of white boxes. He located the date tag and took down a few boxes from that row, searching through content from the days after it, up till the second week when their agency got hold of the information and Seokjin dragged her in.
A few photocopies of rough drafts for the newsrooms. He wondered where those had come from. They contained more specific details about the victim’s names and ages, method of death. Mostly by strangulation or severe blood loss. Interesting, but not that important. He folded those up in the same way that he found them, tucking them back into the box. There was another thick brown envelope at the bottom of one of the boxes.
It contained a stack of photographs, all different from what he’d seen in the official report. Photos from the scene, close-ups on dead bodies and bloodied clothing, hair turned over faces which had been frozen at the point of death.
Another pre-incept photograph - this one a design of the facial prototype, taken from a Wallace lab report, without the thick head of hair and black eyelashes or added lip colouring. The face was still too sharp and perfect, one modelled for combat intimidation and charm. He could think of a face like that coming at him in the streets, adding some sleight of hand manoeuvre which was more precise than brutal.
Then he came to a property registration form. It wasn’t the original copy, but there was an address there, with Electra’s name and citizen number as the owner. Seokjin had already searched the place before and reported that it was empty.
He decided to go there first, out of some personal obligation to finish the work properly.
He took the photographs and shoved the rest away. Only hardcopies, because his Esper at home was an old model which couldn't read video reels. He sealed the envelope and quietly headed out.
Electra’s house was empty, and it had a stale, musty smell in the air. Abandoned for good, since it didn’t look like it’d been lived in for some time. There were still items in the living room and bedroom - small, unimportant objects which weren’t very useful. He checked the kitchen and found it mostly empty. The bedroom had many racks and drawers, but they were filled with mildewed clothes. The bed was stripped of its pillows and bedsheet, just a bare mattress lying there.
He went to the closet and opened it, checking the drawers. All of them were empty. He went to the desk and checked those two, finding them cleaned out except for the last two. The first one contained only old pieces of clothing. The drawer below that was locked. He pulled on it again, hoping he wasn't making too much noise. It still didn't budge.
She probably took the keys with her.
He squinted at the lock, running his fingernail over the outline of the keyhole.
Seemed like an old spring latch design, could be picked and re-locked. He hunted around the apartment for tools, finding a few sewing pins thrown carelessly into a tray. He took a pen from his bag and used the nib to bend out the shape, then pushed two pieces into the keyhole, probing deftly, trying to remember if he was doing it right.
It was dark and stuffy under here, the wood smelling very much like old shoe polish and another kind of odour he didn't want to know about.
He twisted the clips again, fumbling beside him for another sewing pin. After a few more tries, the lock came apart with a soft pop.
Dropping the tools on the desk, he pulled the creaking drawer out, spotting clothes and an envelope. The envelope was filled with glossy printouts of people and number cards, nondescript photos of what looked like a hazy farmhouse and a colourful storefront of textiles, all shot from different angles. It didn’t look very unusual at first, but then he shook out the last photograph from the envelope and found himself looking at a shot of a train station murder scene. There was a name written on the back of it. Pterois.
He took the folded printout of compiled abandoned train stations from his pocket, checking the list. Pterois was listed as an abandoned train station. He made a mark next to it. The other photos had no locations written on them, but there was a string of numbers scrawled on the back of the farmhouse photograph.
He took the entire envelope along with him, placed the clothes back in and shoved the drawer shut.
It spooked him a little back there - how dusty the whole place was, how it reeked of abandonment and a world long gone, how easily he could walk in and out with the pilfered items.
He took the sky train back and alighted at a little station which was built precariously close to the community gardens below, breeding swathes of alien-looking flowering vegetation clumped together like weeds on purple soil patches.
Yoongi’s apartment block was a small monster of brutalist architecture situated along the straight line of identical apartments. From a distance, it looked like it was caving in on itself, floating in its own shadow. Fog had surrounded the top of it in a thick, cloudy embrace. He trekked back through the swamped black road, following the path under the train viaduct which loomed above him. A blimp crossed the angry grey sky, its round underbelly sparkling with light and condensation.
Somehow the blimp had been droning on without interrupting his thoughts. He let himself walk on down the ponded road, thinking about the number of people he’d have to speak to. Of everything that happened, he didn’t expect the resultant feeling of floundering in a mud cesspool with nothing to start out with. It was something he had to get used to all over again.
The first apartment block ahead was dotted with balconies, open windows with golden light pouring out of them. There was washing hanging on the lines, a colourful cord of flapping fabric stretching from one end of the inner courtyard to the opposite side, the work of all those people taking advantage of momentary drier weather.
They were always waiting for rain or the rarity of snow, if nothing fell from the sky. They never waited for sunlight. There was no sunlight here.
Yoongi looked up wearily as he passed, the dark blue light falling on his face, wondering when Hoseok would call him.
Which he did, the next afternoon, while Yoongi was tracing out buildings and roads with a ballpoint. He had been hiding at a tent bar for the rest of the day, sipping on a single bottle of soju, the folded train map spread out over the table. Purple line. Blue line. He figured out where Pterois was and placed a cross over the blank spot where it should have been, if the train line hadn’t been diverted.
