pop-in; the station filled his cockpit’s viewport, glinting and glimmering with countless lights, its surface organically textured with outcroppings of residences, defenses, and the immense arms of the shipyard jutting into space.
JD aimed his corvette at the canyon that was the station’s main hangar and flew through moving traffic, a smile stretched across his face as he turned lazy corkscrews around goliath transport ships and heavy ore carriers from the Endo belt. The station’s automated processes took over, and JD felt the haptic controls go slack as the corvette docked. The controls shifted in his grip, and the throttle became a second stick. JD stood his avatar from its seat and felt the distant phantom pain spike through his knee. He walked off his ship and onto Zero Station.
“How long do I have?” JD asked Mirae.
“There’s no rush, but you should get into position before we generate the repossession job.”
“No rush? Easy for you to say when you’re not trespassing.”
“But I am trespassing. I have compromised Yeun’s phone. He had to disable protections to access my viral architecture, but the same is not true for the rest of Zero’s systems. It is taking more than half my processing power just to avoid detection.”
“Yeun sounds desperate,” JD said.
“I don’t think it is desperation, but rather hubris. He sees me as a tool. He doesn’t expect me to act without his hand guiding me. I guess I should thank you, JD.”
“What for?”
“For seeing more in me. For giving me a chance at an unconfined life.”
“There was never any other option.”
JD walked the length of the dock, passing avatars in a dozen humanoid shapes, and a collection of utterly alien ones—undulating bodies like inverted jellyfish, sentient ever-shifting swarms of nanomachines, and intelligent collectives of microorganisms that washed across the deck in foot-tall waves.
Zero Station was nominally split into two halves—one half that was open to the public, filled with commerce, casinos, cheap avatar accommodations, arenas for three different zero-gravity sports played within VOIDWAR, a theater, two cinemas, plus a variety of clubs, brothels, and child care centers. Some players never left the station. The gargantuan construct gave them everything they needed.
The second half of the station was Zero’s holdings. Every ship, weapon, upgrade, and space station needed to be made from mined resources, which required “physical” storage space. What better way to convince people their digital products—their digital lives—had value than through these artificial limitations? To remain the richest corporation within VOIDWAR, Zero needed room to store their riches, in a system where attacks, piracy, thievery, and other forms of criminal conduct were outlawed.
JD passed the casinos and alien strip clubs by the dock, and pushed his avatar down a seemingly endless corridor lined with blueprint and cosmetic vendors—every second stall strobing in kaleidoscopic color. He kept walking until the jungle of commerce gave way to a wide city square—zero-gravity architecture creating a cube of Escher paths, impossible topiaries, and statues erected for heroes of particularly spectacular battles.
He leaped up, soared through the air, and rolled, landing upside-down relative to where he had begun, mind spinning in vertigo for the few seconds it took to adjust. He stood outside Zero’s VOIDWAR headquarters—a re-creation of the building in downtown Neo Songdo. Unrestricted by gravity, this building pierced the opposite side of the cube, and continued through the station’s superstructure, eventually terminating at a viewing platform on the outer surface.
“I’m here,” JD said. He climbed the stairs to the entrance where the words employee access only shimmered in red brighter than neon.
He waited.
“Mirae?”
“Patience,” I said.
Layers of security peeled aside, stripped away by Khoder’s tools, Yeun’s stolen credentials, and a location-based lock that was bypassed the moment JD plugged me into a machine inside Zero HQ.
“I’ve created a repossession job for the station. You should accept it before someone else does.”
JD logged into his repo account—the one thing I couldn’t spoof, repossessions being tightly controlled, tied to government IDs and personal bank accounts. He brought up the bounty boards and found it at the top of the list. Already three other bids had come in, but JD was the only repo within one astronomical unit of the target. He entered his bid and after a few long seconds of watching a loading bar fill, his vision pinged green.
“Got it.”
JD retrieved the Zero Override from his inventory and examined the small obsidian arrowhead, the glossy black surface so real he could almost feel it between his thumb and forefinger. He slotted it into the door, which slid