Repo Virtual by Corey White (read a book .txt) 📗

said. “The one you shot will live, by the way. Not sure if he’ll keep the leg. You’re lucky they’re not pressing charges.”

“They’re lucky the kid can’t,” Enda said, surprised by the edge of anger to her voice.

“Who is the deceased?”

“Osman, Khoder.”

“Who is he to you?” Li asked.

Enda didn’t answer.

“The department’s machine intelligence division has surveillance data that suggests Osman was involved in a ‘job’ on the night of the World Cup. The same night of the apartment break-in that you’re investigating.”

“You don’t have anything on him, do you?”

“If the kid was alive, I’d have enough to scare him, maybe make him talk,” Li said. “He’s dead, but I still have questions, and you’re going to answer them. Who was Osman?”

Enda clenched her teeth and exhaled loud through her nose. “Kid was a hacker, and I’d hoped he could answer some questions for me.”

“Who’s your client?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“I know who the apartment belonged to. Is it Lee’s family, or is it someone at Zero Corporation?”

“I can’t say.”

“Enda, for all I know, your client paid these four to rough Osman up. They need to be questioned.”

Enda shook her head. She’d already considered that angle, but it didn’t make sense. Could Yeun have someone else on the job? Sure, but it would be another stack of muscles in an expensive suit like Mohamed, not four derelict youths.

“Am I free to go?” Enda asked.

Li shook his head. “You’re free to go into a holding cell while I run this footage upstairs.”

“It was self-defense, Li.”

“You didn’t have to enter that room.”

“Look what they did to that kid. Could you have stayed out of it?” Enda asked.

Li’s nostrils flared. “When the chief sees the footage, I’ll be able to start the paperwork to get you out of here. But until then …” He turned his hands up.

Li sealed Tiny back into its bag, peeled off his gloves, balled them up and put them back in his pocket. He stacked everything on the tablet, arranged the way it had been when he entered the room. The chair screeched over the cement floor behind him.

He paused at the door and turned back to Enda. “You never told me where you trained.”

“What?”

“You didn’t hesitate to breach the room and charge someone armed with an AK-47. I’m guessing that’s not the sort of training you get at private eye school.”

“School?” Enda said. “It was an online course.”

“Precisely.” Li opened the door, and all the sounds of a busy police station flooded in through the gap—suspects loudly protesting their innocence, bored police patter, the hum of a building held upright by the tension between crime and punishment. “One day there won’t be a video recording. One day you’ll find yourself in deeper shit than even you can handle. When that happens I’ll find out who you really are, Enda. When I do, I just hope I don’t regret helping you.”

“You won’t,” Enda said. Even she wasn’t sure if that was a lie.

Li frowned and exited the room, leaving Enda alone with her silence.

The holding cell was a square, three meters a side. The raw concrete floor was cold beneath the thin-soled jail slippers. Enda paced the wall opposite the cell’s low cot, letting her fingertips brush the hard steel of the bars. When she hit the metal just right, a gentle gong would resound, only audible in the moments of quiet between the shrill cries and demanding shouts of the other prisoners.

Her contex were useless without her phone, but Enda was glad to be rid of the head-up display and the clock that always rested in the corner of her vision—temporarily freed from the tyranny of time. The minutes would have passed ever more painfully had she been able to count them.

She paced, letting the conversations of the other prisoners wash over her.

“I didn’t stab him. He walked into the knife.”

“I’m not a drug addict. My body runs hot, y’know; it runs better on meth.”

“It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. I was in virt. It didn’t happen. I killed her in virt, I didn’t kill her in real life. It was so real, so real. So fuckin’ real, but it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real.”

Most of the voices spoke English—disembodied unless Enda bothered to pause and pick them out from the row of cells and bodies receding along one wall. Enda knew enough Korean to get by in Seoul, but she rarely found it necessary in Songdo. She imagined the city as a twenty-first-century version of Hong Kong before it was returned to the Chinese—Eastern culture, language, and traditions pushed to the sides by globalization and refugees fleeing the collapsed empires of the previous centuries.

Enda didn’t miss America. She didn’t even miss New York. She missed Brooklyn, but only in a rare moment of running fugue when reality fell away and she saw Songdo through the lens of memory and desire. It had happened only once: she had seen a Nigerian restaurant beside a trendy bar and a café specializing in Australian brunch fare, and for a few short seconds she was back in Brooklyn. She was home. And then reality returned, carried on a salty breeze spiced with diesel exhaust. The simulated red brick facade across a tenement block flickered, and she’d remembered where she was. Songdo. As much an Augmented Reality simulation as an actual city—a fifty-fifty split between analogue and digital.

Enda flopped down onto the cot, and the hard bedsprings bit her flesh through the wafer-thin mattress.

This was why she ran—to calm her mind when it wanted to take her back through time and space, to deliver her to a country on the other side of the world, a country that she abandoned. The parents she left to die, one day, maybe soon, never knowing what happened to their daughter. The friends, the former lovers. Her expansive record collection.

She didn’t regret her actions. But still, sometimes it hurt.

“What is your primary function?” Troy asked. He spoke quietly; in the background I could hear the