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, Sonmi~451. 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, Sonmi~451, 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. Yoona~939 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 Sonmi~451,” 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.