Luminous, p.1
Luminous, page 1
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For my parents
We may be their parents but they will not be our children.
—Bryan Appleyard, Novacene, Preface
Prologue
THAT SUMMER WAS IMMORTAL. JULY was especially savage with sixty-two heat deaths in Seoul, punctuated by the spectacular fizzing breakdown of a GS-100 security android when it crumpled knees-first outside a United Korea Bank. A cleaner broomed away the remains. The head was left grinning on the pavement, chirping at passersby to warn them of today’s heat.
Then the monsoons came. Undeterred, hundreds of Red Devil fans flooded the World Cup Stadium, waving flags of their reunified nation. Their dreams vaporized after the first round. Mexico: 7, United Republic of Korea: 0. The very next day, the sky cleared. A white sun buttered a salvage yard with rust while an old bomb-disposal unit, the Grumman A-1, moved in a figure eight. It cleared the path for a young girl named Ruijie, who was dragging the body of a woman by the ankles, naked arms thrown back as if shouting hooray.
The woman might have been beautiful once. Lips pink and plush, and long blond hair, the kind that shone with each brush. She was falling apart. Her face had been shredded into confetti, held together by one bleary blue eye, while her torso was a smooth bioplastic vest, translucent as a milk carton. Ruijie had tried pressing the power button located on the nape of the woman’s neck. She’d gotten a twitch of the ankles, a froggy jolt, but nothing. The robot was dead.
Still, what exquisite legs. Ruijie planned to take them home.
She paused to check the battery level of her robowear. Two hours to go. Affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customized circuitry to aid her ability to walk. For she was beloved.
Close to the edge the salvage yard bloomed into silvergrass. Tufty reeds stirred from the breeze while broken war machines slept like ancient dinosaurs, abandoned from the unification war. Ahead of them lay what could be the second-deadliest robot in the yard, the SADARM-1000. When it was still active and nimble, it was a house of horrors from whose impenetrable womb wave after wave of bladed robots would emerge, whipping through the air, keen to slice and beep and blow.
Decades later, now retired, the SADARM reclined on its side like the Buddha of Miamsa, indolent in the shade. The belly had been decimated by a stray blast on a bridge, then pried open and plundered for wires, chips, anything glinty. Ruijie backed up against it, pulling the woman by the feet, but the woman’s head knocked against a piece of buried metal, and her blue eye popped out. Cursing, Ruijie chased it through the grass—the one eye!—until it slowed to a crawl at the base of the SADARM’s belly and kissed the pregnant curve.
Ruijie took a minute to crouch and a second to reach for the eye, then froze. A hornet had landed on it with a flick. It unfolded wings of black glass. Another skittered down the slope of the SADARM’s belly. More crawled out of the smelted head. Maybe under the visor, she’d find a gold blanket trembling inside the SADARM’s skull. They could be drones, the kind that slipped into your ear and slid a long thin needle into your brain, or maybe they were just yellow jackets, sedate until they weren’t. Which was more deadly, real or not real?
The real knew no restraint.
She decided to be perfect and still. Like a robot. Except a robot wouldn’t need mechanic braces to walk. A robot would be thrown away for needing anything at all.
Back away, back away.
Then a hum stirred from deep inside the SADARM. With a tilt of their wings, the hornets buzzed back, a righteous swell of anger, but the singular hum drowned them out. Low and peaceable, it lifted and dipped, from treble to bass, land to sea, the tide rising and pounding against time, the shudder of a temple bell, the ohmmmmmm in the vibrations that snaked up her robowear and scraped the hairs on her arms.
The hornets fell silent.
Someone’s inside. Even her thought was a whisper. And it must be a magical someone to hum a nest of hornets to sleep.
* * *
RUIJIE WAS THE ONLY GRANDCHILD from both sides of her family. Her relatives in Fuzhou called her Rui-Rui and Mingzhu, and her father especially thought of her as a precious pearl.
