Cloud Atlas

Then who was Hae-Joo Im, if he was not xactly who he said he was?

I surprised myself by answering that question: Union.

Hae-Joo said, “That honor is mine to bear, yes.”

Xi-Li, the student, was xtremely agitated.

Hae-Joo told me I could trust him or be dead in a matter of minutes.

I nodded assent: I would trust him.

But he had already lied to you about his ID—why believe him this time? How did you know for sure he wasn’t abducting you?

I did not know: I was not sure. My decision was based on character. I could only hope time would prove it well founded. We abandoned the ancient Cavendish to his fate and fled to our own: down corridors, thru fire doors, avoiding lites and people where possible. Hae-Joo carried me down flites of stairs: we could not wait for me to navigate them unaided.

In a subbasement Mr. Chang waited in a plain ford. There was no time for greetings. The vehicle screamed into life and accelerated thru tunnels and empty ford parks. Mr. Chang glanced at his sony, reporting that the slipway still appeared to be accessible. Hae-Joo ordered him to proceed there, then got a flickknife from his pouch and sliced off the tip of his left index, gouged, and xtracted a tiny metallic egg. He threw it out of the window and ordered me to discard my Soulring similarly. Xi-Li also xtracted his Soul.

Unionmen really cut out their own eternal Souls? I always thought it was an urban myth . . .

How else can a resistance movement elude Unanimity? They would risk detection whenever they passed a traffic lite otherwise. The ford rounded a ramp when a blizzard of phosphate fire shot in the windows; glass filled the air, metal panels groaned; the ford scraped along walls, jarring to an abrupt stop.

From my crouch I heard coltfire.

The ford wailed and sped into motion. A body thumped off the vehicle.

A human wailing, of unendurable pain, rose from the front seat: Hae-Joo held a handcolt against Xi-Li’s head and fired.

What? His own man? Why?

Unanimity dumdums combine kalodoxalyn and stimulin. Kalodoxalyn is a poison that fries the victim in agony, so his screams give his position away; stimulin prevents him from losing consciousness. Xi-Li slumped over into a fetal position. Hae-Joo Im the cheerful postgrad I had known was gone, so thoroly that I wondered now if he had ever really been there. Rain and wind blew in. Mr. Chang drove at hi speed down a garbage alley barely wider than the ford, ripping out drainpipes. He slowed as he joined the campus perimeter road. Ahead were red-and-blue flashes at the campus gates. A hovering aero thrashed the trees, sweeping the traffic with a searchlite; loudspeakers gave incoherent orders to who knew whom. Mr. Chang warned us to brace, killed the engine, and swerved off the road. The ford bucked; its roof whacked my head; somehow Hae-Joo wedged me under him. The ford gathered speed, weight, and weightlessness. The final drop shook free an earlier memory of blackness, inertia, gravity, of being trapped in another ford. Where was it? Who was it?

Bamboo splintered, metal tore, my ribs slammed the floor.

Silence, finally. The ford was dead. Next, I heard insect songs, rain on leaves, followed by urgent whispers drawing near. I was crushed under Hae-Joo; he stirred, groaning. I was bruised but unbroken. Needlelite hurt my eyes. An outside voice hissed, “Commander Im?”

Mr. Chang responded first: “Get this door open.”

Hands lifted us out. Xi-Li’s body was left where it lay. I glimpsed a succession of anxious faces, resolute faces, faces that rarely slept: a company of Unionmen. I was carried into a concrete shack and lowered down a manhole. “Don’t worry,” Hae-Joo told me, “I’m right here.” My hands gripped rusty rungs; my knees scraped along a short tunnel. More arms lifted me into a mechanic’s shop, then lowered me into a smart two-seater xec ford. I heard more orders issued, then Hae-Joo swung in and started the engine. Mr. Chang had disappeared once again. Ahead, garage doors jerked open. Next, I remember gentle rain, suburb back-lanes, then a jammed thruway. The fords around us held lonely commuters, couples on dates, small families, some placid, some rowdy. When Hae-Joo spoke, finally, his voice was cold. “If a dumdum ever scratches me, euthanaze me as quickly as I did Xi-Li.” I had no response. “You must have a hundred questions, Sonmi. I beg your patience a little longer—if we are captured now, believe me, the less you know the better. We have a busy nite ahead of us. First, we’re paying a visit to Huamdonggil.” Do you know that zone of the conurb, Archivist?

My ministry would xpel me if I were ever Eyed in that untermensch slum. But please describe it for my orison.

Huamdonggil is a noxious maze of low, crooked ramshacks, flophouses, pawnshops, drug bars, and comfort hives, covering perhaps five square miles southeast of Old Seoul Transit Station. Its streets are too narrow for fords to enter; its alleys reek of waste and sewage. ShitCorp goes nowhere near that quarter. Hae-Joo left the ford in a lockup and warned me to keep my head hooded: fabricants stolen here end up in brothels, made serviceable after clumsy surgery. Purebloods slumped in doorways, skin enflamed by prolonged xposure to the city’s scalding rain. One boy lapped water from a puddle on his hands and knees. “Migrants with enceph or leadlung,” Hae-Joo told me. “Hospitals drain their Souls until they’ve got only enough dollars for a euthanasia jab—or a ride to Huamdonggil. These poor bastards made the wrong choice.”

I could not understand why migrants fled Production Zones for such a squalid fate. Hae-Joo listed malaria, flooding, drought, rogue crop genomes, parasites, encroaching deadlands, and a natural desire to better the lives of their children. Papa Song Corp, he assured me, seems humane if compared to factories these migrants ran away from. Traffickers promise it rains dollars in the Twelve Cities, and migrants yearn to believe it; the truth never filters back, for traffickers operate only one way. Hae-Joo steered me away from a meowing two-headed rat. “They bite.”

I asked why the Juche tolerates this in its second capital.

Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city’s unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It motivates the downstrata: “Work, spend, work,” say slums like Huamdonggil, “or you, too, will end your life here.” Moreover, entrepreneurs take advantage of the legal vaccuum to erect ghoulish pleasurezones for upstrata bored with more respectable quarters. Huamdonggil can thus pay its way in taxes and bribes. MediCorp opens a weekly clinic for dying untermensch to xchange any healthy body parts they may have for a sac of euthanaze. OrganiCorp has a lucrative contract with the city to send in a daily platoon of immune-genomed fabricants, similar to disastermen, to mop up the dead before the flies hatch. Hae-Joo then told me to stay silent; we had reached our destination.

Which was where xactly?

Xactly, I cannot say: Huamdonggil is not gridnumbered or charted. It was an overhanging mah-jongg house with a high lintel to keep the drainwater out, but I doubt I could identify the building again. Hae-Joo knocked on a reinforced door; an eyehole blinked, bolts unclacked, and a doorman opened up. The doorman’s bodyarmor was stained dark and his iron bar lethal looking; he grunted at us to wait for Ma Arak Na. I wondered if he wore a fabricant’s collar under his neckplate.

A smoky corridor bent out of view, walled with paper screens. I heard mah-jongg tiles, smelled feet, watched xotically clad pureblood servers carry trays of drinks. Their hassled xpressions morphed to girly delite every time they slid open a paper screen. I copied Hae-Joo’s xample and removed my nikes, dirtied by the Huamdonggil alleyways.

“Well, you wouldn’t be here if the news wasn’t bad.” The speaker addressed us from the ceiling hatch; whether her webbed lips, crescent eyes, and thorny voice were the results of genoming or mutation, I could not guess. Her gem-warted fingers gripped the hatch ridge.

Hae-Joo addressed Ma Arak Na as Madam. A cell had turned cancerous, he updated her, Mephi was under arrest, Xi-Li was dumdummed and killed, so yes, the news could hardly be worse.

Ma Arak Na’s double tongue uncurled and curled once or twice; she asked how far the cancer had spread. The Unionman replied he was here to answer that very question. The madam of the establishment told us to proceed to the parlor without delay.

The parlor?

