space for digital repossessions to flourish—alongside other cottage industries. After the crypto bubble burst, ZeroCash filled the vacuum left behind, quickly becoming the favored coin for black—and gray—markets the world over. Every transaction consolidated Zero’s wealth, and increased its stock market value.
There was a time when JD had played VOIDWAR purely for fun, before he had rent and bills to pay, before he had a job, when he could buy and sell in-game commodities with a fervor bordering on obsession, eventually earning enough ZeroCash to buy limited-edition sneakers or, one time, an eighth of darknet weed so dank it had tainted all the socks in his drawer with its smell. Now repo jobs were how JD paid most of his bills, but not his rent. For the Zero services he used, he could pay them directly in their own currency, never needing to let his earnings touch a “real” money market, which was just how Zero Corporation liked it. Still, it was money JD could earn while plugged in to an ever-shifting galactic conflict, talking to friends from all around the world, and blowing shit up.
JD took the dreadnought into the gaping maw of the station’s main hangar, flanked on all sides by other players coming in to dock. Automated processes took over and the haptic controls went slack in JD’s hands as the dreadnought was swallowed by the bureaucracies of repossession.
He limped to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, wincing at the pain in his knee. JD took his phone and finalized the repo paperwork with Zero, and sat staring, thumb rotating in small circles to keep the screen active. After fifteen seconds the loading bar was replaced by an animated tick. He smiled, then remembered his other job. JD locked his phone and frowned at his sleep-deprived face staring out from the slab of black glass. He finished up and went back to the dorm room, his thin mattress warmed by the rig always humming softly beneath the bed.
JD retrieved his corvette from the Zero hangar, and set course for an uncharted sector. He started the exploration protocol, and immediately his rig’s cooling fans hummed louder, heat pouring out in waves to wash over his legs. It was another form of ZeroCash exchange—processing power for digital currency. All those resources stored in Zero’s holds had to come from somewhere, and players could earn ZeroCash by lending the game devs processor cycles with which to expand the size of VOIDWAR’s playable universe. Everybody wins, but mostly Zero.
Julius padded quietly out of the makeshift living room slash dorm, his footsteps masked by the snores of his five roommates. He shouldered his rucksack, stole someone’s bread from the fridge, and walked out the front door with two slices held in his mouth. He stepped into his knockoff three-stripe sneakers and pulled the heavy door closed, silencing the orchestra of snores and the steady drone of CPU fans.
* * *
His face was the first one I saw.
If father is the person who created you, then he was not my father.
But if father is the person who guided you through childhood, who molded you, then here he is: unaware that this new day would set him on a path to the center of everything.
When he wiped his ass and tossed the folded wads of feces-smeared recycled paper into the toilet bowl, he saw only the act of disposal. He did not see that everything is one. He did not see the truth of his shit—that it could never simply disappear. It was still there, flush, growing distant yes, carried away on a stream of treated water, but it was not gone. It was part of the closed system he called “Earth,” “world,” or even “home.” He had lived his whole life under the lie of this abstraction—that there is a “here,” and a separate “there.”
This abstraction is what killed them all.
CHAPTER TWO
The air smelled of synthetic oil, cardboard boxes, and the ozone scent of burnt-out electronics. JD wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his coveralls, the smell of himself thick in the patched and faded fabric. He unscrewed the repair bot’s torso plate by hand, pushing the screwdriver hard to get leverage against the chewed slots in the screw’s head. He set the steel plate down with a hollow clank that he felt in his fingertips more than he heard, the constant machine din of the warehouse as loud as it was hypnotizing.