Cloud Atlas

  But most of all, I was afraid.

  How long did you have to endure that state?

  Some months. Until the ninthnite of the last week of fourth-month, specifically. I woke during curfew to a faint sound of breaking glass. My sisters were all dorming: only Seer Rhee was in the dome at such an hour. Time passed. Curiosity defeated my fear, finally, and I opened the dormroom door. Across the dome, our seer’s office was open. Rhee lay in lamplite, face flat against the floor, his chair upended. I crossed the dinery. Blood leaked from his eyes and nostrils, and a used Soapsac was crumpled on the desk. Seer did not have the color of the living.

  Rhee was dead? An overdose?

  Whatever the official verdict, the office stunk of Soap soporifix. A server usually imbibes three milligrams: Rhee appeared to have taken a quarter-liter sac, so suicide seems a reasonable conclusion. I faced a grand quandary. If I sonyd for a medic, perhaps I could save my seer’s life, but how to xplain my intervention? Healthy fabricants, as you know, never wake during curfew. Bleak as the life of an ascending fabricant was, the prospect of reorientation was bleaker.

  You said you envied your unthinking, untroubled sisters.

  That is not quite the same as wishing to be one. I returned to my cot.

  That decision didn’t cause you any guilt, later?

  Not much: Rhee’s decision was his own. But I had a foreboding that the nite’s events were not yet over, and sure enough, when yellow-up came, my sisters stayed in their cots. The air carried no scent of stimulin, and no aide had reported for work. I discerned the sound of a sony being used. Wondering if Seer Rhee had somehow recovered, I left the dormroom and looked into the dome.

  A man in a dark suit sat there. He had tubed himself a coffee and watched me watching him across the dinery. He spoke, finally. “Good morning, Sonmi451. I hope you’re feeling better today than Seer Rhee.”

  He sounds like an enforcer.

  The man introduced himself as Chang, a chauffeur. I apologized: I did not know the word. A chauffeur, the soft-spoken visitor xplained, drives fords for xecs and Boardmen but sometimes serves as a messenger, too. He, Mr. Chang, had a message for me, Sonmi451, from his own seer. This message was in fact a choice. I could leave the dinery now and repay my Investment outside, or else stay where I was, wait for Unanimity and their DNA sniffers to come and investigate the death of Seer Rhee, and be xposed as a Union spy.

  Not much of a choice.

  No. I had no possessions to pack or farewells to make. In the elevator, Mr. Chang pressed a panel. As the doors closed on my old life, my only life, I could not begin to imagine what waited above me.

  My torso squashed my suddenly feeble legs: I was supported by Mr. Chang, who said every inside fabricant xperiences the same nausea, the first time. Yoona939 must have dropped the boy as she underwent the same mechanical ascension in that same elevator. To dam the unpleasantness, I found myself recalling scenes from Yoona’s broken sony: the cobweb streams, gnarled towers, the unnamed wonders. As the elevator slowed, my torso seemed to rise, disorientingly. Mr. Chang announced, “Ground level,” and the doors opened on outside.

  I almost envy you. Please, describe xactly what you saw.

  Chongmyo Plaza, predawn. Cold! I had never known cold. How vast it seemed, yet the plaza cannot be more than five hundred meters across. Around the feet of the Beloved Chairman, consumers hurried; walkway sweepers droned; taxis buzzed riders; inching fords fumed; crawling trashtrucks churned; thruways, eight lanes wide, lined by sunpoles; ducts rumbling underfoot; neonized logos blaring; sirens, engines, circuitry, new lite of new intensities at new angles.

  It must have been overwhelming.

  Even the smells were new, after the dinery’s scented airflow. Kimchi, fordfumes, sewage. A running consumer missed me by a centimeter, shouted, “Watch where you’re standin’, you democratin’ clone!” and was gone. My hair stirred in the breath of a giant, invisible fan, and Mr. Chang xplained how the streets funnel the morning wind to high speeds. He steered me across the walkway to a mirrored ford. Three young men admiring the vehicle disappeared as we approached, and the rear door hissed open. The chauffeur ushered me inside and closed the door. I crouched. A bearded passenger slouched in the roomy interior, working on his sony. He xuded authority. Mr. Chang sat in front, and the ford edged into the traffic: I saw Papa Song’s golden arches recede into a hundred other corp logos, and a new city of symbols slid by, most entirely new. When the ford braked, I lost my balance, and the bearded man mumbled that no one would object if I sat down. I apologized for not knowing the right Catechism here and intoned, “My collar is Sonmi451,” as taught in Orientation. The passenger just rubbed his red eyes and asked Mr. Chang for a weather report. I do not recall what the chauffeur said, only that the fordjams were bad, and the bearded man looking at his rolex and cursing the slowness.