A gaproom behind a roaring kitchen and a false wall, lit by a weak solar. A cup of ruby lime waited on the rim of a cast-iron brazier that surely predated the building if not the city. We sat on well-worn floor cushions. Hae-Joo sipped the drink and told me to unhood. The planked ceiling thumped and creaked, a hatch flipped open, and Ma Arak Na’s face appeared. She xpressed no surprise at seeing me, a Sonmi. Next, the ancient brazier hummed with xtremely modern circuitry. A sphere of dark sheen and refracted silence xpanded until it filled the parlor, aquifying the kitchen noises. Lastly, a piebald light above the brazier morphed into a carp.

A carp?

A carp, as in the fish. A numinous, pearl-and-tangerine, fungus-blotted, mandarin-whiskered, half-meter-long carp. One lazy slap of its tail propelled the fish toward me. Roots of water lilies parted as it moved. Its ancient eyes read mine; its lateral fins rippled. The carp sank a few centimeters to read my collar, and I heard my name spoken by an old man. Hae-Joo was barely visible through the murky underwater air.

“I am sorely thankful to see you alive”—the 3-D’s transceived voice was cultured but muffled and splintered—“and truly honored to meet you. I am An-Kor Apis of Union.” The fish apologized for the visual dramatics; camouflage was necessary, since Unanimity was combing all transmissions.

I responded that I understood.

An-Kor Apis promised I should understand much more very soon and swung toward Hae-Joo. “Commander Im.”

Hae-Joo bowed, reporting that he had euthanazed Xi-Li.

The senior Unionman said he already knew, that no anesthetic xisted for Hae-Joo’s pain; but that Unanimity had killed Xi-Li, and Hae-Joo had merely spared his brother an ignoble death in a prison cube. Apis then xhorted Hae-Joo to ensure Xi-Li’s sacrifice was not in vain. A short briefing followed: six cells had been compromised and twelve more firebreaked. The “good news” was that Boardman Mephi had managed to suicide before neuro-torture could began. An-Kor Apis then ordered my companion to xit me from Seoul thru West Gate One, to proceed to the northern camp in a convoy, and to reflect well upon what had been advised.

The carp circled, vanishing into the parlor wall before reappearing thru my chest. “You have chosen your friends wisely, Sonmi. Together, we may change corpocratic civilization out of all recognition.” He promised we would meet again soon. The sphere then shrank back into the brazier as the parlor restored itself. The carp became a streak of lite, a dot, finally, nothing at all.

How was Hae-Joo planning to pass thru a city xit without Souls?

The Soul implanter was ushered in just minutes later. A slite, anonymous-looking man, he xamined Hae-Joo’s torn finger with professional disdain. He tweezered the tiny egg from his gelpack, bedded it into fresh tissue, and sprayed cutane over the top. That such an insignificant-looking dot can confer all the rights of consumerdom on its bearers yet condemn the rest of corpocracy to servitude seemed, and seems still, a bizarre obscenity to me. “Your name is Ok-Kyun Pyo,” the implanter told Hae-Joo, adding that any sony would download his fictional history.

The implanter turned to me and produced a pair of laser pliers. They would cut steel but not even scratch living tissue, he assured me. First he removed my collar: I heard a click, felt a tickling as it pulled away, then it was in my hands. That felt odd: as if you were to hold your own umbilical cord, Archivist. “Now for the subcutaneous bar code.” He swabbed anesthetic over my throat, warning me this would hurt, but his tool’s damper would stop the bar code from xploding on contact with air.

“Ingenious.” Hae-Joo peered.

“Of course it’s ingenious,” retorted the implanter. “I designed it myself. Sickening thing is, I can’t patent it.” He had Hae-Joo stand ready with a cloth; a jagged pain tore my throat. As Hae-Joo stanched the bleeding, the implanter showed me the old identity of Sonmi~451, a microchip in a pair of tweezers. He would dispose of it himself, he promised, carefully. He sprayed healant over my wound and applied a skin-tone dressing. “And now,” he continued, “a crime so novel it doesn’t even have a name. The Souling of a fabricant. How is my genius rewarded? A fanfare? A nobel and a university sinecure?”

“A paragraph in the history of the struggle against corpocracy,” said Hae-Joo.

“Wow, thanks, brother,” replied the implanter. “A whole paragraph.” This surgery was swift also. The man laid my right palm on a cloth, sprayed coag and anesthetic onto my index fingerpad, made an incision less than a centimeter, inserted a Soul, and applied cutane. This time his cynicism betrayed a core of sincerity. “May your Soul bring you fortune in your promised land, Sister Yun-Ah Yoo.”

I thanked him. I had all but forgotten Ma Arak Na watching from her ceiling hatch, but now she spoke. “Sister Yoo best get a new face for her new Soul, or some awkward questions’ll crop up between here and the promised land.”

So I suppose your next destination was the facescaper?

It was. The doorman escorted us as far as T’oegyero Street, Huamdonggil’s boundary with its nearest semirespectable neighborhood. We metroed to a once fashionable galleria in Shinch’on and escalatored up thru chiming chandeliers. They took us to a warrenlike precinct on canopy level, frequented only by consumers quite sure of their destination. Twists and turns were lined with discreet entrances and cryptic nameplates; down a dead end, a tiger lily bloomed in a niche by a plain door. “Don’t speak,” Hae-Joo warned me, “this woman’s prickles need cosseting.” He rang the bell.

The tiger lily striped brite; it asked us what we wanted.

Hae-Joo said we had an appointment with Madam Ovid.

The flower flexed to peer at us and told us to wait.

The door slid open. “I am Madam Ovid,” announced a bone-white pureblood. Dewdrugs had frozen her harsh beauty in its mid-twenties, long ago; her voice was a buzz saw. “You have no appointment, whoever you are. This is an upstrata establishment. My biocosmeticians accept only recommendations. Try a ‘maskgrafter’ on one of the lower floors.”

The door shut in our faces.

Hae-Joo cleared his throat and spoke into the tiger lily. “Kindly inform the estimable Madam Ovid that Lady Heem-Young sends her earnest, cordial regards.”

A pause ensued. The tiger lily blushed and asked if we had traveled far.

Hae-Joo completed the code. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

The door opened, but Madam Ovid’s disdain remained. “Who can argue with Lady Heem-Young?” She ordered us to follow, no dawdling. After a minute of curtained corridors tiled with lite-and-sound absorbers, a silent male assistant joined us from thin air, and a door opened into a briter studio. Our voices returned. Tools of the facescaper’s trade gleamed in the sterile solar. Madam Ovid asked me to unhood. Like Madam Ma Arak Na, she did not evince surprise; I doubt a lady of her stratum had ever set foot in a Papa Song dinery. Madam Ovid asked how long the treatment was to last. When Hae-Joo told her we had to leave in ninety minutes, our hostess lost her needle-sharp sangfroid. “Why not do the job yourself with gum and lipstick? Does Lady Heem-Young take Tiger Lily for a discount troweler’s with before-and-after kodaks in the window?”

Hae-Joo hastened to xplain we were not xpecting the full morph, only cosmetic adapts to fool an Eye or a casual glance. He admitted ninety minutes was a ludicrously short time, hence Lady Heem-Young needed the best of the best. The proud facescaper saw his flattery but was not immune. “It is true,” she boasted, “that nobody, nobody, sees the face within the face as I do.” Madam Ovid angled my jaw, saying she could alter my skin, color, hair, lids, and brows. “Eyes we must dye a pureblood color.” Dimples could be punched in, and my cheekbones muted. She promised to make the best of our eighty-nine precious minutes.

So what happened to Madam Ovid’s artistry? You look like a Sonmi fresh from the wombtank.

Unanimity refaced me for my peaktime courtroom appearances. A star actress must look the part. But I assure you, when I xited the Tiger Lily, buzzing with face-ache, not even Seer Rhee would have known me. My ivory irises were hazeled, my eyes lengthened, my follicles ebonized. Consult the kodaks taken at my arrest if you are curious.

