Cloud Atlas, Page 36

  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 paral
lel 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, Sonmi451. 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 lif
e. My Declarations were germinated when Yoona939 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?