Chapter 1: Lost Soul 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?”

“I was going to apply for Traffic,” Jun said.

Two years ago, he’d quit riot police after he knocked down a seventy-year-old North Korean protester. He put in his application for Traffic, feeling resigned enough to don the blinding neon vest and shrill at drivers too rageful to let their cars drive themselves. Then the roaring whisper—Traffic was doomed, automating itself so quickly that cops were handing their vests to the brand-spanking-new PS-19 androids, like stripping your clothes to cover up the nakedness of a store mannequin.

Robot Crimes wasn’t Jun’s second or third choice, but it promised to be low commitment. He’d get to work from Yongsan, close to Itaewon, which had good food and great vibes, and by virtue of proximity, he’d also have a real shot at applying for Major Crimes, where detectives solved the big, weighty cases headlined by North Korean gangs.

Not that Jun cared one lick about joining Major Crimes. His lack of ambition was his favorite trait.

Past Itaewon, the traffic punctured open. As they slid into the Hannam neighborhood, the genteel, prim older sister to Itaewon, the type of robot shifted from mecha and controlling to placid and humanoid, pushing strollers, walking lavender designer dogs. Jun put the car on autopilot and tried to decrypt the smear on his palm; he’d forgotten how easily ink rolled off his skyn.

Their missing robot was a companion model, designed to look ten years old. The child version of the Sakura, the popular “girl next door” from Imagine Friends. “Her name’s Eli,” Jun said. “For Elisha.”

“Fancy English name.”

Jun admitted he’d seen her a couple weeks ago at the police station.

“What’d she do?”

“Robbed a store. Kidding. She got lost, of course.”

Jun had found her alone on the bench outside the office. A baseball cap was pulled low over her sweet, forgettable face, which her owner hadn’t bothered to customize. “A thirty-nine-year-old man dropped me off,” she told Jun. “I’m glad I was not stolen.”

Jun had ransacked his desk for a compatible charger and eventually found one in the evidence room, an eroded skein of wire. Eli plugged herself in with a little squeal and it fairly broke his heart. Her battery had to hit 30 percent before she could remember her address.

“Already janky,” Sgt. Son said.

“Just old. She’s a second-gen Sakura. I bet they’re not even sold online anymore. They were never popular.”

“Isn’t the Sakura the face,” Sgt. Son said, gesturing at his own, “you know, for the company?”

“This version was too clumsy. Imagine Friends tried to spin it as cute.”

“?‘Cute?’?”

“Like a real kid. Tripping, bumping into furniture, then they were breaking plates, making a mess. Owners got sick of it.”

They took the leisurely drive around the well-wooded park of the apartment complex where Eli’s owner lived. “Fancy Hannam apartment,” Sgt. Son said.

The aesthetic mimicked traditional Korean, a nostalgic mock-up of Joseon architecture. Pine waterwheel attached to an artfully sun-bleached pavilion. Jeju statues of artificial volcanic rock, so porous they looked like foam. Jun could hear the shrill of cicadas through the sealed car window. Ridiculously cheerful. Feast for magpies.

He and Eli had strolled through this park the last time he took her home. He got judgy looks from women for being in plain clothes, holding hands with a girl-child robot—the Sakura face, too much of a giveaway—and his vibe hadn’t screamed “fatherly” as much as “embarrassing uncle.” When he tried to shake off Eli’s hand, her fingers tightened, like a steel trap. The grip loosened only when they reached the apartment building where her owner lived. The thirteenth floor, ominous now, but the older apartments were likelier to strike off the number four as unlucky. Jun had watched Eli prance up; as the wind lifted, her shirt billowed, a gauzy white curtain, and he’d seen the tremendous scarring on her back.

Once Jun had strategically parked under a tree with a generous shadow, Sgt. Son asked the question that must have been troubling him all along.

“Is the owner a man?”

