Cloud Atlas, Page 20

  So you are gambling your career on this interview?

  … That is the truth of the matter, yes.

  Your frankness is refreshing after so much duplicity.

  A duplicitous archivist wouldn’t be much use to future historians, in my view. Could you tell me a little more about Seer Rhee? His journal weighed heavily against you at your trial. What manner of seer was he?

  Poor Seer Rhee was corp man, to the bone, but long past the age when seers are promoted to power. Like many of this dying corpocracy’s purebloods, he clung to the belief that hard work and a blemishless record were enough to achieve status, so he curfewed many nights in the dinery office to impress the corp hierarchy. In sum: a whipman to his fabricants; a sycofant to his upstrata, and courteous to his cuckolds.

  His cuckolds?

  Yes. Seer Rhee should be understood in the context of his wife. Mrs. Rhee had sold her child quota early in their marriage, made shrewd investments, and used her husband as a dollar-udder. According to his aides’ gossip, she spent most of our seer’s salary on facescaping. Certainly, her seventy-plus years could pass for thirty. Mrs. Rhee visited the dinery from time to time to inspect the latest male aides, gossip added. Any who spurned her advances could xpect a posting to bleakest Manchuria. But why she never used her apparent corp influence to advance Seer Rhee’s career is a mystery I will not now live to see solved.

  Yoona939’s notoriety must have threatened the seer’s “blemishless record” severely, wouldn’t you agree?

  Certainly. A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scapegoat. When Seer Rhee noticed Yoona’s deviations from Catechism, he bypassed destarring and requested a corp medic to xamine her for reorientation. This tactical mistake xplains the seer’s lackluster career. Yoona939 performed as genomed, and the visiting medic gave her a clean bill. Seer Rhee was thenceforth unable to discipline Yoona without implying criticism of a senior corp medic.

  When did Yoona939 first attempt to make you complicit in her crimes?

  I suppose the first time was when she xplained a newfound word, secret, one slow hour at the teller. The idea of knowing information no one else, not even Papa Song, knew was beyond my grasp, so as we lay in our cots my teller-sister promised to show me what she could not xplain.

  When I next woke it was not to the glare of yellow-up but to Yoona, shaking me, in the near-dark. Our sisters lay dorming, immobile but for minute spasms. Yoona ordered me, like a seer, to follow her. I protested, I was afraid. She told me not to be, she wished to show me the meaning of secret, and led me into the dome. Its unfamiliar silence fritened me further: its beloved reds and yellows were eerie grays and browns in the curfew lite. Seer Rhee’s office door leaked thin lite. Yoona pushed it open.

  Our seer lay slumped on his desk. Drool glued his chin to his sony, his eyelids remmed, and a gurgle was trapped in his throat. Every tenthnite, Yoona told me, he would imbibe Soap and sleep thru to yellow-up. As you know, Soap affects purebloods more powerfully than us, and my sister kicked his unresponding body to prove the point. Yoona found my horror at this blasphemy merely amusing. “Do what you like to him,” I remember her telling me. “He has lived with fabricants for so long he is very nearly one of us.” Then she told me she would show me a greater secret still. Yoona xtracted Rhee’s keys from his pocket and led me to the dome’s north quarter. Between the elevator and the northeast hygiener, she told me to xamine the wall. I saw nothing. “Look again,” Yoona urged, “look properly.” This time I saw a speck, a tiny crack. Yoona inserted a key, and a rectangle in the dome wall swung inward. The dusty darkness gave no clue. Yoona took my hand; I hesitated. If wandering around the dinery during curfew was not a destarrable offense, entering unknown doorways surely was. But my sister’s will was stronger than mine. She pulled me through, shut the door behind us, and whispered, “Now, dear sister Sonmi, you are inside a secret.”

  A white blade sliced the black: a miraculous moving knife that gave form to the stuffy nothing. I discerned a narrow storeroom, crammed with stacked seats, plastic plants, coats, fans, hats, a burnt-out sun, many umbrellas; Yoona’s face, my hands. My heart beat fast. What is that knife? I asked. “Only lite, from a flashlite,” answered Yoona. I asked, Is lite alive? Yoona answered, “Perhaps lite is life, sister.” A consumer had left the flashlite on a seat in our quarter, she xplained, but instead of giving it to our aide, Yoona had hidden it here. This confession shocked me most of all, in a way.

