Cloud Atlas (32 page)

Mr. Chang held my hand and informed me my earlobe was torn off but promised a medic would replace it in the morning. I was too afraid of Boom-Sook’s recriminations to worry about my ear, but Mr. Chang added we would now leave with Boardman Mephi for my new quarters.

That must have been very welcome news
.

Yes, xcept for the loss of my sony. How could I bring that along? No feasible plan came to mind. I just nodded, hoping I could retrieve it during Sextet Recess. The spiral stairs took up my attention; descents are more hazardous than ascents. In the lobby, Mr. Chang produced a hooded cloak for me and a pair of icenikes. The boardman complimented Mr. Chang on the latter’s choice of zebraskin design. Mr. Chang answered, zebra skin was de rigueur in Lhasa’s chicest streets this season.

What reason did the Boardman give for your timely rescue?

None, as yet. He told me I was being transferred to the Unanimity Faculty on the western lip of campus and apologized for letting “those three toxed xec tapeworms” play games with my life. The weather had prevented a timelier intervention. I forget what well-oriented, humble reply I gave.

The campus cloisters were festive with Sextet Eve crowds. Mr. Chang taught me to shuffle thru granular ice to gain traction. Snowflakes settled on my eyelashes and nostrils. Snowball fights ceasefired as Professor Mephi approached; combatants bowed. The sense of anonymity afforded by my hood was delicious. Passing thru cloisters, I heard music. Not AdV or popsong but naked, echoing waves of music. “A choir,” Boardman Mephi told me. “Corpocratic sapiens can be callous, petty, and malign,” he said, “but higher things, too, thank Chairman.” We listened for a minute. Looking up, I felt as if I was rushing upward.

Two enforcers guarding the Unanimity Faculty saluted and took our damp cloaks. This building’s interior was as opulent as the Psychogenomics Faculty had been spartan. Carpeted corridors were lined with Iljongian mirrors, urns of the Kings of Scilla, 3-Ds of Unanimity notables. The elevator had a chandelier; its voice recited corpocratic Catechisms, but Boardman Mephi told it to shut up, and to my surprise, it did. Once again, Mr. Chang held me steady as the elevator sped, then slowed.

We xited into a spacious, sunken apartment from an upstrata lifestyle AdV. A 3-D fire danced in the central hearth, surrounded by hovering maglev furniture. Glass walls afforded a dizzying view of the conurb by nite, obscured by the haze-brite snowfall. Paintings took up the inner walls. I asked Mephi if this was his office.

“My office is one story up,” he replied. “These are your quarters.”

Before I could even xpress surprise, Mr. Chang suggested I invite my distinguished guest to sit down. I begged Boardman Mephi’s pardon: I had never had a guest before, and my manners lacked polish.

The maglev sofa swung under the distinguished man’s weight. His daughter-in-law, he said, had redesigned my quarters with me in mind. The Rothko canvases, she hoped, I would find meditative. “Molecule-true original originals,” he assured me. “I approved. Rothko paints how the blind see.”

A bewildering evening—crossbolts one moment, art history the next …

Certainly. Next, the professor apologized for failing to recognize the xtent of my ascension on our first meeting. “I assumed you were yet another semi-ascended xperiment, doomed to mental disintegration in a week or two. If memory serves, I even dozed off—Mr. Chang, did I? The truth now.” From his post by the elevator, Mr. Chang recalled that his master had rested his eyes during the journey. Boardman Mephi smiled at his chauffeur’s tact. “You’re more than likely wondering what you did to bring yourself to my attention, Sonmi
451.”

His question was a handshake:
Come out, I know you’re in there
. Or, I feared, a trap. Still with a server’s wariness of acting too pureblood, I feigned polite incomprehension. Mephi’s xpression of complicity told me he understood. Taemosan University, he said, generates 2 million–plus library download requests per semester. The vast majority are course texts and related articles; the remainder relate to anything from real estate to stock prices, sportsfords to steinways, yoga to caged birds. “The point is, Sonmi, it takes a reader of
truly
eclectic habits for my friends the librarians to bother alerting me.” The professor switched on his handsony and read from my own list of download requests. Sixthmonth 18th,
Epic of Gilgamesh;
Seventhmonth 2nd, Ireneo Funes’s
Remembrances;
Ninthmonth 1st, Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
. Mephi, bathed in mauve sonyglow, looked proud. “Here we go … Tenthmonth 11th, a brazen-as-you-please cross-search for references to that cancer in our beloved body corpocratic, Union! Speaking as a Unanimityman, such a—could I call it ‘lust’?—for creeds of other worlds alerts us to the presence of an inner émigré. It is idiomatic in my field that such émigrés make the finest Unanimity agents. I knew we had to meet.” He then xplained how he had identified the sony’s inquisitive owner as Nun Hel-Kwon, a geothermist from blizzard-prone Onsōng … who had died two winters before in a skiing accident. Boardman Mephi assigned a gifted graduate the old-fashioned detective’s task of tracing the thief. E-wave surveillance located the sony in Boom-Sook Kim’s lab. Imagining Boom-Sook reading Wittgenstein defied all credulity, however, so Mephi’s trusted student had implanted a microeye in every sony in the room during curfew six weeks ago. “Next day, we found our dissident-manqué was no pureblood but, apparently, science’s first stabilized ascendant and sister-server of the notorious Yoona
939. My work, Sonmi
451, can be taxing and hazardous, but dull? Never!”