Madam Ovid did not say good-bye. Outside, a golden boy with a red balloon waited by the escalator. We followed him to a busy ford park below the galleria. The boy had disappeared, but the balloon was strung on the wiper of a cross-country vehicle. This we drove down Thruway One for the East Gate One.

East Gate One? The Union leader—Apis—had ordered you west.

Yes, but the leader had also suffixed his orders with “reflect well upon what had been advised,” meaning “invert these orders.” Thus, west meant east, north meant south, “travel in a convoy” meant “travel alone.”

That’s a dangerously simple crypto, it seems to me.

Meticulous brains will overlook the simple. As we sped along the thruway, I asked my companion if Hae-Joo Im was a real name or false. The Unionman responded that no names were real for individuals of his calling. The xitway downcurved to the tollgates, and we slowed to a crawl; ahead, each driver in line reached thru the ford window to Eye his Soul. Enforcers were stopping fords for random questioning, worryingly for us. “One in thirty, approx,” Hae-Joo muttered, “pretty long odds.” Our turn at the scanner came. Hae-Joo placed his index on the Eye; a shrill alarm sounded, and the barrier shot down. Fords around us prevented any hope of escape. Hae-Joo hissed at me: “Keep smiling, act vapid!”

An enforcer strode up, jerking his thumb. “Out.”

Hae-Joo obeyed, grinning boyishly.

The enforcer demanded a name and destination.

“Oh, uh, Ok-Kyun Pyo.” Even Hae-Joo’s voice had changed. “Officer. We’re, uh, driving to a motel in an outer conurb.” Hae-Joo glanced around and did a hand gesture whose lewd meaning I had learned from Boom-Sook and his friends. How far was this motel, the enforcer demanded. Didn’t he know it was already past hour twenty-three?

“Motel BangBangYou’reDead, in Yōju.” Hae-Joo adopted an idiotic, conspiratorial tone. “Snug place, reasonable rates, they’d probably let an enforcer sample the facilities gratis. Only thirty minutes in the fast lane, eastbound xit ten.” He promised we could be there before curfew with time to spare.

“What happened to your index finger?”

“Oh, is that why the Eye blinked?” Hae-Joo did a stage groan and rambled; he had cut it destoning a natural avocado at his aunt’s house; blood everywhere, only stoneless avocados for him from now on, nature was more trouble than it was worth.

The enforcer peered into the ford and ordered me to unhood.

I hoped my fear would come over as coyness.

He asked if my boyfriend talked this much all the time.

I nodded, shyly.

Was that why I never spoke?

“Yes, sir,” I said, sure he would recognize me as a Sonmi, “yes, Officer.”

The enforcer told Hae-Joo girls are obedient and demure until they have you married, then they start yacking and never shut up. “Get going,” he said.

Where did you really curfew that nite? Not a seedy motel?

No. We xited the overway at xit two, then forked onto an unlit country lane. A dike of thorned pines hid an industrial field of a hundred-plus units. So close to curfew, our ford was the only vehicle in motion. We parked and crossed a windy forecourt to a concrete bloc signed HYDRA NURSERY CORP. Hae-Joo’s Soul blinked the rollerdoor open.

Inside was not a horticulture unit but a redlit ark, roofing giant tanks. The air was uncomfortably warm and moist. The tangled, stringy broth I saw through the tanks’ viewing windows concealed their contents, for a moment. Then individual limbs and hands came into focus, nascent, identical faces.

Wombtanks?

Yes. We were in a genomics unit. I watched the clusters of embryo fabricants suspended in uterine gel; I was witnessing my own origin, remember. Some slept, some sucked thumbs, some scurried a hand or foot as if digging or running. I asked Hae-Joo, had I been cultivated in that place? Hae-Joo said no, Papa Song’s nursery in Kwangju is five times bigger. The embryos I was looking at had been designed to labor in uranium tunnels under the Yellow Sea. Their saucerlike eyes were genomed for darkness. In fact, they go insane if xposed to brite unfiltered daylite.

The heat soon had Hae-Joo shiny with sweat. “You must need Soap, Sonmi. Our penthouse is this way.”

A penthouse? In a fabricant nursery?

The Unionman was fond of irony. Our “penthouse” was a niteman’s sparse room, a concrete-walled space containing only a water shower, a single cot, a desk, a stack of chairs, a choked aircon, and a broken ping-pong table. Fat pipes throbbed hot across the ceiling. A sonypanel monitored the wombtanks, and a window overlooked the nursery. Hae-Joo suggested I take a shower now as he could not guarantee one tomorrow nite. He strung up a tarp for privacy and built a bed from chairs for himself while I washed my body. A sac of Soap was waiting on the cot with a set of new clothes.

You didn’t feel vulnerable, sleeping in the middle of nowhere without even knowing Hae-Joo Im’s true name?

I was too toxed. Fabricants stay awake for over twenty hours thanks to Soap, then we drop.

When I woke a few hours later, Hae-Joo was snoring on his cloak. I studied a scab of clotted blood on his cheek, scratched as we fled Taemosan. Pureblood skin is so delicate compared to ours. His eyeballs gyred behind their lids; nothing else in the room moved. He may have said Xi-Li’s name, or perhaps it was just noise. I wondered which “I” he was when he dreamed. Then I blinked my Soul on Hae-Joo’s handsony to learn about my own alias, Yun-Ah Yoo. I was a student genomicist, born Secondmonth 30th in Naju during the Year of the Horse. Father was a Papa Song’s aide; Mother a housewife; no siblings . . . the data onscrolled for tens of pages, hundreds. The curfew faded away. Hae-Joo woke, massaging his temples. “Ok-Kyun Pyo would love a strong cup of starbuck.”

I decided the time had come to ask the question that had seized me in the disneyarium. Why had Union paid such a crippling price to protect one xperimental fabricant?

“Ah.” Hae-Joo mumbled and picked sleep from his eyes. “Long answer, long journey.”

More evasion?

No. He answered as we drove deeper into the country. I shall précis it for your orison, Archivist. Nea So Copros is poisoning itself to death. Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless, its air toxloaded, its food supplies riddled with rogue genes. The downstrata cannot buy drugs to counter these privations. Melanoma and malaria belts advance northward at forty kilometers per year. Those Production Zones of Africa and Indonesia that supply Consumer Zones are now 60-plus percent uninhabitable. Corpocracy’s legitimacy, its wealth, is drying up. The Juche’s rounds of new Enrichment Statutes are sticking band-aids on hemorrhages and amputations. Corpocracy’s only strategy is that long favored by bankrupt ideologies: denial. Downstrata purebloods fall into untermensch sinks. Xecs merely watch, parroting Catechism Seven: “A Soul’s value is the dollars therein.”

But what would be the logic in allowing downstrata purebloods to . . . end in places like Huamdonggil? As a class? What could replace their labor?

Us. Fabricants. We cost almost nothing to manufacture and have no awkward hankerings for a better, freer life. We conveniently xpire after forty-eight hours without a specialized Soap and so cannot run away. We are perfect organic machinery. Do you still maintain there are no slaves in Nea So Copros?

And how did Union aim to xtract these . . . alleged “ills” of our state?

Revolution.

But as the Boardman’s anthem says, Nea So Copros is the world’s only rising sun! Pre-Skirmish East Asia was the same chaos of sickly democracies, democidal autocracies, and rampant deadlands that the rest of the world still is! If the Juche had not unified and cordonized the region, we would have backslid to barbarism with the rest of the globe! How can any rational organization embrace a creed that opposes corpocracy? Not only is it terrorism but it would be suicide.

All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility.

Well, you seem to have embraced Union propaganda wholeheartedly, Sonmi~451.

And I might observe that you have embraced corpocracy propaganda wholeheartedly, Archivist.

Did your new friends mention xactly how Union plans to overthrow a state with a standing pureblood army of 2 million backed by a further 2 million fabricant troops?

Yes. By engineering the simultaneous ascension of 6 million fabricants.

