Cloud Atlas (30 page)

The giant told me to follow, but I hesitated: Boom-Sook had ordered me not to leave the room. Wing
027 warned me, “Sonmi
451, 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, Sonmi
451, 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 Wing
027.

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.

Did Boom-Sook never even talk to you … interact with you, in any way?

He addressed me like purebloods speak to a cat. It amused him to pose me questions he fancied were incomprehensible. “Hey,
451, is it worth azuring my teeth, d’you reckon, or is sapphire just a passing fad this season?” He did not xpect cogent answers: I did not disabuse his xpectations. My reply became so habitual, Boom-Sook nicknamed me I-Do-Not-Know-Sir
451.

So for nine months nobody observed your skyrocketing sentience?

So I believed. Boom-Sook Kim’s only regular visitors were Min-Sic and Fang. Fang’s real name was never used in my hearing. They bragged about their new suzukis and played poker, and paid no attention to fabricants outside Huamdonggil comfort hives. Gil-Su Noon, Boom-Sook’s neighbor, a downstrata postgrad on scholarship aid, banged on the wall to complain about the noise from time to time, but the three xecs banged back louder. I saw him only once or twice.

What is “poker”?

A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars. Fang won thousands of credits from Boom-Sook and Min-Sic’s Souls during their poker sessions. Other times, the three students indulged in drugs, often Soap. On these occasions Boom-Sook told me to get out: when toxed, he complained, clones disturbed him. I would go to the faculty roof, sit in the water tank’s shade, and watch swifts hunt giant gnats until dark, when I knew the three postgrads would be gone. Boom-Sook never bothered to lock his lab, you see.

Why was it that you never met Wing
027 again?

One humid afternoon, three weeks after my arrival at Taemosan, a knock on the door distracted Boom-Sook from his facescaper catalog. Unxpected visitors were rare, as I have said. Boom-Sook said, “Enter!” and hid his catalog under
Practical Genomics
. My postgrad rarely glanced at his texts, unlike me.

A wiry student poked the door open with his toe. “Boom-Boom,” he called my postgrad. Boom-Sook sprang to attention, sat down, then slouched. “Hey, Hae-Joo”—he faked a casual manner—”what’s up?”

The visitor was just passing to say hi, he claimed, but he accepted the offered chair. I learned Hae-Joo Im was Boom-Sook’s x-classmate but had been head-hunted by Taemosan’s Unanimity faculty. Boom-Sook told me to prepare tea while they discussed topics of no importance. As I served the drink, Hae-Joo Im mentioned, “You’ll know about your friend Min-Sic’s appalling afternoon by now?”

Boom-Sook denied Min-Sic was a “friend,” necessarily, then asked why his afternoon was appalling. “His specimen, Wing
027, was burnt to bacon.” Min-Sic had mistaken a minus for a plus on the label of a bottle of petro-alkali. My own postgrad smirked, giggled, snorted “Hysterical!” and laughed. Hae-Joo then did an unusual action; he looked at me.

Why is that unusual?

Purebloods see us often but look at us rarely. Much later, Hae-Joo admitted he was curious about my response. Boom-Sook noticed nothing; he speculated about compensation claims by the corp sponsoring Min-Sic’s research. In his own, solo research, Boom-Sook gloated, no one cared if an xperimental fabricant or two “got dropped” along the path of scientific enlitenment.