Her symptoms first appeared in the fourth grade when her father was regaling them at dinner with Ruijie’s science fair project, “The Great Silence and Why I Think We’re Not Listening,” which took the grand prize, and her mother joked about how the table could benefit from their own great silence. Ruijie snorted shacha sauce up her nose and she reached for a glass of water. Then dropped it.
Later that week she dropped her chopsticks. They clattered to the floor, dragging the slippery noodles by the hair. Her father remarked on her clumsiness. Ruijie remembered feeling sheepish, maybe defiant, but not scared. Not yet.
The tremors grew. Her fingers refused to fist. She took advantage and flipped off the annoying kids in front of the teacher. But she couldn’t hold a pen, or type; then she couldn’t stand without wobbling. Then came the tests, between endless waits in endless hospital lobbies, the glow-in-the-dark scans, the shots drilling deeper and deeper into her spine. The doctors lobbed acronyms, like ALS, PMA, and MMA, which regrettably was not the martial arts. There were nights she couldn’t sleep because her body clutched her awake in a squeezing iron fist. These nights she’d pretend to breathe softly when her parents sneaked into her room and knelt beside her bed so they could wrap her hand in sandalwood beads and pray.
She was measured for her first set of robowear. Ivory oblong disks, serving as both sensors and motors, rested on her hips to usher her gait, like a gentle push on the swings. For the first time in weeks, Ruijie stood on her own feet. Her father said she looked “super.” Her mother took a picture and touched it with two fingers, as if the Ruijie frozen in time were more precious and real.
Prepare your hearts, the doctors told her parents, instead of her.
But Ruijie, three-time winner of the science fair, believed in the miracle of science. She believed in the trillions of tenuous threads tying the self to the rest. 物我一體. Matter and I are One. The grace of union so the swimmer flowed with the ocean, so the archer flew in the arrow, so the calligrapher bled from the brush. With this belief, she would wake, walk, and breathe with cosmic synergy, full of darkness and spinning lights, and her body, which broke down day by day, remained a solar system where all the stars would burst and burn, but until then, every quantum speck quivered bright with integrity.
* * *
RUIJIE SAW A HAND stretch out of the SADARM’s belly and pluck the eye from the dirt. When the fingers opened, slow as a lotus flower, the eye pointed toward the sky, resting on the crease of the lifeline, like the world in the palm of your hand.
A boy peeked out. He had staticky hair, wide, crusted eyes. He looked a little bit homeless.
“Is this your eye?” he said, with what little Korean she understood.
When he continued speaking, she shook her head and reached for the eye. He pulled away with a smile. This time he said in English, “Do you have something to eat?”
She rummaged her backpack and found an old ginger candy. “It’s a little spicy, but I eat it whenever I’m dizzy.”
His fingers worked fruitlessly at the wrapper. She offered to try, expecting him to shake her off, throw some of that boy bluster. He handed it over without pause. His smile grew private as she struggled. Growling, she threw it back to him. He ripped it in one go.
“Well,” he said, grinning now, “you did all the work.”
The ginger candy had melted into jelly. He popped it into his mouth and chewed on one side. “Liu Ruijie?” he said, from her name embroidered on her backpack, a clever guess pulled from the gold-threaded strokes. He placed the eye on her palm. “My name is Yoyo.”
“Is that in English?”
In one movement, he pulled himself out of the robot’s belly and landed on the dirt with a clunk. He was her height but felt smaller, listing to the right where his leg ended at the ankle. The shin was covered in shredded skyn, like the hem of his pants had gotten caught in an angry chewy machine, exposing a calf full of wires in red and blue. His stump was so white it felt fragile, more ceramic than bone.
She was staring until he took her hand. Pressing his index on her lifeline, he wrote out his name. Soft circle, then two little strokes, a cut long and swift. Repeat. In hangul, then English.
“Does it hurt?”
“My leg?” He glanced at it. “Not very.”
She peeked at his wrist, his skinny elbow. “How bionic are you?”
“One hundred percent.”
“That’s impossible,” she said, and he laughed.