Fantasy. Lunacy.

All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

How could Union possibly achieve this “simultaneous ascension”?

The battlefield, you see, is neuromolecular. A few hundred Unionmen in wombtank and Soap plants could trigger these vast numbers of ascensions by adding Suleiman’s catalyst into key streams.

What damage could even 10 million—say—ascended fabricants inflict on the most stable state pyramid in the history of civilization?

Who would work factory lines? Process sewage? Feed fish farms? Xtract oil and coal? Stoke reactors? Construct buildings? Serve in dineries? Xtinguish fires? Man the cordon? Fill exxon tanks? Lift, dig, pull, push? Sow, harvest? Now do you begin to see? Purebloods no longer possess these core skills upon which our corpocracy, or any society, rests. The real question is, what damage could 6 million ascensions not inflict, in combination with cordonlanders and downstrata purebloods such as those in Huamdonggil with nothing to lose?

Unanimity would maintain order. Enforcers aren’t all Union agents.

Even Yoona~939 chose death over slavery.

And your role in this . . . proposed rebellion?

My first role was to provide proof that Suleiman’s ascension catalyst worked. This I had done, and still do, simply by not degenerating. The requisite neurochemicals were being synthesized in underground factories thruout the Twelve Cities.

“Your second role,” Hae-Joo informed me that morning, “would be ambassadorial.” General Apis wished me to act as an interlocutor between Union and the ascending fabricants. To help mobilize them as revolutionaries.

How did you feel about being a figurehead for terrorists?

Trepidation: I was not genomed to alter history, I told my fellow fugitive. Hae-Joo countered that no revolutionary ever was. All Union was asking for now, he urged, was that I did not reject Apis’s proposal out of hand.

Weren’t you curious about Union’s blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?

You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”

We’re circling a contentious core, Sonmi. Let’s return to your journey.

We reached Suanbo Plain around hour eleven, via minor routes. Cropdusters strewed clouds of saffron fertilizer, blanking the horizons. Xposure to EyeSats worried Hae-Joo, so we took a Timber-Corp plantation track. It had rained during the nite, so pools bogged the dirt track and progress was slow, but we saw no other vehicle. The Norfolk pine-rubberwood hybrids were planted in rank and file and created the illusion that trees were marching past our ford in a billion-strong regiment. I got out only once, when Hae-Joo refilled the exxon tank from a can. The plain had been brite, but inside the plantation even noon was dank, hushed dusk. The sole sound was a sterile wind swishing blunted needles. The trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds, so the stagnant air stunk of insecticide.

The forest left as abruptly as it had arrived, and the topography grew hillier. We traveled east, the Woraksan Range to our south and Ch’ungju Lake spreading north. The lake water stunk of effluent from its salmon net ponds. Crosswater hills displayed mighty corp logos. A malachite statue of Prophet Malthus surveyed a dust bowl. Our track underpassed the Ch’ungju-Taegu-Pusan xpress-way Hae-Joo said we could be in Pusan within two hours if he dared join it, but a slow crawl thru backcountry was safer. Our pot-holed but Eyeless road switchbacked up into the Sobaeksan Mountains.

Hae-Joo Im wasn’t trying to get to Pusan in one day?

No. At approx hour seventeen, he hid the ford in an abandoned lumberyard, and we struck out on foot. My first mountain hike fascinated me as much as my first drive thru Seoul. Limestone bulges oozed lichen; fir saplings and mountain ash grew from clefts; clouds scrolled; the breeze was fragrant with natural pollen; once genomed moths spun around our heads, electronlike. Their wings’ logos had mutated over generations into a chance syllabary: a small victory of nature over corpocracy On an xposed rock shelf, Hae-Joo pointed across a gulf. “See him?”

Who? I saw only a rock face.

Keep looking, he said, and from the mountainside emerged the carved features of a cross-legged giant. One slender hand was raised in a gesture of grace. Weaponry and elements had strafed, ravaged, and cracked his features, but his outline was discernible if you knew where to look. I said the giant reminded me of Timothy Cavendish, making Hae-Joo Im smile for the first time in a long while. He said the giant was a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth, and perhaps the cracked stonework still possessed a lingering divinity. Only the inanimate can be so alive. I suppose QuarryCorp will destroy him when they get around to processing those mountains.

Why did Im take you on this field trip to the middle of nowhere?

Every nowhere is somewhere, Archivist. Past the cross-legged giant and over the ridge we came upon a modest grain bed in a clearing, clothes drying on bushes, vegetable plots, a crude irrigation system of bamboo, a cemetery. A thirsty cataract. Hae-Joo led me thru a narrow cleft into a courtyard, walled by ornate buildings unlike any I ever saw. A very recent xplosion had cratered the flagstones, blown away timbers, and collapsed a tiled roof. One pagoda had succumbed to a typhoon and fallen on its twin. Ivy more than joinery kept the latter upright. This was to be our lodging for the nite, Hae-Joo told me. An abbey had stood there for fifteen centuries, until corpocracy dissolved the pre-consumer religions after the Skirmishes. Now the site serves to shelter dispossessed purebloods who prefer scraping a life from the mountainside to downstrata conurb life.

So Union hid its interlocutor, its . . . messiah, in a colony of recidivists?

Messiah: what a grandiose title for a Papa Song server. Behind us, a creased, sun-scorched peasant woman, as visibly aged as a senior from Cavendish’s time, limped into the courtyard, leaning on an enceph-scarred boy. The boy, a mute, smiled shyly at Hae-Joo, and the woman hugged Hae-Joo affectionately as a mother. I was introduced to the Abbess as Ms. Yoo. One eye was milk-blind, her other brite and watchful. She clasped my hands in hers in a charming gesture. “You are welcome here,” she told me, “most welcome.”

Hae-Joo asked about the bomb crater.

The Abbess replied that a local Unanimity regiment was using them for teething. An aero appeared last month and launched a shell without warning. One man died, and several colonists were badly injured. An act of malice, the Abbess speculated sadly, or a bored pilot, or perhaps a developer had seen potential in the site as a healthspa hotel for xecs and wanted the site cleared.

My companion promised to find out.

Who were these “colonists” xactly? Squatters? Terrorists? Union?

Each colonist had a different story. I was introduced to Uyghur dissidents, dust-bowled farmers from Ho Chi Minh Delta, once respectable conurb dwellers who had fallen foul of corp politics, unemployable deviants, those undollared by mental illness. Of the seventy-five colonists, the youngest was nine weeks old; the oldest, the Abbess, was sixty-eight, though if she had claimed to be three hundred years of age I would still have believed her, such gravitas she had.

But . . . how could people there survive without franchises and gallerias? What did they eat? Drink? How about electricity? Entertainment? What about enforcers and order? How did they impose hierarchy?

Go visit them, Archivist. You can tell the Abbess I sent you. No? Well, their food came from the forest and gardens, water from the cataract. Scavenge trips to landfills yielded plastics and metals for tools. Their “school” sony was powered by a water turbine. Solar nitelamps recharged during daylite hours. Their entertainment was themselves; consumers cannot xist without 3-D and AdV, but humans once did and still can. Enforcement? Problems arose, no doubt, even crises from time to time. But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate.

What about the mountain winters?

They survived as fifteen centuries of nuns had before them: by planning, thrift, and fortitude. The monastery was built over a cave, xtended by bandits during the Japanese annexation. These tunnels gave sufficient shelter from winter and Unanimity aeros. Oh, such a life is no bucolic Utopia. Yes, winters are severe; rainy seasons are relentless; crops fall prey to disease; their medicine is sorely limited. Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata. I slept soundly that nite against a backdrop of gossip, music, complaints, and laughter, feeling safe for the first time since my dormroom in Papa Song’s.

So what was Union’s interest in the colony?