  How so?

  Catechism Three teaches that for servers to keep anything denies Papa Song’s love for us and cheats His Investment. I wondered, did Yoona939 still observe any Catechism? But misgivings, though grave, were soon lost in the treasures Yoona showed me there: a box of unpaired earrings, beads, tiaras. The xquisite sensation of dressing in pureblood clothes overcame my fear of being discovered. Greatest of all, however, was a book, a picture book.

  Not many of those around these days.

  Indeed not. Yoona mistook it for a broken sony which showed the world outside. You must imagine our awe as we looked at the grimy server serving three ugly sisters; seven stunted fabricants carrying bizarre cutlery behind a shining girl; a house built of candy. Castles, mirrors, dragons. Remember, I was ignorant of these words as a server, as I was the majority of words I employ in this Testimony. Yoona told me AdV and 3-D show only a dull portion of the world beyond the elevator: its full xtent encompassed wonders even beyond Xultation. So many strangenesses in one curfew toxed my head. My sister said we must get back to our cots before yellow-up but promised to take me back inside her secret, next time.

  How many “next times” were there?

  Ten, or fifteen, approx. In time, it was only during these visits to her secret room that Yoona939 became her animated self. Leafing through her book of outside, she voiced doubts that shook even my own love of Papa Song and faith in corpocracy to the core.

  What shapes did these doubts take?

  Questions: How could Papa Song stand on His Plinth in Chongmyo Plaza Servery and stroll Xultation’s beaches with our Souled sisters simultaneously? Why were fabricants born into debt but purebloods not? Who decided Papa Song’s Investment took twelve years to repay? Why not eleven? Six? One?

  How did you respond to such blasphemous hubris?

  I begged Yoona to stop, or at least to fake normalcy in the dinery: I was a well-orientated server in those days, you see, not the evildoer, the threat to civilization, I am now. Moreover, I was scared of being destarred for failing to judas Yoona to Seer Rhee. I prayed to Papa Song to heal my friend, but her deviances became more blatant, not less. Yoona watched AdV openly as she wiped tables. Our sisters sensed her crimes and avoided her. One nite, Yoona told me that she wanted to xit the dinery and never come back. She told me I should xit too: that purebloods force fabricants to work in domes so they can enjoy the beautiful places her book showed, her “broken sony,” without sharing them. In response, I recited Catechism Six, I told her I could never commit such a wicked deviance against Papa Song and His Investment. Yoona939 reacted angrily. Yes, Archivist, an angry fabricant. She called me a fool and coward, she said I was no better than those other clones.

  Two un-Souled fabricants, fleeing their corp, unaided? Unanimity would round you up in five minutes.

  But how could Yoona know that? Her “broken sony” promised a world of lost forests, folded mountains, and labyrinthine hiding places. To mistake a book of fairy tales for Nea So Copros may seem laughable to you, a pureblood, but perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility. Ascension creates a hunger sharp enough to consume the subject’s sanity, in time. In consumers, this state is termed chronic depression. Yoona had sunk to this same condition by my first winter, when diners brushed snow off their nikes and we had to mop the floors regularly. By then she had ceased communicating with me, so her isolation was total.

  Are you saying mental illness triggered the Yoona939 Atrocity?


  I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.

  Would you describe the events of that New Year’s Eve from your vantage point?

  I was wiping tables on my quarter’s raised rim, so I had a clear view of the east. Ma-Leu-Da108 and Yoona939 were manning our busy teller. A children’s party was in progress. Balloons, streamers, and hats obscured the area around the elevator. Popsongs and noise of five hundred–plus diners reverbed round the dome. Papa Song was boomeranging 3-D fire-eclairs over the children’s heads: they passed thru their fingers and fluttered back to land on our Logoman’s snaky tongue. I saw Yoona939 leave our teller, the precise moment you understand, and I knew something terrible was going to happen.

  She hadn’t told you of her escape plan?

  As I said, she had ceased to acknowledge my xistence. But I do not believe she had a plan: I believe she merely “snapped,” in pureblood terms. My sister proceeded, unhurriedly, out of our quarter, toward the elevator. She was timing her approach. The aides were too busy to notice her: Seer Rhee was in his office. Few diners noticed, or looked up from their sonys or AdV, and why should they? When Yoona scooped up a boy in a sailor suit and headed for the elevator, the purebloods who saw merely assumed she was a fabricant maid ordered by her mistress to take her charge home.

