you were tinkering out here, but this is?…” He motioned around the workshop to all the disassembled dogs. “It’s a lot.”
“It’s how I keep myself occupied. Some of the teens have made drone hunting into a vocation, so there’s always work. It keeps me centered.”
“Do you mind?” JD asked, pointing to the dog open on Soo-hyun’s workbench. They stepped back and JD leaned in for a better look. “You didn’t tell me you worked on police dogs.”
“You didn’t ask,” Soo-hyun said.
JD nodded. He’d been angry with Soo-hyun for the longest time. Eventually it got to be easier not to ask what they were doing with their life, easier to just pretend there was no anger there, no connection.
“Tektech put in for the tender to repair the police dogs, but nothing ever came of it. I always wanted to get a look inside one.”
“All you had to do was visit,” Soo-hyun said. “They’re nasty machines until you teach them some manners.” They pulled a screwdriver from a drawer in the workbench and held it by the head, tapping the rubber handle on the robot’s hip flexor. “Basic movement and motor functions are the same as we had in the warehouse, more or less. Where dogs get interesting is here,” they said, dropping the tool onto the bench and pulling away half of the dog’s skull, their fingers tipped with grime-blacked nails.
They parted two lots of power cabling and their fingers disappeared inside the cranial cavity. They reached around blindly and continued: “Before you can reprogram them, you want to remove the storage and start from scratch.” They grunted with this last word and pulled their hand free.
Soo-hyun held a standard storage cube—burnished steel casing twelve millimeters a side. One of the faces was dotted with small holes like the six of a die. They dropped it into JD’s hand.
“Got every police rule and procedure in there, plus records of every day it spent on the job.”
JD tried to give the datacube back, but Soo-hyun closed his hand around it.
“Keep it. Stick it inside a quadcopter drone and watch it try and pull over speeding auto-trucks.” Soo-hyun grinned. They took the screwdriver from the bench and handed that to JD too.
“What’s this for?” JD asked.
“Happy birthday.”
“My birthday was months ago.”
“And I didn’t get you anything. It’s a LOX-Recess screwdriver. If you ever get a chance to open up a dog, you’re going to need one of those.”
“Don’t you need it?”
“I’ve got a dozen of them littered around here.” Soo-hyun squeezed JD’s shoulder. “Come on, take a seat.”
They motioned to two stools, and JD groaned as he dropped onto the low seat, struggling to ignore the ache in his knee. Soo-hyun reached into a cooler beside the chair and produced two bottles of unlabeled beer. They tossed one to JD and he caught it.
JD twisted the lid off his beer and took a sip; it wasn’t good beer, but it was cold, and it was free.
“What do you think of the place?”
JD raised his eyebrows. “It’s, uh, cozy.”
“It’s a shithole,” Soo-hyun said.
JD nodded, and they both smiled. “At least you don’t have to share the workshop with anyone else. Do you?”
“No.”
“There you go then, that’s something,” JD said. “You really like it out here?”
“It’s quieter. I’m quieter. I fucked up, y’know,” they said, pointing to JD’s knee with their beer. “Liber is good for me.”
“You can’t hide here forever.”
Soo-hyun shrugged. “Songdo will always be waiting for me, but for now I’m happy.”
“Alright,” JD said. “Kali said you’d give me the details of this job?”
“I’ve already put the file together. I’ll make you a copy.” Soo-hyun walked to an old rig asleep in the corner, and whacked the mechanical keyboard to life. They pointed to a yellow envelope on a workbench by the door. “That’s your down payment; two thousand for expenses. Don’t give Red an excuse to come looking for it, hyung.”
“I wouldn’t give him the pleasure,” JD said as he wandered over to the bench. He swept up the cash-laden envelope and slipped it into his back pocket in one smooth movement.
Soo-hyun worked at their rig in silence for a minute or two, while JD drank his beer. Another dog drone walked in through the open door and bumped into Soo-hyun’s leg, shaking its rear half though it had no tail to wag. They patted it on the head and glanced at JD.
“Might have gone overboard on the canine subroutines with this one.”
JD smiled. “Nah, it’s cute.”
“I’ve got another present for you,”