Simple: Union provides hardware, such as their solars; in return, the colony provides a safe house, kilometers from the nearest Eye. I woke in my dorm tunnel just before dawn and crept to the temple mouth. The guard was a middle-aged woman nursing a colt and a stimulin brew; she lifted the mosquito net for me but warned me about coyotes scavenging below the monastery walls. I promised to stay in earshot, skirted the courtyard, and squeezed between the narrow rocks to the balcony of blacks and grays.

The mountain dropped away; an updraft rose from the valley, carrying animal cries, calls, growls, and snuffles. I could not identify even one; for all my knowledge of censored arcana, I felt impoverished. And such a sky of stars! Ah, mountain stars are not these apologetic pinpricks over conurb skies; hanging plump they drip lite. A boulder stirred, just a meter away. “Ah, Ms. Yoo,” said the Abbess, “an early riser.”

I wished her a good morning.

The younger colonists, the old woman confided, worry about her wandering around before sunup, in case she fell off the edge. She produced a pipe from her sleeve, stuffed its bowl, and lit it. A raw local leaf, she admitted, but she had lost the taste for refined marlboros years ago. The smoke smelled of aromatic leather and dried dung.

I asked about the stone figure in the escarpment across the gulf.

Siddhartha had other names, she told me, mostly lost now. Her predecessors knew all the stories and sermons, but the old Abbess and senior nuns were sentenced to the Litehouse when non-consumer religions were criminalized. The present Abbess had been a novice back then, so Unanimity judged her young enough for reorientation. She was raised in an orphans’ bloc in Pearl City Conurb, but she said, she had never left her abbey spiritually. She returned years later and founded the present colony in the wreckage.

I asked if Siddhartha was indeed a god.

Many called him so, the Abbess agreed, but Siddhartha does not influence fortune or weather or perform many of a divinity’s traditional functions. Rather, Siddhartha is a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations. “But I pray to the ideal.” She indicated the meditating giant. “Early, so he knows I’m serious.”

I said I hoped that Siddhartha would reincarnate me in her colony.

Lite from the coming day defined the world more clearly now. The Abbess asked why I hoped so.

It took a little time to form my answer. I said how all purebloods have a hunger, a dissatisfaction in their eyes, xcept for the colonists I had met.

The Abbess nodded. If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she xtemporized, corpocracy would be finished. Thus, Media is keen to scorn colonies such as hers, comparing them to tapeworms; accusing them of stealing rainwater from WaterCorp, royalties from VegCorp patent holders, oxygen from AirCorp. The Abbess feared that, should the day ever come when the Board decided they were a viable alternative to corpocratic ideology, “the ‘tapeworms’ will be renamed ‘terrorists,’ smart bombs will rain, and our tunnels flood with fire.”

I suggested the colony must prosper invisibly, in obscurity.

“Xactly.” Her voice hushed. “A balancing act as demanding as impersonating a pureblood, I imagine.”

She knew you weren’t pureblood all along? How?

It seemed tactless to ask. Maybe a spyhole in our quarters had captured me imbibing Soap. My host informed me that xperience had taught the colonists to keep a friendly eye on their guests, even Unionmen. The Abbess herself disliked such a violation of the old abbey’s hospitality codes, but the younger colonists were adamant that close surveillance be maintained. She revealed her intelligence only to bid me luck in my future enterprises, for of all corpocracy’s crimes against the downstrata, the Abbess stated, “nothing is more heinous than the enslavement of your tribe.”

I presume she meant fabricants? But was she speaking in specific terms—servers in dineries—or general terms—every fabricant in Nea So Copros?

I did not know, and did not learn that until the following nite in Pusan. But by now breakfast pans were banging in the courtyard. The Abbess looked at the cleft to the courtyard and changed her tone. “And who might this young coyote be?”

The mute boy padded over and sat by the Abbess’s feet. Sunlite bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.

So day two as a fugitive got under way.

Yes. Hae-Joo breakfasted on potato cakes and fig honey; unlike the previous nite, no one pressed me to eat the pureblood food. As we said our farewells, two or three of the teenage girls, tearful to see Hae-Joo depart, shot me hateful glances, much to my guide’s amusement. Hae-Joo had to behave like a hard-bitten revolutionary, but he was still a boy in some respects. As she embraced me, the Abbess whispered in my ear, “I shall ask Siddhartha to grant your wish.” Under his gaze we left that rarefied height and hiked down through the noisy forest, where we found our ford, untouched.

Progress toward Yōngju was fair. We passed upbound timber rigs driven by burly same-stem fabricants. But the rice plain north of Andongho Lake is laced with xposed timber tracks, so we stayed inside the ford most of the day, hidden from EyeSats until hour fifteen or so.

Crossing an old suspension bridge above Chuwangsan River, we got out to stretch our legs. Hae-Joo apologized for his pureblood bladder and pissed into the trees two hundred meters below. Over the other side, I studied the monochrome parrots who roost there on guano-stained chasm ledges; their flapping and honking reminded me of Boom-Sook Kim and his xec friends. A ravine wound upstream; downstream, the Chuwangsan River was channeled thru leveled hills before disappearing under Ūlsōng’s canopy for sewage duty. Aeros clustered over the conurb: black-and-silver dots.

The bridge cables groaned under the strain of a gleaming xec ford, without warning. It was an xpensive auto to encounter on such a rustic road, suspiciously so. Hae-Joo reached into our ford for his colt. He returned to me, hand in his jacket pocket, murmuring, “Let me do any talking, and get ready to dive down.”

Sure enough, the xec ford slowed to a stop. A stocky man with a facescaped sheen swiveled out from the driver’s seat with a friendly nod. “Beautiful afternoon.”

Hae-Joo nodded back, observing it was not too sultry.

A pureblood woman unfolded her legs from the passenger door. Her thick wraparounds revealed only a pixie nose and sensual lips. She leaned on the opposite railing, with her back to us, and lit a marlboro. The driver opened the ford trunk and lifted out an airbox, one suitable for transporting a medium-size dog. He unlocked its clickers and lifted out a striking, perfectly formed, but tiny female form, about thirty centimeters in height; she mewled, terrified, and tried to wriggle free. When she caught sight of us her miniature, wordless scream became imploring.

Before we could do or say anything, the man swung her off the bridge, by her hair, and watched her fall. He made a plopping noise with his tongue when she hit the rocks below and chuckled. “Cheap riddance”—he grinned at us—“to very xpensive trash.”

I forced myself to remain silent. Sensing the effort this cost, Hae-Joo touched my arm. One scene from the Cavendish disney, when a pureblood gets thrown off a balcony by a criminal, replayed itself in my head.

I presume he had discarded a fabricant living doll.

Yes. The xec was keen to tell us all about it. “The Zizzi Hikaru Doll was the must-have the Sextet before last. My daughter didn’t give me a moment’s rest. Of course, my official wife”—he nodded at the woman on the other side of the bridge—“put her all in, morning, noon, and nite. ‘How am I supposed to look our neighbors in their faces if our daughter is the only girl in our carousel to not have a Zizzi?’ You got to admire the marketers of these things. One junky toy fabricant, but genome it like some glitzy antique idol and up goes its price by fifty thousand; that’s before you shell out for designer-ware, dollhouse, accessories. So what did I do? I paid for the damn thing, just to shut the women up! Four months later, what happens? Teencool surfs on and Marilyn Monroe dethrones poor, passé Zizzi.” He told us, digustedly, that a registered fabricant xpirer cost three thousand dollars, but—the man jerked a thumb over the railing—an accidental plunge comes free. So why chuck good dollars after bad? “Pity”—he winked at Hae-Joo—“divorces aren’t as hitchless, eh?”

“I heard that, Fat-Ass!” His wife still did not deign to face us. “You should have taken the doll back to the franchise and had your Soul redollared. Our Zizzi was defective. It couldn’t even sing. The damn thing bit me.”

Fat-Ass replied, sweetly, “Can’t imagine why that didn’t kill it, darlingest.” His wife muttered a casual obscenity while her husband ran his eyes over my body and asked Hae-Joo if we were vacationing near that remote spot or passing thru on business.