  Media reported that Yoona939 stole the child to employ as a pureblood shield on the surface.

  Media reported the “atrocity” xactly as Unanimity directed. Yoona carried the boy into the elevator because somehow she had learned of that basic precaution corps take: elevators do not function without a Soul onboard. The risk of being noticed aboard an elevator full of consumers was too high, so Yoona believed her best hope lay in borrowing a child and using his Soul to make an otherwise-empty elevator convey her to freedom.

  You sound very sure of your thesis.

  If my xperiences do not give me the right to be sure, whose do? The events that followed, I need not recount.

  Nonetheless, please describe the Yoona939 Atrocity, as you saw it.

  Very well. The child’s mother saw her son in Yoona’s arms as the elevator doors closed. She screamed: “A clone’s taken my boy!” A chain reaction of hysteria began. Trays were flung, shakes spilled, sonys dropped. Some diners believed the earthquake cushioning had malfunctioned and dived under the tables. An off-duty enforcer unholstered his colt, waded into the heart of the turmoil, and bellowed for order. He fired a sonicshot, ill-advisedly in a sealed space, causing many to believe terrorists were firing on consumers. I remember seeing Seer Rhee emerge from his office, slip on a spilled drink, and vanish under a swell of customers now stampeding for the elevator. Many were injured in this crush. Aide Cho was yelling into his handsony: I could not hear what. Rumors ricocheted around the dome: a Yoona had kidnapped a boy, no, a baby; no, a pureblood had kidnapped a Yoona; an enforcer had shot a boy; no, a fabricant had hit the seer whose nose was bleeding. All the while, Papa Song surfed noodle waves on His Plinth. Then someone shouted that the elevator was descending, and silence seized the dinery as quickly as panic had less than a minute before. The enforcer shouted for space, crouched, and aimed at the doors. The crush of consumers cleared in an instant. The elevator reached the dinery, and its doors opened.

  The boy was quivering, balled into one corner. His sailor suit was no longer white. Perhaps my last memory in the Litehouse will be Yoona939’s body, turned into a pulp of bullet holes.

  That image is burned into every pureblood memory, too, Sonmi. When I got home that nite my dormmates were glued to the sony. Half of Nea So Copros’s New Year Festivities were canceled, the other half was decidedly muted. Media alternated footage from the in-dinery nikon with the Chongmyo Plaza public order nikon, showing the passing enforcer neutralize Yoona939. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. We were sure a Union terrorist had facescaped herself to look like a server, for twisted propaganda purposes. When Unanimity confirmed the fabricant was a genuine Yoona … we … I …

  You felt the corpocratic world order had changed, irrevocably. You vowed never to trust any fabricant. You knew that Abolitionism was as dangerous and insidious a dogma as Unionism. You supported the resultant Homeland Laws dictated by the Beloved Chairman, wholeheartedly.

  All of those, yes. What happened down in your dinery, meanwhile?

  Unanimity arrived in force to blip every diner’s Soul and to nikon eyewitnesses’ accounts as the dome was evacuated. We cleaned the dinery and imbibed Soap without Vespers. The following yellow-up, my sisters’ memories of Yoona939’s killing remained largely intact. That Matins, instead of the customary Starring Ceremony, Papa Song delivered His Anti-Union Sermon.

  I still find it incredible that a Logoman told his fabricants about Union.

  Such was the shock, the panic. Doubtless the Sermon’s primary goal was to show Media that the Papa Song Corp had a damage control strategy in place. Papa Song’s upstrata lexicon that Matins supports this theory. It was quite a performance.

  Would you recount what you remember for my orison?

  Our Logoman’s head filled half the dome, so we seemed to stand inside his mind. His clownish xpression was heavy with grief and rage, and his clown’s voice rang with despair. The Hwa-Soons trembled, the aides looked awed, and Seer Rhee was pasty and sick. Papa Song told us a gas called evil xists in the world; purebloods called terrorists breathe in this evil, and this gas makes them hate all that is free, orderly, good, and corpocratic; a group of terrorists called Union had caused yesterday’s atrocity by infecting one of our own sisters, Yoona939 of the Chongmyo Plaza Dinery, with evil; instead of judasing Union, Yoona939 had let the evil take her into temptation and deviance; and were it not for the dedication of Unanimity, with whom Papa Song Corp has always fully cooperated, a consumer’s innocent son would now be dead. The boy had survived, but diners’ trust in our beloved corp had been wounded, grievously. The challenge before us, Papa Song concluded, was to work harder than ever to earn back that trust.