Denial was plainly pointless
.

Indeed: Boardman Mephi was no Seer Rhee. In a way, my discovery was a relief. Many criminals say the same. I sat and listened to his account of the interdepartmental squabbles that broke out when he reported his findings. Old-school corpocrats wanted me euthanized as a deviant; psychogenomicists wanted me to undergo cerebral vivisection; marketing wanted to go public and claim me as Taemosan University’s own xperimental breakthru.

Obviously, none of them got their way
.

No. Unanimity won a stopgap compromise: I could continue studying in my illusory free will until a consensus of opinion could be reached. Boom-Sook’s crossbow, however, forced Unanimity’s hand.

And what did Boardman Mephi intend to do with you now?

Frame a new compromise between those interests competing for a slice of me, then enforce it. Billions of research dollars had been spent in corp labs, unsuccessfully, to achieve what, simply, I was, what I am: a stable, ascended fabricant. To keep the genomicists happy, an array of vetted scientists would conduct cross-disciplinary tests on me. Mephi, dipping his hands into the heart of the 3-D flames, promised these tests would not be onerous or painful, or xceed three hours per day, five days out of ten. To win over the Taemosan Board, research access would be auctioned: I would raise big dollars for my masters.

Did Sonmi
451’s interests enter this simultaneous equation?

To a degree, yes: Taemosan University would enroll me as a foundation student. I would also have a Soul implanted in my collar so I could come and go on campus as I pleased. Boardman Mephi even promised to mentor me when he was on campus. He withdrew his hand from the fire and inspected his fingers. “All lite, no heat. Youngsters nowadays wouldn’t know a real flame if their nikes were set alite.” He told me to call him Professor instead of Sir.

One thing I can’t work out. If Boom-Sook Kim was such a buffoon, how had he attained this holy grail of psychogenomics—stable ascension?

Later, I asked Hae-Joo Im the same question. His xplanation ran: Boom-Sook’s thesis jockey sourced his supply of psychogenomics theses from an obscure tech institute in Baikal. The original author of my x-postgrad’s work was a production zone immigrant named Yusouf Suleiman. Xtremists were killing genomicists in Siberia at that time, and Suleiman and three of his professors were blown up by a car bomb. Baikal being Baikal, Suleiman’s research languished in obscurity for ten years until it was sold on. The agent liaised with contacts at Papa Song Corp to instream Suleiman’s ascension neuro-formula to our Soap. Yoona
939 was the prime specimen; I was a modified backup. If all that sounds unlikely, Hae-Joo added, I should remember that most of science’s holy grails are discovered by accident, in unxpected places.

And all the while Boom-Sook Kim was blissfully unaware of the furor his plagiarized Ph.D. was causing?

Only an obdurate fool who never squeezed a pipette could remain unaware, but yes, Boom-Sook Kim was such a fool. Maybe that, too, was no accident.

How did you find your new regime in the Unanimity Faculty? How was it as a fabricant, actually attending lectures?

As I was moved on Sextet Eve, I had six quiet days before the new regime began in earnest. I walked around the icy campus only once: I am genomed to be comfortable in hot eateries, and xposure to the Han Valley winter on Mount Taemosan burned my skin and lungs. On New Year’s Day I awoke from curfew to discover two gifts: the battered old sony Wing
027 had given me and a star for my collar, my third. I thought of my sisters, my x-sisters, thruout Nea So Copros enjoying Starring Ceremonies. I wondered if I would one day depart for Xultation, my Investment repaid. How I wished Yoona
939 could attend my first lecture on secondday with me. I still miss her.