A cruel compulsion brushed me. I asked the Kyelim, didn’t she want to live how purebloods live? Sit at dinery tables instead of wiping them?
Kyelim~889 wanted so badly to please, telling me, “Servers eat Soap!”
Yes, I persisted, but didn’t she want to see Outside?
She said, Servers don’t go Outside until Twelvestarred.
A consumer girl with zinc-ringlets and plectrum nails jabbed me. “If you’ve got to taunt dumb fabricants, do it on firstday mornings. I need to get to the gallerias this side of curfew, okay?”
Hastily, I ordered rosejuice and sharkgums from Kyelim~889. I wished Hae-Joo was still with me. I was jumpy in case the Soulring malfunctioned and xposed me. The device worked, but my questions had marked me as a troublemaker. “Democratize your own fabricants!” A man glowered as I pushed by with my tray. “Abolitionist.” Other purebloods in the line glanced at me, worried, as if I carried a disease.
Hae-Joo had found a free table in my old quarter. How many tens of thousands of times had I wiped this surface? Hae-Joo asked, gently, if I had discovered anything valuable.
I whispered, “We are just slaves here for twelve years.”
The Unanimity postgrad just scratched his ear and checked no one was eavesdropping: but his xpression told me he agreed. He sipped his rosejuice. We watched AdV for ten minutes, not speaking: a Juche Boardman was shown opening a newer, safer, nuclear reactor, grinning as if his strata depended on it. Kyelim~889 cleared the table next to us; she had already forgotten me. My IQ may be higher, but she looked more content than I felt.
So your visit to Papa Song’s was an . . . anticlimax? Did you find the “key” to your ascended self?
Perhaps it was anticlimactic, yes. If there was a key, it was only that no key xisted. In Papa Song’s I had been a slave; at Taemosan I was a more privileged slave. One more thing occurred, however, as we headed back to the elevator. I recognized Mrs. Rhee, working at her sony. I spoke her name out loud.
The immaculately dewdrugged woman smiled up with puzzled, luscious, remodeled lips. “I was Mrs. Rhee, but I’m Mrs. Ahn now. My late husband drowned in a sea-fishing accident last year.”
I said that was just awful.
Mrs. Ahn dabbed her eye with her sleeve and asked if I had known her late husband well. Lying is harder than purebloods make it look, and Mrs. Ahn repeated her question.
“My wife was a qualities standardizer for the Corp before our marriage,” Hae-Joo xplained hastily, putting his hand on my shoulder and adding that Chongmyo Plaza was in her area and that Seer Rhee had been an xemplary corp man. Mrs. Ahn’s suspicions were aroused, however, and she asked xactly when that might have been. Now I knew what to say. “When his chief aide was a consumer named Cho.”
Her smile changed its hue. “Ah, yes, Aide Cho. Sent north, somewhere, I believe, to learn about team spirit.”
Hae-Joo took my arm, saying, “Well, ‘All for Papa Song, Papa Song for All.’ The gallerias beckon, darling. Mrs. Ahn is obviously a woman with no time to fritter.”
Later, back in my quiet apartment, Hae-Joo paid me this compliment. “If I had ascended from server to prodigy in twelve straight months, my current address wouldn’t be a guest quarter in the Unanimity Faculty: I would be in a psych ward somewhere, seriously. These . . . xistential qualms you suffer, they just mean you’re truly human.”
I asked how I might remedy them.
“You don’t remedy them. You live thru them.”
We played Go until curfew. Hae-Joo won the first game. I, the second.
How many of these xcursions took place?
Every ninthnite until Corpocracy Day. Familiarity bred esteem for Hae-Joo, and soon I shared Boardman Mephi’s high opinion of him. The professor never probed about our outings during our seminars; his protégé probably filed reports, but Mephi wished me to have at least the illusion of a private life. Board business demanded more of his time, and I saw him less regularly. The morning tests continued: a procession of courteous but unmemorable scientists.
Hae-Joo had a Unanimityman’s fondness for campus intrigue. I learned how Taemosan was no united organism but a hillock of warring tribes and interest groups, much like the Juche itself. The Unanimity Faculty maintained a despised dominance. “Secrets are magic bullets,” Hae-Joo was fond of saying. But this dominance also xplains why trainee enforcers have few friends outside the faculty. Girls looking for husbands, Hae-Joo admitted, were attracted to his future status, but males of his own age eschewed getting drunk in his company.
Archivist, my appointment in the Litehouse is approaching. Can we segue to my final nite on campus?
Please do.
A keen passion of Hae-Joo’s was disneys, and one perq of Professor Mephi’s mentorship was access to forbidden items in the security archives.
You mean Union samizdat from the Production Zones?
No. I mean a zone even more forbidden, the past, before the Skirmishes. Disneys were called “movies” in those days. Hae-Joo said the ancients had an artistry that 3-D and Corpocracy had long obsolesced. As the only disneys I had ever seen were Boom-Sook’s pornsplatters, I was obliged to believe him. On sixthmonth’s final ninthnite, Hae-Joo arrived with a key to a disneyarium on campus, xplaining that a pretty Media student was currying favor with him. He spoke in a theatrical whisper. “I’ve got a disc of, seriously, one of the greatest movies ever made by any director, from any age.”
Namely?
A picaresque entitled The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, made before the foundation of Nea So Copros, in a long-deadlanded province of the European democracy. Have you ever seen film dating from the early twenty-first century, Archivist?
Sweet Corpocracy, no! An eighth-stratum archivist wouldn’t get such security clearance in his wildest dreams! I’d be fired for even applying, and I’m shocked that even a Unanimity postgrad has access to such deviational material.
Is that so? Well, the Juche’s stance on historical discourse is riddled with inconsistencies. On the one hand, if historical discourse were permitted, the downstrata could access a bank of human xperience that would rival, and sometimes contradict, that taught by Media. On the other hand, corpocracy funds your Ministry of Archivism, dedicated to preserving a historical record for future ages.
Yes, but our xistence is kept from the downstrata.
Xcept from those condemned to the Litehouse.
Be that as it may, future ages will still be corpocratic ones. Corpocracy isn’t just another political system that will come and go—corpocracy is the natural order, in harmony with human nature. But we’re digressing. Why had Hae-Joo Im chosen to show you this Ghastly Ordeal?
Perhaps Professor Mephi had instructed him. Perhaps Hae-Joo Im had no reason xcept a fondness for the disney. Whatever the reason, I was engrossed. The past is a world both indescribably different from and yet subtly similar to Nea So Copros. People sagged and uglified as they aged in those days: no dewdrugs. Elderly purebloods waited to die in prisons for the senile: no fixed-term life spans, no euthanasium. Dollars circulated as little sheets of paper and the only fabricants were sickly livestock. However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.