  Therefore: we must be vigilant against evil, every minute of every day. This new Catechism was more important than all others. If we obeyed, our Papa would love us forever. If we failed to obey, Papa would zerostar us year after year and we would never get to Xultation. Did we understand?

  My sisters’ understanding would have been hazy, at best; our Logoman had used many words we did not know. Nevertheless, cries of “Yes, Papa Song!” echoed around the Plinth.

  “I cannot hear you!” our Logoman xhorted us.

  “Yes, Papa Song!” every server in every dinery in corpocracy shouted, “Yes, Papa Song!”

  As I said, quite a performance.

  You said in your trial that Yoona939 couldn’t have been a Union member. Do you still maintain that position?

  Yes. How and when could Union recruit her? Why would a Unionman risk the xposure? Of what worth was a genomed server to a terrorist ring?

  I’m puzzled. If amnesiads in Soap “nullify” memory, how come you can recall the events of that time with such precision and clarity?

  Because my own ascension had already begun. Even to a thoroughbred imbecile like Boom-Sook, the degradation of Yoona939’s neurochemical stability was obvious, so another guinea pig was being prepared. The amnesiads in my Soapsac were reduced, accordingly, and ascension catalysts instreamed.

  So … after the Sermon, New Year’s Day was business as usual?

  Business, yes; usual, no. The Starring Ceremony was perfunctory. Two Twelvestarreds were escorted into the elevator by Aide Ahn. These were replaced by two Kyelims. Yoona939 was replaced by a new Yoona. Seer Rhee inserted our new stars into our collars in grave silence; applause was deemed inappropriate. Soon after, Media streamed in, flashing nikons and besieging the office. Our seer could get them out only by first letting them nikon the new Yoona lying in the elevator with a 939 sticker on her collar, covered in tomato sauce. Later, Unanimity medics xamined each of us in turn. I was fritened of incriminating myself, but only my birthmark provoked any pa
ssing comment.

  Your birthmark? I didn’t know fabricants have birthmarks.

  We do not, so mine always caused me embarrassment in the steamer. Ma-Leu-Da108 called it “Sonmi451’s stain.”

  Would you show it to my orison, just as a curio?

  If you wish. Here, between my collarbone and shoulder blade.

  Xtraordinary. It looks like a comet, don’t you think?

  Hae-Joo Im made xactly the same remark, curiously.

  Huh, well, coincidences happen. Did Seer Rhee retain his position?

  Yes, but it brought the unlucky man little solace. He reminded his corp xecs how he had “smelled deviance” on Yoona939 months before, thus passing blame to the medic who xamined her. Chongmyo Plaza profits soon returned to average levels: purebloods have short memories where their stomachs are concerned. Kyelim689 and Kyelim889 were a further attraction: as a newly created stemtype, they drew queues of fabricant spotters.

  And it was around this time that you grew aware of your own ascension?

  Correct. You wish me to describe the xperience? It mirrored Yoona939’s, I now recognize. Firstly, a voice spoke in my head. It alarmed me greatly, until I learned that no one else could hear this voice, known to purebloods as “sentience.” Secondly, my language evolved: for xample, if I meant to say good, my mouth substituted a finer-tuned word such as favorable, pleasing, or correct. In a climate when purebloods thruout the Twelve Cities were reporting fabricant deviations at the rate of thousands a week, this was a dangerous development, and I sought to curtail it. Thirdly, my curiosity about all things grew acute: the “hunger” Yoona939 had spoken of. I eavesdropped diners’ sonys, AdV, Boardmen’s speeches, anything, to learn. I, too, yearned to see where the elevator led. Nor did the fact that two fabricants, working side by side on the same teller in the same dinery, both xperienced these radical mental changes evade me. Lastly, my sense of alienation grew. Amongst my sisters I alone understood our xistence’s futility and drudgery. I even woke during curfew, but never entered the secret room, or even dared move until yellow-up. Yoona’s doubts about Papa Song haunted me. Ah, I envied my uncritical, unthinking sisters.