The last owner to call them had reported a burglary and tried to file an insurance claim for his robot, who was deemed damaged beyond repair. She was murdered, he said. He was misinformed. Ink washed off biosilicon skyn with a brisk hand-wring, but the texture often preserved fingerprints like yeasty dough, and the ones wrapped around his robot’s throat had matched his own.

But Jun had never met Eli’s owner. He didn’t even go inside the building. He could have, but what could he do if the owner had turned out to be another sicko? Call Child Protective Services? For robots? That would route him to his own number. Why risk entering this beautifully tended apartment, one of the most expensive properties in not only Hannam but the greater Gangbuk area, all of Seoul, and South Korea, and might as well include the North, and risk running into his younger sister, whom he had been avoiding for the last five years?

Like most things, Jun put off answering this and went inside.

ELI’S OWNER WAS AN imperious woman with a cotton cloud of hair who hid long and sinewy limbs under a dress of handwoven hemp. “We spoke over the phone?” Jun said, but her gaze slipped past his face, like rain off the windshield, landing instead on Sgt. Son in his grim-dark jacket, the ironed trousers that bared his sandaled feet. Prone to sweat rash, Sgt. Son avoided socks in the summer.

She asked if they were truly police in a tone that suggested she’d rather send this dish back to the kitchen. Sgt. Son assured her that they were from Robot Crimes and, fanning his face, he suggested they talk inside. His face scrunched delicately when they entered. No AC. In the living room, a small electric fan was aimed at a wooden Virgin Mary who prayed from the coffee table. The TV flickered mutely.

Jun heard the clink of glass, Kim Sunduk in the kitchen. Some minor signs of chaos: the bathrobe puddled on the floor, the pair of umbrellas lying crumpled like drowned crows. The rest was an immaculate home. Calligraphy draped the walls, rippling in holographic paints and gems. Behind the dining table was a wall-sized canvas of a jade and ice mountain, and in the corner he recognized the hanja for Kim Sunduk’s name, her austere, elegant signature. Of course Eli’s owner would be an artist. A collector would never buy a failed android model, but an artist would. An artist would try to make it their own.

“She’s North Korean,” Sgt. Son said, plucking from the wall a framed news article. In the cropped picture, Kim Sunduk smiled thinly beside a snow-haired man.

Jun shrugged; North Koreans could be rich and famous too. “The man beside her, that’s Kanemoto Masaaki. Founder of Imagine Friends.”

Kanemoto, the article said, had diligently collected the artist Kim Sunduk’s White Tiger series on Mount Baekdu—North Korea’s most mystical mountain, and deadliest—once exhibited in the likes of the Guggenheim and the White Cube. Now the entire series was being displayed in Imagine Friends’ Seoul headquarters, after Kanemoto’s passing.

Sgt. Son placed the framed article back on the wall, leaving it slightly crooked. “If she’s friends with a tech billionaire, why keep a janky old robot?”

They quieted down when Kim Sunduk returned from the kitchen empty-handed. She turned off the TV and they sat around the coffee table. Jun felt tempted to pick up the Virgin Mary and feel around the folds of her robes, in case she was a covert lighter.

“It helps to walk us through the day,” Sgt. Son said, pulling out a handkerchief to dab around his neck.

Eli had disappeared last night on Tuesday, July 31. She was wearing an oversized tee of Einstein (with the tongue) and jean shorts, muddy tennis shoes. A black baseball cap with the slogan TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL.

“You sent your robot out around seven?” Sgt. Son said.

“Seven thirty.”

“For cigarettes?”

“For cigarettes. I called the 7-Eleven last night. They didn’t see her come in.”

“Convenience stores let kiddie robots buy cigarettes?” Sgt. Son said, turning to Jun, but Kim Sunduk continued in her toneless affect:

“This 7-Eleven is attached to our apartment complex. Eli knows the robots who work there and they know her. They know me.”

“What’s her last GPS signal? Did you try Find My Robot?”

“Her GPS doesn’t work. I took her to the Imagine Friends store, but their updates no longer apply to her. They said”—here she laughed, quiet and mocking—“they said I should take advantage of the trade-in program.”

