Cloud Atlas (49 page)

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 parallel 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, Sonmi
451. 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 life. My
Declarations
were germinated when Yoona
939 was xecuted, nurtured by Boom-Sook and Fang, strengthened by the tutelage of Mephi and the Abbess, birthed in Papa Song’s slaughtership.