Sublimation(106)

He was strangely relieved that he wasn’t that sort of person. That there was, underneath everything, no raw red throbbing hatred of his other self, the recombination of their selves wasn’t an act of continuing violence, it was just the single stab and the coalescing. He remembers thinking about Mitosis—overwriting himself. Both versions of him. Ah—there’s the shame at his own greed. There’s the relief that Yujin hadn’t tried the other version of this reintegration—somehow luring YJ to the Mitosis machine and overwriting him, and that YJ hadn’t gotten away, hadn’t lured Yujin into that same trap in fear of what Yujin might do.

He felt like himself, whoever himself was. Yujin, probably. He would think of himself as Yujin, because in his head, YJ had also been Yujin, more often than not, and Yujin had never thought of himself as YJ.

“I was so mad,” he says to himself. “I wouldn’t have been so mad if you had just talked to me, once or twice.”

“I didn’t know how to bring the subject up. On either end,” he says, after a long pause. “I was tired of stasis. I was tired of the perpetual motion machine.”

“I guess I felt like I had been suffering for no reason,” he says.

Yujin scrubs his face with his hand. He casts his mind back—the last few weeks, the series of events and decisions that led here. The feelings, winding back from the facts. Soyoung had asked Yujin to distract YJ. Soyoung had come over to YJ’s apartment earlier. Soyoung and YJ had slept together and Soyoung had been the one who initiated. Soyoung and YJ had argued, multiple times, about Mitosis, about the IIS, about how she thought he had some intrinsic, intangible duty to act.

She wanted him to make decisions different from the ones that he’d made. She wanted to be separate. Yujin was supposed to be a distraction—a distraction from what? Yujin frowns. He gets up. Soyoung had come here to get something. Get something, or plant something. But they hadn’t talked about anything suspicious. They had mostly talked about relationship things. Would she have been blackmailing him with their relationship? With the possibility of a relationship? That made no sense.

“She didn’t have to do that,” he says to himself.

He goes to his wallet. He flips through his cards—his general passcard and the passcard for floor twenty-six are both gone. He knows where Soyoung is going. She’s going to the Mitosis lab.



* * *



Every future person in the universe will learn sin, after Eve bites the apple. It is an inevitability.



* * *



Yujin dresses. Button-down, pants, a jacket. Formal. Like he’s going to work. He should look like he’s a professional, not like he just got off the plane. Yujin doesn’t know what Soyoung is going to do. Whether she’s going to take everything and dump it onto the internet, whether she’s going to record the inside of the Mitosis lab and dump that online, too. Would she send the Mitosis specs to reporters? Will she write a manifesto and post it? He has no idea.

Yujin tries calling her, while putting his shoes on. The call goes straight to voicemail. Of course she’s not picking up. He tries from Yujin’s phone, racking up a huge data charge with the international roaming. She still doesn’t pick up. Is she in the lab, already? Or just in an elevator or a subway?

Yujin doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he meets her. He knows he has to hurry. Soyoung has an enormous head start—but she had timed her plans with Yujin’s arrival in the apartment, he thinks. He might be able to intercept her.

It’s the strangest thing, but: Yujin feels good. He feels alive. In the middle of this motion, there’s no past, no future. Just the present, the single ongoing action. Maybe both of his selves had been living in stasis for too long. Maybe both of his selves should have been trying to change, all this time. What’s been stopping him? Only his own self.



* * *



He calls a cab, stumbles into the first one that pulls over. It’ll be faster than the subway, this time of night, and if he pays in cash then there’s no record, not like with a rideshare. He doesn’t know whether this is going to matter, but—he’s trying to be careful.

“Hey, you can’t get blood on the upholstery,” the taxi driver says in a thick accent that Yujin can’t place. He touches his ear. It feels wet.

“I won’t,” Yujin says. YJ hadn’t thrown the pan with any precision, it must have scraped against the side of his head.

“Rough night? Girl kick you out?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

Girl did kick him out, in the sense that this is Soyoung’s fault. Yujin dabs at the blood on his ear. It smells like iron. They say that head wounds bleed a lot. He wonders if ears count. He calls Soyoung again. The phone immediately goes to voicemail. No connection. He tries again. Still no connection.

Yujin dabs his head with his sleeve. He’s going to go to the Mitosis offices. He’s going to swipe into the building, break into the lab, and he’s going to confront Soyoung and he’s going to figure out what she’s thinking, even if he has to unravel her to do it.

“Can you take me to Fortieth and Seventh?”





SOYOUNG-ROSE


This late at night, the Mergebreak building is a cold black monolith studded with the occasional pane of light. Soyoung walks in through the front door like she belongs here, because as long as she looks like she belongs she won’t be stopped. The lighting in the lobby is still blunt daylight-strength fluorescent, and she nods to the single doorman sitting at the desk. He nods back. Soyoung knows she looks respectable. She had fixed her hair on the subway.