Heaving a sigh, Sgt. Son slumped into the sofa. He asked her to consider this: The heat was brutal, the worst in years. They had to push back the World Cup semifinals. What about the poor bank robot that broke down last week? What if, maybe, Eli collapsed in the middle of the street and it was garbage that picked her up?

The silence stretched long enough for Jun to eye the kitchen, the bathroom, escape.

“I said I don’t want a new robot,” Kim Sunduk said.

“You’ll learn to love the next one,” Sgt. Son said, not unkindly.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said slowly. “Do you think I took Eli in because I wanted a child? I have a child. An ungrateful son who’d sooner leave me in the mountains if the nursing homes were full. Eli isn’t a replacement. Eli is—”

She looked at Jun, suddenly lost. “Eli is special.”

Jun asked if he could use the bathroom, which Sgt. Son would take as permission to snoop. He had to be efficient. Sgt. Son was willing to invest on a missing robot no more than forty-eight hours (thirty-six with the heat). They had been burned one too many times. While Jun searched the kitchen, Sgt. Son would now be cajoling Kim Sunduk, trying to dim her expectations. It’s not like we’re bad at our job, Jun thought as he opened the cabinets, finding plastic cups of pastel elephants and giraffes. Within the year, Officer Kim had quit to take over his father’s sauna business, and Detective Kim, the only woman on their floor, was headhunted by Sex Crimes, and now they were a two-man show.

Jun heard Sgt. Son ask, “Do you have any water?” and he slipped out of the kitchen. He spotted something lying flat and secretive on the dining table, covered with the kind of cloth that ought to be folded into a swan. He pulled away the cloth.

Chrysanthemums spilled red instead of funeral white across shoulder blades, garlanding the horns of a devil-faced dokkaebi. The spindly petals faded into pink around the violent, marred grin. Half the dokkaebi’s face was scarred. Cigarette burns puckered down the spine.

A hand reached for the cloth. Kim Sunduk drew it over the canvas, like a sheet to cover a body in the morgue. “This is unfinished.”

“I recognize it,” Jun said. Eli skipping in front of him. The wind lifting her shirt. Tremendous scars. “Isn’t this the tattoo on her back?”

“She had it when I bought her.”

“The burns on the canvas, you used an actual cigarette?”

“I purchased a bolt of skyn in her coloring and stapled it to the canvas. It burns like human skin. But you can smell the preservatives. Like chicken nuggets.”

“Why didn’t you replace the skyn on her back?”

“Couldn’t you have replaced the flesh on your face?”

He ducked his head. “Okay, good point.”

“Is it a war injury?”

“It was a robot, carrying an IED until she dropped it. Homemade bomb.”

She stared at him, wide burning eyes. “How you must despise them.”

“I used to work with robots, actually,” Jun said, with a light laugh. “On the field, as their operator. My military buddies called me the robot whisperer, but really I was a babysitter.”

She touched the edge of the painting, adjusted the cloth. “Eli said you were kind to her.”

“Yeah, well, I felt sorry for her.”

Kim Sunduk nodded. “She felt sorry for you too.”

SEVEN YEARS AGO, Jun had woken from his induced coma. The doctor said he’d flatlined twice during surgery, which was a mild way of putting it, as if he’d tripped and fallen on his face.

Apparently, his father had visited him in the ICU. The doctor said his father took one look at him and forbade anyone else in the family from seeing him.

“That sounds like my dad,” Jun said.

“The thing is you looked barely human,” the doctor said.

Another week slunk by before Jun could sit up without wanting to kill himself. The doctor said the reconstruction of his body had flipped his organs, his stomach and spleen shoved where his uterus used to be. His liver was swapped for a tinier freight train. His bladder was bigger. Urination would be infrequent, once or twice a week, which was a nice perk, but expect a stream of darkly concentrated yellow. If it smelled pungent, it meant it was working. Jun tuned out the doctor somewhere between the liver and missing uterus, fancifully imagining his organs as colorful Tetris blocks in doomed teetering piles. The IED damaged 78 percent of his body beyond recovery. It was a miracle he was alive. No, it was Science. They repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic.

