JD paused. “You’ve already trashed my room, then?” he guessed.
“Where are you?” she asked again.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”
“Where the fuck are you?” Kali yelled.
“One hundred thousand,” JD said, the words forming on his lips before he could think, but sounding right as he spoke them.
“Are you blackmailing me?”
JD stifled a yawn. “Blackmail would be ‘money, or else,’ this is just capitalism.”
The line went quiet.
“We agreed on fifty thousand,” she said, enunciating each word carefully.
“Then you lied to me, and now you’ve wrecked all my stuff. One hundred thousand.”
“You fucking—”
JD hit the red button to end the call.
Still hanging over the edge of the bed, he touched the phone again, glass like skin burning fever-hot.
“Shit,” he said, dragging out the single syllable—annoyed that he hadn’t figured it out earlier. As well as its integrated power supply, the cube had its own processor, one too powerful to run unchecked without heat sinks.
“Who were you talking to?” Troy asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” JD said. He scrolled through the phone settings. Processor usage had been uncapped, so he knocked it back down to 0.3 percent, remembering the warning message from the night before.
Brrrrrrt.
JD took the call on speaker again: “Yellow?”
There was breathing on the other end, rasping loud across the line. “One hundred thousand,” Kali said. “Bring the cube to me, and you’ll get your money.”
“Bring it to you? In the city ruins, where there’s no surveillance, and you have an army of teenage psychopaths? No, that won’t work. I’ll give it to Soo-hyun, and no one else. Have them meet me at the technopark, in the central square. One o’clock.” JD hung up without waiting for a response. His head began to throb with his pulse, so he snatched his phone off the floor and sat up against the headboard. Already the phone felt cooler.
“JD,” Troy said. Not “Jules,” not even “Julius,” but “JD.” He knew he was in trouble. “What are you doing? Who are these people you’re fucking with?”
“Don’t worry about me,” JD said. He sat on the edge of the bed, back turned to Troy.
“I only ever see you when you’re in over your head; of course I worry.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“What did you just say?” Troy said.
JD shook his head and stood, searching for his underpants before remembering all his clothes were still in the bathroom.
He sighed. “You only see me when I’m in the shit because that’s the only time we can talk. Otherwise I come around and it’s awkward. It seems like I’m the one who’s coping, even though you’re the one that broke up with me.”
“You know why I did that.”
“I’m not sure that I do.” JD headed to the bathroom.
“I can’t sit by and watch you get caught up in all this criminal shit,” Troy called out. “I want to be with you, but the you that has a job, that gives a damn about his future.”
JD dressed quickly, smell of last night’s clothes filling his nostrils as soon as he was dressed. He met Troy in the hallway between rooms. “Why do you think I do this shit?” he said. “There are no jobs, there’s no fucking future,” he spat the words out, angrier than he’d meant, and Troy stepped back as though struck.
Troy crossed his arms over his chest. “You can’t believe that.”
“I do, though. I have to make a future for myself any way I can. But sure, you go and teach philosophy to students who’ll wind up working four jobs just to make ends meet. When all this comes tumbling down, at least they’ll be able to chat about Kierkegaard while they’re eating rats around a bonfire.”
“That won’t happen.”
“Why not? None of this is sustainable. Corporate capitalism is built on a foundation of infinite growth despite our very finite resources. We’re on track to consume our way to an unlivable planet, and no one seems to care.” JD jabbed a finger toward the front door: “But I will steal from every person out there to provide for my mother and myself, and for you, if you’d let me love you.”
Tears welled in JD’s eyes. He turned and walked to the apartment entrance.
“You can’t provide anything from prison. You can’t provide if you’re dead,” Troy said, but he said it quiet. It was an argument neither of them wanted to win.
His socks were still damp, so JD balled them up and shoved them into one of the outer pockets of his rucksack. He put his