He put the pen down and eyed the plates of fried chicken on the tables of the other patrons, trying to ignore the suspicious looks the owner was throwing him.
The police, the media – they had covered it all up. He thought about going back to ask Seokjin again, but that would probably piss the guy off. With holes in his chest and a punctured lung, being stuck in there and having to talk was probably as close to death as he could get.
On the other hand, Hoseok said he was free that evening. He found Yoongi asleep on the table at six, with his hand wrapped loosely around an empty shot glass.
Hoseok poked his elbow, gently at first, then harder, to wake him up.
“Hyung,” he hissed, and Yoongi heard it, the incessant chatter of the tent bar filtering through the hazy blackness all at once as his vision cleared.
He sat up slowly, feeling the pain in his left cheek from where it had pressed against his arm.
Hoseok’s face was golden in the glare of the dim light. He had a big blue puffer jacket on, the colour sharply outlined against his murky vision.
“God,” Yoongi yawned. “You’re early.”
“I’m not. Did you eat already?”
“No.”
“When did you come here?”
“This morning.”
Hoseok tutted and took off his jacket. The collared shirt under that was halfway buttoned over another black sweater inside.
“I’ll buy something,” he said, pulling his crumpled sleeves down. “What do you want?”
“Whatever you’re eating.” Yoongi rubbed his eyes. “Get a double.”
When they finally settled down to have a proper meal, hunched over steaming bowls of food, Yoongi told him. Above them, rain was pelting down on the red tent flaps.
Nestled with all these people inside, the place was filled with this sort of orange glow, the glow of security in masses. A safe, night-time kind of feeling.
The alcohol in his system was making him feel very warm and sluggish.
“I’m having some problems at work.” He stirred his soup slowly, not daring to look up.
“Yeah?” Hoseok said. “What is it?”
“A replicant.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I’m looking for an escaped replicant.”
“Okay.” Hoseok skewered a piece of meat. “Who is this replicant?”
Yoongi watched him eat, his own food still untouched.
“She killed people at a train station.”
“So,” Hoseok said, dabbing at the corner of his mouth. “A dysfunctional android?”
“Synthetic humans, not robots. Those that look real. The ones like you and me, except they’re not.” Yoongi stared at a limp noodle strand he’d picked out of the soup with his chopsticks. “I wouldn’t expect you to know, anyway. Even I can’t tell the difference sometimes.”
“Why are you looking for them?”
“We’re supposed to retire them.” Yoongi let his gaze wander over the crowds of people huddled inside the tent. “Just another word for killing them off.”
“That’s what you do for a living?”
“Pretty much.”
“Don’t they track them, or something?” Hoseok mimed the plugging-in motion behind his neck. “You know, like what we did at school.”
"That's the problem. They took the trackers out."
"Oh."
“They didn’t want to be tracked or connected to Wallace’s monitoring system.” Yoongi stared at the little bottle of soy sauce on the table and reached for it. “- Which is surprising, considering that they’re supposed to be subservient.”
“This is reminding me of something.”
“Anyway – I mean, they tried to look for them,” Yoongi continued, poking limply at his food. “But these new models, they’re more advanced than I thought.”
“Maybe you should go back to your boss.” Hoseok reached for his glass.
“He’s not letting me off until I get all my targets.” Yoongi finally put a piece into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Says it’s their worst case yet, whatever excuse that’s supposed to be. I haven’t got a proper car or any help, which is pretty bad, considering I used to … work as part of a pair.”
“What else are you supposed to do, then?”
“There was a media blackout on the whole thing.” He paused and shook his head. “I’ve been out of the loop for so long - two years is a long time if you’re in that business. Wallace is trying to make their models more … human, and that’s not making it any easier to work with them.”
They continued eating in silence, until Hoseok suddenly put his utensils down.
“Look - I don’t have anything against what you’re doing, but what’s really the problem with those skinjobs running around untracked?”
“My supervisor thinks they’re running away because of an underground movement that we don’t know about.” Yoongi chewed and swallowed. “I don’t really think there’s a problem if they don’t cause any trouble. But Wallace does. The police department does.”
---
They walked back after the meal, past a row of stores, the dark interiors forming a long stretch of black and blue windows. Yoongi found himself catching glimpses of their reflections in the glass as they went by.
“So tell me about your skinjobs.” Hoseok was tilting his face up to the sky. A light misty rain was falling.
“Don’t you know what they are?”
“Not really. You already said it’s hard to distinguish them, didn’t you?”
Yoongi stared at the ground as they walked. “What do you want to know?”
“How do you tell one apart from a person?”
“We use a test. I can’t tell you what goes into it except that it’s supposed to measure emotional responses.”
“Cool.” Hoseok was nodding. “Like an EQ test. Seems appropriate.”
“Something like that.”
They stopped at a traffic crossing, the droning voice of the controller sounding from the horn attached to the lights above their heads. Stop, it said, over and over again.
They didn’t speak until they left the crossing far behind. It was quieter here, just long lines of people from the subway station ahead, rushing back in raincoats and jackets with the silent intensity of a morning peak-hour crowd.
