Sublimation(114)

You crouch over Rose.

“Are you okay?”

Rose looks up at you.

“Let’s keep the house,” she says. “I want us to keep the house.”

“Sure,” you say. “Okay. Yes.”





ROSE


You click at the terminal. Soyoung is sitting next to Yujin, who still hasn’t woken up. You hope he’s okay. You’ll let Soyoung worry about him right now. You’re scrubbing your fingerprints from the server—this is a you job, not a Soyoung job. You’re the one who knows how to use the command line interface.

“I have a theory,” Soyoung says.

“Okay,” you say, glancing up from the terminal. She’s got Yujin’s head in her lap.

“I think in his own terrible way, he was trying to give us choices,” Soyoung says. “Our grandfather, I mean. Not YJ. If you wanted to come back. If you wanted the house. I don’t think he thought that we’d actually listen to him, if we didn’t want to reintegrate. I think he just … wanted to put it on the table.”

“He should have used his words,” you say. You try for spite and it comes out stale.

“Well, he’s dead,” Soyoung says, and it makes you laugh. She’s funny. You’re funny.

“Yeah, he’s dead.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t get what you wanted—the perfect separation,” she says. “Unless you don’t remember, and only I remember.”

You remember the last few months in clear detail. Beyond that, Soyoung’s life is like the memory of a memory. Like a reflection in a window.

“That’s okay,” you say.

“We can try again, while we’re here?”



* * *



The night on the mountain, your grandfather’s dead body in his tomb. The way you felt, looking at her. The way she pulled toward you with such guileless motion. The night when you picked up your phone. The way it wasn’t a question, of course you were going to go back. How all your actions were foregone conclusions.



* * *



You look at Soyoung. Soyoung looks at you.



* * *



The way there was no choice but to release the files. How there was no self capable of any other decision. How you are trying to learn from your own selfishness. How you had liked the person you had been, with her. How the ability to take action had felt better than watching, ruminating, stasis. How you want to be someone who is able to move through the world and admit to themself what they want, and how you want to be a person who is able to understand when there are more important things than what you want. How you think that the two of you, together, would be a more effective instrument.



* * *



“Do you want—?”

“Only if you want,” she says.

You’ve been her before. She’s been you. She doesn’t move forward. She holds out her hand, palm up, like a question.

You take her hand. For a moment, it’s warm. And then—





YJ-YUJIN


Yujin wakes up. This time, the first thing he notices is that he’s warm. He’s lying on something soft with a shiny shock blanket pulled over him. He opens his eyes. He turns his head. Soyoung-or-Rose is poking at a laptop.

She looks over at him. “I was a little worried you wouldn’t wake up.”

Yujin slides up. They’re still in the Mitosis laboratory. Soyoung sits next to him.

“Do you remember what happened?”

The dream—the feeling of separation, of reintegration—is dissipating like so much smoke in his brain. He remembers getting thrown through memories, scraping the inside of Soyoung and Rose’s brain. He has the passing thought—ah, if we could give this experience to everyone, there would be world peace—and it’s brought crashing down through the remembrance of what his selves did to get here. He gets it. He understands how they felt. He just—he would have done things differently, had he known.

“Yes,” Yujin says. “Soyoung, is Rose here? Did you stay reintegrated?”

Soyoung shrugs.

“I put myself back together,” she says.

The rest of his memories trickle in. What he had agreed to. What they had talked about, inside. How he had agreed to help her, to let her run and take the blame for releasing all the Mitosis data.

“Where will you go?”

“I’m not telling you,” Soyoung says. “You shouldn’t know anything about that. For plausible deniability.”

Yujin imagines her boarding a plane. He imagines her going to Korea or to a country without an extradition treaty with the United States. He imagines her on a sunny beach, wearing a tiny bikini like a Bond girl. He imagines her in a small interrogation cell, strapped to a polygraph machine, as if she’s James Bond.

“Do you think you’re going to be okay?”

Soyoung smiles at him. All bravado, teeth shiny and white, the same smile that she had as a kid when she was about to skewer him with the lightsaber.

“I’ll be fine.”

She gets up and goes back to the terminal where she begins packing up her hard drives. She’s not looking at him when she speaks.