He crossed to the window and watched Soo-hyun march back to the exit, carving a straight line through the machines. They waved once as they pushed the main doors open, and disappeared into the glare, swallowed by the external world.
* * *
Hours later, JD stepped outside, leaving behind the industrial clang of the warehouse. The building loomed over him, haloed by the fast-approaching dusk. It was four stories’ worth of storage, humming with machine labor, and still ringed with suicide nets from when human pickers and packers worked themselves to exhaustion within its walls, all for the sake of some technocrat’s net worth. JD left the structure’s shadow and pushed into the sidewalk surge, joining the shuffling biomass of Neo Songdo. Sunlight speared between buildings at migraine height; it burned bright through the smog, heat hanging heavy over the city, where it would persist until well after midnight.
Traffic lights and crossing signals shone in the real, largely for the sake of pedestrians and the rare human driver—the self-driving cars too unsettling to watch without their every move telegraphed in advance. The cars didn’t see the lights, they reacted instead to some hidden system of machine semiotics, chattering constantly among themselves. Watching them, JD wondered if the cars ever talked about their passengers, ever gossiped about the biological denizens of the machine city.
The original plans for Songdo had called for a focus on pedestrians and public transport—a clean city, a green city—but when Zero bailed out the government and took on the city’s debt, their rideshare network had taken precedence. Wide sidewalks gave way to roads, people gave way to cars, and the grand intentions of Songdo’s architects gave way to the excesses of capital.
Waiting at a crosswalk, people packed in tight around JD, their bodies adding to the heat of the falling sun. He scrunched his nose against the medley of body odor, the acrid scent of vehicle exhaust and factory runoff, and the biologic smells of vomit and piss baking on hot cement.
The signal turned green, and JD walked.
He shot daggers at every corporate worker dressed identically in black, white, and gray, still exquisitely preened after eight hours in air-conditioning, but he knew the sneer that twisted his mouth was pure jealousy, not class warfare. He pushed those elite specters from his mind and took in the rest of the bustle: gig-economy hopefuls rushing home, some paid, others not; folks peddling noodles, soup, or bottled water from behind corporate censor bars; and rich kids strangled by private school uniforms, chain-smoking cigarettes because nothing is cooler than lung cancer your parents can afford to cure. They flocked birdlike around the street’s other denizens: urchins, runaways, freaks, beggars, and petty criminals working their latest angle.
In disused doorways and dirty alleys, virt-lost homeless withered away to skin and bone, largely hidden behind Songdo’s Augmented Reality facade. They owned no possessions but the third-hand phones clutched in bony fingers and the makeshift blindfolds wrapped around their heads to keep their virtual worlds sacrosanct, safe from the encroachments of the real.
JD shouldered through the crowd with his limping gait, his broad frame an unintentional battering ram. Eyes followed him as he moved through the sea of mostly Korean bodies, their gaze marking him as an outsider—the city’s multicultural push hindered by thousands of years of Korean ethnic homogeneity. JD stepped into the street to pass a knot of execs tied around a pop-up cocktail bar and ignored the flashing red warning underfoot. He slapped the door of a passing auto-car and the driving algorithm slammed to a halt with a honk of its horn. JD just laughed.
At the next corner a man stood at a little stall, dressed in a jacket patterned with bright rectangles of global currency. He sold US hundred-dollar bills enshrined in plastic frames for ten euro apiece—souvenirs from a fallen empire.
Everywhere slabs of color stood out too-crisp against the dreary real, hiding graffiti, pirate ads, and occasional spatters of blood. Early in Neo Songdo’s life, the Augmented layer had been writable. Excited city planners invited citizens to write their own lives onto the street: advice for new arrivals, reviews of local restaurants, warnings of criminal elements or overzealous police. In practice, the city became a bathroom wall writ large. Now, only city council and advertisers could write into the Augmented feed, giving every street a uniform commercial banality that scraped at JD’s psyche.
Walls on either side of the road thrummed with high-resolution adverts tailored