“Ok-Kyun Pyo, sir, at your service.” Hae-Joo gave a slite bow and introduced himself as a fifth-stratum aide in Eagle Accountancy Franchise, a minor corp division.

The xec’s curiosity died. “That so? I manage the Golf Coast between P’yōnghae and Yōngdōk. You are a golfer, Pyo? No? No? Golf isn’t just a game y’ know, golf is a career advantage!” The Paegam course, he promised, has an all-weather fifty-four holer, lickable greens, lake features like the Beloved Chairman’s famous water gardens. “We outbid the local downstrata for the aquifer. Normally you can’t get membership for love nor money unless you’re a seer, but I like you, Pyo, so just mention my name to our membership people: Seer Kwon.”

Ok-Kyun Pyo gushed gratitude.

Pleased, Seer Kwon began telling his xec life story, but his wife tossed her marlboro after the Zizzi Hikaru, climbed into the ford, and kept her hand on the horn for ten seconds. Zebra-feathered parrots cannonaded skyward. The xec gave Hae-Joo a rueful grin and advised him to pay the xtra dollars to conceive a son when he gets married. As he drove off I wished for his ford to plunge off the bridge.

You considered him a murderer?

Of course. One so shallow, moreover, he did not even know it.

But hate men like Seer Kwon, and you hate the whole world.

Not the whole world, Archivist, only the corpocratic pyramid that permits fabricants to be killed so wantonly, casually.

When did you finally reach Pusan?

Nitefall. Hae-Joo pointed at exxon clouds from Pusan refinery, turning melon pink to anthracite gray, and told me we had arrived. We entered Pusan’s northern rim on an unEyed farmtrack. Hae-Joo deposited the ford at a lockup in Sōmyōn suburb, and we took the metro to Ch’oryang Square. It was smaller than Chongmyo Plaza but as busy, and strange after the silent emptiness of the mountains. Fabricant nannies scooted after their xec charges; swanning couples assessed couples swanning; corp-sponsored 3-Ds competed to outdazzle all the others. In a tatty back-galleria an old-style festival was taking place where hawkers sold palm-size curios, “friends for life”: toothless crocs, monkey chicklets, jonahwhales in jars. Hae-Joo told me these pets are an old cheapjack’s ruse; they die forty-eight hours after you get them home, invariably. A circusman was touting for business through a megaphone: “Marvel at the Two-Headed Schizoid Man! Gaze upon Madame Matryoshka and Her Pregnant Embryo! Gasp in Horror at the Real, Live Merican—but don’t poke your fingers into his cage!” Pureblood sailors from all over Nea So Copros sat in frontless bars, flirting with topless comforters, under the scrutiny of PimpCorp men: leathery Himalayans, Han Chinese, pale-hued hairy Baikalese, bearded Uzbeks, wiry Aleutians, coppery Viets and Thais. Comfort houses’ AdVs promised satisfaction for every peccadillo a hungry pureblood could imagine. “If Seoul is a Boardman’s faithful spouse,” said Hae-Joo, “Pusan is his no-pantied mistress.”

Backstreets grew narrower. A funneled wind bowled bottles and cans along, and hooded figures hurried by. Hae-Joo led me through a surreptitious doorway, up a glimlit tunnel to a portcullised entrance. KUKJE MANSIONS was inscribed over a side window. Hae-Joo pressed a buzzer. Dogs barked, the blind upzipped, and a pair of identical saber-tooths slavered at the glass. An unshaven woman hauled them aside and peered at us. Her gemwarted face lit with recognition at Hae-Joo and xclaimed: “Nun-Hel Han! It’s been nearly twelve months! Little wonder, if the rumors about your brawls were even half true! How were the Philippines?”

Hae-Joo’s voice had changed again. I checked, involuntarily, so hard-scoured was his accent now; it was still him at my side. “Sinking, Mrs. Lim, sinking fast. You haven’t gone subletting my room, now, have you?”

“Oh, I keep a reliable house, don’t worry about that!” She faked offense but warned she would need a fresh blip of dollars if his next voyage lasted as long as his last. The portcullis rose, and she glanced at me. “Say, Nun-Hel, if your fluffball stays over a week, single apartments get charged as doubles. House rules. Like it or lump it. All the same to me.”

Nun-Hel Han the sailor said I would stay for only a nite or two.

“In every port”—the landlady leered—“it’s true, then.”

Was she Union?

No. Flophouse landladies judas their own mothers for a dollar; judasing a Unionman would fetch a far higher price. But, as Hae-Joo told me, they also discourage the idly inquisitive. Inside, a pocked stairwell echoed with arguments and 3-Ds. I was, at last, getting used to stairs. On the ninth floor a woodworm corridor led us to a scraped door. Hae-Joo retrieved a pre-placed match stump from its hinge, noting the management had succumbed to a nasty rash of honesty.

Nun-Hel’s floproom had a sour mattress, a tidy kitchenette, a closet of clothes for varying climates, a blurred foto of naked Caucasian prostitutes straddling a group of sailors, souvenirs from the Twelve Conurbs and minor ports, and of course, a framed kodak of the Beloved Chairman. A lipsticked marlboro was left teetered on a beer can. The window was shuttered.

Hae-Joo showered and changed. He told me he had to attend a Union cell meeting and warned me to keep the window shutter down and not to answer the door or fone unless it was him or Apis with this crypto: he wrote the words “These are the tears of things” on a scrap of paper, which he then burned in the ashtray. He put a small supply of Soap in the fridge, and promised to return in the morning, soon after curfew.

Surely, such a distinguished defector as yourself deserved a rather grander reception?

Grand receptions draw attention. I passed some hours studying Pusan’s geography on the sony before showering and imbibing my Soap. I woke late, I think, after hour six. Hae-Joo returned xhausted, holding a bag of pungent ttōkbukgi. I made him a cup of starbuck, which he drank gratefully, then ate his breakfast. “Okay, Sonmi—stand by the window and cover your eyes.”

I obeyed. The rusty shutter uprolled. Hae-Joo commanded, “Don’t look . . . don’t look . . . now, open your eyes.”

A swarm of roofs, thruways, commuter hives, AdVs, concrete . . . and there, in the background, the brite spring sky’s sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me . . . like the snow had done. All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.

Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”

You’d never seen it before?

Only on Papa Song’s 3-Ds of life in Xultation. Never the real thing with my own eyes. I yearned to go and touch it and walk by it, but Hae-Joo thought it safest to stay hidden during daylite until we were requartered somewhere more remote. Then he lay on the mattress and within a minute began snoring.

Hours passed; in ocean slots between buildings, I watched freighters and naval vessels. Downstrata housewives aired worn linen on nearby rooftops. Later the weather grew overcast, and armored aeros rumbled thru low clouds. I studied. It rained. Hae-Joo, still asleep, rolled over, slurred “No, only a friend of a friend,” and fell silent again. Drool slid from his mouth, wetting his pillow. I thought about Professor Mephi. In our last seminar he had spoken of his estrangement from his family and confessed he spent more time educating me than teaching his own daughter. Now he was dead, because of his belief in Union. I felt gratitude, guilt, and other emotions too.

Hae-Joo woke midafternoon, showered, and brewed ginseng tea. How I envy purebloods your rainbow cuisine, Archivist. Before my ascension, Soap seemed the most delicious substance imaginable, but now it tastes bland and gray. I suffer nausea if I so much as taste pureblood food, however, and vomiting later. Hae-Joo downshuttered the window. “Time to liaise,” he told me. Then he unhooked the Beloved Chairman’s kodak and placed it facedown on the low table. Hae-Joo inplugged his sony to a socket concealed in the blemished frame.

An illegal transceiver? Hidden in a kodak of Nea’s architect?

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane. A 3-D of an old man clarified britely; he looked like an inxpensively healed burn victim. His lips out of sync with his words, he congratulated me on my safe arrival in Pusan and asked who had the prettier face, him or the carp?

I replied honestly: the carp.