  Didn’t you ask where you were being taken?

  Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? Remember, Archivist, I had never seen an xterior, nor xperienced conveyance: yet there I was, thruwaying Nea So Copros’s second biggest conurb. I was less a cross-zone tourist, more a time traveler from a past century.

  The ford cleared the urban canopy near Moon Tower, and I saw my first dawn over the Kangwon-Do Mountains. I cannot describe what I felt. The Immanent Chairman’s one true sun, its molten lite, petro-clouds, His dome of sky. To my further astonishment, the bearded passenger was dozing. Why did the entire conurb not grind to a halt and give praise in the face of such ineluctable beauty?

  What else caught your eye?

  Oh, the greenness of green: back under the canopy, our ford slowed by a dew garden between squattened buildings. Feathery, fronded, moss drenched, green. In the dinery, the sole samples of green were chlorophyll squares and diners’ clothes, so I assumed it was a precious, rare substance. Therefore, the dew garden and its rainbows sleeving along the fordway astounded me. East, dormblocks lined the thruway, each adorned by the corpocratic flag, until the waysides fell away and we passed over a wide, winding, ordure-brown strip empty of fords. I summoned up courage to ask Mr. Chang what it might be. The passenger answered: “Han River. Sōngsu Bridge.”

  I could only ask, what were these things?

  “Water, a thruway of water.” Tiredness and disappointment flattened his voice. “Oh, notch up another wasted early morning, Chang.” I was confused by the difference between water in the dinery and the river’s sludge. Mr. Chang indicated the low peak ahead. “Mount Taemosan, Sonmi. Your new home.”

  So you were taken to the University straight from Papa Song’s?

  To reduce xperimental contamination, yes. The road upzigged thru woodland. Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me. Soon we arrived on the plateau campus. Cuboid buildings clustered: young purebloods paced narrow walkways where litter drifted and lichen yeasted. The ford coasted to a halt under a rain-stained, sun-cracked overhang. Mr. Chang led me into a lobby, leaving the bearded passenger to doze in the ford. Mount Taemosan’s high air tasted clean, but the lobby was grimed and unlit.

  We paused at the foot of a double-helix staircase. This is an old-style elevator, Mr. Chang xplained. “The university xercises students’ bodies as well as their minds.” So I battled gravity for the first time, step by step, grasping the handrail. Two students descended the down-helix, laughing at my clumsiness. One commented, “That specimen won’t be making a bid for freedom anytime soon.” Mr. Chang warned me not to look over my shoulder; I did so, foolishly, and vertigo tipped me over. Had my guide not caught me, I would have fallen.

  It took several minutes to ascend to the sixth floor, the topmost. Here, a slitted corridor ended at a door, slitely ajar, name-plated BOOM-SOOK KIM. Mr. Chang knocked, but no answer came.

  “Wait in here for Mr. Kim,” the chauffeur told me. “Obey him as a seer.” I entered and turned to ask Mr. Chang what work I should do, but the chauffeur had gone. I was quite alone for the
first time in my life.

  What did you think of your new quarters?

  Dirty. Our dinery, you see, was always spotless: the Catechisms preach cleanliness. Boom-Sook Kim’s lab was, in contrast, a long gallery, rancid with pureblood male odor. Bins overflowed; a crossbow target hung by the door; the walls were lined with lab benches, buried desks, obsolete sonys, and sagging bookshelves. A framed kodak of a smiling boy and a dead, bloodied snow leopard hung over the only desk to show evidence of use. A filthy window overlooked a neglected courtyard where a mottled figure stood on a Plinth. I wondered if he was my new Logoman, but he never stirred.

  In a cramped anteroom I found a cot, a hygiener, and a sort of portable steam cleaner. When was I to use it? What Catechisms governed my life in this place? A fly buzzed lazy figures of eight. So ignorant was I of outside, I even wondered if the fly might be an aide and introduced myself to it.

  Had you never seen insects before?