He slipped past her. A leg like his should wring his muscles, each thump sending shocks up the spine. Yet Yoyo moved like he was free.
Her parents flinched at the risk of bionic surgery, but Ruijie had found the idea of it inevitable. Converting herself from oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon into a different chemical blend of wires, titanium, and nanofiber made the purest sense to her. She collected success stories and relayed them to her mother: the bedridden-turned-bionic woman who climbed Mo unt Everest; the burn victim in Germany who survived a 67 percent transition; even the sixteen-year-old boy, paralyzed from the neck down, who received a spinal implant that was only a tiny bit invasive and look at him now, point guard on the varsity basketball team.
Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman. The world made a promise to her: death is a problem that can be solved.
* * *
YOYO DIDN’T SWEAT. Together they dodged the sun between pockets of shade. They found little cover, just the thinning shadows cast from the towers of stacked cars, their metal husks veined a crackling orange especially around the fenders.
She led Yoyo to one of the shallow piles in the yard where trucks would swirl in on Dump Day and tilt containers full of jumbled fizzy robots. She was collecting specimens for research, she told him. Today she’d scored big, with a fully intact robotic body, but any limb would do. Mecha or organic, hirsute or hairless, for the fated day a pair of long sturdy robot legs would be hers. “I pull them apart and put them back together,” she said. “Even though I won’t be in charge of my own surgery, I want to know how my body will work.”
They dug around scrap at knee level, and she could feel gravity and heat draw the swarthy flush to her cheeks, the ripening of her armpits. For the first time she was embarrassed to sweat in front of a boy. Yoyo was bionic and almost perfect, while she oozed like a slug.
She gulped water and offered Yoyo her bottle, but he shook his head, distracted. He seemed to possess a preternatural sense for danger. He’d freeze, long before she could spot the bright orange uniforms of the scrappers who worked here, who dallied during lunch breaks and emerged late in the afternoon, angling their hard-shelled construction hats to smack chalky sunblock on their reddish napes, willing to scavenge only after the sun had started to droop. These scrappers, who knew her by sight, cursed her in Mandarin or Korean that sang like Mandarin, and she’d curse them back.
The scrappers were foul tempered but harmless, she thought. Yet she could feel Yoyo tremble against her shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said. “They won’t hurt you.”
“If they catch me, they’ll destroy me,” Yoyo said.
Which was a tad dramatic. But they made a point to hide.
They found three more legs that day. One leg was too long, one for mechas, and when she picked up the last leg, it slumped like pantyhose. Yesterday’s rain had left puddles. Yoyo found a worm drowning. The worm panicked and squirted weakly on his palm, but he watched it twist around his fingers in awe, as if it were a jewel.
“You’re like my cat,” Ruijie said when Yoyo crouched to smile at a frog that was even smaller than a cricket. “Smaug would catch everything. Frogs, mice, birds.” Her cat had the lovely habit of bringing sparrows into the house. Feathers ruffled but alive, if humiliated.
Smaug had passed away at the start of this year. On their last day together, her mother took a picture of Smaug, the black tufted head resting on Ruijie’s shoulder, then her father carried her cat into the vet’s office, and Smaug opened her eyes and looked at her.
Ruijie was still feeling her way around this darkness. Sometimes it felt like a game of hide-and-seek, and all she had to do was search very hard and find Smaug, pumpkin-eyed behind the couch.
When she looked down, she saw Yoyo had placed on her knee the ginger candy wrapper, tied into a ribbon. Comfort often budded from the inexplicable.
“When do you go home?” Yoyo said.
“My mom’s going to pick me up.” Summer school ended at three and it was already nearly five. “She thinks I’m at the school library. What about you?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Where do you live?” An inkling grew, itchy and uncomfortable. “Do you have a home? A family?”
He went still, so still, you’d think he froze.
She saw another orange shape closing in from a distance, still twenty meters away. The scrapper was whistling, a spring in his step, a lurching sway.