An-Kor Apis’s laugh became a cough. “This is my true face, whatever that means these days.” His sickly appearance suited him well, he said, because casual enforcers worried that he might be contagious. He asked if I had enjoyed my journey across our beloved motherland.

Hae-Joo Im had looked after me well, I answered.

General Apis asked if I understood the role Union wished me to assume in their struggle to ascend fabricants into citizens. Yes, I began, but I did not have the chance to declare my indecision. “We want to xpose you to a . . . sight, a formative xperience, here in Pusan, before you decide, Sonmi.” He warned it would not be pleasant but was imperative. “To allow for an informed decision regarding your future. If you agree, Hae-Joo can take you now.”

I said I would go, certainly.

“Then we’ll speak again, very soon,” promised Apis, disconnecting his imager. Hae-Joo produced a pair of technic uniforms and semi-visors from his closet. We dressed in these, then over-cloaked for the landlady’s benefit. Outside was cold, and I was grateful for the double layers. We rode the metro to the port terminal and took a conveyor down to the waterfront berths, passing the vast oceangoing vessels. The nite sea was oily black and the ships similarly austere, but one brite vessel pulsed golden arches and resembled an undersea palace. I had seen it before, in a previous life. “Papa Song’s Golden Ark,” I xclaimed, telling Hae-Joo what he already knew, that it conveyed the Twelvestarred east across the ocean to Xultation.

Hae-Joo confirmed Papa’s Golden Ark was our destination.

Security on the gangway was minimal: a bleary-eyed pureblood with his feet on the desk, watching fabricant gladiators slay each other in the Shanghai Colosseum on 3-D. “And you are?”

Hae-Joo blinked his Soul on his Eye. “Fifth-stratum technic man—Shik Gang.” He checked his handsony and reported we had been sent to recalibrate busted thermostats on deck seven.

“Seven?” The guard smirked. “Hope you haven’t just eaten.” Then he looked at me. I looked at the floor. “Who’s this verbal marathonette, Technic Gang?”

“My new aide. Technic Aide Yoo.”

“That so? Is tonite your maiden visit to our pleasuredome?”

I nodded yes, it was.

The guard said there was no time like the first time. He waved us by with a lazy twitch of his foot.

Gaining access to a corp ship was so simple?

Papa Song’s Golden Ark is not xactly a magnet for illegal boarders, Archivist. Crew, aides, and various technics bustled in the main gangways, too intent on their own business to notice us. The service side shafts were empty, so we descended to the Ark’s underbelly unmet. Our nikes clanged on the metal stairs. A giant motor drummed. I thought I heard singing but told myself my ears must be mistaken. Hae-Joo consulted his deck plan, unlatched an access hatch, and I remember him pausing, as if to tell me something. But he changed his mind, clambered in, helped me thru, then locked the hatch behind us.

I found myself on all fours on a cramped hangway suspended from the roof of a sizable holding chamber. The hangway’s far end was concealed by flaps, but thru its gridded floor I could see some two hundred Twelvestarred Papa Song servers, lining up in a paddock of turnstiles whose single direction was onward. Yoonas, Hwa-Soons, Ma-Leu-Das, Sonmis, and some stem-types unused in Chongmyo Plaza Dinery, all in the familiar gold-and-scarlet uniform. How dreamlike to see my x-sisters, outside the context of a Papa Song dome. They sang Papa Song’s Psalm, over and over; background hydraulics underbassed that sickening melody. But how jubilant they sounded! Their Investment was paid off. The voyage to Hawaii was under way, and their new life on Xultation would shortly begin.

You sound as if you still envy them.

Watching them from the hangway, I envied their certainty about the future. After about a minute, an aide at the head of the line ushered the next server through golden arches and the sisters clapped. The lucky Twelvestarred waved back at her friends, then passed thru the arch to be shown to her luxury cabin we had all seen on 3-D. The turnstiles rotated the fabricants one space forward. After watching this process several times, Hae-Joo tapped my foot and signaled for me to crawl along the hangway, thru the flap, into the next chamber.

Weren’t you in danger of being seen?

No. Brite droplites underswung our hangway, so from the noisy holding pen floor, several meters below, we were invisible. Anyway, we were not intruders but technics conducting maintenance work. The next chamber was in fact a small room, no bigger than this prison cube. The singing and din was damped out; its quiet was eerie. A plastic chair stood on a dais; above this chair, suspended from a ceiling monorail, hung a bulky helmet mechanism. Three smiling aides dressed in Papa Song scarlet guided the server onto the chair. One aide xplained that the helmet would remove her collar, as promised by Papa Song in Matins over the years. “Thank you, Aide,” burbled the xcited server. “Oh, thank you!”

The helmet was fitted over the Sonmi’s head and neck. It was at this moment I noticed the odd number of doors into the cell.

“Odd” in what way?

There was only one door: the entrance from the holding pen. How had all the previous servers left? A sharp “clack” from the helmet refocused my attention on the dais below. The server’s head slumped unnaturally. I could see her eyeballs roll back and the cabled spine connecting the helmet mechanism to the monorail stiffen. To my horror, the helmet rose, the server sat upright, then was lifted off her feet into the air. Her corpse seemed to dance a little; her smile of anticipation frozen in death tautened as her facial skin took some of the load. Below, meanwhile, one worker hoovered bloodloss from the plastic chair and another wiped it clean. The monorailed helmet conveyored its cargo parallel to our hangway, through a flap, and disappeared into the next chamber. A new helmet lowered itself over the plastic stool, where the three aides were already seating the next xcited server.

Hae-Joo whispered in my ear. “Those ones you can’t save, Sonmi. They were doomed when they boarded.” In fact, I thought, they were doomed from their wombtanks.

Another helmet clacked its bolt home. This server was a Yoona.

You understand, I have no words for my emotions at that time.

Finally, I managed to obey Hae-Joo and crawl along the hangway thru a soundlock into the next chamber. Here, the helmets conveyed the cadavers into a vast violet-lit vault; the space must have accounted for a quarter of Papa Song’s Ark’s volume. As we entered, the celsius fell sharply and a roar of machines burst our ears. A slaughterhouse production line lay below us, manned by figures wielding scissors, sword saws, and various tools of cutting, stripping, and grinding. The workers were bloodsoaked, from head to toe. I should properly call those workers butchers: they snipped off collars, stripped clothes, shaved follicles, peeled skin, offcut hands and legs, sliced off meat, spooned organs . . . drains hoovered the blood . . . The noise, you can imagine, Archivist, was deafening.

But . . . why would—What would the purpose be of such . . . carnage?

The economics of corpocracy. The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied biomatter, for wombtanks, but most of all, for Soap. What cheaper way to supply this protein than by recycling fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally, leftover “reclaimed proteins” are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers in the corp’s dineries all over Nea So Copros. It is a perfect food cycle.

What you describe is beyond the . . . conceivable, Sonmi~451. Murdering fabricants to supply dineries with food and Soap . . . no. The charge is preposterous, no, it’s unconscionable, no, it’s blasphemy! As an Archivist I can’t deny that you saw what you believe you saw, but as a consumer of the corpocracy, I am impelled to say, what you saw must, must have been a Union . . . set, created for your benefit. No such . . . “slaughtership” could possibly be permitted to xist. The Beloved Chairman would never permit it! The Juche would ionize Papa Song’s entire xec strata in the Litehouse! If fabricants weren’t paid for their labor in retirement communities, the whole pyramid would be . . . the foulest perfidy.

Business is business.

You’ve described not “business” but . . . industrialized evil!

You underestimate humanity’s ability to bring such evil into being. Consider. You have seen the 3-Ds, but have you visited a fabricant retirement village, personally? I shall take your silence as a no. Do you know anyone who has visited one, personally? Again, no. Then where do fabricants go after retirement? Not just servers, the hundreds of thousands of fabricants who end their serviceable lives every year. There should be cities full of them by now. But where are these cities?