  Only rogue-gened roaches and dead ones: Papa Song’s aircon inflows insecticide, so if any enter via the elevator, they die, instantly. The fly hit the window, over and over. I did not then know windows open; indeed, I did not know what a window was.

  Then I heard off-key singing; a popsong about Phnom Penh Girls. Moments later a student in beach shorts, sandals, and silk weighed down by shoulder bags, kickboxed the door open. Upon seeing me he groaned, “What in the name of Holy Corpocracy are you doing here?”

  I bared my collar. “Sonmi451, sir. Papa Song’s server from—”

  “Shut up, shut up, I know what you are!” The young man had a froggish mouth and the hurt eyes then in vogue. “But you’re not supposed to be here until fifthday! If those registry dildos xpect me to cancel a five-star Taiwanese conference just because they can’t read calendars, well, sorry, they can suck maggots in an ebola pit. I only came in to pick up my worksony and discs. I’m not babysitting any xperimental clone still in uniform when I could be sinning myself sticky in Taipei.”

  The fly hit the window again; the student picked up a pamphlet and pushed past me. The whack made me jump. He inspected the smear with a laugh of triumph. “Let that be a warning to you! Nobody double-crosses Boom-Sook Kim! Now. Don’t touch anything, don’t go anywhere. Soap’s in the boxfridge—thank Chairman they delivered your feed early. I’ll be back late on sixthday. If I don’t leave for the aeroport now I’ll miss my flite.” He went, then reappeared in the doorway. “You can talk, can’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Thank Chairman! Fact—for every moronity, there’s ten registry clone-bones somewhere committing it as we speak.”

  What … were you supposed to do for the next three days?

  Xcept watch the rolex hand erode the hours, I had no idea. It was no major hardship: servers are genomed for grueling nineteen-hour workdays. I passed idle hours wondering if Mrs. Rhee was a grieving widow or a glad one. Would Aide Ahn or Aide Cho be promoted to Chongmyo Plaza seer? Already, the dinery seemed impossibly distant. From the courtyard I heard pins and needles of sound, from shrubs mobbing the Plinth. Thus I first encountered birds. An aero overflew, and many hundreds of swallows poured upstream. For whom did they sing? Their Logoman? The Beloved Chairman?

  The sky curfewed, and the room darkened for my first nite on the surface. I felt lonely, but nothing worse. Windows across the courtyard yellowed-up, showing labs like Boom-Sook’s, housing young purebloods; neater offices, occupied by professors; busy corridors, vacant ones. I did not see a single fabricant.

  At midnite I felt toxed and imbibed a sac of Soap, lay in the cot, and wished Yoona939 was there to make sense of the day’s legion mysteries.

  Did your second day outside provide any answers?

  Some: but yet more surprises. The first stood across the anteroom from my cot as I awoke. A pylonic man, over three meters tall and dressed in an orange zipsuit, was studying the bookshelves. His face, neck, and hands were scalded red, burnt black, and patched pale, but he did not seem to suffer pain. His collar confirmed he was a fabricant, but I could not guess his stemtype: lips genomed out, ears protected by hornvalves, and a voice deeper than any I heard before or since. “No stimulin here. You wake when you wake. Especially if your postgrad is as lazy as Boom-Sook Kim. Xec postgrads are the worst. They have their asses wiped for them. From kindergarten to euthanasium.” With a giant, two-thumbed hand, he indicated a blue zipsuit half the size of his. “For you, little sister.” As I changed from my Papa Song’s uniform into my new garment, I asked if he had been sent by a seer. “No seers, either,” said the burnt giant. “Your postgrad and mine are friends. Boom-Sook called yesterday. Complained about your unxpected delivery. I wished to visit you pre-curfew. But Genome Surgery postgrads work late. Unlike slackers here in Psychogenomics. I’m Wing027. Let’s find out why you’re here.”

  Wing027 sat on Boom-Sook’s desk and switched on the sony, ignoring my protests that my postgrad had forbidden me to touch it. Wing clicked the screenboard; Yoona939 appeared. Wing trailed his finger along the rows of words. “Let’s pray to the Immanent Chairman … Boom-Sook doesn’t make that error again …”

  I asked Wing, could he read?