Jun had burst out laughing then, imagining himself as a Humvee with pink fleshy ears for side-view mirrors.

After three weeks of tender and wincing sponge baths, with the help of a pretty robot nurse who smiled through the worst of Jun’s spectacular temper, he finally took a shower.

He washed everything in worship and terror. After maneuvering himself out of the stall, he faced the fogged mirror over the sink. An opaque oval, soft as the moon. He opened the door a crack and waited for the fog to lift. He could be patient. He’d waited all his life for this.

Before the IED blast, he had been on testosterone since his sophomore year of high school. His voice had cracked, slipped, plummeting in free fall, reckless and delightful. Hair had grown in strange, strange places. He’d come out in the Army to the less shitty half of his squad during boot and earned some pats, one vigorous, baffling noogie. He’d scheduled top surgery and fantasized so precisely, it became sharp and real and he could taste it, like the scald of blood in his mouth before the IED decimated his body.

The mirror cleared. He had to reach for it to ascertain it was him. He looked different. Different from what he’d imagined. No incision marks. No grafted nipples. No nipples at all. Where the hell are my nipples? and it sounded shrill even in his head. Later, he’d chuckle at that. Later, he’d buy his nipples. But the mirror gave him everything else, this gorgeous, hurt thing. His chest, which he could stroke in awe, the greening archipelago where the flesh was still tender and alive, then it smoothed into blank arctic skyn stretched over his ribs where he traced a long scar shaped in a white lightning bolt on his hip. The coy seam of a teddy bear.

He could feel his heart pounding. Muffled, as if packaged then misplaced. The mirror proved this was him. His existence, his resolve, threaded into every nanostitch, for he was alive, but at what cost? Self-obliteration. He’d prepared for this—had he not? Relinquishing his old body so he could live, so he could face his blurring reflection and whisper, This is everything you ever wanted.

Then he heard a knock. The door opened, his sister, Morgan, fresh from a semester of her could-be Ivy League, bug-eyed with shock. Are you crying?

The old Jun would have cracked a joke, called her a perv, but he was so furious he could barely breathe. Get the fuck out, he had shouted, because she didn’t get it and she never would.

JUN MOVED THROUGH the apartment complex with Sgt. Son, knocking on doors. Door-to-door canvassing was their least favorite part of the job. People were nosy and mean, neighborliness on a steep decline. The war had ended with a burst of “jeong” to celebrate the quivering, disbelieving joy in the unification of North and South. This led to an uptick in communal-based housing that mimicked the supposed rustic closeness of North Korean communities, sharing parks, playgrounds, and shopping centers, like this building. But affection dried up quick with every bump of the reunification tax.

Most neighbors reacted with shock over Eli’s disappearance. A lost child! The horror, so swiftly to wither into scorn when it became evident Eli was just a Sakura, a mere imitation.

“Have some water.” An old woman handed them two bottles. “Suffering like dogs in this heat over a robot.”

“Ice-cold!” Sgt. Son said, flushed and pleased.

Jun pressed his bottle against the back of Sgt. Son’s neck. He got swatted.

Every time he rang a doorbell, his spine stiffened and he plastered on a smile. Morgan could be behind any one of these doors. Probability wasn’t on his side. He wondered if she still had that dyed hair, the frosted tips.

They covered the whole floor, circling back to Kim Sunduk’s home, which left just the unit next door. He knocked. No answer. He raised his hand again, paused.

“We’re with Robot Crimes. We won’t take long. Promise.”

Like a pendulum, the door swung open. Then it decided to close. Jun, moving not on autopilot but on frightening compulsion, as if the past had reached out and gripped him by the lapels, seized the edge of the door before it could shut.