No crime of such magnitude could take root in Nea So Copros. Even fabricants have carefully defined rights, guaranteed by the Chairman!

Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful. In corpocracy, this means the Juche. What is willed by the Juche is the tidy xtermination of a fabricant underclass.

But what about the 3-Ds of Xultation and such? You saw them in the Papa Song’s at Chongmyo Plaza yourself. There’s your proof.

Xultation is a sony-generated simulacrum dijied in Neo Edo. It does not xist in the real Hawaii, or anywhere. Indeed, during my final weeks at Papa Song’s, it seemed that scenes of Xultation repeated themselves. The same Hwa-Soon ran down the same sandy path to the same rock pool. My unascended sisters did not notice, and I doubted myself at the time, but now I had my xplanation.

Your Testimony must stand as you speak it, despite my protests. I—we must progress. . . . How long did you watch this slaughter?

I cannot recall, accurately. Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour. I remember Hae-Joo leading me thru the dining area, numbly. Purebloods played cards, ate noodles, smoked, worked at sonys, joked, engaged in ordinary life. How could they know what happened in the underbelly and just . . . sit there, indifferent? As if it were not living fabricants being processed but pickled sardines? Why did their consciences not scream for this obscenity to end? The bearded security guard winked, saying, “Come back soon, honeysuckle.”

In the metro back to the flophouse, as the commuters swayed, I “saw” cadavers on the monorail. Ascending the stairwell, I “saw” them hoisted aloft the xecution room. In his room, Hae-Joo did not switch on the solar; he just raised the shutter a few centimeters to let the lites of Pusan dilute the darkness and poured himself a glass of soju. Not a word had passed between us.

I alone, of all my sisters, had seen the true Xultation and lived.

Our sex was joyless, graceless, and necessarily improvised, but it was an act of the living. Stars of sweat on Hae-Joo’s back were his gift to me, and I harvested them on my tongue. After, the young man smoked a nervy marlboro in silence and studied my birthmark, curiously. He fell asleep on my arm, squashing it. I did not wake him; the pain turned to numbness, the numbness to pins and needles, then I squirmed out from under him. I spread a blanket over Hae-Joo; purebloods catch rogue colds in all weathers. The city readied itself for curfew. Its smeary glow dimmed as AdVs and lites switched off. The final server of the final line would be dead by now. The processing line would be cleaned and silent. The slaughtermen, if they were fabricants, would be in their dorm-rooms, if purebloods, at home with their families. The Golden Ark would sail away tomorrow to a new port, where the reclamation would begin afresh.

At hour zero I imbibed my Soap and joined Hae-Joo under the blanket, warmed by his body.

Weren’t you angry with Union for xposing you to the Golden Ark without adequately preparing you?

What words could Apis or Hae-Joo have used?

Morning brought a sweaty haze. Hae-Joo showered, then devoured a huge bowl of rice, pickled cabbage, eggs, and seaweed soup. I washed up. My pureblood lover sat across the table from me. I spoke for the first time since we entered that protein-xtraction line. “That ship must be destroyed. Every slaughtership in Nea So Copros like it must be sunk.”

Hae-Joo said yes.

“The shipyards that build them must be demolished. The systems that facilitated them must be dismantled. The laws that permitted the systems must be torn down and reconstructed.”

Hae-Joo said yes.

“Every consumer, xec, and Juche Boardman in Nea So Copros must understand that fabricants are purebloods, be they grown in a wombtank or a womb. If persuasion does not work, ascended fabricants must fight with Union to achieve this end, using whatever force is necessary.”

Hae-Joo said yes.

“Ascended fabricants need a Catechism, to define their ideals, to harness their anger, to channel their energies. I am the one to compose this declaration of rights. Will—can—Union seedbed such a Catechism?”

Hae-Joo said, “This is what we’re waiting for.”

Many xpert witnesses at your trial denied Declarations could be the work of a fabricant, ascended or otherwise, and maintained it was ghosted by Union or a pureblood Abolitionist.

How lazily “xperts” dismiss what they fail to understand!

I, only I, wrote Declarations over three weeks at Ūlsukdo Ceo, outside Pusan, in an isolated xec villa overlooking the Nakdong Estuary. During its composition I consulted a judge, a genomicist, a syntaxist, and General An-Kor Apis, but the Ascended Catechisms of Declarations, their logic and ethics, denounced at my trial as “the ugliest wickedness in the annals of deviancy,” were the fruits of my mind, Archivist, fed by the xperiences I have narrated to you this morning. No one else has lived this life. My Declarations were germinated when Yoona~939 was xecuted, nurtured by Boom-Sook and Fang, strengthened by the tutelage of Mephi and the Abbess, birthed in Papa Song’s slaughtership.

And your capture came shortly after completing your text?

The same afternoon. Once my function was fulfilled, there was no reason for Unanimity to let me run free. My arrest was dramatized for Media. I handed my Declarations on sony to Hae-Joo. We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing. I knew we would never meet again, and maybe he knew that I knew.

At the edge of the property a small colony of wild ducks survive the pollution. Rogue genomes give them a resilience lacking in their pureblood ancestors. I suppose I felt a kinship with them. I fed them bread, watched water walkers dimple the chrome-brite surface, then returned to the house to watch the show from inside. Unanimity did not make me wait long.

Six aeros sharked over the water, one landing on the flower garden. Enforcers jumped out, priming their colts, and belly-snaked toward my window with much hand signing and fearless bravado. I had left the doors and windows open for them, but my captors contrived a spectacular siege with snipers, megaphones, and an xploding wall.

You are implying that you xpected the raid, Sonmi?

Once I had finished my manifesto, the next stage could only be my arrest.

What do you mean? What “next stage” of what?

Of the theatrical production, set up while I was still a server in Papa Song’s.

Wait, wait, wait. What about . . . everything? Are you saying your whole confession is composed of . . . scripted events?

Its key events, yes. Some actors were unwitting, Boom-Sook and the Abbess, for xample, but the major players were all provocateurs. Hae-Joo Im and Boardman Mephi certainly were. Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot?

Such as?

Wing~027 was as stable an ascendant as I: was I really so unique? You yourself suggested, would Union truly risk their secret weapon on a dash across Korea? Did Seer Kwon’s murder of the Zizzi Hikaru fabricant on the suspension bridge not underline pureblood brutality a little too neatly? Was its timing not a little too pat?

But what about Xi-Li, the young pureblood killed on the nite of your flite from Taemosan? His blood was not . . . tomato ketchup!

Indeed not. That poor idealist was an xpendable xtra in Unanimity’s Disney.

But . . . Union? Are you saying even Union was fictioned for your script?

No. Union prexists me, but its raisons-d’être are not to foment revolution. Firstly, it attracts social malcontents like Xi-Li and keeps them where Unanimity can watch them. Secondly, it provides Nea So Copros with the enemy required by any hierarchical state for social cohesion.

I still can’t understand why Unanimity would go to the xpense and trouble of staging this fake . . . adventure story.

To generate the show trial of the decade. To make every last pureblood in Nea So Copros mistrustful of every last fabricant. To manufacture downstrata consent for the Juche’s new Fabricant Xpiry Act. To discredit Abolitionism. You can see, the whole conspiracy has been a resounding success.

But if you knew about this . . . conspiracy, why did you cooperate with it? Why did you allow Hae-Joo Im to get so close to you?

Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?

Tell me.

We see a game beyond the endgame. I refer to my Declarations, Archivist. Media has flooded Nea So Copros with my Catechisms. Every schoolchild in corpocracy knows my twelve “blasphemies” now. My guards tell me there is even talk of a statewide “Vigilance Day” against fabricants who show signs of the Declarations. My ideas have been reproduced a billionfold.

But to what end? Some . . . future revolution? It can never succeed.

As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor. Now, my narrative is over. Switch off your silver orison. In two hours enforcers will escort me into the Litehouse. I claim my last request.

. . . name it.

Your sony and access codes.

What do you wish to download?

A certain disney I once began, one nite long ago in another age.