  Wing said if a randomly assembled pureblood can read, a well-designed fabricant should learn with ease. Soon a Sonmi appeared on the sony: my collar, 451, circled her neck. “Here,” said Wing and read, slowly; In-Dormroom Cerebral Upsizing the Service Fabricant: A Feasibility Case Study on Sonmí-451 by Boom-Sook Kim. “Why,” Wing muttered, “is a no-brainer xec postgrad aiming so high?”

  What sort of fabricant was Wing-027? A militiaman?

  No, a disasterman. He boasted he could operate in deadlands so infected or radioactive that purebloods perish there like bacteria in bleach; that his brain had only minor genomic refinements; and that disastermen’s basic orientation provides a more thoro education than most pureblood universities. Finally, he bared his hideously burnt forearm: “Show me a pureblood who could stand this! My postgrad’s Ph.D. is tissue flameproofing.”

  Wing027’s xplanation of deadlands appalled me, but the disasterman anticipated their approach with relish. The day when all Nea So Copros is deadlanded, he told me, will be the day fabricants become the new purebloods. This sounded deviant, and besides, if these deadlands were so widespread in the world, I asked, why had I not seen them from the ford? Wing027 asked me how big I believed the world to be. I was unsure but said I had been driven all the way from Chongmyo Plaza to this mountain, so I must have seen most of it, surely.

  The giant told me to follow, but I hesitated: Boom-Sook had ordered me not to leave the room. Wing027 warned me, “Sonmi451, you must create Catechisms of your own,” and slung me over his shoulder, carried me along the slitted corridor, around a tite corner, and up a dusty spiral staircase, where he fisted open a rusty door. Morning sunlite blinded, brisk winds slapped, and airgrit stung my face. The disasterman set me down.

  On the roof of the Psychogenomics Faculty, I gripped the railing and gasped; six levels down was a cactus garden, birds hunting insects in the needles; further down the mountain, a ford park, half full; further, a sports track, circummed by a regiment of students; below that, a consumer plaza; beyond that, woods, sloping down to the spilled, charred-and-neon conurb, hi-rises, dormblocks, the Han River, finally mountains lining the aeroscored sunrise. “A big view,” I remember Wing’s soft, burnt voice. “But held against the whole world, Sonmi451, all you see is a chip of stone.”

  My mind fumbled with such enormity and dropped it; how could I understand such a limitless world?

  Wing replied, I needed intelligence; ascension would provide this. I needed time; Boom-Sook Kim’s idleness would give me time. However, I also needed knowledge.

  I asked, How is knowledge found?

  “You must learn how to read, little sister,” said Wing027.

  So Wing-027, not Hae-Joo Im or Boardman Mephi, mentored you first?

  That is not true, strictly. Our second meeting was our final one. The disasterman returned
to Boom-Sook’s lab an hour before curfew to give me an “unlost” sony, preloaded with every autodidact module in upstrata corpocracy schooling. He showed me its operation, then warned me never to let a pureblood catch me gathering knowledge, for the sight scares them, and there is nothing a scared pureblood will not do.

  By Boom-Sook’s return from Taiwan on sixthday I had mastered the sony’s usage and graduated from virtual elementary school. By sixthmonth I completed xec secondary school. You look skeptical, Archivist, but remember what I said about ascendants’ hunger for information. We are only what we know, and I wished to be much more than I was, sorely.

  I didn’t mean to look skeptical, Sonmi. Your mind, speech, your … self, show your dedication to learning. What confuses me is, why did Boom-Sook Kim give you so much time to study? An xec heir, surely, was no covert Abolitionist? What about his Ph.D. xperiments on you?

  Boom-Sook Kim’s concerns were not his Ph.D. but drinking, gambling, and his crossbow. His father was an xec at Kwangju Genomics lobbying for a boardmanship on the Juche until his son made such an influential enemy. With such an upstrata father, study was a mere formality.

  But how was Boom-Sook planning to graduate?

  By paying an academic agent to collate his thesis from the agent’s own sources. A common practice. The ascension neurochemicals were preformulated for him, with yields and conclusions. Boom-Sook himself could not have identified the biomolecular properties of toothpaste. In nine months, my xperimental duties never xceeded cleaning his lab and preparing his tea. Fresh data might cloud those he had bought and risk xposing him as a fraud, you see. So during my postgrad’s long absences, I could study without risk of discovery.

  Wasn’t Boom-Sook Kim’s tutor aware of this outrageous plagiarism?

  Professors who value tenure do not muckrake the sons of future Juche Boardmen.