“Most of these guys have slightly underdeveloped emotional responses to things,” Yoongi said. “Even if you think they do, it’s all simulated by fake memories.”
“That just sounds sad.”
“But they don’t know it, and they don’t really expect any empathy from others either. It just doesn’t come naturally to them.”
They were moving towards a stretch of large buildings with pink-lit shopfronts, dancing holograms on their pedestals and animatronic mannequins. Hoseok was walking with hands in the pockets of his pants.
“Do they … feel things?”
“They have primal instincts.” Yoongi scratched at his head. “But the rest are usually picked up from the social cues and emotions of people around them.”
“They can learn too?”
“They’re good at imitating human behaviour to learn, yes.”
“I like the idea of that,” Hoseok said, rather wistfully. “That they have the ability for organic growth, instead of … just programming things into themselves. Neurocables make it so easy to forgo traditional learning nowadays.”
Yoongi realised he didn’t recognise this part of the city. He’d been so focused on thinking that he’d been blindly following Hoseok along. They were walking very close to each other, their arms colliding every few minutes.
“Are you going anywhere?” he asked.
“Nope. I’m free tonight.” A gust of wind blew and Hoseok tugged on his jacket to pull it tight. “You had a place in mind?”
“No.” Yoongi looked back over his shoulder, as if watching out for someone. “I don’t want to go out.”
“Okay.” Hoseok started walking faster. “Let’s head home then. I don’t like it out here either.”
They ended up at the carpark. It was cold and quiet, with only a streetlamp at the corner of the chain-link fencing, a gravel-lined floor and cracked concrete.
“You drove all the way here?” Yoongi asked. The cold was suddenly giving him a slight headache.
“What else did you expect me to do,” Hoseok said, suddenly pulling him by the arm to the cab, “- take the train?”
Inside, they’d tuned in to a local symphonic station, the volume turned down low. Yoongi tilted his head to press against the car window, following the rising and falling lines of the train tracks outside with his eyes.
Hoseok spoke first.
“Don’t you think that Halfaxa sounds a lot like what your replicants are doing?”
Yoongi turned to face him. The trickling music continued in the background, a quiet murmur. He leaned his head back onto the headrest as the car went over a hump.
“It’s highly unlikely that a small school movement would lead to something like that.”
Hoseok tilted his head. “But it sounds so similar, doesn’t it?”
“We can’t assume without some kind of evidence. All of those are just rumours.”
Hoseok didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
Yoongi didn’t reply.
“Hyung.”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you?” Yoongi gave him a sidelong glance, frowning slightly. “I’m not a cop. And I don’t like this job. Plain and simple as that.”
“Okay,” Hoseok said quietly, not looking at him. “I’m sorry. Okay.”
Yoongi closed his eyes, still seeing lights shift murkily behind his eyelids.
“Do you remember them, though?” Hoseok said after a while, voice cutting into his thoughts.
Guy still talked a lot, never shut his mouth. Yoongi remembered liking him too much for that.
He opened one eye. “Remember who?”
“Those classmates who started the uprising.”
“Mm, not really.”
“I’m still in contact with a few of them."
“Yeah?” Yoongi rubbed at his temple and focused on the blinker light of the vehicle in front of them.
“You don’t have to worry about, you know, associating with us, if that’s what you’re concerned about. The whole thing died out just as quickly as it started. People hardly remember who we were anymore.”
“I heard.”
“I can let them know you're still around.”
“Sure.”
They turned into a side street, the floating yellow holographic billboards drifting above.
"Or would you like to come down for a visit?"
"Where?"
"The substation."
Those images of engine oil on the road and red-light districts, their dorms filled with call girls and boys who kept serrated blades in their bags. It all came back to Yoongi in one jagged mesh.
"No. Not going down there."
He could hear the smile in Hoseok’s voice. "Come on."
"It's hell."
"You've got to get out there and look around. Otherwise you'll never find your targets."
Yoongi bumped his head against the glass, not saying anything.
“They’re interesting, I promise. Maybe you’ll be able to get them to help you.”
After a while, Yoongi looked over at him. “You’re friends with them?”
“Sort of.”
"How are they?"
The car turned into the street below Yoongi’s apartment block.
“Do you even remember their names?”
“Somewhat.” Yoongi laughed. “As in, I would know if you told me. Not off the top of my head.”
"Okay. There’s Taehyung, who just bought his own garage. Rich as hell. Jimin's dancing for an underground troupe. You remember him? The model student.”
“Yeah.”
“And Yves's gotten into the hunting business. Money is good, if you’re willing to spend your days dragging yourself through dust and auctions."
“Someone got expelled, right.”
“Yeah. He was … he was really something, Namjoon. Yeah.”
They stopped under the overhanging fire escape. The entire street was empty.
"So ... you'll come over?"
Hoseok’s eyes still had that eager shine to them, that boyish amiability behind this cool facade of sophisticated blue-tinted glasses and classy clothes.
Yoongi sighed. “Okay.”
Hoseok seemed to relax a little.
“I don’t know what happened to Namjoon, though,” he said, pressing the hazard light. “We lost touch years ago. If you want to find him, you’re on your own.”