She tried to move but couldn’t. Her robowear had gone rigid. A light on her belt blinked red. “My battery’s dead.” She twisted her waist, took a deep breath, and tried to sound composed instead of the careless, helpless creature she was. “Yoyo, can you go get my backpack? I need my charger.”
He knelt in the mud and reached for the flap on her belt.
“What are you doing?”
He looked at her, but not in a way a child or adult would. His eyes asked for permission. When she granted it, he reached behind his neck to pull out a wire, glinting silver, as if he’d torn his own essence from his spine. He plugged the wire into her robowear; she shivered. She’d felt the shock.
The whistling drew closer. Yoyo sat down and crossed his legs so the stump rested on his knee. Her robowear charged quietly, blinking blue. A light appeared over his head. Like a firefly, it spun in a lethargic circle.
She studied the whorl on his head. His hair curled wet around his ears from the humidity, and she tried to imagine the inside of his skull. If there were gears buzzing like a hornet’s nest, or if, beneath his staticky hair and thick layer of skyn, his mind was a river that wound silent and silver.
As the whistling grew faint, Yoyo hummed along. He caught her stare and grinned.
“Wish I could whistle,” he said.
Can you charge anywhere? she asked and he said yes.
Are you powered by the sun? she asked and he said yes.
Her battery was fully charged, but she didn’t want to go home. She wanted to lie beside Yoyo in the silvergrass and search for the stars that shine no matter how shy. She’d tell him how her parents had met during a month of study abroad and kissed in front of Amsterdam’s floating houses, how she used to be an ice-skater and swimmer and placed first in butterfly, the most difficult of the forms. When she erred on the side of self-pity, she talked about her future, how she was going to study astrology and graduate summa cum laude from her mother’s alma mater and become the first bionic astronaut who wouldn’t even have to breathe in space. She was willing to wait for Yoyo to open up to her, like the lotus that rose from the mud. They could whisper secrets that flowed only when the sky was watching you.
“Will you live forever?”
He said, “Yes.”
PART I
1. Lost Soul
DETECTIVE CHO JUN OF ROBOT Crimes answered the phone with a sly, proud emphasis on detective. The caller said it was an emergency: last night her child never came home.
“Sorry,” Jun said, “just to clarify—child? Or robot?”
He leaned on his elbow and cranked up his hearing. The people in his office were shouting at each other. Someone had been stealing lunches from the break room. It was the ferocious first of August and the AC was dead. Over the weekend, someone else had grabbed a ladder and vandalized one of the flags—South Korea and United Korea left beautiful and whole, only the North Korean flag torn down the middle.
Jun searched for his tablet, but his desk was collateral damage, so he grabbed a pen and scribbled on his palm the description of the missing robot child, name and address, all the while leaking sympathetic noises for the caller.
“Another lost soul?” said Sgt. Son, who was wearing a puffy neck pillow, poised for his power nap.
“Very lost.” Jun looped his tie around his neck and tried to remember the direction of the knot. “Can I go pay the owner a sincerity visit?”
“You’re not leaving me here.”
Earlier that morning, Jun had parked their patrol car in the slim shade of a tree that had skirted capriciously to the left, leaving it white-hot, the insides smothered in leather. He tossed his jacket in the back seat, cranked up the fan, and ahhed at the blast of AC.
“You don’t even sweat,” Sgt. Son said.
“Still pretty fucking bliss, Sergeant.”
Driving through Itaewon from their precinct in Yongsan was slow but smooth if only Jun left the car on autopilot. Which he didn’t. He could feel the locked-jaw anxiety from Sgt. Son, as Jun shouldered the car into the tightest, twistiest road to avoid the main traffic. Every corner bulged with storefronts and every crossroad was a potential jump scare from a motorcycle. In the last two decades since the Unification War, twenty or so years ago, Itaewon, with its hanok-styled bars and subterranean clubs, had become an area run by robots. At the end of the road, a plasticky PS-19 whistled and waved for traffic control, stoppering the flow of cars. “That was still green,” Sgt. Son groused at the red light. “Why fire the whole department if all these mechas do is the macarena?”
