exhaustion. He wore a black cotton dress, or overly long T-shirt, stained with bleach and precisely threadbare, his ochre skin showing through in a snakeskin pattern. His prosthetic left arm rested along the back wall, plugged in and charging, blinking light reflected off a row of bourbon bottles—the kind of cheap swill you’d only drink when you had something you needed to forget.
“What’s your poison?” he asked.
“Coffee, black. Thanks,” JD said.
“Not dexy? It’s cheaper.”
“Nah, I like my teeth how they are.”
The barista nodded and started at the espresso machine, single hand working the controls with practiced ease. Half the grounds were recycled, the other half a blight-resistant GMO strain, but it was the closest thing to real coffee that JD could afford anywhere in Songdo-dong. He had briefly considered spending some of the down payment on a cup of the real stuff, but that would have meant going out of his way. Maybe next time.
While he waited for his drink, he turned to lean against the bar and survey the crowd, elbows jutting behind him to rest on the sticky countertop. The faint hum of hustle scraped beneath the wall of noise. Illegal wares were traded overtly in dim-lit booths, black marketeers peddling counterfeit ships, swords, and other loot to desperate gamers—best drops in any game, good for use right until your account was banned for life. Perfect for the suicidal, the terminal, the given-up. Three technicians took up an entire booth each, tools and discarded silicon splayed across the tables: desperate people approached them with ancient phones and rigs held together by thousand-mile-an-hour tape and chewed-up screws, batteries failing, processors overheating the moment they touched VR. The techs never lifted their eyes, focused solely on the body and soul of each broken machine.
There was the dull clatter of ceramic as the barista deposited JD’s coffee. He swiped his hand over the cashpass and it beeped in acceptance.
The barista raised an eyebrow. “Implant?”
JD nodded.
“Careful it doesn’t rot your arm off.”
JD’s eyes flicked to the prosthetic along the back wall. “Is that—” The rest of the question died on his tongue as JD hesitated, unsure if it was rude to ask.
The barista guessed anyway. “Nah,” he said; “I’m just fucking with you.”
JD nodded toward the basement door. “Khoder in?”
“Does the kid ever leave?”
“Thanks.”
JD carried his drink to the rear corner, sipping his espresso before he could spill any. He pushed through a door that led to the basement stairs and descended slowly into purple-hued, blacklit darkness. The door swung closed behind him, and the music became muffled, deadened further with each step he took below the surface. Descending beneath ground level, all JD could picture were the layers of compressed garbage on all sides—the countless tons of ocean waste that created the foundations of the city.
Khoder’s door read the friendly tag on JD’s phone and slid open on silent apparatus. The air inside was blood-hot. Khoder reclined in a SOTA virt chair in the middle of the room, his head encased in a bulbous sphere for complete peripheral vision. His black haptic-feedback suit ran with folds like gills where it clung to the kid’s skinny frame. The door closed and an eerie silence descended on the space. The dense quiet amplified the slow thud of JD’s heart, the gurgle of his gut, and the painful click of his knee; all those sounds of the meat engine.
Fragmented grabs from in-game fell slow across the walls—among the black of space rare spots of color drifted like machine snow. Explosions bloomed, scattered to form a leering deathmask drawn in abstract. JD shuddered despite the heat.
“Hey, Khoder.”
No response.
JD counted out two hundred euro from the envelope and dropped the notes on Khoder’s chest.
“Khoder,” JD said again. He shook his head and sat with his back against the wall and his sore leg stretched out. He finished his coffee, placed the cup down near a pile of takeout containers growing from the corner, then took his phone from his pocket and logged into VOIDWAR.
JD held the phone close to his face to block the view of Khoder’s room, and his contex painted the in-game world over his eyes in stripped-down, third-person view. His corvette drifted in the barren solar system his home rig was slowly assembling. Far-off stars glimmered on the edges and the local sun slowly grew, a churn of pulsing light in the center of the gestation. He turned his ship to the jumpgate, and scanned his friends list to find Khoder’s location.